Reform, my friends, Reform

Lately, there has been quite a bit in the newspapers about the attempts to repeal the Healthcare Bill. As there have been many frustrating stories in the news recently (Sarah Palin, TSA, Astrology (*gasp!*scandal!*) - to name a few), I've been picking and choosing what I read. Furthermore, where I now reside in Maine is not the most liberal-minded of areas. As such, I've reached a point where I try not to think about politics so as not to accidentally open my mouth during a conversation and offend anyone.* However, I just finished skimming over an article that stated that Maine has joined some other states, including Florida (what the heck, retirees?) in launching a lawsuit against the Healthcare Bill. That's right, these states want to sue an act of legislation.

This is not what has me fired up. From the very beginning, from the very idea, there has been somewhat understandable opposition to the imposition of healthcare on our nation. I get it - it's a new concept to this country. We've functioned this way for over 200 years and done so somewhat effectively, why should we change now? Nevermind that those weirdos over in Sweden, Canada, and other happy countries have national healthcare systems that provide care and peace of mind to their citizens. What has me upset are the comments that follow the story. Now, I know, I know, as I already pointed out, I am well aware of the political affiliations of the majority of citizens in my area, but the comments are upsetting for other reasons. Namely, they just seem to be a bunch of people who feel the need to be angry and shout about something that they don't understand.

I have a theory. I have no way to prove this theory without crafty and unethical experimentation along the lines of Milgram and Zimbardo, but I still have this theory. I say that many of those on the right end of our political spectrum choose to dislike everything that comes out of the current presidential office because they have chosen that they just don't like the president himself. Whether they dislike him for his age, color, background, name, flexibility, kids, taste in dogs doesn't matter. Some people are just pissed that he got elected and thus pissed about everything that he does. I know I can't be far off from this. When we're angry with someone, we don't listen to what they say. When we think a celebrity is a crackpot (as some certainly are), we tend not to rate their movies very highly. It is to such a degree that I feel the incredible stubbornness of the people of this nation are further perpetuating a dangerous ignorance.

For those who actually want to want to learn more about the healthcare bill, I would recommend taking the time to do so. I admit to simply running away with the happy idea that I'm covered til I'm 26 and that eventually all Americans will eventually have healthcare (what a counseling student I am). Having read all of these comments though, I felt obliged to educate myself. Having done that, I can now happily respond, in the simplest of terms, to these incendiary comments.**

1. You are covered under your parents insurance til you're 26. End of story. Stop. Bitching.

2. No one - NO ONE - will be denied coverage despite a preexisting condition. Would you nonbelievers prefer we give your uninsured mother stage 4 liver cancer to help you understand how expensive chemo is, and how frustrating not getting coverage is?

3. Yeah, we'll all have to have coverage or we'll be fined. You still get to choose. And they're not going to make you pay more than you can. They've supported you on welfare with someone else's money this far, what makes you think they'd stop?

4. If you have a job, your employer will most likely be the one to provide you coverage. Yeah, you've still gotta pay, but there are bonuses to someone else being in charge of it.

5. The government is not trying to take over (we're not quite living in England yet where there are posters that encourage your neighbors to watch your every move and report your suspicious whispers and wiggles in the kitchen after midnight to the most secret secret agency). The government is trying to help you by finding another way for someone to help pay the bills. Oh, wait, you like to pay full price for x-rays for your broken hand? Oh, that's cool, I guess.

6. It's going to save the country money. In fact, it's already saved the country money. About 8 billion dollars.

I'm off my soapbox. I don't like arguments. I don't like conflict. I like to try to solve things. As is the case with just about every question in life, the answer is education. If half the nation chooses to cross their arms and stomp off, there's not much more we can do. In time, though, everyone comes around to a good idea in time.

*On a side note, this does not stop my great amusement at the Patriots' loss to the Jets and watching my proud boyfriend parade about in his Jets regalia.
**The "you"s that appear in this article are not meant to be accusatory. They are being utilized in the form of a universal "you" as I don't have the interest or patience to use the stupid "he/she" or "one" rules. And you're thankful I don't, aren't you?

Tribute

Tonight, I want to take a moment to pay tribute to one of the finest of the funny men in Hollywood's history. He had nothing to do with my directly having read any materials over the year, with the exception of his news obituary. I invite you to read it as well:

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/11/28/actor-leslie-nielsen-dies-of-complications-from-pneumonia/

Leslie Nielsen, I was first exposed to your Naked Gun movies at what was likely far too young of an age. For that reason, though I have to thank you for creating a movie that amused me from age 8 to age 20 and beyond. It was only relatively recently that I watched Airplane! and I enjoyed myself just as much as I did for 2 1/2 and 33 1/3. Your deadpan delivery and wild faces were always well appreciated in my house. Your Mr. Magoo lives on in mind every time I look at my crazy little bulldog.

Thank you, Leslie Nielsen, for taking the time to make us laugh until our sides split and we had to rewind the movie to hear what was said after the punchline. Thank you. We really, really loved you.

And they say it ain't a science...

I am here today to comment on several news articles I have read online. In talking with my parents, having just booked holiday flights, I was reminded of something that I initially thought was a joke: The New TSA Security Measures. I have been reading numerous articles about the science, reasoning, backlash, and response to these measures. Regardless of the fact that I am looking forward to my holiday airport experience that much less, I would still like to take the time provide an psychological analytic perspective to all this.

From what I have heard and read, there are already horror stories abound concerning these new machines. I feel the need to clarify some facts about them, however. According to the most recent article I read on NPR*, there are currently 400 of these full-body image scans in use at 70 of the nation's airports. Furthermore, passengers are not required, per se, to go through these. They are instead "randomly" selected to go through the machine. The full-body pat-downs, one step away from a cavity search according to the descriptions, are required only in the cases where a person refuses a scan or something suspicious appears, the latter of which might be an understandable circumstance.

Does anyone else see the faulty logic in the rest of that, though? If I am not required to go through the machine just by going through security and am instead happily "volunteered" for the scan, should I not be able to refuse it in lieu of a magnetic scan? Apparently not. Issues have arisen with this, somewhat understandably, in which individuals have refused both and experienced a less than friendly removal from the airport.**

However, moving on from that, we hear from the head of the TSA that he is doing what he has to do to keep us safe from terrorists.*** Countries where people bomb each other every day are laughing at us. Laughing! This is apparently the only way to invade our privacy just enough to keep us safe. And boy, oh boy, is this an invasion of privacy. I get it! There are bad people out there who want to hurt us all, but there is a point at which ensuring our safety does less to reduce our fear than to increase it. I think we've reached that point. Hell, I'm pretty sure we're far past it.

That said, now for the psychological aspect of this analysis and commentary. For those of you who are familiar with Milgram and Zimbardo, you should already be thinking what I'm thinking. For those who are not, allow me to clarify.

Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments after WWII to figure out juuuust what made the German soldiers do what the German soldiers did. His design essentially fooled a subject by making them think they had just chosen/had just been led/had just been forced to shock another man to death. (Yeah yeah yeah, there were loooots of ethical issues). What he hypothesized is that people wouldn't do it. What he found was that people would. Which brings me to my first point: Though these TSA agents are only doing their job of forcing people to a scan, looking at scanned xrays, or doing one step short of a cavity search, they do not have to do it. Repeat: they are simply following orders. Sheep get nothing accomplished; they just get eaten by the wolf.

Philip Zimbardo conducted the sometimes slightly more well know Stanford Prison Experiments. He took every day people and assigned them to one of two roles: they could either be a prisoner, or a prison guard. I am not familiar with his specific hypothesis, but I know what he found. Just a few days into the experiment, he saw people genuinely assuming the roles that they had been assigned. The prisoners felt frightened and became compliant; the guards became abusive and used brutality. Here again, I see the TSA agents (innocent for now) as being those guards. They have, in their menial, minimum-wage jobs, been given a position of a power. It's powerful because they get to hurt and alienate people. Soon, they're going to begin abusing this power. From what I've heard, they already have (see if you can find the video of the 3 yr old body search - it seems to have been "copyrighted). Meanwhile, we as the prisoners, have no choice but to comply.

I don't care what people think about the scientific status of psychology, the fact remains that the findings of Milgram and Zimbardo are both significant and applicable. These men didn't conduct research just to go, "Golly gee, so that's why 6 million Jews were killed." These men took the time to conduct their studies over and over again with different designs to prove what humans are capable of as a means of preventing us from fulfilling that potential. But yet again, here we are doomed to repeat it. Only this time, the experiment is again real life and there is no safety of a laboratory.

I apologize for the long links; blogspot didn't want to insert my links tonight.
*http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131470688
**http://articles.cnn.com/2010-11-15/travel/california.airport.security_1_alternative-screening-tsa-physical-pat-down?_s=PM:TRAVEL
***http://articles.cnn.com/2010-11-17/travel/airport.security_1_pat-downs-body-scans-tsa?_s=PM:TRAVEL

For more info on Milgram and Zimbardo, do a search, find their pages, read some articles, search on Wikipedia, or take my word for it. It's fascinating stuff.

Whoops!

Yeah, so I haven't written since April after only doing a few posts. Whoops.

I figured this would be a good way to start again. I saw the following list a while ago and was reminded of it recently by a friend. According to her post, according to the BBC, people have read an average of only six books on this list. I'm proud to say while I've read more than that, I still have many to read. I'm also proud to report that many of the books on the list that I haven't read are on my "To Read"* list. Here's the list!

bold denotes I've read it; italics denotes I've read part of it**; this nice font denotes I plan to read it.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien***

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling***

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (in progress on my ipod)

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (most of it)

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

*Everyone should have a "To Read" list - I don't care if the only thing on it is this week's People Magazine, we should all have one.

**Some books get boring. Some of these are series. Parts of others were read for class.

***Some of these books clearly count as multiples. Given that, I've completely read 34 books; put a valiant effort in on 8+ books ("The Complete Works of Shakespeare? Really? I've read a lot of his plays and sonnets - that is not one book); and I have desires to read 7 books.

Not bad, I'd say. How'd you do?

There's no Pretending about Good Cooking.

Perhaps I should just make a goal of one post a week. That might be a better way to ease into things.

This post has somewhat of a double entendre. Last weekend (in most ways) was incredibly productive for me. Not only did I assist in the putting up (and taking down) of a successful three-night showing of Horton Foote's Dividing the Estate, but I also cooked an entire meal for the cast to be used in the show each night. A meal that was apparently far more delicious than I had even imagined. As cooking is a passion along with pleasing others, I'm sure you can understand my delight at being so well received. With that said, I would like to take the time to describe part of the meal to you through this quote from "Pauline".

"Everything certainly looks good. Sweet potatoes with marshmallows and pecans are my favorite."

And so it was good. Of course, there was far more to be had than the aforementioned traditional southern dish I vowed I would never make (though I assure you I am not, by any means, above eating it). There were also poached green beans, maple-roasted ham, and cheddar garlic biscuits. Are you drooling yet? Good. Fear not, though, I will not leave you mopping up your keyboard empty-handed. Should any of the dishes listed here strike your fancy, I plan to divulge the recipes just for you. These recipes were found elsewhere and then adapted for my own purposes. Keep in mind that I do not tend to measure and thus many of the measurements for "flavors" are just rough estimates.

Baking Powder Cheddar Garlic Biscuits

As adapted from the Fannie Farmer Cookbook

2 cups Flour

1/2 tsp Salt

4 tsps Baking Powder

1 tbsp Sugar

1/2 cup Vegetable Shortening

2/3 cup Milk

1/2 cup Grated Cheddar Cheese

2 tsps Dried Parsley

1 tsp (to taste) Garlic Powder

1 tsp Finely Ground Black Pepper

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Grease two 8-inch cake pans (or whatever works). Combine all of the dry ingredients (including the cheese) in a large bowl. Cut the shortening into the mix until it resembles coarse meal. Add the milk and stir until it forms a ball around the utensil. Turn onto a lightly floured surface and knead 14 times. Pat until 1/2 inch thick. Cut into rounds. Place touching each other in the cake pans and bake for 15-20 minutes. If cut with a 2-inch cutter, it should yield about 16 biscuits.

Sweet Potato Casserole

Adapted from a recipe found on Allrecipes.com

For the Potatoes:

4 cups Sweet Potato, Peeled and Cubed

1/2 cup Brown Sugar

2 Eggs, Beaten

1/2 tsp Salt

4 tbsps Butter, Softened

1/2 cup Milk

1/2 tsp Vanilla Extract

All of the spices listed below are used to taste. If you want it to have a kick, up the chile powder. If you love ginger, up that.

1/2 tsp Ginger (Powder)

1 tsp each of Chile Powder, Salt, and Finely Ground Pepper

For the Topping:

1/2 cup Brown Sugar

1/3 cup Flour

3 tbsps Butter, Softened

1/2 cup Chopped Pecans

1 1/2 cups (estimated) mini-marshmallows

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Put peeled, chooped sweet potatoes into a pot with enough water to cover. Boil until tender. Drain and mash well.
2. Mix together sweet potatoes, sugar, eggs, salt, butter, milk, and vanilla until smooth. Transfer to a 9x13 baking dish.
3. Mix together sugar and flour. Cut in the butter until coarse. Stir in the pecans. Sprinkle over the sweet potatoes.
4. Bake for 30 minutes or until the topping is lightly brown. Top with marshmallows and bake until lightly browned.

Humor that Flies Over Head

I apologize. My intention for this blog is to post in it as near to every day as possible. Sometimes, though, time gets away from us. Last weekend, time made quite a show of itself in the form of my great-gram's 100th birthday. Having lived many years with the belief that that side of the family was infinitesimal as compared to my mother's side, it was quite an experience to be standing in my gram's tiny house with no fewer than 1 great-gram, 5 great uncles, 2 great aunts, 1 aunt, 1 father, 3 second-cousins, and numerous family friends. I heard many stories about the town, family members I don't know, and my dad as a kid. Each story was as incredible and amusing as the last.

That being said, though, this post is about one of the moments of humor experienced not with my family, but with(in) the book I was reading.

"...'I'm also a master of boil-in-the-bag. Eating for one. Living on my own. Bit of a crusty old bachelor. Actually, in the papers, that always means gay, doesn't it? Not gay, just never met the right woman.' And for a moment, he looked rather sad."

--Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book.

Teehee! I love how things like this can be slipped into young adult fiction! I don't know if it's a bigger reflection of Gaiman's audacity or of the changing times. I'm sure many who read this book will giggle at the line just as I did, and just as my father did when I read it to him. Of course, there are others who will immediately ban the book just based on this one sentence. And when asked to defend their argument, they'll suddenly come up with many other provocative lines that they never saw before. But then, what good is a piece of literature if it doesn't tick someone off?

Social Influence

Having taken two courses on social psychology, I tend to merely peruse the text (Exploring Social Psychology, 5th ed. by David G. Myers) for the class in which I am currently enrolled. By doing so, I am usually reminded of the basics of various concepts like the low-ball and foot-in-the-door techniques, methods of persuasion, and social conformity. This week, however, I came across one quote in the chapter titled, "How Nice People get Corrupted." The book quotes one of television's more memorable personalities:

"Good people sometimes do bad things."

--Mr. Rogers.

Being Mr. Rogers, of course we know he was right. We are all sometimes led astray. It might be something simple like hastily rushing through a yellow light when we know we should stop. It could take the more serious form of cheating for a test or plagiarizing for a paper. Of course, the bad act could be much worse than even that.

Regardless of the bad acts we're aware of committing, there are many that never register with us at all. When we walk by a homeless person and, despite a belly full of food and a pocketful of change, offer nothing -- we're doing a bad thing. When someone drops something on the bus and we choose not to say anything -- we're doing a bad thing. If we wait to act because we assume someone else will, we're ignoring our social responsibilities. Because as we're sitting around assuming someone else will take care of it, everyone else is sitting around and thinking the same thing.