Talking to The Man

Every so often, I like to send little notes to the members of Congress in my state. (Sometimes I'll send them to Congresscritters in other states, too. But let's not talk about that.) Mostly, this just gets me on mailing lists and doesn't do much else. But I'm an optimist by nature, so I keep trying.

This time, I thought I'd wander over to the "contact Tom" button on Senator Tom Udall's (D-NM) site.

Tom,

(Can I call you Tom? As much as you've emailed me, I feel I should be allowed to.)

I couldn't help noticing that a number of Democrats are caving in to the Republican talking point that any extension of unemployment benefits should be "paid for."

Well, if that's the case, how are we paying for all of the corporate subsidies that my tax dollars are going to? Gas and oil companies get massive subsidies every year, and none of them are struggling. But families in your state are.

What about the $1.1 billion we pay out to distillers every ten years, to allow them to produce flavored vodka? (That one's covered in Section 5010 of the tax code, if you're wondering.) What about the $80 million worth of sugar we bought back from domestic sugar producers (a $3.3 billion dollar industry)?

See if you can "pay for" the unemployment by reducing the subsidy to any industry that's consistently turned a profit in the last decade. This wouldn't even be a hard sell. You could point out that the majority of unemployment insurance goes to families with children, and you personally don't see the benefits to the country that comes from forcing children to starve.

You could point out that long-term unemployment hurts the economy, and while there are people who would like to see the US economy destroyed, none of them should be in Congress.

You can even finish with "And if extending unemployment benefits is such a distasteful subject, I would like to ask why our Republican colleagues have been blocking every effort to create any type of jobs bill for the past six years?"

Give it a shot, Senator. See how far it could take you.

As always, I doubt it will accomplish anything, but let's see what happens.

Dark matters

I've always been uncomfortable with the term "Dark Matter."  Whatever the phenomenon behind unexplained gravitational forces might be, leakage from an alternate universe or MOND or TeVeS we're only guessing what it is from the observable world where mass has gravity.  Yes, it's presumptuous of me to talk about things so far over my head (pun partially intended) but when I heard  Neal DeGrasse Tyson explain to Bill Moyers that the existence of such invisible "stuff" was only suggested by habit I was impressed, as I usually am when someone otherwise impressive agrees with my muddy observations.  “What it truly is is dark gravity. Boom,”  Sounds right to me and right to the point. We see what we're primed by habit to see. Obviously a genius.

I have to like the guy and although some astrophysicists seem to have fled out into the cosmos  to escape the rest of us and others dislike scientists who make the effort to share their enthusiasm for science with the world, seeing that as an effort to sell ideas without peer review, I don't think his regard and his enthusiasm for public understanding of what's going on at the frontier of knowledge is a fault. I'm looking forward to the rest of his series  The New Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

I have to like the guy even more after reading this excerpt from his new autobiography: The Sky is not the Limit

"When combined with the dozens of times I have been stopped and questioned by the police for going to and from my office after hours, and the hundreds of times I am followed by security guards in department stores, and the countless times people cross the street upon seeing me approach them on the sidewalk, I can summarize my life’s path by noting the following: in the perception of society, my athletic talents are genetic; I am a likely mugger-rapist; my academic failures are expected; and my academic successes are attributed to others."

If that doesn't resonate with you somehow, perhaps only that alternate universe hypothesis can explain it.  Dr. Tyson is an exceptional man and not only for being able to do the math that stumps a brain such as most of us have, but for succeeding at doing what society has constantly told him he couldn't, shouldn't and wasn't suited to do.  An example for the young, certainly, but more deliciously a slap in the face for smug, condescending attitudes from those who think they know something important about you by referring to a stereotype. 

What you see is all there is

Or Night of the Radio Frequency Dead

Remember the Alar scare from the 80's?  Feed mice enough of the stuff they used to spray on apples to choke a hippo  (about 5000 gallons a day scaled up to human proportions,)  and they sometimes might get sick -- and so therefore according to what passes for logic in America, it's TOXIC and so much so, there were instances of people calling up toxic waste facilities to ask whether apple juice was too dangerous to dump along with the paint remover and the used motor oil.  Flush it down the toilet and the world might just end.

Of course in the real world, nobody really could demonstrate any ill effects from Alar or most of the other fertilizer, pesticide and hormone horrors du jour.  There are after all enough people who don't feel well at one time or another to keep the Chicken Littles clucking about toxins and selling us things to make it go away, from duct tape for your feet to jewelry made of resistors and capacitors and diodes "tuned to natural frequencies."  People still believe Alar is deadly, but then people still believe lead foil on the outside of a wine bottle will make the wine poisonous and that degradation of  someone's DNA would turn it into OJ Simpson's and WiFi at Starbucks will lower your sperm count. Of course there are also enough people that begin to feel better after a while to keep the sales of snake oil brisk, but that's another matter.

Did silicone breast implants really cause cancer and lupus, etc?  Billions in settlements were paid because ad hoc 'studies' and anecdotes seemed like enough data for a jury to believe the story but  large, independent studies have subsequently found that silicone breast implants do not appear to cause breast cancers or any identifiable systemic disease.  Are we disposed to fear anything new and so much that we refuse to look at evidence and grasp at fragments?

Does eating Gluten give you "grain brain" and make you fat like that e-mail doctor says?  No reason to think so but that some entrepreneur wrote a book and advertises on the internet, but all it takes is a handful of people who say they feel good after eating Doctor Bonkers' gluten free breakfast cereal to provide "clinical results" and don't bother to teach them about statistical regression or the Placebo effect or deprive them of that holier than thou status one gets from a gluten free, 'organic' and free range 'unprocessed' diet.  I mean there's a "study" of mummies that proves wheat killed off the Egyptian aristocracy even though it's total fact-free bunkum. What you see is all there is. It's all I know, so that's all anybody knows.

Think we've learned anything?  No, we haven't and with statistical and clinical support or without it - especially without it -we're still willing to fear that something is making us sick even if we're not sick - something other than the double bacon chili cheeseburgers with special sauce or the cigarettes or all that TV and video game couch time. Besides it doesn't matter if you buy the magic berries of the week from the TV doctor and it must be true if it's on Oprah.  I'm tempted to say there is no truth, no science, no knowledge any more, only marketing.

An article in the local paper the other day told us about the "environmental activist group" that was suing to opt out of the "Smart Meter" program that eliminated meter readers and that can tell the electric company if your power is out and what your peak usage time is.  They use "radio frequencies" insist the activists and although not one of them can cite any evidence that the microscopic amounts of RF these meters use will in any way affect anything living or dead and despite the many years of research and the 100 years of experience users of high power radio equipment have logged, they're convinced that these meters will, like any technology the public doesn't understand, produce immense ecological damage. Will the meter emit less RF than the cell phone the meter reader carries with him?  Of course. It will emit less than your TV or even the 455 KHz IF oscillator in your 1947 radio as well or your cordless phone or your Bluetooth earphone. Of course in this town there's a contingent that is sure the meters are only there to let Obama listen to your thoughts.  I wish I were joking.

These are the same kind of people that will become hysterical about "cell phone frequencies" without any idea what those frequencies are, how they behave, what other equipment uses those bands at much higher power levels and are likely to mumble something about roulette when asked about the inverse square law.  Are they the same people who talk about 'going green' and  'saving the planet' when they unplug their cell phone charger to save a milliwatt hour per year? You tell me.

I remember when TV would make you blind and color TV would give you cancer and you would get melanoma  even on a cloudy day in Yellow Knife wearing a shirt and ski mask if you didn't wear that special clothing soaked in SPF 960. Nuclear testing would produce giant ants and medical advance would piss off God as much as building a ziggurat over 70 feet high once did. None of us are old enough to remember the scares about how taking a train that went over 20mph would make your blood boil and the Telegraph would leach away the electricity from your brain and give you neurasthenia if you didn't buy doctor Feelgood's electric shock machine --  and of course there were dire predictions about electric light and the Telephone - and Ohmagawd, now there's radio and there are "activist groups" to make sure we're properly misinformed and hysterical.

Absence of evidence always seems to trump evidence of absence.  That cell phones after extensive research don't really seem to cause cancer or kill bees, has little effect on belief nor does the fact that 800 MHz police radios put out far, far more power and the police aren't keeling over from neuresthenia - nor the ham radio operators with their 1500 watt transmitters for that matter. Let's not even get into commercial radio stations with a 100 thousand Watts, or high power radar.

That Fluoride in the water doesn't melt your bones and that the Measles vaccine really does prevent measles and condoms really do work for prevention of disease is as demonstrable and more so than than the hard fact that Neill Armstrong didn't take one great leap for mankind in some studio in Pasadena.  It doesn't matter. As Barnum said, there's one born every minute and not one of them has a clue about what a 'study' is, what statistics teach us or what scientists are doing these days.  Daniel Kahneman's brilliant book Thinking Fast and Slow discusses the problem of statisticians who should know much better giving no care at all to sample size and confidently producing meaningless conclusions from "studies" like the now much discredited French Monsanto study showing genetically modified corn producing tumors in rats.  But the public reacts to studies without knowing enough to judge them when it feeds the fear of the new and there's an industry dedicated to keeping things just that way. Just turn on your TV (keeping in mind how dangerous TVs are, of course.)  Data doesn't matter and that study will be referenced by activists and pundits and "save the planet" bloggers ad infinitum. What matters is producing a coherent story that we can grasp at and limiting the data we reveal to that which buttresses the story.

Who knows?  So anxious is the human mind to find causal relationships in chaos.  When one unrelated thing follows another, it's enough and as the columnist from the paper says, "maybe these meters are the reason we have so much more autism."  Maybe indeed and the less information he has about radio frequency emissions or human developmental problems the more speculation seems justified by random events. One always prefers a plausible story to a discussion of mathematical probability and the more so when the plausibility is based on ignorance.  As Daniel Kahneman calls it:  WYSIATI, or What You See Is All There Is. Fragmentary evidence, Gerrymandered evidence -- If I don't know the science, there is no science. If I don't know all the years of research that's been done, then no research has been done and who's going to take the trouble to refute me?
I've always called it the "I don't know, therefore. . ." fallacy or the Argument from Ignorance, but either way if I don't know exactly how the pyramids were built, even if someone else does, it must be space aliens and by the way, my front porch light burned out yesterday and my knee hurts this morning -- those compact fluorescents emit radio frequencies after all.  Scary stuff kids.  Scary stuff.

Of rats and men

Or, In Vino Veritas

When I watched Dennis Rodman's drunken rant the other day, I was astonished, dumfounded and amazed that none of the commentary included the compelling, obvious, unavoidable  observation that the man was dead drunk:  smashed, stewed, tanked, wasted, three sheets to the wind and shitfaced.  It was probably more obvious to the sheepish players sitting next to him who were, I'm sure, worried about any open flame in such hazardous atmosphere.  If we needed any further reminder of the somewhat erratic journalistic and public  tendency to forgive athletes for their often disgusting outbursts, perhaps here we have it.

None the less, we now have the inevitable apology from the man who might not give a rat's ass about being a rat and an ass himself  but just might respond to worries about the financial consequences on those too rare occasions of sobriety.  I'm not expecting any such retraction from the Reverend Jesse 'Hymietown' Jackson who not only couldn't find the strength to criticize the friend and defender of a grizzly mass murderer and psychotic tyrant, but still defends him.  "I had been drinking" says Rodman through a face full of hardware.  No shit! reverberates throughout the cosmos.

Is it time at long last, for America to examine the way it selects people for elevation to the status of hero, prophet and role model for our children - examine the reasons we give to explain our support or condemnation? 

Shhhh - what's that sound?   NO SHIT! says the universe.

Governor Kristie Kreme KO’d by Bridget’s Bridge Jam

The Republican Governor of the State of New Jersey has given new meaning to the term 'gridlock.'

Emails released today (Wednesday, January 8, 2014)  showed that Governor Chris Christie's deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly, deliberately plotted to wreak havoc on the city of Fort Lee, New Jersey, once it became clear that the borough's mayor, Democrat Mark Sokolich, would refuse to endorse Christie in his reelection bid.

"Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee," Deputy Chief of Staff Bridget Anne Kelly wrote in an email on Aug. 13.

"Got it," replied David Wildstein, who was then one of Christie's top appointed officials at the Port Authority, which is run jointly by New York and New Jersey. Wildstein resigned last month.

Sure enough, a month later, there was a massive traffic problem lasting three days. On Sept. 9, the first day of school in Fort Lee, drivers found that two of the three access lanes to the George Washington Bridge -- the busiest bridge in the United States -- were closed, causing gridlock throughout the entire city that delayed all emergency and police vehicles. Among the reported emergencies that day were a missing child case and a cardiac arrest (see comments below).

Furthermore, there is ample justification to claim what I have always felt from the beginning: Governor Kristie Kreme is a verbal abuser, fosters a culture of bullying, and is unfit for public office.

Here is an editorial in today's New Jersey Star Ledger.

Who remembers Nicaragua?

So, on Face the Nation this weekend, Peggy Noonan called New York mayor Bill De Blasio a "Sandinista" – she tried to walk it back almost immediately, as soon as the host called her on it.



But, you know, it's a funny thing: that idea seems to be the latest right wing talking point. In November, Rush Limbaugh called De Blasio a Sandinista and a communist, as did the pundits on Fox "News."

So let’s be clear what’s going on here: the right wing is assuming (perhaps justifiably, considering how they’ve destroyed education) that nobody knows who the Sandinistas were. But before we get to them, the first thing you should know is that the Somoza family ran Nicaragua for 43 years (either directly or through puppets); they were wonderful guys, who kept power through assassination and torture; their relations with the US finally fell apart finally when the Nicaraguan National Guard was caught on tape gunning down ABC reporter Bill Stewart (and his translator Juan Espinoza) in early 1979.

In 1979, the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) overthrew the Somoza regime by force: the only way possible when faced with a tyrant, with a secret police force and a prison full of anyone who spoke out against them. In 1988, Bill De Blasio traveled to Nicaragua, and came away with admiration for what the Sandinistas were accomplishing to help their people.

And, admittedly, the Sandinistas got a little repressive later on - mostly in order to fight the Contras (more on them later), but never, by any stretch of the imagination, did they get as bad as the government they replaced.

But Peggy Noonan was speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, who supported the Somoza regime. This was not surprising, because Reagan had this habit of supporting murderous thugs around the world, like the Taliban, the racist government of South Africa and their policy of apartheid, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and many others. Essentially, it wouldn't matter how many of his own people a dictator killed or tortured: if they bought their guns from the US instead of the USSR, Reagan liked them. He was friendly that way.

In fact, one of the most memorable acts of the Reagan administration (you might have heard of it) was when they quietly sold arms to Iran (the same country that had just recently taken over their American embassy), and funneled the money to a terrorist organization called the Contras.

Remember the Contras? They opposed the Sandinista government. And they showed their opposition through the gentle, humanitarian tactics of rape, murder, destruction of entire towns, kidnapping, blowing up health care clinics, and targeting doctors for assassination. You know, just good, clean fun; these were the people Reagan supported.

So, let's draw a few lines: Peggy Noonan worked for Reagan, who supported the Contras, who were opposed to the Sandinistas. So I guess it's understandable that Noonan might think badly of the Sandinistas, as well.

Because she, too, apparently loves murderous thugs and hates freedom. At least, that’s the impression I get. Can anybody explain what it is that I might be misunderstanding?

A Dinosaur's Thoughts on the ACA So Far

Now that the ACA or "Obamacare" has kicked in, this simple lizard has a few thoughts to put out on how it's going.  First, it occurs to me that while there have been plenty of complaints from humans of the right-wingety variety, few if any have latched onto something that really is quite radical about the otherwise middle-of-the-road initiative.  I'm referring to that little bid'niss of doing away with the "pre-existing conditions" screening procedure.  Know why that's che-sexy radical?  Well, THE BASIC PREMISE of insurance is that you must set up your client-parameters with certain exclusions in mind, ones that allow you to turn a profit by the actuarial tables.  I'll bet you're still trying to wrap your mind around the fact that a walnut-brained Jurassic dinosaur just used a fancy phrase like "actuarial tables" and actually seems to have understood what it meant, but let's get back to the subject at hand.  What I'm suggesting is that Obumuhcare messes with the very concept that makes insurance insurance.

Here's a f'rinstance: if a guy is standing on top of a tall building and threatening to jump, you don't sell him a million-dollar life-insurance policy that takes effect immediately and carries no exclusionary language against suicide.  But that's close to what Obamacare does, isn't it?  If I have three life-threatening diseases at the same time, I get to sign up for a policy and you can't exclude me on that basis.  You also don't get to charge me more, if I understand the law correctly.  (Except that the insurers can still charge more for older people.  Because not doing that would be no fun at all.)  What that requirement does is transform the for-profit insurer into an entity that in at least one regard has to behave rather like a gub'mint agency.  You get Medicare when you turn 65.  They don't turn you away because you're sick or old, not even with an unctuous smile.

Now, I'm not complaining about this new development – far from it.  If I've got it right, it's a good move on the Administration's part.  It's even admirably insidious of them, no?  People are so busy complaining about a few curve balls that they've missed the soshulist spitball fluttering right past them and into the catcher's mitt.  So there's that.  Big Insurers who used to make Cruella De Vil (you know, the novel and cartoon character who grinned maniacally whilst shooting dalmations from a helicopter – okay, I made that last part up) look like a major benefactor to the ASPCA must now behave like halfway decent corporate citizens. 

But then there's everything else.  I've read that a lot of very poor folk have been able to sign up for Medicaid, CHIP, etc. and that a lot of people have indeed been able to get policies with help from Uncle Sam.  That's great.  What's not so great is that in a fair number of cases, middle-classers are finding that those "affordable" new ACA-compliant policies are priced beyond financial reach, and no help is available.  Somehow, when the Democrats say "rich bastard," they always seem to mean, "Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and all those other caviar-eating mother-truckers who make more than $25,000 per annum."  Yup, O ye rich 'uns, your Prada-shod hoof shall slide in due time; your days of living it up with your ill-gotten venti-cinque mille k's are fast coming to the ignominious end they deserve.  Yes, that's right, you -- and ….  Well, you get the idea.

That’s a problem with the ACA, I think – it fails up to now to make provision for the fact that a lot of perfectly ordinary Americans are getting squeezed by the provisions of a law intended to help ordinary Americans.  Because of course how could people who preside over a capitalist economy possibly be expected to bethink themselves five minutes in advance and realize what's bound to happen when they tell insurers to start offering something like "access to necessary health care" instead of the snake-oil & small-print gobs of bunkum they've so often been guilty of offering in the past?  Think ahead?  "Who does that?" as the saying goes.  Who, indeed.  Why, if you thought they should have made allowance for this kind of behavior, you're just the sort of unreasonable individual who thinks that when you know your website is going to get 3.8 million hits per day, you ought to design it not to crash when more than five people log on at once.  And there's just no talking to an unreasonable lot like you.  I give up, I really do.

Put these two things together – one, that Obamacare radically and (I think) admirably transforms the health insurance market in terms of how it assesses eligibility for access to care, and two, a lot of people don't perceive "unaffordably higher premiums for somewhat better policies" to be particularly beneficial to them.  Then I think you can see what needs to happen.  No, not the "Repeal Maobamacare" mantra of the Right, but rather a determination to iron out whatever needs ironing out in the ACA and a recognition (forced on us partly by the ACA itself) that yes, health care is often pretty good in this country but it's also pretty expensive and almost nobody can really afford the true cost of it, so the market is a VERY imperfect vehicle for making things right.  All that means extending the premium subsidies to people who make more than the amounts that currently trigger subsidies.  (And yes, my $25,000 figure was only intended as satire, it isn't even close to the correct figure.)  Extending the subsidies or tax breaks would move the ACA much closer to being a law that recasts health-care access as a basic right, a necessity, rather than as a privilege or a hassle. 

As things stand, I think the ACA only goes about halfway in that direction, and that's why the public perception of it (aside from enough right-wing propaganda to choke up the infernal rivers Phlegethon and Cocytus together) isn't very positive right now.  It's the half-measure we were able to get given the political landscape during President Obama's first term, and therein lies the problem.  Apparently, so many of us here in the "US & A" despise government so much that even when we try to get it to do something good, we do things in a muddled, overly complex and yet half-bum way and we end up creating as many problems as we solve.  What I think needs to be done would cost us all somewhat more as taxpayers, but at least it would be fair and it would stop all the grumbling about the unintended consequences of a major and mostly beneficial law.

SPAM! SPAM! SPAM!

It's Sunday, and I'm waiting for another season of Downton Abbey to premier tonight.  Yes, I know, it's a soap opera with British accents, but will Lady Mary ever find happiness now that Matthew is dead and buried?  And what about Edith?

So as I'm doing some clean-up chores on my computer and checking my email, I decided to look at my spam folder, since a legitimate email now and then gets thrown in there by mistake.

My spam folder may very well be more entertaining than a third season of Downton Abbey.

Someone named "Jennifer" asked me in no less than 10 emails "Why won't you respond to my message?"  I felt a twinge of guilt, but then was immediately distracted by "Ashley Madison's"  subject line "Life is Short, Have an Affair."    At my age, I'm afraid that would make life seem too long and way too complicated.

"Abigail" writes "Hello Mighty Man, How Are You?"  I guess it's impossible to tell what sex I am from my email identity, and possibly it doesn't matter to these spammers, so I'm not upset with "Abigail."   "Bree Olson's Nitroxin" promises me a "STRONGER, THICKER, HARDER PENIS -- FREE TRIAL 100% GUARANTEED!"  Well?

"Master Seducer" entices with "Weird video gets you laid? Watch this."  I'll pass, but thanks, M. Seducer, for the invite.  "Christian Mingle" promises that I'll find "That Special Someone."  But there's no 100% GUARANTEE, like I'm promised on that "STRONGER, THICKER..." well, you know. Some things even God won't back up, I suppose.  Finally, "Ava" says "Congrats on Your Free Fuckbook Account!"   I don't even.

Mixed in with all this sexual ministrone are coupons for "mozzarella sticks and buffalo wings" from "Applebee's," "a free oil change coupon," a credit card deal with "0% APR,"  "Rock Star Loans," "Rolex Replicas," and a "LIMITED TIME FREE ACCESS TO LOCAL SLUTS," offered by "slut finder."  The mind reels.

What a big wide world it is out there, and how confounded I am by it all.

Mistakenly thrown in among all these irresistible spam ads and enticements was one email from a friend of mine who works with people to find them low-income housing.  The email profiled "The Home Buyer of the Month," a husband and wife who were finally able to find affordable housing for themselves and their two children in time for Christmas by working with my friend, Jim, and the state agency he heads.  Nice.

So I guess plowing through Wal-Mart ads, Penis Enhancement ads, something from "knobsplus" that handles "Trash Cans and MORE!" an "ALERT' about a "sexual predator" in my neighborhood, a plea from "Eliza Berrier" asking me to "PLEASE TAKE A LOOK!" and "Layla" whose inscrutable subject line was "Friends With Benefits Is What I Actually Meant hahaha ;)," and "Stella" telling me to "Just Don't Let the Days Past[sic] You By Without Enjoying Them to the Fullest," --after all that mish-mash of a jumble of sexual enticements and straight-out, good old American commercialism, I found a happy end-of-the-year story.

It was worth going through all that junk.  And I'm sorry, "Jennifer," but I still won't be responding to your message, even if I can guess what it is.

Happy 2014

All I have to do is dream

Phil Everly  1939 - 2014

Summer of  '58 - the Everly Brothers, a friend's back porch, his older sister's little 45RPM machine.  13 years old and I know about those dreams, the world on the horizon, just out of reach almost too much to hope for and just aching not to be just a boy any more.  Tail fins and chrome bumpers like big breasts on two tone cars and Little Suzie in the back seat. Drive in movies and hot dogs and big Schwinn bicycles with springer forks and how I wished it was an Indian.

Year before I had rigged mom's Motorola 5 tube, battery radio to take earphones. WJJD in Chicago and when she took it back, those batteries were expensive, I built a germanium diode radio with a one transistor PNP audio amp and a wire out the window and Rock & Roll under the blankets late at night like a new 283 cubic inch, fuel injected V8 world coming to replace the old one.  Fuelie Chevy, Duntov cam - three speed trans. Everly Brothers on a Summer night.  All I have to do is dream.

Good night Phil, good night
We gotta go home.

Pot calling the kettle

I only talk about it once in a while, but my wife suffers from chronic pain issues. She's been seeing a number of doctors for a number of years, some better than others, trying to keep her going. As the years have gone on and the pain has gotten worse, she's ended up on gradually stronger and heavier doses of narcotics. And she hates it.

She's always been intelligent. She used to catch on immediately to the most subtle nuance. And then, as the cloud of narcotics around her head got thicker and heavier, she found it harder and harder to concentrate. She couldn't easily focus her attention on anything.

The tradeoff between being less intelligent and not being in pain was difficult for her. It was a different kind of pain, but there it is.

But New Mexico, unlike many more "civilized" states, has medical marijuana laws. And after our daughter suggested medical marijuana, she started doing her research. (OK, technically, our daughter suggested Marinol - she didn't think there was a chance in hell that her mother would smoke.)

New Mexico issues licenses to its known users, and the process for getting a license, while not particularly complicated, is rigid, structured, and annoying as hell.

We gathered all the documents that they wanted: the completed five-page application, a copy of her driver's license, her medical records, and certification from two different practitioners (her primary care guy, and her Pain Management guy).

(Weirdly, we also got a call from the Department of Health asking permission to contact a third doctor - she had an x-ray in her records, and they wanted to contact the radiologist who read it: possibly as evidence that she had cysts where he said she did - we've never really been certain.)

We had different problems getting the two medical authorizations. The first one, and easily the strangest one, was from our primary care guy. We've been seeing this short, elderly guy, and he wanted us to make an appointment with him. He'd apparently reviewed her records, and he sat down with her, looked her in the eyes, and asked her if she was aware of the possibility of the drug causing severe schizophrenia?

Yes, that's right. A medical doctor, concerned about Reefer Madness. (That was actually the incident that caused us to reevaluate our primary care provider.)

The second problem was came up later. It seems that the Pain Management doctor's paperwork didn't meet their requirements, and we'd been back-burnered for three weeks before we found out.

After a long and angry phone call with the Department of Health, I got them to finally explain what the problem was: the doctor's Physician's Assistant (PA) had filled out the paperwork for him - that, after all, is what PA's do. But she wasn't a Board Certified Pain Medicine specialist - the doctor was.

The next day, I overnighted updated paperwork from the doctor to them, and my wife now has a bright, shiny green card from the New Mexico Department of Health. It has a fascinating statement on the back: "card holders are legally permitted to use and possess up to six (6)ounces (170 grams) of usable marijuana." As opposed to all that unusable marijuana that people are caught with every day?

She also has a list of all the non-profit pot stores certified by the State of New Mexico (I think they should call them "dealerships"), along with an admonition not to disclose their locations. My wife is now a state-sponsored stoner.

So there's the trick: the government has a program, but they don't have a lot of inclination to help you themselves. You have to push them into doing their job, and you have to keep resubmitting anything they have a problem with - all it takes is one comma out of place, and everything comes to a halt.

She has a vaporizer (smoking irritates her throat, so we avoid that), and the store has some fairly high-quality pot, with names like "Wow" and "Shiska-berry", along with information on which of the various cannabinoids each brand contains.

And while she spends most days mildly buzzed, she no longer feels like her head is wrapped in cotton. She can concentrate on things for an extended period; she can read books again, and not have to go back over the same page three or four times.

There are conflicting theories regarding the use of marijuana; I just know this. It helps my wife, and that's what matters to me.