Today's Apathetic Youth: Space for Long Articles

2010-11-09T15:38:00.001-08:00

2010-02-23T19:36:00.001-08:00

baby crap

2010-02-09T03:08:00.000-08:00

Sharri Markson

2008-06-01T04:38:00.000-07:00

From The Age:

According to the UK Press Gazette, some Australian journalists have put even their tabloid British cousins to shame. "I have never come across such outrageous reporting practices," is the blunt analysis of Claire Burroughs, chief press officer at St Mary's Hospital, London.

[...]

But formal complaints have now been made to the Australian High Commission in London by St Mary's, by the liaison officer representing the family of Melbourne man Sam Ly, who died on Friday, and by several families of the injured who have not been identified.

[...]

Soon after, however, the press office learned that a second Australian journalist, Sharri Markson, a young Sunday Telegraph reporter who last year was named as News Limited's Young Journalist of the Year, had gained access to Professor Tulloch's room.

According to the ward's chief nurse, Markson had arrived at the ward looking upset, with a bunch of flowers, and insisting on seeing the injured man.

Professor Tulloch told staff at the hospital he initially assumed she was a student but realised she was a journalist when she began conducting an interview, and taking photographs with a digital camera. He completed the interview in the knowledge that she was a journalist.

"Sharri never misrepresented herself," says Sunday Telegraph editor Jeni O'Dowd. "She was never asked by any hospital staff why she was there. She introduced herself to Professor Tulloch, who was with his wife in the room. She told them who she was and where she was from. They were happy to talk to her and pose for photographs."

"She duped a nurse; I've had that from the nurse and I've had that from John (Professor Tulloch)," Ms Burroughs responds.

When Ms Burroughs arrived on the ward, she says, Professor Tulloch, who was suffering from vertigo as a result of a perforated eardrums and could not see properly because his glasses had been lost in the explosion, said he was tired and confused and no longer wanted to be interviewed.

The hospital immediately cancelled plans for the pooled interview, creating angry scenes that intensified over the weekend when Seven aired the hand-held camera footage of the interview that Reason had conducted during his encounter with Professor Tulloch.

Images

2007-07-22T06:00:00.000-07:00

Why the death penalty is still a bad idea

2007-07-15T01:07:00.000-07:00

As Execution Nears, Last Push From Inmate’s Supporters

By BRENDA GOODMAN

Published: July 15, 2007

ATLANTA, July 14 — It was a Friday night in a rough part of town when Officer Mark A. MacPhail of the Savannah Police Department showed up to work his second job, moonlighting as a security officer for the Greyhound bus station on Oglethorpe Avenue in Savannah, an area where transients were known to congregate and to drink through the early morning hours.

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Georgia Department of Corrections

Troy A. Davis was convicted of killing a police officer in 1989.

A few hours later, early on a Saturday morning in August 1989, Officer MacPhail was shot and killed as he tried to break up a fight over a can of beer. He never drew his weapon.

The man convicted of shooting the officer that night in 1989, Troy A. Davis, is likely to be the focus of an unusual clemency hearing before the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles. On Monday, the board is to hear the case of Mr. Davis, 38, who was sentenced to death in 1991 for the killing.

Though prosecutors have considered the case solved for nearly two decades, a chorus of eyewitnesses say the police arrested the wrong man. Now, on the eve of execution, scheduled for Tuesday, they have joined his family and his lawyers in an effort to get the courts to hear new evidence they say proves he is innocent.

With no physical evidence — the murder weapon was never found — prosecutors relied heavily on the testimony of nine eyewitnesses who took the stand against Mr. Davis.

But since his trial, seven of the nine have recanted or changed their testimony, saying they were harassed and pressed by investigators to lie under oath. Other witnesses have come forward identifying a different man as the shooter.

But because of a 1996 federal law intended to streamline the legal process in death penalty cases, courts have ruled it is too late in the appeals process to introduce new evidence and, so far, have refused to hear it.

Legal experts, including William S. Sessions, a retired federal judge, a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a self-described supporter of the death penalty, have sounded the alarm over Mr. Davis’s case. They say it underscores the many ways the death penalty is unevenly and wrongly applied, particularly in the South, the region with the most death penalty cases.

“It would be intolerable to execute an innocent man,” Mr. Sessions wrote in an op-ed article for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “It would be equally intolerable to execute a man without his claims of innocence ever being considered by the courts or by the executive.”

Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, is expected to testify at the clemency hearing Monday.

In addition to the hearing, lawyers for Mr. Davis asked for a new trial, but on Friday, Judge Penny Haas Freesemann of Chatham County Superior Court in Savannah denied the bid. Mr. Davis’s lawyers told The Associated Press that they would appeal to the state Supreme Court.

Mr. Davis’s older sister, Martina N. Correia, has watched her brother’s battle against a legal system she believes is biased against poor black defendants.

Georgia is one of only two states that do not guarantee defense counsel for condemned prisoners after they have exhausted their direct appeals.

“Our father worked as a sheriff’s deputy in Savannah,” said Ms. Correia, 40. “My fiancé is a police officer. We trusted that if you’re innocent, the system would work.”

“When they finally got people to tell the truth, they said it was too late to introduce it,” she said. “Some of these people, I don’t know how they sleep.”

On June 10, Ms. Correia and her mother led representatives from Amnesty International to the offices of the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles and delivered thousands of letters written in support of Mr. Davis, asking for clemency.

It is rare for the board to commute a death sentence but not unprecedented. Since 1973, the board has granted 50 clemency hearings and commuted 8 sentences.

The last was granted more than three years ago, however, and even Mr. Davis’s lawyers acknowledge that despite the outpouring of support for their client, undoing 15 years of what previous defenders have admitted was poor legal work on behalf of their client would be a long shot.

“But we believe the truth can prevail,” said Jason Ewart, a lawyer from Washington who is representing Mr. Davis.

Some of the facts of the night Officer MacPhail was killed are not in dispute.

Early on the morning of Aug. 19, 1989, a man described as a neighborhood thug, Sylvester Coles, began harassing a homeless man named Larry Young for the beer he was carrying in a paper sack.

A crowd of bystanders, some of whom had spilled out of nearby Charlie Brown’s Pool Hall after hearing the ruckus, followed the fight as it progressed up Oglethorpe Avenue toward the bus station.

Several witnesses later testified that they had heard Mr. Coles threaten Mr. Young with a gun and then saw him pull a pistol out of his pants and then use it to beat Mr. Young on the head.

Fearing for his life, Mr. Young yelled for someone to call the police, and Officer MacPhail responded. He was shot twice and died.

Mr. Davis said he had been one of the bystanders who came out of the pool hall and watched as Mr. Coles tormented Mr. Young. He said that he had run when he heard Mr. Coles threaten to shoot Mr. Young and that he had never looked back.

Mr. Davis surrendered to the Chatham County Sheriff’s Department several days later when he learned the police were looking for him, said his sister Ms. Correia. The family says it trusted that what seemed to be a case of mistaken identity would quickly be sorted out.

With no physical evidence to connect Mr. Davis to the shooting, the prosecutors relied heavily on the testimony of nine witnesses, including Mr. Coles, who identified Mr. Davis as the gunman the day after it happened, with a lawyer by his side.

Mr. Coles could not be found for comment this week.

But in an affidavit filed later, one of the witnesses, Antoine Williams, recalled his testimony that Mr. Davis was responsible for the crime.

“Even when I said that,” Mr. Williams said, “I was totally unsure whether he was the person who shot the officer. I felt pressured to point at him because he was the one who was sitting in the courtroom.”

Ms. Correia said that as the day of the execution drew near, some of the people who testified against her brother were feeling remorse.

“These witnesses, they are calling my brother and asking him to forgive them,” Ms. Correia said. “They thought if they told the truth and signed a piece of paper saying they lied before that’s all it would take. He would go free. They can’t believe he might die because they lied.”

The Shelf Life of Bliss

2007-06-30T04:52:00.000-07:00

The Shelf Life of Bliss

By SAM ROBERTS

Published: July 1, 2007

FORGET the proverbial seven-year itch.

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BYE-BYE HAPPINESS Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston’s live-in relationship turns sour in “The Break-Up.”

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Not to disillusion the half million or so June brides and bridegrooms who were just married, but new research suggests that the spark may fizzle within only three years.

Researchers analyzed responses from two sets of married or cohabitating couples: one group was together for one to three years, the other for four to six years.

While the researchers could not pinpoint a precise turning point — the seven-year itch, as popularized in the play and film about errant husbands, was largely a theory — they found distinct differences between the groups.

“We know the earlier ones are happier,” said Prof. Kelly Musick, a University of Southern California sociologist. “The initial boost that marriage seems to provide fades over time.”

Research also showed that the median duration of first marriages that end in divorce remains a little more than seven years, which means that those couples will likely spend more than half their married lives less happy than they were when they cut the first slice of wedding cake.

“Some folks start getting less happy at the wedding reception,” said Larry Bumpass, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who wrote the study with Professor Musick.

Is there a three-year itch?

“There is not necessarily anything magical about year three,” Professor Musick said. “We know that typically when marriages end in divorce, half end before seven or so years and half end after. This is the same idea.”

Their analysis, which included unmarried, cohabitating partners but not gay couples, was based on the National Survey of Families and Households, a national

sample of 9,637 racially diverse households conducted by the University of Wisconsin Center for Demography and Ecology. The research, coupled with a survey released today by the Pew Research Center, provides an intriguing look at an ethereal part of marriage. Everyone knows the first blush of love is the strongest, but measuring how long it will last and whether that bliss is unique to marriage has always fallen more into the category of “here’s what my mother says” than something quantifiable.

In an academic paper they completed last year that analyzed earlier findings from the national surveys, Professors Musick and Bumpass compared responses to questions about how couples described their relationships, how often they fought and over what, and how they would envision their lives if they separated.

The research doesn’t address whether blissful 21st-century relationships are any more or less enduring than they were in the 20th century, so it may be that happy coupledom always came with a three-year expiration date. With nonmarital childbearing more common and women more economically independent, “What’s keeping people together is their love and commitment for each other,” Professor Musick said, “and that’s fragile.”

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the findings have some foundation.

Bart Blasengame, a 33-year-old freelance writer from Portland, Ore., was with his former fiancée for three years. “I felt like, by year three, we were both forcing it,” he recalled.

“It’s the whole cliché of pursuit,” he said. “Your dates are planned out like some Drew Barrymore romantic comedy with unicorns and rainbows. By year two, we were cruising along, living together, relatively happy. But from a growth standpoint things had started to atrophy. We were happy, content is a better word, but there was no spark.”

But the evolving rules of marriage provide both opportunities and pitfalls, Professor Musick said. “There may be greater potential to find fulfillment in relationships,” she said, “but that possibility and the expectations that come from it may lead to greater disappointment for some” if the expectations aren’t fulfilled.

Her bleak statistical assessment of the durability of enchantment is one of several new findings about relationships and marriage in America. In a word, the State of the Unions is precarious.

Even with the nation’s population increasing, the number of married Americans age 21 to 54 has declined slightly since 2000 — apparently for the first time, as measured by the Census Bureau. In the first decade of the 21st century, the proportion of Americans in every racial and ethnic group who were never married has continued to grow by double digits.

The United States is far from embracing Europe’s postmarriage model or its much higher rates of nonmarital births. Most Americans surveyed this year by the Pew center, in fact, still say marriage is an ideal, if a more elusive one.

While roughly 9 in 10 American adults eventually marry, the time they spend married has declined sharply, in part because they are marrying later and living longer as widows. Moreover, the Pew survey found that 79 percent of Americans say a woman can lead a complete and happy life if she remains single. The comparable figure for men was 67 percent.

While married couples generally say they are more satisfied with their lives, younger adults are far less likely to stigmatize alternatives such as living together and having children out of wedlock, according to the Pew telephone survey of 2,020 adults, which is available at www.pewresearch.org.

The Pew survey found that nearly half of Americans in their 30s and 40s have cohabitated. Among all adults, a minority (44 percent) said that living together without getting married was bad for society (only 10 percent said it was a good thing), although the Pew survey concluded that “by providing an alternative to marriage, cohabitation for some appears to diminish rather than strengthen the impulse to legally marry.”

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In general, married people are presumed to be happier and better off, but Professor Bumpass, who found that most marriages nowadays are preceded by cohabitation, and Professor Musick questioned whether those benefits were unique to marriage and whether they are stable over time.

“We conclude that the boundaries between marriage and cohabitation may become increasingly blurred,” Professor Musick said.

As for the three-year itch, Byron Lester, a 49-year-old information technology administrator from Bloomfield, Conn., is well suited to consider it. Married three years and two months ago, he said the secret to success is often in the details. “Little things really do mean a lot,” he said.

Mr. Lester said he abandoned his cherished newspaper reading during dinner because that is when his wife most enjoys conversation. “And I think she’s adapted to watching more sports,” he said.

Marriage rates vary widely by race, ethnicity, education, income (63 percent of white women over 18 who make more than $100,000 are married; 25 percent of poor black women are). Soaring divorce rates have leveled off, most experts agree, but one reason may be that the dissolution of live-in relationships are not taken into account.

Raoul Felder, the celebrity divorce lawyer whose favorite aphorism is that marriage is the first step on the road to divorce, says marital longevity has fallen victim to the velocity of our suped-up society.

“We’re all addicted to a television-clicker lifestyle,” he said.

But a dissipation of that all-enveloping rapture is no reason to give up on a relationship, many people insist.

“At times, sure, I’m bored,” said Sean Meehan, 51, a therapist from West Hartford who has been married for 14 years. “Who isn’t? But you talk about it with your spouse and you can switch things up.”

“People are so used to everything being disposable,” he said. “They throw out diapers, lighters, coffee cups, so they can throw out a marriage.”

Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the sex adviser, cautioned, too, that the notion of a three-year itch can become self-fulfilling. “How dangerous it is to say something like that,” she said. “From now on, everyone who’s getting married will say it will last three years and then I will have to look for someone else.”

Or, as Paul D. Neuthaler, a divorce mediator in Westchester, said: “The fizzle tends to bubble out within a three- to five-year period when the basis for the marriage was purely physical or related to some attraction not closely associated with each partner’s essential character.”

Another new study, by Prof. Evelyn Lehrer of the University of Illinois at Chicago, contradicts the chestnut that women who marry later are more likely to divorce. She found that with both men and women marrying later than ever, later marriages seem to last longer.

Stephanie Coontz, director of and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families, a research group, said: “We’re getting close to a 180-degree turn in many of the rules about what makes marriage work and not work. The marriages of college-educated couples are becoming more stable.”

Professor Musick is happily married herself — “mostly,” she says — and will celebrate her third anniversary this fall. “My honeymoon,” she mused, “is almost over.”

Whatever the trends, marriage and relationships are in an unusual state of flux, as they were for baby boomers. With so much room to maneuver, younger couples have fewer firm markers to guide them.

In the film “Knocked Up,” Ben beseeches his father for advice after his one-night stand results in a pregnancy.

“I’ve been divorced three times,” his father replies. “Why are you asking me?”

Disability, the Insurance That Is Often Sadly Overlooked

2007-06-30T04:43:00.000-07:00

Disability, the Insurance That Is Often Sadly Overlooked

By HILLARY CHURA

Published: June 30, 2007

It took just 17 days for Cindy Wrenn to realize that her disability insurance premium was not just another drain on her checking account. One-third of American workers are likely to be disabled for an extended period, and she became one of them when she had a stroke and brain aneurysm at age 28.

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Rollin Riggs for The New York Times

Disability pay helps Tammy Brown of Bradford, Ark.; her son, Jordan; and husband, Scott, deal with her Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Mrs. Wrenn signed up for her long-term disability insurance policy in February 2002, as a supplement to the one she had through her job as a licensed title agent. After her medical emergency, the policies paid 70 percent of her salary for the six months it took her to get back to work full time.

“We thought we were too young to have an illness and were pretty secure in our jobs,” said Mrs. Wrenn, of Knoxville, Md. “It wasn’t an outrageous premium, so we did it. Because of disability insurance, we got to follow through with the purchase of our house, and that is where we are living today.”

Disability insurance provides partial income replacement so that if someone becomes disabled, they need not dive into savings, sell a home or radically change how they live. Working people are more likely to become disabled than they are to die prematurely, even though twice as many people have life insurance as have disability coverage, according to industry statistics.

According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, illness is a major factor in home foreclosures.

About one-third of 20-year-old workers today will become disabled before they hit retirement age at 67, according to the Social Security Administration. And the primary cause of disability is chronic disease — cardiovascular, musculoskeletal problems and cancer are leading diagnoses — rather than work-related mishaps or nonworkplace accidents, according to a 2007 study for the Life and Health Insurance Foundation for Education, a nonprofit organization that informs the public about insurance needs.

While job-related expenses decrease if someone cannot work, other expenses can soar, especially if homes must be altered to accommodate a disability, said Craig Sampson, a lawyer in Richmond, Va. He bought disability insurance in 1999 when he was self-employed. He pays about $800 a year for $30,000 in coverage.

“Being disabled, you can go down the financial tubes fairly quickly,” he said. “Not only do you have regular living expenses you are unable to meet, but you have other expenses and all the uncovered medical bills. There’s a lot of stuff health insurance doesn’t cover.”

Tammy Brown of Bradford, Ark., signed up for short-term and long-term disability insurance after she started working for Wal-Mart Stores when she was 17. Fifteen years later, in December 2004, when she was 32, she learned that she had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and was told she had two to five years to live. She took the summer of 2005 off to spend time with her children, then 6 and 9, and received short-term disability. She went back to work in a wheelchair for about a year, then left on long-term disability in 2006. She receives about half of her salary now.

“Without disability, we would’ve lost our home, our vehicle,” Mrs. Brown, now 34, said. “We probably would’ve had to move in with my in-laws.”

The family bought a handicapped-accessible van and installed a handicapped lavatory complete with roll-in shower and rails around the toilet as well as two ramps to the house and a lift to help move Mrs. Brown around the home. Now unable to use her hands or arms to any degree or walk, she needs 24-hour care, either from relatives or someone they pay.

“As I look back on it, I don’t know what we’d have done without it,” Mrs. Brown said. “I never thought I’d ever use it. I thought I’d be working at Wal-Mart until I was 60 or 70.”

There are two major types of disability insurance. Short-term coverage, often offered by employers, covers the first part of a disability and may provide income for a week up to a year or two, depending on the policy.

Long-term insurance starts after short-term coverage ends and helps replace income for a predetermined period, usually two or five years or when the disabled person retires. It can be offered through work — though usually not free —as well as through private policies.

Even those with a policy through work should consider buying private coverage, as an employer’s policy may be bare-bones, could take a while to begin and will not continue when the employee changes jobs. It may also exclude pre-existing health problems.

About 42 percent of full-time workers have no short- or long-term disability, according to Michael Fradkin, vice president for disability product management for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Specialists agree that if you can afford only one type of disability insurance, buy long-term coverage since being without an income for several months would be a burden but being without an income ever again could be devastating.

Because independent disability insurance tends to be expensive — and becomes more so as people age — specialists urge workers to buy it as soon as they start working so they can lock in lower rates. Besides, young workers often have not yet developed health problems that will hinder coverage later.

Mr. Fradkin said many employers offer disability policies, but some have been shifting costs to employees. At the same time, insurers are changing policies to make benefits less generous. They also are becoming more selective in who is granted a private policy.

The policy should replace at least 60 percent of take-home salary and ideally up to 80 percent, if that level of coverage is affordable. Disability insurance will not cover the whole salary for fear that there would be no incentive to work if the entire paycheck could be collected for staying home.

Before purchasing an individual long-term disability policy, it is best to figure out monthly expenses as well as any income from employers, investments or the government. Realize, however, that Social Security payments tend to be minimal, have a five-month waiting period and apply only if someone cannot do any job. Payouts through work policies are subject to taxes, while benefits through independent coverage are tax free.

Bruce Block, a disability specialist with Jenkins Block & Associates in Baltimore, said few people really understood their coverage. Plans vary. Some pay if someone is unable to work in her own professions; others pay if a person cannot do any job, Mr. Block said. Some offer a combination. Others provide coverage for only a few years, some until Social Security begins.

Premiums vary depending on age, sex, income, health, whether a person smokes, what type of job they have and the exclusions they accept. Generally a young nonsmoking accountant who would not need a payout for two years would pay a smaller premium than a chain-smoking construction worker who would want immediate disbursements.

Cara J. Lovenson, an insurance broker and employee benefits consultant in New York City, said she recently sold a policy to a 45-year-old man in relatively good health who is paid about $200,000 a year. She said the policy cost him about $2,800 a year, covered 80 percent of his salary and started payments after 90 days.

Mrs. Wrenn said that when she and her husband, Matthew, discuss ways to cut expenses, dropping their disability is never an option.

“I’ll never let it go,” Mrs. Wrenn said, “well, not until I retire.”

Buying into the Green Mvt

2007-06-30T01:32:00.000-07:00

Buying Into the Green Movement

By ALEX WILLIAMS

Published: July 1, 2007

HERE’S one popular vision for saving the planet: Roll out from under the sumptuous hemp-fiber sheets on your bed in the morning and pull on a pair of $245 organic cotton Levi’s and an Armani biodegradable knit shirt.

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Mark Elias/Bloomberg News

WORLDLY GOODS The 438-horsepower Lexus luxury hybrid sedan.

Stroll from the bedroom in your eco-McMansion, with its photovoltaic solar panels, into the kitchen remodeled with reclaimed lumber. Enter the three-car garage lighted by energy-sipping fluorescent bulbs and slip behind the wheel of your $104,000 Lexus hybrid.

Drive to the airport, where you settle in for an 8,000-mile flight— careful to buy carbon offsets beforehand — and spend a week driving golf balls made from compacted fish food at an eco-resort in the Maldives.

That vision of an eco-sensitive life as a series of choices about what to buy appeals to millions of consumers and arguably defines the current environmental movement as equal parts concern for the earth and for making a stylish statement.

Some 35 million Americans regularly buy products that claim to be earth-friendly, according to one report, everything from organic beeswax lipstick from the west Zambian rain forest to Toyota Priuses. With baby steps, more and more shoppers browse among the 60,000 products available under Home Depot’s new Eco Options program.

Such choices are rendered fashionable as celebrities worried about global warming appear on the cover of Vanity Fair’s “green issue,” and pop stars like Kelly Clarkson and Lenny Kravitz prepare to be headline acts on July 7 at the Live Earth concerts at sites around the world.

Consumers have embraced living green, and for the most part the mainstream green movement has embraced green consumerism. But even at this moment of high visibility and impact for environmental activists, a splinter wing of the movement has begun to critique what it sometimes calls “light greens.”

Critics question the notion that we can avert global warming by buying so-called earth-friendly products, from clothing and cars to homes and vacations, when the cumulative effect of our consumption remains enormous and hazardous.

“There is a very common mind-set right now which holds that all that we’re going to need to do to avert the large-scale planetary catastrophes upon us is make slightly different shopping decisions,” said Alex Steffen, the executive editor of Worldchanging.com, a Web site devoted to sustainability issues.

The genuine solution, he and other critics say, is to significantly reduce one’s consumption of goods and resources. It’s not enough to build a vacation home of recycled lumber; the real way to reduce one’s carbon footprint is to only own one home.

Buying a hybrid car won’t help if it’s the aforementioned Lexus, the luxury LS 600h L model, which gets 22 miles to the gallon on the highway; the Toyota Yaris ($11,000) gets 40 highway miles a gallon with a standard gasoline engine.

It’s as though the millions of people whom environmentalists have successfully prodded to be concerned about climate change are experiencing a SnackWell’s moment: confronted with a box of fat-free devil’s food chocolate cookies, which seem deliciously guilt-free, they consume the entire box, avoiding any fats but loading up on calories.

The issue of green shopping is highlighting a division in the environmental movement: “the old-school environmentalism of self-abnegation versus this camp of buying your way into heaven,” said Chip Giller, the founder of Grist.org, an online environmental blog that claims a monthly readership of 800,000. “Over even the last couple of months, there is more concern growing within the traditional camp about the Cosmo-izing of the green movement — ‘55 great ways to look eco-sexy,’ ” he said. “Among traditional greens, there is concern that too much of the population thinks there’s an easy way out.”

The criticisms have appeared quietly in some environmental publications and on the Web.

GEORGE BLACK, an editor and a columnist at OnEarth, a quarterly journal of the Natural Resources Defense Council, recently summed up the explosion of high-style green consumer items and articles of the sort that proclaim “green is the new black,” that is, a fashion trend, as “eco-narcissism.”

Paul Hawken, an author and longtime environmental activist, said the current boom in earth-friendly products offers a false promise. “Green consumerism is an oxymoronic phrase,” he said. He blamed the news media and marketers for turning environmentalism into fashion and distracting from serious issues.

“We turn toward the consumption part because that’s where the money is,” Mr. Hawken said. “We tend not to look at the ‘less’ part. So you get these anomalies like 10,000-foot ‘green’ homes being built by a hedge fund manager in Aspen. Or ‘green’ fashion shows. Fashion is the deliberate inculcation of obsolescence.”

He added: “The fruit at Whole Foods in winter, flown in from Chile on a 747 — it’s a complete joke. The idea that we should have raspberries in January, it doesn’t matter if they’re organic. It’s diabolically stupid.”

Environmentalists say some products marketed as green may pump more carbon into the atmosphere than choosing something more modest, or simply nothing at all. Along those lines, a company called PlayEngine sells a 19-inch widescreen L.C.D. set whose “sustainable bamboo” case is represented as an earth-friendly alternative to plastic.

Rick Friedman for The New York Times

A second home, complete with solar panels and constructed with salvaged lumber, in Edgartown, Mass.

Manjunath Kiran/European Pressphoto Agency

Laptops and desktop computers said to be good for the earth.

But it may be better to keep your old cathode-tube set instead, according to “The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook,” because older sets use less power than plasma or L.C.D. screens. (Televisions account for about 4 percent of energy consumption in the United States, the handbook says.)

“The assumption that by buying anything, whether green or not, we’re solving the problem is a misperception,” said Michael Ableman, an environmental author and long-time organic farmer. “Consuming is a significant part of the problem to begin with. Maybe the solution is instead of buying five pairs of organic cotton jeans, buy one pair of regular jeans instead.”

For the most part, the critiques of green consumption have come from individual activists, not from mainstream environmental groups like the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network. The latest issue of Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club, has articles hailing an “ecofriendly mall” featuring sustainable clothing (under development in Chicago) and credit cards that rack up carbon offsets for every purchase, as well as sustainably-harvested caviar and the celebrity-friendly Tango electric sports car (a top-of-the-line model is $108,000).

One reason mainstream groups may be wary of criticizing Americans’ consumption is that before the latest era of green chic, these large organizations endured years in which their warnings about climate change were scarcely heard.

Much of the public had turned away from the Carter-era environmental message of sacrifice, which included turning down the thermostat, driving smaller cars and carrying a cloth “Save-a-Tree” tote to the supermarket.

Now that environmentalism is high profile, thanks in part to the success of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the 2006 documentary featuring Al Gore, mainstream greens, for the most part, say that buying products promoted as eco-friendly is a good first step.

“After you buy the compact fluorescent bulbs,” said Michael Brune, the executive director of the Rainforest Action Network, “you can move on to greater goals like banding together politically to shut down coal-fired power plants.”

John Passacantando, the executive director of Greenpeace USA, argued that green consumerism has been a way for Wal-Mart shoppers to get over the old stereotypes of environmentalists as “tree-hugging hippies” and contribute in their own way.

This is crucial, he said, given the widespread nature of the global warming challenge. “You need Wal-Mart and Joe Six-Pack and mayors and taxi drivers," he said. “You need participation on a wide front.”

It is not just ecology activists with one foot in the 1970s, though, who have taken issue with the consumerist personality of the “light green” movement. Anti-consumerist fervor burns hotly among some activists who came of age under the influence of noisy, disruptive anti-globalization protests.

Last year, a San Francisco group called the Compact made headlines with a vow to live the entire year without buying anything but bare essentials like medicine and food. A year in, the original 10 “mostly” made it, said Rachel Kesel, 26, a founder. The movement claims some 8,300 adherents throughout the country and in places as distant as Singapore and Iceland.

“The more that I’m engaged in this, the more annoyed I get with things like ‘shop against climate change’ and these kind of attitudes,” said Ms. Kesel, who continues her shopping strike and counts a new pair of running shoes — she’s a dog-walker by trade — as among her limited purchases in 18 months.

“It’s hysterical,” she said. “You’re telling people to consume more in order to reduce impact.”

For some, the very debate over how much difference they should try to make in their own lives is a distraction. They despair of individual consumers being responsible for saving the earth from climate change and want to see action from political leaders around the world.

INDIVIDUAL consumers may choose more fuel-efficient cars, but a far greater effect may be felt when fuel-efficiency standards are raised for all of the industry , as the Senate voted to do on June 21, the first significant rise in mileage standards in more than two decades.

“A legitimate beef that people have with green consumerism is, at end of the day, the things causing climate change are more caused by politics and the economy than individual behavior,” said Michel Gelobter, a former professor of environmental policy at Rutgers who is now president of Redefining Progress, a nonprofit policy group that promotes sustainable living.

“A lot of what we need to do doesn’t have to do with what you put in your shopping basket,” he said. “It has to do with mass transit, housing density. It has to do with the war and subsidies for the coal and fossil fuel industry.”

In fact, those light-green environmentalists who chose not to lecture about sacrifice and promote the trendiness of eco-sensitive products may be on to something.

Michael Shellenberger, a partner at American Environics, a market research firm in Oakland, Calif., said that his company ran a series of focus groups in April for the environmental group Earthjustice, and was surprised by the results.

People considered their trip down the Eco Options aisles at Home Depot a beginning, not an end point.

“We didn’t find that people felt that their consumption gave them a pass, so to speak,” Mr. Shellenberger said. “They knew what they were doing wasn’t going to deal with the problems, and these little consumer things won’t add up. But they do it as a practice of mindfulness. They didn’t see it as antithetical to political action. Folks who were engaged in these green practices were actually becoming more committed to more transformative political action on global warming.”

2007-06-24T08:13:00.000-07:00

Super Rich Seek New Heights in Pampering

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: June 15, 2007

Filed at 2:57 a.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- Forget about the $350 stilettos. Shoes with status these days come with $1,000 price tags. And $600 handbags have become so bourgeois. A-listers don't want to be seen with anything costing less than $5,000.

It's no secret that luxury sales have been booming over the past six years. But at a time when the average American is grousing about meager wage growth and feeling strapped by a 30-cent spike in the price of gas, splurging by the wealthy has risen to gaudy proportions as the super rich seek new heights in pampering, price tags and one-of-a-kind items that set them apart.

''There's this insatiable appetite for the most luxurious,'' said Faith Hope Consolo, chairman of Prudential Douglas Elliman's retail leasing sales division, who has brought European designers including Versace and Valentino to the U.S. over the past two decades.

Luxury sales worldwide topped $150 billion last year, of which 30 percent came from the U.S., where such sales have been rebounding after taking a pause following the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to Telsey Advisory Group's James Hurley.

While U.S. store executives say that the weakening dollar has fueled a surge of tourists from Asia and emerging countries like Russia, whom experts say tend to go for the bling, luxury stores don't have to just wait for foreigners. Sure, investment bankers and Internet entrepreneurs have kept luxury sales booming, but the latest source of new wealth are hedge fund managers -- the top 25 last year made more than a combined $14 billion a year, according to Institutional Investor.

And unless there's another major geopolitical event that sends shoppers hibernating, experts believe luxury spending -- growing at double-digit rates for many high-end purveyors -- won't lose momentum.

Some social experts warn the trend will only increase tensions between the haves and have nots.

The over-the-top splurging is happening at a time when the income gap between the wealthy -- those making more than $350,000 -- and everyone else is the widest since the Depression Era. And while the average American worker's income increased 4.6 percent in 2006, the wealthy have enjoyed double-digit gains.

There's some trickle down effect too. Waiters at tables with $3,000 tabs get their share of big tips. But as Carl Steidtmann, chief economist at Deloitte Research says, the biggest beneficiaries are artisan and small trade businesses, which are seeing the market expand as Americans' appetite for rare items increases.

According to Carol Brodie, chief luxury officer at CurtCo Media, the publisher of the Robb Report, whose annual issue features the year's best-of-the-best like a $330,000 Mikimoto golden pearl choker, the super rich don't want just the expensive. What they are looking for is the rarest item, something that is custom-made and the best quality. Unlike the 1980s and 1990s, ''it's not about the logos,'' she said. ''It shouts quietly.''

Nevertheless, the price tags seem loud.

Montblanc recently sold a $700,000-plus pen just a few days after it showed up in the New York store. The pen, adorned with rubies, sapphires and diamonds, took 15 months to handcraft. At Cartier, $1 million to $2 million sales checks -- rare only a few years ago -- is occurring a couple times a month at its North American boutiques.

Frederic de Narp, CEO and president of Cartier North America, said the largest bill tallied by a customer on a single visit last year topped $11 million. He would not give specifics on the purchase.

And Bulgari reports that single purchases in the millions of dollars are becoming more common in the States as well.

Louis Vuitton this spring pre-sold its limited number of $40,000-plus handbags made up of a patchwork of samples from different spring and summer collections.

The bags cost only slightly less than the median household income of $46,326, as reported by the Census Bureau.

Even Coach Inc., whose bags average $300, is extending its reach to the next tier. Last year, the handbag maker introduced a collection of limited edition $10,000 crocodile handbags.

Designers and retailers are also going to new lengths to cater to these wealthy buyers -- Tom Ford's new store in Manhattan has a butler who will bring drinks or order lunch.

With luxury merchants generating at least $8,000 in revenue per square foot -- about 10 times what a middlebrow retailer takes, according to Consolo, these boutiques can afford the frills. But these stores can't afford to be snooty about who they serve.

As luxury companies expand their stores or open new ones in such major cities as New York, Las Vegas and Washington, and reach out into wealthier towns like Chevy Chase, Md., they have to be careful about giving all customers who walk in the door the VIP treatment. Even celebrities seem like to shop in Juicy Couture sweats.

''Stores have to be more welcoming regardless of who they are,'' said Jim Taylor, vice chairman of the Harrison Group, a marketing consultancy. He noted that based on a comprehensive Harrison study on the wealthy, most of the well-heeled interviewed say they have not been treated well.

Nevertheless, the prices on luxury goods keep going up as stores don't see any consumer resistance. The dollar's weakness against the Euro has also made European goods more expensive here. According to Kelly Bensimon, founding editor of Elle Accessories, only a few years ago, the must-have bag retailed for $500; now the ''it'' bags go for well over a $1,000.

Trend experts say the shoe designer du jour is Christian Louboutin, whose prices top $1,000-- most likely beyond the reach of most upper middle class women seeking to splurge.

''Whether it's a handbag, shoe, or watch, the price of keeping up has gone up,'' said Bensimon. ''In order for you to be that woman, you have to have a serious bank account.''

Allison Weiss Brady, 36, a venture capitalist and philanthropist who is on the board of her family foundation, said she likes to be practical when buying handbags preferring to buy bags in basic colors. Still, she spends $20,000 per season on accessories and typically spends $5,000 per bag, much more than the $2,000 she used to spend a few years ago.

Among Brady's most prized finds recently are a pair of $11,000 earrings at Judith Ripka and a multicolored lizard Fendi handbag for $4,960.

Keri Frame, director of stores at Wynn Las Vegas, who oversees the 22 Wynn-owned stores in the luxury resort -- including Manolo Blahnik, Gaultier and a Ferrari dealership -- agreed that increasingly customers are looking for items almost no one else has.

Frame noted that it takes four years to make Jean Dunand watches sold at Wynn & Co. Jewelry, and 16 were made this year. Wynn has sold four of those ranging in price from $350,000 to $575,000 so far this year.

That leaves the hoipolloi who want to have the latest runway item feeling inadequate, or going into debt to try to keep up.

Nadine Absolam, a 32-year-old Brooklyn resident, says she likes to have the trendiest designer items, but she said it's getting harder to come up with the cash.

''My first priority should be my bills. But these designers bring out so many hot items that you must have these things,'' said the Pilates instructor. ''I am always late with my bills.'' Absolam spends about $1,000 in clothing and accessories per month, about half of her monthly salary. One of her most recent buys was a $1,100 Gucci messenger bag; her boyfriend last Christmas bought her Fendi's ''Spy bag,'' priced at around $3,000 and coveted by fashionistas.

''I can't keep wearing my Spy bag. I have to change it,'' to look fresh, Absolam said.

Others like Jennifer Sandovan, 28 of Yonkers, N.Y., say they just don't want to be part of it.

''I think it's a waste,'' she said. The most Sandovan pays for a handbag is $50.

If the average American doesn't want to dig themselves into debt, that may be the most they should spend. But for the well-heeled, spending $3,000 for an accessory doesn't make much of a dent.

According to an analysis of the latest IRS tax data available by Prof. Emmanuel Saez, the University of California, Berkeley economist with Prof. Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, those in the top tenth of a percent reported an average income of $5.6 million in 2005, up $908,000 from the prior year; the top one-hundredth of a percent had an average income of $25.7 million, up almost $4.4 million from the year before, according to the study.

Meanwhile, real reported income in the U.S. rose 3.4 percent in 2005 on average but the average income for those in the bottom 90 percent fell slightly compared with the year before, according to the study.

John Vogel, faculty director, Allwin Initiative for Corporate Citizenship at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, said such disparity doesn't bode well for society.

''We build a society around the middle class and as the middle class gets stretched and shrinks there are significant implications,'' said Vogel. If the ideal life is owning a pair of $1,000 shoes, that's ''a terrible ideal for young people.''

A growing number of stores and shoppers are seeing the need to give back, however. Brady, the philanthropist who divides her time between Miami and New York, prefers to shop at stores where a portion of sales goes to a charity.

And who knows how the younger generation will prioritize luxury?

Francois-Henry Bennahmias, president and CEO of Audemars Piguet North America, which sells watches that average about $40,000, does wonder about how his 11-year-old daughter's generation will view luxury spending.

''Will she want a watch, or will she want to spend on the environment?'' asked Bennahmias. ''You don't know what the youth will go for.''

Influx From Zimbabwe to South Africa Tests Both

2007-06-23T05:29:00.000-07:00

Benedicte Kurzen/EVE

At the Central Methodist Church in Johannesburg, hundreds of Zimbabwean refugees gather each evening for prayer. South Africa’s services have been severely strained.

By MICHAEL WINES

Published: June 23, 2007

JOHANNESBURG, June 22 — As Zimbabwe’s disintegration gathers potentially unstoppable momentum, a swelling tide of migrants is moving into neighboring South Africa, driven into exile by oppression, unemployment and inflation so relentless that many goods now double in price weekly.

South Africa is deporting an average of 3,900 illegal Zimbabwean migrants every week, the International Organization for Migration says. That is up more than 40 percent from the second half of 2006, and six times the number South African officials said they were expelling in late 2003.

And that reflects only those who are captured. Many more Zimbabweans slip into the country undetected, although estimates vary wildly. In a nation of 46 million, most experts say, undocumented Zimbabweans could number several hundred thousand to two million.

Social tensions are ratcheting up in both nations, as Zimbabwe’s adult population dwindles and South Africans, already burdened by high unemployment, face new competition for jobs and housing. The migrants also pose a diplomatic problem, because South Africa is trying to broker an end to Zimbabwe’s long political crisis without criticizing its government or appearing to have a major stake in the outcome.

The situation is inflicting ever more misery on the Zimbabweans. The vast majority flee their country’s penury to find a way to support their families back home. But in South Africa they often find xenophobia, exploitation and a government unwilling and ill-equipped to help them.

“There’s a lot of competition” with South Africans “for other resources like housing in informal settlements, access to limited primary health care and education,” said Chris Maroleng, an expert on Zimbabwe at the Institute for Security Studies, a research organization in Pretoria.

South Africa’s government already struggles to provide free housing, medical care and employment for its own poorest, including the millions living in shantytowns. Here, where joblessness runs from 25 to 40 percent of adult workers, the Zimbabweans — now the nation’s largest migrant group — are increasingly seen as intruders, not victims, and clashes between the groups are not uncommon.

Unquestionably, the Zimbabweans are victims first. A rising number claim to be refugees from persecution by President Robert G. Mugabe’s police and by supporters of his ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front. Just six Zimbabweans sought political asylum in South Africa in 2001; last year, the total was nearly 19,000, more than a third of all asylum applications in South Africa.

But most are fleeing privation, not persecution. Zimbabwe’s annual inflation rate was officially 4,530 percent in May; economists say it is at least twice that. Industries are operating at barely 30 percent of capacity, unemployment exceeds 80 percent and a disastrous harvest is likely to leave up to four million in need of food aid this year.

A memorandum prepared by 34 international aid agencies, including the United Nations and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, predicted this month that the country’s economy would cease to function by the end of this year.

Remittances keep the economy afloat: half of all households get most of their money from distant friends and relatives, a Global Poverty Research survey concluded last June. More than one in five of those who sent money lived in South Africa, the most of any nation except Britain.

Magugu Nyathi arrived in Johannesburg two and a half years ago and found work as a journalist for a Zimbabwe news organization. Her aunt, an office worker in Bulawayo, earns 400,000 Zimbabwe dollars a month — about $9, until the Zimbabwe dollar plummeted this week.

Now the aunt’s monthly salary is worth about $2. She survives in part on a stipend from Ms. Nyathi.

“There are families who don’t have a kid outside the country,” said Ms. Nyathi, who lives in Cape Town. “How are they surviving? Just think of it.”

Ms. Nyathi is lucky as migrants go: she has a skill and has obtained a temporary permit that allows her to remain legally in South Africa while her application for asylum is processed. Because Zimbabwe was long one of the best-educated nations in Africa, a share of migrants — particularly teachers, who have often been targets of harassment by Mr. Mugabe’s supporters — stand a good chance of finding work in South Africa, legally or not.

Johannesburg’s government said this week that 8 in 10 people who had visited a new office for migrant assistance were Zimbabwean, and that the visitors included mathematicians, geologists, engineers and experts in computers and aviation.

But skills are no guarantee of employment. At the Central Methodist Church in downtown Johannesburg, hundreds of Zimbabwean refugees gather every evening, waiting for the doors to open so they can spend the night. They occupy several floors of the building, from the foyer to stairwells and meeting rooms.

“Some of the people we have in this building are amazing,” said the Rev. Paul Verryn, the Methodist bishop of Johannesburg. “We have a doctor, two accountants, teachers, a health inspector — all sleeping on the floor.”

Even qualified migrants find it hard to get jobs without work permits or temporary permits that allow migrants to stay while they apply for asylum.

The permits are issued only in a handful of offices, and only at limited times. The Home Affairs Ministry, which regulates immigration, is frequently accused by Zimbabweans and advocacy groups of deliberately withholding permits, perhaps to force them to return home. More likely, it is simply overwhelmed: in Pretoria, for example, refugees often sleep on the streets outside the office to be the first of hundreds and even thousands who line up to apply for asylum.

Those who apply for asylum wait years for a decision, as officials tackle a vast backlog. Last year, as nearly 19,000 Zimbabwean applications for asylum flooded in, Home Affairs processed fewer than 2,000 requests from past years and granted asylum to a mere 103 people.

The growing crush of applicants presents the government with a delicate problem. During his seven years in office, President Thabo Mbeki has studiously avoided criticizing Mr. Mugabe’s authoritarian rule, and is trying to present himself as an impartial broker in negotiations between Mr. Mugabe and opposition politicians to lay the groundwork for a presidential election next year.

When a leading opposition politician, Roy Bennett, fled Zimbabwe last year under threat of arrest, his application for political asylum was denied because the South African government decided that his claims of persecution were not founded. Mr. Bennett’s farm had been seized by the government, he had been imprisoned for a year for shoving a member of Parliament and he had been accused by the Zimbabwe police of plotting to murder Mr. Mugabe.

Mr. Bennett eventually won asylum, but only after going to court.

“The problem in giving someone asylum is that you have to make a statement about the country that individual is fleeing,” said Mr. Maroleng, at the Pretoria institute. “Politically, it raises questions, and it undermines the government’s policy on Zimbabwe, which is not to engage the government of Zimbabwe” on questions of repression and misrule.

So migrants wait for a chance at legal residence that may never arrive. On Thursday, a schoolteacher and union official from Harare used his Zimbabwe civil-service passport to walk across the border in Beitbridge and make his way to Johannesburg.

The teacher, who insisted on anonymity, said he had left his wife and two children behind because he was living in fear. He had been arrested and beaten after joining a union march in September, he said. “As we go forward toward elections in 2008,” he said, “we are again targets of violence. Every morning, my life was very much in danger.”

But he might have stayed, he said, had his monthly salary not been the equivalent of $15.

Another teacher, a friend, had fled Zimbabwe last year after government spies mistook a wake in her parlor for a meeting of opposition members, and set fire to her house, she said.

“You don’t feel the pain on somebody when it’s not happening to you,” she said in a Johannesburg clinic for migrants seeking legal advice. “I never expected such a life. But I think there’s a reason why God wants this.”

But for the moment, she said: “I just want a job. I can do dishes. I don’t mind that I was a teacher.”

2007-06-23T05:09:00.000-07:00

My Virginity Went From Choice to Burden

By KATE McGOVERN

Published: June 24, 2007

Are you pregnant?” Sabrina asked me.

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David Chelsea

“No,” I said. I was leaning against the plastic divider of the nurse’s station at the clinic where I worked part time interviewing patients for a psychologist’s study of depression. Normally my contact with Sabrina, or with any of the nurses, was brief, involving the whereabouts of patients who had screened positive for depressive symptoms.

That morning, though, I had fainted on the train on my way to work. In the past, my occasional fainting spells — officially known as vasovagal syncope — had been precipitated by specific sources of pain: if I had a bad stomachache, say, or twisted my neck oddly.

I had grown accustomed to predicting these episodes just before they began. But that morning on the train it occurred at random, when I was otherwise feeling fine, which had left me sufficiently rattled that I sought out Sabrina in the nurse’s station.

Sabrina was my favorite nurse. She wore cat-eye glasses with plastic floral-print frames and scrub tops long and belted, like ’80s dresses culled from a vintage clothing shop. Sometimes I’d catch her on “kitchen duty,” as she called it, emptying basins of bloodied instruments on Wednesday mornings.

Wednesday morning was known as “procedures clinic.” Sometimes “procedure” meant cyst removal, IUD placement or a few other things, but usually it meant abortion.

That morning, Sabrina’s ponytail hung long down her back, thick with a hair extension. Her scrub dress was purple. She tapped her acrylic nails on the plastic counter and looked me up and down.

“You’re sure you’re not pregnant?” she asked.

I definitely was not pregnant. Pregnancy, in fact, was a scientific impossibility for me. Not because I’d had a slow month or two (though this was what I implied to Sabrina, with a carefully calculated roll of the eyes) but because at age 25, quite by accident, I was still a virgin.

When you are a young woman of childbearing years, most visits to the doctor inspire some form of inquiry about the state of your uterus. At my college health clinic, it didn’t matter what you went in for: pinkeye, sprained ankle, heavy drinking. Anything seemed to be a potential symptom of pregnancy.

At 19, seeking a Z-Pak or Robitussin with codeine, I was able to laugh the question off easily. “I’m still a virgin,” I’d say to the doctor, nurse practitioner, receptionist — whoever it was who asked. My virginity seemed so utterly normal to me at the time, and it was. Many of my friends were still virgins then, too. I was a late bloomer; I was choosy. And anyway, who wants to have sex in a twin bed?

As the sexless years ticked by, though, I became less forthcoming with the details of my virginity. Two days after my 24th birthday, I visited a gastroenterologist’s office in pain so acute that I couldn’t stand upright.

The male doctor to whom I presented my distended stomach was somewhat incredulous. “So you’re really in pain? Are you sure you’re not just pregnant?”

Quite sure.

“Do you want to take a pregnancy test just to be sure?”

No, really, that’s not necessary.

Three hours later, having gone from gastroenterologist to radiologist to gynecologist and back again, I was irritated. I was in pain, I had been explored rather intimately by three different doctors with three different devices and I had been reminded of my sexual inexperience at least five times.

After all this, it turned out it was nothing but a ruptured ovarian cyst that had caused my bulging stomach and the pain that the gastroenterologist hadn’t believed I had felt.

When I returned to his office, he laughed — a haughty kind of chuckle that made me momentarily hate him and all his ovaryless kind. “Well, I guess you’re not pregnant!” he exclaimed.

By that point, if I was to keep the promise I made to myself at 21 (to lose my virginity by the time I turned 25), I had only one more year. Four years had once seemed impossibly far away. But as that birthday loomed ever larger on my mental calendar, my lingering virginity began to loom larger as well, until I entered a state of near panic and told myself it was time to meet someone, anyone, and get it over with.

So I looked — in bars and at friends’ parties, on the subway, in coffee shops. And I met a lot of perfectly decent men. But I remained a virgin. I never actually made the choice to no longer be.

To inject a bit of much-needed humor into the situation, I even posted my virginity on Craigslist. I had no intention of following through with what I joked to friends was “my little experiment,” but nonetheless I was curious to read the responses that poured in (more than a hundred in the first hour).

I wasn’t so much surprised by the volume of responses, but rather by their wide range. There were, predictably, those who offered to “make it special,” “do it right,” and other variations on that theme. There were also men who confessed to being aging virgins themselves.

But the responses that most surprised (and pained) me were those from men who were ostensibly looking out for me. “If you’ve waited this long,” said one, “wouldn’t you rather wait until it’s really special?”

I was too much of a realist to think I was going to wait until I had found my one and only. Still, the well-meaning Craigslist crowd had it partly right. I hadn’t waited all this time just to lose it to a random guy for the sake of getting it over with.

Unfortunately, this realization did little to stem my anxiety. When my friends told me to chill out, that I was attractive and great and that it would happen when the time was right, I freaked out even more. Why had the right time not shown up yet? And what if it never did?

Eventually I began to view my entire reproductive system as a personal affront. Every month, my period, which had been cloyingly regular since the day it started, served as nothing more than a reminder that there was no possible way I might be pregnant. I was sure I could hear mean giggles coming from inside the box of tampons as I opened it.

FOR most women like me (we who expect to be mothers at some point but not yet), the prescient discomfort of PMS comes as a welcome relief, evidence yet again that the birth control pills, the IUD, the condom or whatever the contraceptive of choice has done its duty.

But when I felt my emotions spike and my midsection contort, there was no sigh of relief. There was just a sigh. There goes another month.

Then one week, two close friends happened to call within days of each other, each anxious that their periods were late. I played sympathetic. It’s probably just stress, I offered, you should relax. Suddenly, though, mine was late, too. Not a day or two, but more than a week — especially unusual for me, and certainly enough to make a girl worry, if she had cause to.

Instead, I found myself becoming increasingly jealous of my friends’ anxiety. I longed not for an unintended pregnancy (of course), but for the fear of the possibility of one.

I did not envy the women I saw in the clinic every Wednesday, awaiting their “procedures.” I believe in every woman’s right to make that choice, but I had no desire to be there on the table myself, my own feet in the stirrups.

Still, the possibility of conception (and perhaps the fear that accompanies it) is part of womanhood. Without it, I wondered, imagining the lonely eggs floating inside me without even the potential of fertilization, was I fully a woman?

I know, I know: sex and conception aren’t even linked for many women, whether because of their sexuality or their fertility or their personal choices, and I would never question the legitimacy of their womanhood. A woman is so much more than her ability to bear children. I know this, I believe it, and yet I wanted that possibility.

AT the clinic that day, Sabrina looked at me over the rims of her glasses, an eyebrow raised. I was ready to take a pregnancy test if she suggested it. I would pay for a pointless medical test before I would admit to this or any other health professional that at 25 I was still a virgin. Because if I told Sabrina the truth, I would also feel compelled to tell her that I wasn’t a prude, that I had felt strongly for men, had slept with their breath in my hair and their skin against mine, but just this one thing, this technicality, really — though I knew it was more than that — had eluded me.

But Sabrina didn’t need all that information. My virginity was not a big deal to her. She had just spent her morning cleaning the tiny vacuums that empty the uteruses of women who might be much like me, except for this one huge thing. If anything, my virginity might have struck Sabrina as a wise choice, or at least a safe one.

But I couldn’t view it that way. My virginity had trapped me in childhood, and by 25 I was willing to lie to appear as if I was out of it, if only for a moment, if only to one person. I was willing to lie, even pay, for the illusion of normalcy.

I was almost disappointed when Sabrina didn’t suggest a pregnancy test. Instead, she sent me to a doctor who, after asking if I was pregnant, assured me that I was fine. But the idea that I could pretend my virginity away stuck with me, and shortly thereafter, I went on birth control. I told myself (and my gynecologist, and my mother) that I wanted to abate the cramps that had become increasingly disruptive in the past year or two.

This was partly true. But I also wanted to bring the fantasy as close to reality as possible. To this end, I paid a $24 monthly co-pay on the prescription and pumped my body full of hormones I didn’t really need. Crazy, I know. But before I had been on the pill even three months, as if those little white tablets tricked my body in more ways than one (and I should add, at the very moment that I made the choice to stop worrying about it), I lost my virginity.

My impulse was to run back to Sabrina, to finally take that pregnancy test, even though I was pretty sure of what it would say. Pretty sure, but no longer completely. And somewhere, in that measure of uncertainty, was the woman I wanted to be.

Freegan in the USA

2007-06-21T06:02:00.000-07:00

Not Buying It

Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times

At New York University, Autumn Brewster rescued a discarded painting.

By STEVEN KURUTZ

Published: June 21, 2007

ON a Friday evening last month, the day after New York University’s class of 2007 graduated, about 15 men and women assembled in front of Third Avenue North, an N.Y.U. dormitory on Third Avenue and 12th Street. They had come to take advantage of the university’s end-of-the-year move-out, when students’ discarded items are loaded into big green trash bins by the curb.

Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times

Darcie Elia found angel wings.

New York has several colleges and universities, of course, but according to Janet Kalish, a Queens resident who was there that night, N.Y.U.’s affluent student body makes for unusually profitable Dumpster diving. So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the gathering at the Third Avenue North trash bin quickly took on a giddy shopping-spree air, as members of the group came up with one first-class find after another.

Ben Ibershoff, a dapper man in his 20s wearing two bowler hats, dug deep and unearthed a Sharp television. Autumn Brewster, 29, found a painting of a Mediterranean harbor, which she studied and handed down to another member of the crowd.

Darcie Elia, a 17-year-old high school student with a half-shaved head, was clearly pleased with a modest haul of what she called “random housing stuff” — a desk lamp, a dish rack, Swiffer dusters — which she spread on the sidewalk, drawing quizzical stares from passers-by.

Ms. Elia was not alone in appreciating the little things. “The small thrills are when you see the contents of someone’s desk and find a book of stamps,” said Ms. Kalish, 44, as she stood knee deep in the trash bin examining a plastic toiletries holder.

A few of those present had stumbled onto the scene by chance (including a janitor from a nearby homeless center, who made off with a working iPod and a tube of body cream), but most were there by design, in response to a posting on the Web site freegan.info.

The site, which provides information and listings for the small but growing subculture of anticonsumerists who call themselves freegans — the term derives from vegans, the vegetarians who forsake all animal products, as many freegans also do — is the closest thing their movement has to an official voice. And for those like Ms. Elia and Ms. Kalish, it serves as a guide to negotiating life, and making a home, in a world they see as hostile to their values.

Freegans are scavengers of the developed world, living off consumer waste in an effort to minimize their support of corporations and their impact on the planet, and to distance themselves from what they see as out-of-control consumerism. They forage through supermarket trash and eat the slightly bruised produce or just-expired canned goods that are routinely thrown out, and negotiate gifts of surplus food from sympathetic stores and restaurants.

They dress in castoff clothes and furnish their homes with items found on the street; at freecycle.com, where users post unwanted items; and at so-called freemeets, flea markets where no money is exchanged. Some claim to hold themselves to rigorous standards. “If a person chooses to live an ethical lifestyle it’s not enough to be vegan, they need to absent themselves from capitalism,” said Adam Weissman, 29, who started freegan.info four years ago and is the movement’s de facto spokesman.

Freeganism dates to the mid-’90s, and grew out of the antiglobalization and environmental movements, as well as groups like Food Not Bombs, a network of small organizations that serve free vegetarian and vegan food to the hungry, much of it salvaged from food market trash. It also has echoes of groups like the Diggers, an anarchist street theater troupe based in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in the 1960’s, which gave away food and social services.

According to Bob Torres, a sociology professor at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., who is writing a book about the animal rights movement — which shares many ideological positions with freeganism — the freegan movement has become much more visible and increasingly popular over the past year, in part as a result of growing frustrations with mainstream environmentalism.

Environmentalism, Mr. Torres said, “is becoming this issue of, consume the right set of green goods and you’re green,” regardless of how much in the way of natural resources those goods require to manufacture and distribute.

“If you ask the average person what can you do to reduce global warming, they’d say buy a Prius,” he added.

There are freegans all over the world, in countries as far afield as Sweden, Brazil, South Korea, Estonia and England (where much has been made of what The Sun recently called the “wacky new food craze” of trash-bin eating), and across the United States as well .

Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times

Others took home a TV.

Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times

Others took home detergent.

In Southern California, for example, “you can find just about anything in the trash, and on a consistent basis, too,” said Marko Manriquez, 28, who has just graduated from the University of California at San Diego with a bachelor’s degree in media studies and is the creator of “Freegan Kitchen,” a video blog that shows gourmet meals being made from trash-bin ingredients. “This is how I got my futon, chair, table, shelves. And I’m not talking about beat-up stuff. I mean it’s not Design Within Reach, but it’s nice.”

But New York City in particular — the financial capital of the world’s richest country — has emerged as a hub of freegan activity, thanks largely to Mr. Weissman’s zeal for the cause and the considerable free time he has to devote to it. (He doesn’t work and lives at home in Teaneck, N.J., with his father and elderly grandparents.)

Freegan.info sponsors organize Trash Tours that typically attract a dozen or more people, as well as feasts at which groups of about 20 people gather in apartments around the city to share food and talk politics.

In the last year or so, Mr. Weissman said, the site has increased the number and variety of its events, which have begun attracting many more first-time participants. Many of those who have taken part in one new program, called Wild Foraging Walks — workshops that teach people to identify edible plants in the wilderness — have been newcomers, he said.

The success of the movement in New York may also be due to the quantity and quality of New York trash. As of 2005, individuals, businesses and institutions in the United States produced more than 245 million tons of municipal solid waste, according to the E.P.A. That means about 4.5 pounds per person per day. The comparable figure for New York City, meanwhile, is about 6.1 pounds, according to statistics from the city’s Sanitation Department.

“We have a lot of wealthy people, and rich people throw out more trash than poor people do,” said Elizabeth Royte, whose book “Garbage Land” (Little, Brown, 2005) traced the route her trash takes through the city. “Rich people are also more likely to throw things out based on style obsolescence — like changing the towels when you’re tired of the color.”

At the N.Y.U. Dorm Dive, as the event was billed, the consensus was that this year’s spoils weren’t as impressive as those in years past. Still, almost anything needed to decorate and run a household — a TV cart, a pillow, a file cabinet, a half-finished bottle of Jägermeister — was there for the taking, even if those who took them were risking health, safety and a $100 fine from the Sanitation Department.

Ms. Brewster and her mother, who had come from New Jersey, loaded two area rugs into their cart. Her mother, who declined to give her name, seemed to be on a search for laundry detergent, and was overjoyed to discover a couple of half-empty bottles of Trader Joe’s organic brand. (Free and organic is a double bonus). Nearby, a woman munched on a found bag of Nature’s Promise veggie fries.

As people stuffed their backpacks, Ms. Kalish, who organized the event (Mr. Weissman arrived later), demonstrated the cooperative spirit of freeganism, asking the divers to pass items down to people on the sidewalk and announcing her finds for anyone in need of, say, a Hoover Shop-Vac.

“Sometimes people will swoop in and grab something, especially when you see a half-used bottle of Tide detergent,” she said. “Who wouldn’t want it? But most people realize there’s plenty to go around.” She rooted around in the trash bin and found several half-eaten jars of peanut butter. “It’s a never-ending supply,” she said.

Many freegans are predictably young and far to the left politically, like Ms. Elia, the 17-year-old, who lives with her father in Manhattan. She said she became a freegan both for environmental reasons and because “I’m not down with capitalism.”

There are also older freegans, like Ms. Kalish, who hold jobs and appear in some ways to lead middle-class lives. A high school Spanish teacher, Ms. Kalish owns a car and a two-family house in Queens, renting half of it as a “capitalist landlord,” she joked. Still, like most freegans, she seems attuned to the ecological effects of her actions. In her house, for example, she has laid down a mosaic of freegan carpet parcels instead of replacing her aging wooden floor because, she said, “I’d have to take trees from the forest.”

Not buying any new manufactured products while living in the United States is, of course, basically impossible, as is avoiding everything that requires natural resources to create, distribute or operate. Don’t freegans use gas or electricity to cook, for example, or commercial products to brush their teeth?

Michael Falco for the New York Times

Madeline Nelson quit her corporate job and became politically active.

Enlarge This Image

Evan Sung for The New York Times

Adam Weissman, center, is de facto spokesman of the freegan movement.

“Once in a while I may buy a box of baking soda for toothpaste,” Mr. Weissman said. “And, sure, getting that to market has negative impacts, like everything.” But, he said, parsing the point, a box of baking soda is more ecologically friendly than a tube of toothpaste, because its cardboard container is biodegradable.

These contradictions and others have led some people to suggest that freegans are hypocritical, making use of the capitalist system even as they rail against it. And even Mr. Weissman, who is often doctrinaire about the movement, acknowledges when pushed that absolute freeganism is an impossible dream.

Mr. Torres said: “I think there’s a conscious recognition among freegans that you can never live perfectly.” He added that generally freegans “try to reduce the impact.”

It’s not that freeganism doesn’t require serious commitment. For freegans, who believe that the production and transport of every product contributes to economic and social injustice, usually in multiple ways, any interaction with the marketplace is fraught. And for some freegans in particular — for instance, Madeline Nelson, who until recently was living an upper-middle-class Manhattan life with all the attendant conveniences and focus on luxury goods — choosing this way of life involves a considerable, even radical, transformation.

Ms. Nelson, who is 51, spent her 20s working in restaurants and living in communal houses, but by 2003 she was earning a six-figure salary as a communications director for Barnes & Noble. That year, while demonstrating against the Iraq war, she began to feel hypocritical, she said, explaining: “I thought, isn’t this safe? Here I am in my corporate job, going to protests every once in a while. And part of my job was to motivate the sales force to sell more stuff.”

After a year of progressively scaling back — no more shopping at Eileen Fisher, no more commuting by means other than a bike — Ms. Nelson, who had a two-bedroom apartment with a mortgage in Greenwich Village, quit her job in 2005 to devote herself full-time to political activism and freeganism.

She sold her apartment, put some money into savings, and bought a one-bedroom in Flatbush, Brooklyn, that she owns outright.

“My whole point is not to be paying into corporate America, and I hated paying a big loan to a bank,” she said while fixing lunch in her kitchen one recent afternoon. The meal — potato and watercress soup and crackers and cheese — had been made entirely from refuse left outside various grocery stores in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

The bright and airy prewar apartment Ms. Nelson shares with two cats doesn’t look like the home of someone who spends her evenings rooting through the garbage. But after some time in the apartment, a visitor begins to see the signs of Ms. Nelson’s anticonsumerist way of life.

An old lampshade in the living room has been trimmed with fabric to cover its fraying parts, leaving a one-inch gap where the material ran out. The ficus tree near the window came not from a florist, Ms. Nelson said, but from the trash, as did the CD rack. A 1920s loveseat belonged to her grandmother, and an 18th-century, Louis XVI-style armoire in the bedroom is a vestige of her corporate life.

The kitchen cabinets and refrigerator are stuffed with provisions — cornmeal, Pirouline cookies, vegetarian cage-free eggs — appropriate for a passionate cook who entertains often. All were free.

She longs for a springform pan in which to make cheesecakes, but is waiting for one to come up on freecycle.org. There are no new titles on the bookshelves; she hasn’t bought a new book in six months. “Books were my impulse buy,” said Ms. Nelson, whose short brown hair and glasses frame a youthful face. Now she logs onto bookcrossing.com, where readers share used books, or goes to the public library.

But isn’t she depriving herself unnecessarily? And what’s so bad about buying books, anyway? “I do have some mixed feelings,” Ms. Nelson said. “It’s always hard to give up class privilege. But freegans would argue that the capitalist system is not sustainable. You’re exploiting resources.” She added, “Most people work 40-plus hours a week at jobs they don’t like to buy things they don’t need.”

Since becoming a freegan, Ms. Nelson has spent her time posting calendar items and other information online and doing paralegal work on behalf of bicyclists arrested at Critical Mass anticar rallies. “I’m not sitting in the house eating bonbons,” she said. “I’m working. I’m just not working for money.”

Michael Falco for the New York Times

Freegans furnish their homes with items like the CD rack in Madeline Nelson’s living room.

Enlarge This Image

Evan Sung for The New York Times

The food at a recent feast came from supermarket trash.

Enlarge This Image

Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times

A TV cart was rescued from garbage.

She is also spending a lot of time making rounds for food and supplies at night, and has come to know the cycles of the city’s trash. She has learned that fruit tends to get thrown out more often in the summer (she freezes it and makes sorbet), and that businesses are a source for envelopes. A reliable spot to get bread is Le Pain Quotidien, a chain of bakery-restaurants that tosses out six or seven loaves a night. But Ms. Nelson doesn’t stockpile. “The sad fact is you don’t need to,” she said. “More trash will be there tomorrow.”

By and large, she said, her friends have been understanding, if not exactly enthusiastic about adopting freeganism for themselves. “When she told me she was doing this I wasn’t really surprised — Madeline is a free spirit,” said Eileen Dolan, a librarian at a Manhattan law firm who has known Ms. Nelson since their college days at Stony Brook. But while Ms. Dolan agrees that society is wasteful, she said that going freegan is not something she would ever do. “It’s a huge time commitment,” she said.

ONE evening a week after the Dorm Dive, a group of about 20 freegans gathered in a sparely furnished, harshly lit basement apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, to hold a feast. It was an egalitarian affair with no one officially in charge, but Mr. Weissman projected authority, his blue custodian-style work pants and fuzzy black beard giving him the air of a Latin American revolutionary as he wandered around, trailed by a Korean television crew.

Ms. Kalish stood over the sink, slicing vegetables for a stir-fry with a knife she had found in a trash bin at N.Y.U. A pot of potatoes simmered on the stove. These, like much of the rest of the meal, had been gathered two nights earlier, when Mr. Weissman, Ms. Kalish and others had met in front of a Food Emporium in Manhattan and rummaged through the store’s clear garbage bags.

The haul had been astonishing in its variety: sealed bags of organic vegetable medley, bagged salad, heirloom tomatoes, key limes, three packaged strawberries-and-chocolate-dip kits, carrots, asparagus, grapes, a carton of organic soy milk (expiration date: July 9), grapefruit, mushrooms and, for those willing to partake, vacuum-packed herb turkey breast. (Some freegans who avoid meat will nevertheless eat it rather than see it go to waste.)

As operatic music played on a radio, people mingled and pitched in. One woman diced onions, rescuing pieces that fell on floor. Another, who goes by the name Petal, emptied bags of salad into a pan. As rigorous and radical as the freegan world view can be, there is also something quaint about the movement, at least the version that Mr. Weissman promotes, with its embrace of hippie-ish communal activities and its household get-togethers that rely for diversion on conversation rather electronic entertainment.

Making things last is part of the ethos. Christian Gutierrez, a 33-year-old former model and investment banker, sat at the small kitchen table, chatting. Mr. Gutierrez, who quit his banking job at Matthews Morris & Company in 2004 to pursue filmmaking, became a freegan last year, and opened a free workshop on West 36th Street in Manhattan to teach bicycle repair. He plans to add lessons in fixing home computers in the near future.

Mr. Gutierrez’s lifestyle, like Ms. Nelson’s, became gradually more constricted in the absence of a steady income. He lived in a Midtown loft until last year, when, he said, he got into a legal battle with his landlord over a rent increase — a relationship “ruined by greed,” he said. After that, he lived in his van for a while, then found an illegal squat in SoHo, which he shares with two others. Mr. Gutierrez had a middle-class upbringing in Dallas, and he said he initially found freeganism off-putting. But now he is steadfastly devoted to the way of life.

As people began to load plates of food, he leaned in and offered a few words of wisdom: “Opening that first bag of trash,” he said, “is the biggest step.”

2007-05-31T23:30:00.000-07:00

response to Adele Horin anti-porn crusade

2007-05-25T23:52:00.001-07:00

Just a mouse-click away are images that exceed the bounds of fantasy or imagination.

Only for those who lack imagination, Adele! As for the bounds of fantasy, in my experience, fantasies are something for which there is a boundless range. Whose fantasy is Adele referring to? Mine? Gam's? Yours? No matter how totally bizarre something you think of may be, it's pretty safe to bet that there's already a porn site or forum catering to the people who get off on it. As I found out when I went searching for a picture of a hairy armpit to use on one of my posts- most of the images that appeared in my browser were from hairy armpit erotica sites!

The godfather of US sex addiction research, Patrick Carnes, the author of In the Shadows of the Net: Breaking Free of Compulsive Online Sexual Behaviour, claims 3 to 6 per cent of people are sex addicts

'Dr' Patrick Carnes, PhD, according to his website "graduated in 1966 from St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, with a Bachelor of Arts degree. He received his Master’s degree in 1969 from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and a Ph.D. in counselor education and organizational development from the University of Minnesota in 1980."

Thought so. Another one of these self-styled 'experts' from the United States, whose chosen field has nothing to do with the degree they received their doctorate in, yet they use the 'Dr' title to lend them an aura of credibility. In other words, they make shit up and people like Adele Horin lean on their every word. That figure of 3-6% does not arise from any kind of valid body of scientific literature. 'Dr' Carnes simply pulled it out of his arse, and Adele Horin was happy to publish it because it came from 'the godfather' of the ~~anti-porn crusader movement~~ sex addiction 'research'. Horin publishes a token acknowledgement on the next page that such figures are completely unscientific, but lack of a sound scientific basis didn't prevent her from spreading them in the first place.

What seems undeniable is that a subset of people spends so much time porn gazing online that they are damaging their relationships.

Why is it damaging to the relationships? I have no doubt that it's possible for someone to look at so much porn that they neglect to carry out other activities. On the other hand, it's equally likely that there's a subset of women who find the idea of masturbation disturbing and take their partner's masturbation activities to mean that there is something lacking in their sex life. Instead of finding out how the woman's views on sex and masturbation affect how they perceive their partner's porn habits, all we hear from Horin are horror stories...

Men became [...] "lazy lovers". In the end they could not be bothered with real-life sex. In other cases, sex lives became porn-like, male-focused, extreme and lacking in intimacy.

This is based on the reports from female partners who believed that porn had negatively affected their sex lives. If this is a problem, it's alarming. It's alarming in the same way it would be if men started emulating the boys from South Park or Family Guy. Most men are perfectly able to tell the difference between fantasy, fiction and reality, just as most women are. What's harder for the public to discern is the bounds of the fantasy that exist within Horin's article when she quotes self-styled 'experts' in the same breath as university researchers.

Women's self-esteem nose-dived. They felt they could not compete with the nymphs on screen. They did not measure up to the bodies or sexual performance of the women their men were watching. Connie, a 50-year-old graphics designer, whose former partner looked at pornography constantly, says: "After a while I started to feel worthless." Karen 44, whose eight-year marriage broke up over her husband's porn obsession, agonised over "why he preferred that to me".

What's happening here is an overgeneralisation about the sort of women you find in porn. Porn is a broad church. What don't these women measure up to? BBW's? Hippy chicks? Big booty? Big boobs? Small boobs? Leather-wearing? Hairy/Shaved? White/Black/Japanese/Indian/Latina chicks? One weird type of Japanese hentai where thumbelina-sized women (and probably men too) are molested by giant genitalia? Arms not hairy enough? What kind of 'sexual performance' is Horin referring to? The problem here is not the pornography, it's that the women start to convince themselves that they are worth less than a 2D woman on a computer screen. We don't hear the perspective from the men- whether Karen's partner really did prefer 'that' to having sex with her, or what Connie's husband thought about her feelings of worthlessness. What we have here is a failure to communicate!

The perspective that Horin is pushing here is that porn is a viable replacement for a real woman. That, given the chance, men will take porn in preference to the real thing. Is that true? While I can't quote any scientific literature to counter Horin's views, my guess is that if men who use porn were actually asked such questions, they'd probably laugh in astonishment. It would be a very abnormal man indeed who preferred using porn to having sex with a woman, and to my mind, women are better off with men like that taken out of the dating pool, because they're bound to have other strange issues as well!

A well-conducted British survey based on a representative sample of partners of regular porn users shows these feelings are widespread. Most partners are largely neutral about their men's regular pornography use, the survey, published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy in 2003, shows.

But a significant minority - about one-third of the women - found it highly distressing. About 32 per cent said their partner's porn use had adversely affected their sex life, 39 per cent said it had negatively affected their relationship, 34 per cent had lessened self-esteem, 41 per cent felt less attractive and desirable since having discovered their partner's use, and 42 per cent said it made them feel insecure. More than one-quarter viewed it as a kind of affair.

The assumption here is that it's the 'fault' of the male partner for viewing pornography and causing distress to the female partner. What's not addressed is that maybe some of the women have underlying issues with sex and masturbation that lead to their lessened self-esteem and feelings of being less attractive and desirable. The fact that more than 25% of women viewed their partner's viewing of pornography as 'a kind of affair' is what sets the alarm bells ringing; would these women also view their partner's masturbation in the same way?

Would their partner jerking off in the absence of visual stimulation elicit the same reaction? Why would they have that reaction? If a survey showed that 25% of women felt less attractive and desirable because their partner masturbated from time to time, would we see articles from Horin on how masturbation, a perfectly normal and healthy behaviour, was 'poisoning' relationships? Or would we say that the women's views perhaps reflected something fundamentally wrong with the way our society judges sexual behaviour?

The point that Horin completely misses in her article is that porn is simply a masturbation aid, not something that men use as a replacement for a sexual relationship. Men who do not want a real sexual relationship are a genuine minority. If they weren't we wouldn't see the proliferation of adult 'dating' (great euphemism that) sites such as Adult Matchmaker, because men would all be getting their fix from porn. Clearly they're not.

Horin shares a few extreme examples, presumably real, to hammer the horror home:

Gracie, a human resources manager, insists she is no prude. She is a willing sexual explorer. But even she was surprised at what her 33-year-old boyfriend, a builder, stored under his "favourites" file. "There must have been 20 porn sites there. I was pretty shocked - not that they were there, only that there were so many," she says.

My thought? "Only 20?!". Of course, if Gracie's boyfriend was paying $30 a month for all those sites, then it might be a problem- a financial one! $30 seems to be the going rate for many- some are cheaper... Gam and I subscribed to Wifey's World for a month once, and I think it was about $30. I imagine if a guy couldn't control his spending on porn then it might become a problem. The real problem in Gracie's case seemed to be that her boyfriend confused fantasy with reality:

The sex became impersonal and aggressive: "It became more 'porn' style - pulling my hair, no kissing, slapping around a bit, all stuff I was initially OK with. And always he wanted to come in my face," Gracie says. "There was no real intimacy, no thought about what I might like."

I've seen a lot of porn. Not all porn involves the guy cumming on a woman's face! Not all porn involves hair pulling. Most of the porn I've seen involves some kissing, but in my opinion it only works when there appears to be genuine chemistry between the 'actors'. I've also seen a lot of amateur porn, in which none of those things occur: the girls are average, the guys are average, the sex is average, there's just the 'naughtiness' of two very normal people doing it on camera. In fact, it's often better, as the two people want to sleep with each other and aren't being paid to do so. Horin is buying into the myth than all porn involves plastic-surgerified actresses like Jesse Jane and Gina Lynn being contorted into uncomfortable positions all for the gratification of some well hung (but usually not very attractive) guy. I find myself scarcely able to believe that Gracie's boyfriend wanted the same thing every time, because if sex was the same every time it would be boring. Variety really is the spice of life.

Porn is a broad church, Adele, and you'd know that if you'd actually watched some instead of just railing against it.

Ordinary women's desire or desperation to "make it more like porn" has helped fire the popularity of Brazilian waxes [...] Unlike the natural-looking porn stars of the 1970s such as Linda Lovelace of Deep Throat fame, the nymphs populating internet porn today have their pubic hairs ripped out after an application of hot wax. The desired look is "clean" and pre-pubescent. "Women today are emulating porn stars who have no pubic hair," says Etcoff, "and I think men like it."

I'm not sure what Horin is getting at here, particularly with the use of the word 'clean'. The implication that pubic hair is somehow dirty is a pet dislike of mine. Brazilians are just a fashion, pushed as much by women's magazines and shows like Sex and the City, and not something that all guys buy into. Women in 80s porn have hair in places that I scarcely knew it grew, and I'm sure men back then weren't thinking "If only there was no hair down there, this porn would be so good". More like they were thinking "Naked chick! Having sex! Alriiight!".

Figures provided by Nielsen/NetRatings NetView show 2.7 million Australians visited an "adult" website in March (this figure counts repeat visitors to adult websites only once); 4.3 million visited in the first three months of this year. More than 35 per cent of all internet users in the quarter ending March visited an adult website at least once

I take that to mean that around a quarter of the population visits adult websites. I'm one of them. Gam's one of them. We look at a lot of stuff together. We've had a great sex life right from the word 'go' in our relationship, and we still have a great sex life now. Some of the porn we look at is simply out of sheer fascination rather than erotic desire (there's some weird shit out there). When we're apart we might look at porn alone. In fact, because Gam is much more patient at wading through crappy porn than I am, I rely on him to save clips that he thinks I might like!

And while we enjoy some of the same porn, we have different tastes too, as you might expect- Gam likes women and I like men. He gets off more on watching women enjoy themselves, and I get off more on watching guys enjoy themselves (that's why gay porn is often better than straight porn!). I also like to read erotic literature, as my imagination can often do a better job than a porn director can. And no, my imagination does not dream up soft, romantic fantasies- it's a horrible stereotype of women's sexuality. Women don't all want the same thing any more than men do.

Do I feel less attractive when Gam takes a look at the big-bootied Latina women of Mexican Lust? Do I feel like I need a bigger arse to 'compete'? Hell no! Gam likes me exactly the way I am! It's only when a woman's partner pushes her to change her appearance so that she better fulfils his sexual fantasies that there is a problem in the relationship (if there ever was a 'dump him' scenario it would be that). If a woman decides by herself that she needs to change in order to please her partner, I would argue that it's probably a psychological problem on the part of the woman, not a problem that can be addressed by her partner ceasing to view porn, and that both partners might be better off discussing their views and perhaps visiting a counsellor.

Women are also under pressure to emulate the porn stars' apparent penchant for anal sex, according to four consecutive Swedish studies, the latest published in 2005 in the International Journal of STD and AIDS. Young men who are regular porn consumers are more likely to have had anal sex with a girl, and most of the men liked it. Most young women did not like anal sex, with fewer than half saying they would do it again, the studies found.

[...]

Nadine, a 30-year-old accountant, who observed her boyfriend, a 33-year-old lawyer, graduate to harder and harder porn sites over years, says: "He loves anal and I hate it. He knows that I do but he still insists on it. I dread it and honestly, I close my eyes and pray that he hurries up and gets it over with it."

Wow. Another 'dump him' scenario. What kind of relationship is that? Here, Horin is using an example of a woman experiencing something that I would argue at best borders on rape to prove that porn results in women having anal sex against their will. The problem here is not anal sex in porn, it's a) the fact that any woman might feel she has to give in to any kind of sexual activity she does not want to engage in and b) the fact that there are men out there who feel they have the right to engage in sexual activities with an unwilling partner. That's an attitude that's been around for a lot longer than porn has existed, and it's one that's absolutely and fundamentally wrong.

Basically, Horin's article is one that attempts to lump responsibility for some time-honoured sexual and relationship woes experienced by ordinary men and women onto 'porn'. Her article lacks any recognition of the fact that 'porn' is a term that covers an incredibly broad range of content that caters to an even broader range of people, women included. If masturbation while viewing porn is cited as a factor in relationship troubles, it's not necessarily porn that's at the heart of the problem.

Worker Safety in Hands of Industry

2007-04-25T02:21:00.000-07:00

OSHA Leaves Worker Safety in Hands of Industry

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Edwin G. Foulke Jr., left, of OSHA, and Eric Peoples, an injured worker, testified Tuesday at a Congressional hearing.

By STEPHEN LABATON
Published: April 25, 2007

WASHINGTON, April 24 — Seven years ago, a Missouri doctor discovered a troubling pattern at a microwave popcorn plant in the town of Jasper. After an additive was modified to produce a more buttery taste, nine workers came down with a rare, life-threatening disease that was ravaging their lungs.
Puzzled Missouri health authorities turned to two federal agencies in Washington. Scientists at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which investigates the causes of workplace health problems, moved quickly to examine patients, inspect factories and run tests. Within months, they concluded that the workers became ill after exposure to diacetyl, a food-flavoring agent.

But the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, charged with overseeing workplace safety, reacted with far less urgency. It did not step up plant inspections or mandate safety standards for businesses, even as more workers became ill.

On Tuesday, the top official at the agency told lawmakers at a Congressional hearing that it would prepare a safety bulletin and plan to inspect a few dozen of the thousands of food plants that use the additive.

That response reflects OSHA’s practices under the Bush administration, which vowed to limit new rules and roll back what it considered cumbersome regulations that imposed unnecessary costs on businesses and consumers. Across Washington, political appointees — often former officials of the industries they now oversee — have eased regulations or weakened enforcement of rules on issues like driving hours for truckers, logging in forests and corporate mergers.

Since George W. Bush became president, OSHA has issued the fewest significant standards in its history, public health experts say. It has imposed only one major safety rule. The only significant health standard it issued was ordered by a federal court.

The agency has killed dozens of existing and proposed regulations and delayed adopting others. For example, OSHA has repeatedly identified silica dust, which can cause lung cancer, and construction site noise as health hazards that warrant new safeguards for nearly three million workers, but it has yet to require them.

“The people at OSHA have no interest in running a regulatory agency,” said Dr. David Michaels, an occupational health expert at George Washington University who has written extensively about workplace safety. “If they ever knew how to issue regulations, they’ve forgotten. The concern about protecting workers has gone out the window.”

Agency officials defend their performance, saying that workplace deaths and injuries have declined during their tenure. They have been considering new standards and revising outdated ones that were unduly burdensome on businesses, they said, adding that they have moved cautiously on new rules because those require extensive scientific and economic analysis.

“By the time the Bush administration is done — we have a good record already — we will have a better record,” said Edwin G. Foulke Jr., the agency’s head, in a recent interview.
On diacetyl, Mr. Foulke said “the science is murky” on whether the additive causes bronchiolitis obliterans, the disease that has been called “popcorn worker’s lung.” That claim is echoed by some industry officials, but a number of leading scientists and doctors agree with scientists at the national occupational safety institute that there is strong evidence linking the additive to the illness.

Without an OSHA standard, which would establish the permissible level of exposure for workers, companies can set any limit of exposure they want.

Instead of regulations, Mr. Foulke and top officials at other agencies favor a “voluntary compliance strategy,” reaching agreements with industry associations and companies to police themselves.
Administration officials say such programs are less costly, allowing companies to hire more workers and keep consumer prices down. The number of voluntary agreements has grown in recent years, but they cover a fraction of the seven million work sites that OSHA oversees, or less than 1 percent of the work force.

Sixty-one food plants out of the tens of thousands across the country participate; industry representatives say other businesses are taking steps to protect workers on their own.

Critics say the voluntary programs tend to have little focus on specific hazards and no enforcement power. Because only companies with strong safety records are eligible, they argue, the programs do not force less-conscientious businesses to improve their workplaces. A 2004 study by the Government Accountability Office found some promising results from such programs, but recommended against expanding them until their effectiveness could be assessed.

“OSHA has been focusing on the best companies in their voluntary protection program while doing nothing in the area of standard setting,” said Peg Seminario, the director of occupational safety and health at the A.F.L.-C.I.O. “They’ve simply gotten out of the standard-setting business in favor of industry partnerships that have no teeth.”

While labor organizations and public health experts argue that the agency has been lax in recent years, some industries have applauded its efforts. Construction companies, for example, are pleased that OSHA recently decided to relax the standards for handling explosives.

The agency had long been the target of businesses that criticized its rules as arbitrary, costly and confusing. Three of the biggest industries regulated by OSHA — transportation, agribusiness and construction — have given more than $630 million in political campaign contributions since 2000, with nearly three-quarters of that money going to Republicans. The Bush administration has promised to address their concerns.

Change at OSHA

“We’re also going to bring a transparency to the regulatory jungle that is unprecedented in the federal government,” Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao told business owners in a speech on June 2002. “There are more words in the Federal Register describing OSHA regulations than there are words in the Bible. They’re a lot less inspired to read and a lot harder to understand. This is not fair.”

Until recently, Congress has provided no significant oversight of OSHA. With Democrats now back in control, House and Senate committees are holding hearings this week.

Among those who testified Tuesday was Eric Peoples, a former worker at the popcorn plant in Jasper, a small town 125 miles south of Kansas City. Once healthy, the 35-year-old Mr. Peoples has been told by doctors that he will need a double-lung transplant. Far from Washington, he finds the debate over the calculus of regulation — the costs to companies and consumers of upgrading workplaces versus the possible health benefits to workers — baffling.

“I can’t understand what it would take to get them to pass rules to make it safer to handle this stuff,” Mr. Peoples said, referring to diacetyl. “Something needs to be done.”

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration was created under President Richard M. Nixon in 1970 after Congressional hearings exposed dangerous workplace conditions. The agency was to set and enforce safety standards as well as detect health hazards before they could take a toll on workers. Since the agency’s creation, deaths and injuries on the job have steadily declined. Regulators have taken credit for much of that trend, though experts also cite pressure from insurers and lawsuits. Government records show that in 2005, more than 6,800 workplace-related deaths occurred, along with 4.2 million injuries and illnesses. OSHA officials say that since 2001, the fatality rate has declined by 7 percent and the injury rate by 19 percent.

Labor leaders and health experts say those numbers significantly undercount the problem, in part because the Bush administration has reduced the categories of recognized injuries and because many dangerous jobs are now performed by undocumented workers who do not report problems.

In one of his first acts in office, President Bush signed legislation repealing one of OSHA’s most-debated accomplishments during the Clinton administration, an ergonomics standard intended to reduce injuries to factory, construction and office workers from repetitive motions and lifting. Business groups and manufacturers had lobbied against the measure, saying it would cost $100 billion to carry out.

By the end of 2001, OSHA had withdrawn more than a dozen proposed regulations. The agency, though, soon identified several safety priorities: rules on the hazards posed by dust from silica, used as a blasting agent, and noise from construction sites, which was causing a growing number of workers to suffer hearing loss. The agency has yet to produce either standard, though OSHA officials say they are working on them.

Mr. Foulke, the OSHA chief, has a history of opposing regulations produced by the agency he now leads. He has described himself as a “true Ronald Reagan Republican” who “firmly believes in limited government.” Before coming to Washington last year, Mr. Foulke, a former Republican Party state chairman in South Carolina and top political fund-raiser, worked in Greenville, S.C., for a law firm that advises companies on how to avoid union organizing. Representing the United States Chamber of Commerce, he had testified before Congress several times to promote voluntary OSHA compliance programs. He also opposed the ergonomics standards.

And as a member in the 1990s of an independent agency that reviews OSHA citations, he led a successful effort to weaken the agency’s enforcement authority.

Early in his tenure at OSHA, Mr. Foulke delivered a speech called “Adults Do the Darndest Things,” which attributed many injuries to worker carelessness. Large posters of workers’ making dangerous errors, like erecting a tall ladder close to an overhead wire, were displayed around him.

“Kids don’t always know what their parents do all day at work, but they instinctively understand the importance of them working safely,” he told the audience, which included children who had won a safety-poster contest. “In contrast, adults could stand to learn a thing or two. Looking at the posters, I was reminded of a couple examples of safety and health bloopers that are both humorous and horrible.”

A Pattern of Illness

Soon after Eric Peoples began working at the Jasper popcorn plant in 1997, he was thrilled to get a promotion: from the assembly line, which paid $6 to $7 an hour, to the mixing room, where he got more than $11 an hour to prepare ingredients.

Ten months later, Mr. Peoples recalled in a recent interview, he came down with a fever and chills. Doctors first said that Mr. Peoples, then 27, had pneumonia. When he did not improve, he saw a specialist who treated him for asthma. Still suffering from breathing problems, Mr. Peoples was hospitalized in St. Louis. After days of testing, doctors diagnosed bronchiolitis obliterans.

“My lung capacity had dropped to 18 percent,” Mr. Peoples said. He was told that there was no cure for the often-fatal disease and that he would likely need a double lung transplant to survive.
Some of his co-workers had similar health problems. A local lawyer whose mother had fallen ill showed the medical records of several workers to Dr. Allen Parmet, a former T.W.A. medical director who specializes in occupational hazards.

“It took me about 15 or 20 minutes to see there was a pattern,” said Dr. Parmet, who in his previous two decades in medicine had seen only three other cases of bronchiolitis obliterans. He contacted the Missouri Department of Health, which then notified the agencies in Washington.

The Missouri officials noted that in addition to nine sick workers identified by Dr. Parmet, 20 to 30 current and retired workers had similar symptoms. All had been exposed to vapors from diacetyl, a compound found naturally in cheese, butter, milk and other foods. It is added for the buttery taste in microwave popcorn and widely used as a flavoring agent in other foods, like snacks and pastries.

Although Dr. Parmet’s letter was the first that Washington learned of a possible problem with diacetyl, some companies had been aware of the health hazards. In late 1996, the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association heard from a company that a flavoring plant employee had developed bronchiolitis obliterans. Three years earlier, BASF, the German chemical maker, had found in animal studies that diacetyl caused
severe respiratory problems.

After scientists from the national occupational safety institute visited the Jasper factory and examined the injured workers, the agency issued a bulletin in September 2001 saying “a work-related cause of lung disease” had occurred there. In December 2003, the agency issued an alert to more than 4,000 businesses, with tens of thousands of workers, that suggested safeguards.

OSHA’s response was more limited. The agency sent an inspector to the Jasper plant, but he did not test the air, saying the company’s insurers had done an environmental sampling four years earlier. He concluded that the plant was in compliance with existing rules and closed the case.

Sixteen months later, a lawyer for ill workers filed a complaint with the agency. OSHA conducted a 40-minute inspection, but said it could do nothing more because there was no safety standard that established what level of diacetyl was acceptable. Since the first outbreak, OSHA has inspected three food and flavoring plants for links to popcorn worker’s lung, and issued one citation, according to records provided to public health experts at George Washington University and the United Food and Commercial
Workers International Union under the Freedom of Information Act.

Other workers have developed symptoms of the lung disease. Keith Campbell had worked at a Conagra microwave popcorn factory in Marion, Ohio, for two years when he got sick. He was then 44, but his doctors told him he had the lung capacity of an 80-year-old, Mr. Campbell said in an interview. He has extreme difficulty breathing, particularly in cold weather. “It’s affected my entire life,” he said.

Kenneth B. McClain, a lawyer at the Missouri firm that has represented Mr. Peoples and Mr. Campbell, said he had tried or settled more than 100 cases involving diacetyl and other flavorings and that more than 500 were still awaiting resolution in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Missouri and Ohio.

At a two-week trial in March 2004, lawyers for the makers of diacetyl products — International Flavors and Fragrances and its subsidiary, Bush Boake Allen — maintained that the additive did not cause Mr. Peoples’s illness and that, in any event, the popcorn company had mishandled the substance. Jurors awarded Mr. Peoples $20 million. His case, like Mr. Campbell’s, was later settled for an undisclosed amount.
Melissa I. Sachs, a spokeswoman at International Flavors and Fragrances, based in New York, declined to comment on the cases. According to its latest annual report, the company has been sued by more than 150 workers in four states.

Health experts have not raised alarms about diacetyl vapors that are released when consumers make microwave popcorn. But they note that there is little science on the issue, and the Environmental Protection Agency has declined to make public the results of its studies.
There are no estimates of the costs of upgrading all plants that use the food additive to protect workers better. Some microwave popcorn companies, including the Gilster-Mary Lee Corporation plant in Jasper, have spent millions of dollars on better ventilation, respirators and other equipment.

The Official Response

Two industry groups — the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association and the Popcorn Board — have also become involved in resolving workplace problems, particularly as the lawsuits have mounted. The association has not expressed opposition to an OSHA standard; its officials say it is working with California regulators to develop one there.

But John Hallagan, the association’s general counsel, says the group is working with OSHA to reach a voluntary compliance agreement.

“OSHA is doing the right things in addressing flavor-related health and safety issues,” Mr. Hallagan said in a recent e-mail message.

He said the agency had met with industry and health officials and had posted on a Web site possible health hazards associated with some flavorings.

In September 2002, OSHA’s Kansas City office entered into an alliance with the Popcorn Board, which represents popcorn processors, to try to address safety problems. But that arrangement soon ended.
Last July, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters petitioned OSHA for an emergency temporary standard for diacetyl. Urging action, 42 doctors and scientists from institutions including Harvard, Yale, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins, wrote to Ms. Chao, who oversees OSHA.

The agency responded by saying it was preparing a safety bulletin and would be monitoring diacetyl hazards at a few dozen popcorn plants, but not at the thousands of other food factories that use the additive. That has frustrated public health experts like Dr. Michaels, the George Washington University epidemiologist.
“Here you have one federal agency, Niosh, doing a great job exploring the science behind a problem and a second agency, OSHA, which is supposed to be moving forward with enforcement and standard setting, and they are not,” he said.

Accepting Gay Identity, and Gaining Strength

2007-04-03T04:44:00.000-07:00

Accepting Gay Identity, and Gaining Strength

C. M. Glover for The New York Times

Zach O’Connor, center, with his brother, Matt, 15, and their parents, Cindy and Dan.

By MICHAEL WINERIP

Published: April 1, 2007

MADISON, Conn.

ONE month before Zach O’Connor, a seventh grader at Brown Middle School here, came out about being gay, he was in such turmoil that he stood up in homeroom and, in a voice everyone could hear, asked a girl out on a date. It was Valentine’s Day 2003, and Zach was 13.

“I was doing this to survive,” he says. “This is what other guys were doing, getting girlfriends. I should get one, too.”

He feared his parents knew the truth about him. He knew that his father had typed in a Google search starting with “g,” and several other recent “g” searches had popped up, including “gay.”

“They asked me, ‘Do you know what being gay is?’ ” he recalls. “They tried to explain there’s nothing wrong with it. I put my hands over my ears. I yelled: ‘I don’t want to hear it! I’m not, I’m not gay!’ ”

Cindy and Dan O’Connor were very worried about Zach. Though bright, he was doing poorly at school. At home, he would pick fights, slam doors, explode for no reason. They wondered how their two children could be so different; Matt, a year and a half younger, was easygoing and happy. Zach was miserable.

The O’Connors had hunches. Mr. O’Connor is a director of business development for American Express, Ms. O’Connor a senior vice president of a bank, and they have had gay colleagues, gay bosses, classmates who came out after college. From the time Zach was little, they knew he was not a run-of-the-mill boy. His friends were girls or timid boys.

“Zach had no interest in throwing a football,” Mr. O’Connor says. But their real worry was his anger, his unhappiness, his low self-esteem. “He’d say: ‘I’m not smart. I’m not like other kids,’ ” says Ms. O’Connor. The middle-school psychologist started seeing him daily.

The misery Zach caused was minor compared with the misery he felt. He says he knew he was different by kindergarten, but he had no name for it, so he would stay to himself. He tried sports, but, he says, “It didn’t work out well.” He couldn’t remember the rules. In fifth grade, when boys at recess were talking about girls they had crushes on, Zach did not have someone to name.

By sixth grade, he knew what “gay” meant, but didn’t associate it with himself. That year, he says: “I had a crush on one particular eighth-grade boy, a very straight jock. I knew whatever I was feeling I shouldn’t talk about it.” He considered himself a broken version of a human being. “I did think about suicide,” he says.

Then, for reasons he can’t wholly explain beyond pure desperation, a month after his Valentine “date” — “We never actually went out, just walked around school together” — in the midst of math class, he told a female friend. By day’s end it was all over school. The psychologist called him in. “I burst into tears,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Yes, it’s true.’ Every piece of depression came pouring out. It was such a mess.”

That night, when his mother got home from work, she stuck her head in his room to say hi. “I said, ‘Ma, I need to talk to you about something, I’m gay.’ She said, ‘O.K., anything else?’ ‘No, but I just told you I’m gay.’ ‘O.K., that’s fine, we still love you.’ I said, ‘That’s it?’ I was preparing for this really dramatic moment.”

Ms. O’Connor recalls, “He said, ‘Mom, aren’t you going to freak out?’ I said: ‘It’s up to you to decide who to love. I have your father, and you have to figure out what’s best for you.’ He said, ‘Don’t tell Dad.’ ”

“Of course I told him,” Ms. O’Connor says.

“With all our faults,” Mr. O’Connor says, “we’re in this together.”

Having a son come out so young was a lot of work for the parents. They found him a therapist who is gay 20 miles away in New Haven. The therapist helped them find a gay youth group, OutSpoken, a 50-minute drive away in Norwalk.

Dan Woog, a writer and longtime soccer coach at Staples High in Westport, helped found OutSpoken in 1993. He says for the first 10 years, the typical member was 17 to 22 years old. “They’d come in saying: ‘I’m gay. My life is over,’ ” Mr. Woog says. “One literally hyperventilated walking through the door.”

But in recent years, he says, the kids are 14 to 17 and more confident. “They say: ‘Hi, I’m gay. How do I meet people?’ ”

For the first 10 years, Mr. Woog never saw a parent; meetings were from 4 to 6 p.m. Sunday, so members could get out of the house without arousing suspicion. Now, he says, parents often bring the child to the first meeting.

He believes teenagers are coming out sooner because the Internet makes them feel less isolated and they’re seeing positive role models in the media. Indeed, Zach says he spent his first therapy session talking about the gay characters on the TV show “Will and Grace” as a way to test the therapist’s attitudes before talking about himself.

Still, seventh grade was not easy. “We heard kids across the street yelling ‘homo’ as he waited for the school bus,” Mr. O’Connor says. Zach says classmates tossed pencils at him and constantly mocked him. “One kid followed me class to class calling me ‘faggot,’ ” he says. “After a month I turned and punched him in the face. He got quiet and walked away. I said, ‘You got beat up by a faggot.’ ”

The O’Connors say middle-school officials were terrific, and by eighth grade the tide turned. Zach was let out 15 minutes early and walked across the football field to Daniel Hand High School to attend the gay-straight club. Knowing who he was, he could envision a future and felt a sense of purpose. His grades went up. He had friends. For an assignment about heroes, a girl in his class wrote about him, and Zach used her paper to come out to his Aunt Kathy.

He still wasn’t athletic, but to the family’s surprise, coming out let out a beautiful voice. He won the middle school’s top vocal award.

His father took him to a gay-lesbian conference at Central Connecticut State in New Britain, and Zach was thrilled to see so many gay people in one place. His therapist took him to a Gay Bingo Night at St. Paul’s Church on the Green in Norwalk that raises money for AIDS care. Zach became a regular and within a few months was named Miss Congeniality.

“They crowned me with a tiara and sash, and I walked around the room waving,” he recalls. “I was still this shy 14-year-old in braces. I hadn’t reached my socialness yet, and everyone was cheering.

“I was the future. Most of the men were middle-aged or older, and to see this 14-year-old out, they loved it. They were so happy.”

Now, as a 17-year-old 11th grader, Zach has passed through phases that many gay men of previous generations didn’t get to until their 20s, 30s, even 40s. “Eighth grade was kind of his militant time,” Mr. O’Connor says.

“Everything was a rainbow,” says Ms. O’Connor.

These days, Zach is so busy, he rarely has time for the gay-straight club. He’s in several singing and drama groups and is taking an SAT prep course.

“I’ve been out so long, I don’t really need the club as a resource,” he says. “I’m not going to say I’m popular, but I’m friendly with nearly everybody. Sophomore year, my social life skyrocketed.”

In music groups he made male friends for the first time. “They weren’t afraid of me,” he says. “They like me.”

His brother, Matt, says sometimes kids come up to him and ask what it’s like to have a gay brother. “I say it’s normal to me, I don’t think of it anymore.”

As for his parents, they’re happy that Zach’s happy.

“Coming out was the best thing for him,” Ms. O’Connor says. “We ask him, ‘Why didn’t you come out in fifth grade?’ ”

US raid leads to 'hostage' crisis

2007-04-03T03:29:00.000-07:00

The botched US raid that led to the hostage crisis

Exclusive Report: How a bid to kidnap Iranian security officials sparked a diplomatic crisis

By Patrick Cockburn

Published: 03 April 2007

A failed American attempt to abduct two senior Iranian security officers on an official visit to northern Iraq was the starting pistol for a crisis that 10 weeks later led to Iranians seizing 15 British sailors and Marines.

Early on the morning of 11 January, helicopter-born US forces launched a surprise raid on a long-established Iranian liaison office in the city of Arbil in Iraqi Kurdistan. They captured five relatively junior Iranian officials whom the US accuses of being intelligence agents and still holds.

In reality the US attack had a far more ambitious objective, The Independent has learned. The aim of the raid, launched without informing the Kurdish authorities, was to seize two men at the very heart of the Iranian security establishment.

Better understanding of the seriousness of the US action in Arbil - and the angry Iranian response to it - should have led Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence to realise that Iran was likely to retaliate against American or British forces such as highly vulnerable Navy search parties in the Gulf. The two senior Iranian officers the US sought to capture were Mohammed Jafari, the powerful deputy head of the Iranian National Security Council, and General Minojahar Frouzanda, the chief of intelligence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, according to Kurdish officials.

The two men were in Kurdistan on an official visit during which they met the Iraqi President, Jalal Talabani, and later saw Massoud Barzani, the President of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), at his mountain headquarters overlooking Arbil.

"They were after Jafari," Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff of Massoud Barzani, told The Independent. He confirmed that the Iranian office had been established in Arbil for a long time and was often visited by Kurds obtaining documents to visit Iran. "The Americans thought he [Jafari] was there," said Mr Hussein.

Mr Jafari was accompanied by a second, high-ranking Iranian official. "His name was General Minojahar Frouzanda, the head of intelligence of the Pasdaran [Iranian Revolutionary Guard]," said Sadi Ahmed Pire, now head of the Diwan (office) of President Talabani in Baghdad. Mr Pire previously lived in Arbil, where he headed the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), Mr Talabani's political party.

The attempt by the US to seize the two high-ranking Iranian security officers openly meeting with Iraqi leaders is somewhat as if Iran had tried to kidnap the heads of the CIA and MI6 while they were on an official visit to a country neighbouring Iran, such as Pakistan or Afghanistan. There is no doubt that Iran believes that Mr Jafari and Mr Frouzanda were targeted by the Americans. Mr Jafari confirmed to the official Iranian news agency, IRNA, that he was in Arbil at the time of the raid.

In a little-noticed remark, Manouchehr Mottaki, the Iranian Foreign Minister, told IRNA: "The objective of the Americans was to arrest Iranian security officials who had gone to Iraq to develop co-operation in the area of bilateral security."

US officials in Washington subsequently claimed that the five Iranian officials they did seize, who have not been seen since, were "suspected of being closely tied to activities targeting Iraq and coalition forces". This explanation never made much sense. No member of the US-led coalition has been killed in Arbil and there were no Sunni-Arab insurgents or Shia militiamen there.

The raid on Arbil took place within hours of President George Bush making an address to the nation on 10 January in which he claimed: "Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops." He identified Iran and Syria as America's main enemies in Iraq though the four-year-old guerrilla war against US-led forces is being conducted by the strongly anti-Iranian Sunni-Arab community. Mr Jafari himself later complained about US allegations. "So far has there been a single Iranian among suicide bombers in the war-battered country?" he asked. "Almost all who involved in the suicide attacks are from Arab countries."

It seemed strange at the time that the US would so openly flout the authority of the Iraqi President and the head of the KRG simply to raid an Iranian liaison office that was being upgraded to a consulate, though this had not yet happened on 11 January. US officials, who must have been privy to the White House's new anti-Iranian stance, may have thought that bruised Kurdish pride was a small price to pay if the US could grab such senior Iranian officials.

For more than a year the US and its allies have been trying to put pressure on Iran. Security sources in Iraqi Kurdistan have long said that the US is backing Iranian Kurdish guerrillas in Iran. The US is also reportedly backing Sunni Arab dissidents in Khuzestan in southern Iran who are opposed to the government in Tehran. On 4 February soldiers from the Iraqi army 36th Commando battalion in Baghdad, considered to be under American control, seized Jalal Sharafi, an Iranian diplomat.

The raid in Arbil was a far more serious and aggressive act. It was not carried out by proxies but by US forces directly. The abortive Arbil raid provoked a dangerous escalation in the confrontation between the US and Iran which ultimately led to the capture of the 15 British sailors and Marines - apparently considered a more vulnerable coalition target than their American comrades.

The targeted generals

* MOHAMMED JAFARI

Powerful deputy head of the Iranian National Security Council, responsible for internal security. He has accused the United States of seeking to "hold Iran responsible for insecurity in Iraq... and [US] failure in the country."

* GENERAL MINOJAHAR FROUZANDA

Chief of intelligence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the military unit which maintains its own intelligence service separate from the state, as well as a parallel army, navy and air force.

Pay attention, because this is really important. If this raid really happened, and if it had succeeded in kidnapping those two men, we would be at war with Iran.

Miranda Devine: Corby vs. Hicks

2007-03-29T23:13:00.000-07:00

Grace under fire moves a nation

By Miranda Devine
May 29, 2005
The Sun-Herald

Composed: Corby, flanked by police officers, as she left court on Friday
Photo: AFP

After visiting Schapelle Corby in prison after her conviction, her defence team met beside the pool at the rented Seminyak villa of her financial backer, Gold Coast businessman Ron Bakir.

They ordered pizza and wept, as Bakir, 28, played Corby's song on the stereo - a homemade mix of Michael Buble's song Home and poignant snatches of Corby's voice in the courtroom.

"It's not fair," said red-eyed Bakir of her 20-year sentence, as news came that the prosecutor was appealing its "leniency".

Lebanese-born Bakir, a high school dropout made good from Merrylands, western Sydney, and his friend, Gold Coast lawyer Robin Tampoe, 38, are chivalrous men a little in love with the damsel in distress sitting in Kerobokan prison a few kilometres away. Bakir, a former bankrupt, has been portrayed as an opportunistic spiv, but the reality may be quite different, as his genuine anguish after the verdict indicates.

Tampoe, whose dark good looks come from his Irish-Sri Lankan background, is another poor boy made good, specialising in commercial law for Japanese and Korean businesses. With the oft-criticised young Indonesian lawyer Lily Lubis, they are characters straight from central casting in Corby's David v Goliath struggle to prove her innocence.

"They are just a poor family," said Tampoe of the Corbys, "a normal family. Those type of people normally don't fight, do they? Everyone thought they wouldn't fight and they all dismissed us. But they underestimated her."

Schapelle's Princess Diana-like popularity in Australia is seemingly unstoppable. It sneaked up on politicians and much of the media and has caused a world of trouble between Australia and Indonesia. It has brought out the worst xenophobia in her fellow citizens, complete with bomb threats to Indonesian consulates, and one radio host describing the three judges as monkeys, "straight out of the trees".

It has forced Prime Minister John Howard and his ministers into damage control, trying to offload blame on to her defence team as public anger grows at the realisation the Government, the Federal Police and Qantas did little to help her case.

What was remarkable in that muggy chaotic Denpasar court room on Friday was Schapelle's composure as she was convicted of trafficking 4.1 kilograms of marijuana into Bali. Through the chaos of 40 flashing cameras poked through the open windows, 200 journalists, family and friends, packed thigh to sweaty thigh behind her, rows of armed Indonesian police lining the walls, the sound of crashing tripods outside, swearing cameramen, reporters filing live crosses and a dozen translators murmuring, she stayed calm and straight-backed for almost two hours.

It was only as the third judge began to read his portion of the verdict in a harsh hectoring tone that the 27-year-old Gold Coast student beautician began to rock and weep. But she always pulled herself together and turned to smile and mouth "It's OK" to her family, sitting gloomy and uncomprehending in the front row.

She seemed only to despair when her sister Mercedes and mother Ros began shrieking at the judges after they pronounced the 20-year sentence.

"You people, how dare you," yelled Ros. "You judges will never sleep."

"Mum, stay calm. Mum, stop, it's OK. Just relax," pleaded Corby as the police rushed to surround the family, and Corby's usually placid father Michael crossly shushed his ex-wife.

"Schapelle's asked you," he said.

"I know what I'm doing," Ros snapped back.

The family dynamics bolstered an impression of Corby which has emerged throughout her seven-month ordeal, that she is the dutiful third daughter of a poor, loyal but relatively dysfunctional family; adored by her terminally ill father, who left the family when she was six; who has tried to make something of herself by being perfect.

Her grooming every day of the trial has been immaculate, a Herculean task in her circumstances, with just bowls of water to wash in.

The Australian public has seen what Corby's defence team saw long ago: a transcendent grace that makes her guilt implausible. Her strength of character, not to mention the careful styling and stunning good looks, improved in recent months by jail-time weight loss, have bolstered her claim she is innocent and that corrupt baggage handlers planted the drugs in her boogie board bag.

Public belief in her innocence is evident on the baggage carousel at Bali's Denpasar airport. Almost all the bags are locked, or bound with straps, some even shrink-wrapped in plastic.

A new paranoia has joined the Australian travellers' worries, along with Islamic terrorists and windshear. If, as Corby claims, someone put the plastic sack of hydroponic marijuana in her bag between Brisbane airport and Bali, then any one of us could be sitting in her dank cell in the Kerobokan prison tonight.

Protection, not money, the key to securing exclusive access

Contrary to popular belief, Channel Nine did not pay Schapelle Corby's mother Ros a cent.

Australian journalists covering the story in Bali have been complaining about chequebooks all week because Nine had gained exclusive access to Ros, Schapelle's father Michael and other family members.

In fact, Nine paid for air fares and a villa in Bali for Ros and her partner Greg. "She chose a really modest villa," producer Sean Walsh said. "She never hits us up for extra money for food. She's never been greedy. She's just really decent."

What the public may not understand is that in media-saturated situations, families like the Corbys will often choose to give exclusive access to one outlet, not for money, but in order to gain protection from the rest of the media, which is competing fiercely for their attention.

The chosen media organisation will then shield the family from media scrums, organise getaway cars, courtroom seats, translators, secure accommodation and such mundane items as bottles of water and cigarettes.

It is, of course, infuriating for other journalists to be blocked from getting the story but that doesn't mean the family is venal

What I tried to say was

In an email from Java, Professor Tim Lindsey, director of the University of Melbourne's Asian Law Centre, took exception to last week's column which quoted him defending the Indonesian criminal justice system. He wants to make clear he never said the Indonesian justice system is not corrupt.

However, he says: "I have not seen anything to suggest that this court is acting corruptly in Corby's trial.

"What I have said on repeated occasions is that the Indonesian system has serious problems of institutionalised corruption at all levels but this certainly does not mean all judicial decisions in Indonesia are corrupt.

"Many major commercial cases are often subject to corruption, as are many political cases. Routine criminal cases are, however, less likely to be exposed to this problem.

"The current Chief Justice of Indonesia, Professor Bagir Manan, is a committed reformer and under his leadership there have been major steps towards cleaning up the courts."

Professor Lindsey is none too popular with Corby's defence team, after he said they "did not rise well to the challenge" of countering the prosecution case. He also slammed Indonesian lead lawyer Lily Lubis for crying in court and being "young and relatively inexperienced".

But the competent Lubis had hired a more experienced, albeit less photogenic, well-connected lawyer to run the case in court. Erwin Siregar, a lawyer in Denpasar for 26 years, has defended more than 100 drugs cases and among those people who bombarded his mobile phone with messages of support after the verdict was good friend Denny Kailimang, Jakarta-based head of the Indonesian Lawyers Association.

=========================

'Guilty' puts end to the Hicks myth

March 29, 2007

Other related coverage

By pleading guilty to terrorism this week, David Hicks has plastered egg all over the faces of his supporters - the naive hysterics who believe he is a tortured innocent as well as those glory-seeking civil rights lawyers who have attached themselves to his case.

The egg was coming, anyway, as the prosecution finally had an opportunity to lay out its allegations before the United States military commission in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

But even as they wiped the yolk from their surprised brows yesterday, apologists for the 31-year-old Muslim convert, aka Mohammed Dawood, had found another way to spin this piece of bad news to their advantage.

"There's no way that this can be seen as a genuine guilty plea," the Greens senator Bob Brown told reporters, ignoring the fact that an innocent man would do anything to have his day in court.

"[It is] simply a plea for release for exit from the inhumane Guantanamo Bay gulag."

Singing from the same songsheet were newspaper letter pages bulging with outrage: "By accepting a plea deal to escape the Guantanamo Bay hellhole, a bit player who hurt nobody becomes a self-confessed war criminal," wrote Lesley Pople of Cremorne.

Thus you see the spin: Hicks only pleaded guilty to get out of the gulag, not because he is guilty. And even if he is a teensy bit guilty he's not a big scary terrorist, like Osama bin Laden. He's just a bit player. A small fish. Which is what most terrorists are. You don't find big fish like bin Laden or Khalid Sheik Mohammed strapping on backpacks full of hydrogen peroxide.

But with Hicks pleading guilty to the charge of providing material support to a terrorist organisation, we can only hope for some respite from the mythology that has grown around him.

No more "Free David Hicks" posters in cafes across the "intellectual" suburbs. Getup! might stop running ads portraying the self-confessed terrorist with the receding hairline as a cherubic nine-year-old. It might even think about returning the $500,000 it received last year in public donations, much of which it spent on salaries and expenses, as Australian Securities and Investments Commission documents reportedly revealed last month.

Maybe now Hicks's supporters might stop referring to him as "gaunt" since courtroom artists in the prison camp have revealed how porky he has grown on meals consumed on the US taxpayer.

Maybe now his lawyers might even drop the pretence that Hicks's hair is long because he needs to wrap it around his eyes to block out an "inhumane" light in his cell 24 hours a day, even though US authorities keep saying the "security light" is so dimmed at night you can't read a book by it.

Maybe now, we can put the American system for dealing with terrorist detainees in perspective, instead of falling for the line that it is the moral equivalent of al-Qaeda.

One such line came from Steven Miles, an America bioethicist who appeared on ABC's Lateline this week complaining about conditions at Guantanamo Bay. One of the techniques was to put "nude pin-ups on the chests of prisoners, having them take them off and then match them up with pin-ups on the floor". Another interrogation tactic was to make the detainees watch movies such as Die Terrorists, Die.

Responding on the program to the allegation that interrogation is designed to manipulate detainees' emotions and weakness, the US chief prosecutor, Moe Davis, said: "I would certainly hope so. I mean, that's the purpose of an interrogation is to obtain intelligence information to prevent the next 9/11 or the next Bali bombing."

Maybe now that he has confessed to being a terrorist people might start remembering the real David Hicks.

Here are the inconvenient facts:

On October 5, 2001, the Australian Government announced it was committing troops to the war against terrorism. By this stage, according to the charge sheet prepared by US prosecutors, Hicks had been at Kandahar airport for about two weeks with other al-Qaeda fighters. He had been issued with an AK-47 rifle and then "on his own armed himself with six ammunition magazines, 300 rounds of ammunition, and three grenades to use in fighting against the US Northern Alliance or other coalition forces".

It was a full two months before Hicks would be captured in Afghanistan.

On October 22, 2001, the first deployment of our Special Forces Task Group left Australia for Afghanistan.

This was about the time Hicks "decided to look for another opportunity to fight in Kabul", where he had heard fighting would be heavy.

On or about November 9, 2001, Hicks met a terrorist friend "who requested Hicks go to the front lines in Konduz [in the north] with him". Hicks joined a group of fighters including the "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, who were "engaged in combat against coalition forces".

After the front line collapsed, Hicks spent the rest of November in Arab safe houses in Konduz, still with his AK-47. By late November, there were reports that an advance party of Special Air Service soldiers was in Afghanistan. On December 3, 2001, Australian SAS troops were confirmed to be in Kandahar. That was about the time Hicks was arrested, in a taxi heading from Konduz to the Pakistan border.

It's worth remembering that on February 17, 2002, an Australian SAS soldier, Sergeant Andrew Russell, was killed in Afghanistan after an anti-tank mine exploded. While his death occurred two months after Hicks's capture, it nevertheless highlights Australia's very real exposure on the front line.

Hicks was not a misguided child who only went back to Afghanistan to retrieve his clothes, as some of his supporters maintain.

He was a well-trained terrorist, an al-Qaeda "golden boy" who had watched footage of the September 11, 2001, attacks which killed 3000 innocent people, including Australians, on a friend's TV in Pakistan, who "approved of the attacks" and went back to Afghanistan to fight the US and its allies with his terrorist mates. He was the enemy traitor when Australian troops were on the ground.

Aged, Frail and Denied Care by Their Insurers

2007-03-27T00:50:00.000-07:00

Anne Sherwood for The New York Times

Jacqueline Wheeler with her mother Mary Derks, who bought a long-term-care policy from Conseco, which denied coverage.

By CHARLES DUHIGG

Published: March 26, 2007

CONRAD, Mont. — Mary Rose Derks was a 65-year-old widow in 1990, when she began preparing for the day she could no longer care for herself. Every month, out of her grocery fund, she scrimped together about $100 for an insurance policy that promised to pay eventually for a room in an assisted living home.

On a May afternoon in 2002, after bouts of hypertension and diabetes had hospitalized her dozens of times, Mrs. Derks reluctantly agreed that it was time. She shed a few tears, watched her family pack her favorite blankets and rode to Beehive Homes, five blocks from her daughter’s farm equipment dealership.

At least, Mrs. Derks said at the time, she would not be a financial burden on her family.

But when she filed a claim with her insurer, Conseco, it said she had waited too long. Then it said Beehive Homes was not an approved facility, despite its state license. Eventually, Conseco argued that Mrs. Derks was not sufficiently infirm, despite her early-stage dementia and the 37 pills she takes each day.

After more than four years, Mrs. Derks, now 81, has yet to receive a penny from Conseco, while her family has paid about $70,000. Her daughter has sent Conseco dozens of bulky envelopes and spent hours on the phone. Each time the answer is the same: Denied.

Tens of thousands of elderly Americans have received life-prolonging care as a result of their long-term-care policies. With more than eight million customers, such insurance is one of the many products that companies are pitching to older Americans reaching retirement.

Yet thousands of policyholders say they have received only excuses about why insurers will not pay. Interviews by The New York Times and confidential depositions indicate that some long-term-care insurers have developed procedures that make it difficult — if not impossible — for policyholders to get paid. A review of more than 400 of the thousands of grievances and lawsuits filed in recent years shows elderly policyholders confronting unnecessary delays and overwhelming bureaucracies. In California alone, nearly one in every four long-term-care claims was denied in 2005, according to the state.

“The bottom line is that insurance companies make money when they don’t pay claims,” said Mary Beth Senkewicz, who resigned last year as a senior executive at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. “They’ll do anything to avoid paying, because if they wait long enough, they know the policyholders will die.”

In 2003, a subsidiary of Conseco, Bankers Life and Casualty, sent an 85-year-old woman suffering from dementia the wrong form to fill out, according to a lawsuit, then denied her claim because of improper paperwork. Last year, according to another pending suit, the insurer Penn Treaty American decided that a 92-year-old man had so improved that he should leave his nursing home despite his forgetfulness, anxiety and doctor’s orders to seek continued care. Another suit contended that a company owned by the John Hancock Insurance Company had tried to rescind the coverage of a 72-year-old man when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease four years after buying the policy.

In court filings, all three companies said the denials had been proper. They declined further comment on the cases, though Bankers Life and John Hancock eventually settled for unspecified amounts.

In general, insurers say criticisms of claims-handling are unfair because most policyholders are paid promptly and some denials are necessary to root out fraud.

In a statement, Conseco said the company “is committed to the highest standards for ethics, fairness and accountability, and strives to pay all claims in accordance with policy contracts.” Penn Treaty said in a statement, “We strive to treat all policyholders fairly, and to deliver the best, most efficient evaluation of their claim as possible.”

But policyholders have lodged thousands of complaints against the major long-term-care insurers. A disproportionate number have focused on Conseco, its affiliate, Bankers Life, and Penn Treaty. In 2005, Conseco received more than one complaint regarding long-term-care insurance for every 383 such policyholders, according to data from the insurance commissioners’ association. Penn Treaty received one complaint for every 1,207 long-term-care policyholders. (The complaints touch on a variety of topics, including claims handling, price increases and advertising methods.)

By comparison, Genworth Financial, the largest long-term-care insurer, received only one complaint for every 12,434 policies.

Conseco is among the nation’s largest insurers, collecting premiums worth more than $4.2 billion in 2006, of which long-term-care policies contributed 21 percent. Penn Treaty focuses primarily on long-term-care products and collected premiums of about $320 million in 2004, the last year the company filed an audited annual report.

In depositions and interviews, current and former employees at Conseco, Bankers Life and Penn Treaty described business practices that denied or delayed policyholders’ claims for seemingly trivial reasons. Employees said they had been prohibited from making phone calls to policyholders and that claims had been abandoned without informing policyholders. Such tactics, advocates for the elderly say, are becoming common throughout the industry.

“These companies have essentially turned their bureaucracies into profit centers,” said Glenn R. Kantor, a California lawyer who has represented policyholders.

Yet these concerns have been ignored by state regulators, advocates say, and have gone unnoticed by federal lawmakers who recently passed incentives intended to promote purchases of long-term-care policies, in the hopes of forestalling a Medicare funding crisis.

Conseco and Bankers Life “made it so hard to make a claim that people either died or gave up,” said Betty J. Hobel, a former Bankers Life agent in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

“When someone is 70 or 80 years old,” she said, “how many times are they going to try before they just give up?”

A Race to Sell Policies

When Mrs. Derks bought her long-term-care policy from a door-to-door salesman in 1990, she was unaware that she represented the insurance industry’s newest gold mine.

Her husband had died eight years earlier of a stroke, leaving her to run a barley farm in northern Montana, where she lived with her three children and her aging mother. As she watched her own parent decline, Mrs. Derks became preoccupied with sparing her children the expense of her final years.

“She was terrified that she would bankrupt us or get sent to a public nursing home,” said Ken E. Wheeler, her son-in-law.

At the time, long-term-care policies, which can cover the costs of assisted-living facilities, nursing homes and at-home care, were becoming one of the insurance industry’s fastest-growing products. Companies like Conseco, Bankers Life and Penn Treaty were aggressively signing up clients who were not in the best health at rates far below their competitors’ in order to win more business, former agents said. From 1991 to 1999, long-term-care sales helped drive total revenue gains of roughly 500 percent each at Penn Treaty and Conseco, including its affiliate Bankers Life.

Cracks in the business, however, soon started to appear. Insurance executives began warning they had underestimated how long policyholders would live after entering nursing homes. The costs of treating Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and diabetes ballooned.

As insurers began realizing their miscalculations, they persuaded insurance commissioners in California, Pennsylvania, Florida and other states to approve price increases of as much as 40 percent a year.

By 2002, Conseco’s long-term-care payouts exceeded revenue. Those and other disappointing results prompted the company to file for bankruptcy, from which it emerged 10 months later.

That same year, Mrs. Derks entered Beehive Homes, a cheery, 12-bed center one block from the Prairie View elementary school. In the previous four years, she had been hospitalized more than two dozen times. She had once lain unconscious in her living room for a day and a half. Her physician ordered her into an assisted-living center.

Initially, Conseco told Mrs. Derks’s daughter, Jackie Wheeler, that her claim would go through smoothly, Mrs. Wheeler said. The family began paying Beehive Homes’s $1,900 monthly fee.

But three months after submitting her claim, Mrs. Derks received a letter from Conseco saying she had waited too long, and her earliest costs would not be reimbursed. Two months later, she received another letter denying her entire claim because she had not submitted proof of illness.

Yet a copy of Mrs. Derks’s policy, sent to the Wheelers by Conseco in 2004 and reviewed by The Times, mentions no requirement for proof of illness. The policy requires only that the confinement be ordered by a physician, and it allows for a notice of claim to be sent “as soon as reasonably possible.”

Mrs. Derks’s daughter called Conseco and explained that her mother could not recall the date or people’s names and had started multiple fires by forgetting to turn off the stove. She sent letters stating that her mother needed assistance to dress, eat, go to the bathroom and inject insulin.

“This is medically necessary!!!” reads a form signed by Mrs. Derks’s physician in 2004. “This has been filled out three times! This person needs assistance!”

Seven months later, Conseco sent another letter, this time denying Mrs. Derks’s claim because her policy “requires a staffed registered nurse 24 hours per day.” Her policy does not mention such a requirement.

Conseco also sent letters denying Mrs. Derks’s claim because her policy had an “assisted living facility rider,” and because Mrs. Derks “does not have an assisted living facility rider.” In all, the family received more than a dozen letters from the company. Many contradict one another, and frequently cite requirements that are nowhere mentioned in Mrs. Derks’s policy.

“There was always a new step in the runaround,” Mrs. Wheeler said. “It felt like everything was designed to make me just go away.”

Over two years, Mrs. Wheeler estimated, she called the company about 100 times. Twice a month, she sent envelopes stuffed with medical records. Some afternoons, she spent hours making calls. After one conversation, Mrs. Wheeler slammed down the phone and started to cry. Then she drove to Beehive Homes, where her mother was surrounded by faded photos of her childhood and boxes of adult diapers.

“I wouldn’t tell her about the problems we were having with Conseco, because I knew it would cause her so much worry,” Mrs. Wheeler said.

Eventually, the Wheelers sold part of their John Deere dealership to raise money to pay for her mother’s care. In October 2006, they sued.

Conseco, asked by a reporter about the company’s handling of the Derks claim, declined to answer, citing the pending litigation. In court documents, the company denied Mrs. Derks’s allegations without specifying why her claim was denied.

“We did everything they asked,” Mrs. Wheeler said. “And this company just treats us like dirt.”

Tales of Bureaucracy

Inside the large Conseco headquarters in Carmel, Ind., scores of employees receive the flood of documents and calls that arrive each day. At times, according to depositions and interviews, that deluge became so overwhelming that documents were lost, calls went unreturned and mistakes occurred.

Some employees describe vast mailrooms where documents appear and disappear. One call-center representative said he was afforded an average of only four minutes to handle each policyholder’s call, no matter how complicated the questions. Employees said they were instructed not to say when the company was behind in processing paperwork, even when the backlog extended to 45 days. Workers were prohibited from contacting each other by phone, although such calls might have quickly resolved obstacles, according to depositions.

Conseco, asked in detail about the company’s policies, declined to respond.

Bureaucratic obstacles were pervasive, according to interviews with 10 former Conseco employees and depositions of more than a dozen others. Robert W. Ragle, a former Bankers Life branch manager, once contacted the claims department on behalf of a client, and “they just laughed us off the phone,” he said. “Their mentality is to keep every dollar they can.” Mr. Ragle was dismissed by Bankers Life in 2002. He sued for wrongful termination and settled out of court.

In lawsuits, complaints and interviews, policyholders contend that Conseco, Bankers Life or Penn Treaty denied claims because policyholders failed to submit unimportant paperwork; because daily nursing notes did not detail minute procedures; because policyholders filled out the wrong forms after receiving them from the insurance companies; and because facilities were deemed inappropriate even though they were licensed by state regulators.

In depositions conducted on behalf of angry policyholders, Conseco employees described bureaucratic obstacles that prevented payment of claims. Those depositions were sealed in settlement agreements but were obtained by The Times.

In a 2006 deposition, a Bankers Life and Conseco claims adjuster, Teresa Carbonel, testified that she denied claims because of missing records but was prohibited from calling nursing homes or physicians to request the documents. She also testified that when a claim was denied, she was forbidden to phone a policyholder, but instead used a time-consuming mailing system.

Ms. Carbonel’s testimony, recorded during lawsuit on behalf of a 94-year-old policyholder, Rhodes K. Scherer, also disclosed that if policyholders did not mail requested documents within 21 days, Conseco might abandon their claim, sometimes without informing them.

In the case of Mr. Scherer, who was institutionalized after a bathroom fall, it was difficult to obtain a response, Ms. Carbonel said, because the company’s requests were mailed to his home address, rather than the nursing center where the company had been notified that he had moved. Ms. Carbonel, who is no longer with the company, did not return calls. Conseco declined to comment on her testimony.

In another deposition, Conseco’s then-senior manager for long-term- care claims, Jose S. Torres, testified that Conseco would sometimes withhold payments until it received documents not required by customers’ policies. In Mr. Scherer’s case, Mr. Torres said, the company refused to pay his nursing home costs unless he sent copies of the home’s license, payment invoices and medical records, even though those documents had no bearing on approving his claim.

Mr. Scherer’s claim “was handled not in the best way, but it was handled according to the processes and procedures placed at the time,” Mr. Torres testified. “Mistakes are going to be made, you know.”

Other executives testified that when Conseco appeared to have lost important documents in Mr. Scherer’s claim, no investigation was initiated. Shawn Michael Schechter, a Conseco claims supervisor who left the company in 2005 on positive terms, according to the deposition, testified that the handling of Mr. Scherer’s claim violated the principle of good faith, which requires insurance companies to treat customers fairly.

“The claim adjuster could have made that very easy and not have put the burden back onto the policyholder,” he testified.

Mr. Torres did not return calls. Mr. Schechter declined to answer questions.

Mr. Scherer died in 2004 without receiving benefits from Conseco. His estate settled with the company in February for an undisclosed amount, according to a lawyer representing the estate.

Conseco declined to discuss its complaint history or individual cases, citing confidentiality agreements. In its statement, the company said that in 2006, Conseco paid nearly $2.3 billion on 9.8 million claims in all types of insurance sold by the company.

The company added: “Conseco, through training, education and process improvements in all of its insurance companies, is continuously focused on enhancing service and resolving any problems expeditiously. The Conseco Insurance Group’s overall insurance department complaints decreased 20 percent from 2005 to 2006.”

Depositions of executives at Penn Treaty also point to questionable practices. In a 2005 lawsuit, a Penn Treaty senior vice president, Stephen Robert LaPierre, testified that the company rejected one claim without informing the policyholder why, asked for information that was not required to process a claim, gave incomplete information about a claim’s status and said the company was delaying payment because of an investigation while failing to take steps that might have resolved the inquiry.

Mr. LaPierre declined to discuss his testimony. Penn Treaty settled the lawsuit by paying the policyholder an unspecified amount, the policyholder’s lawyer said.

Penn Treaty said in a statement that evaluating a company by measuring its complaints was flawed, and that since 2003, the company has denied an average of less than 1.7 percent of the up to 8,000 claims it received every year because of reasons related to policyholder eligibility. “From time to time, Penn Treaty is compelled to investigate fraud or questionable billing activities,” the company added.

Few Regulatory Inquiries

Few of the cases or complaints filed against Conseco, Bankers Life, Penn Treaty or other insurers have received much attention, in part because many lawsuits filed against long-term-care insurers have been settled with the requirement that depositions, documents and settlement terms be kept confidential. Frequently, say policyholders’ lawyers, the companies have been willing to pay millions of dollars in exchange for confidentiality.

Furthermore, despite the complaints against long-term-care insurers, few states have conducted meaningful investigations.

Ron Gallagher, a deputy commissioner with the Pennsylvania Insurance Department, said, “I don’t know that we have a real problem with improper claim denials.”

Yet data from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners show that from 2003 to 2005, Pennsylvania received more complaints regarding Conseco, Bankers Life and Penn Treaty than any other state. Mr. Gallagher said he might begin a new review of those companies.

Other states with large numbers of long-term-care complaints, including California, Missouri, Maryland, Indiana and Washington have not begun investigations, or have reviewed only small numbers of policies.

As a result, other seniors may end up like Mrs. Derks.

While she was waiting for her lawsuit to proceed, Medicaid began contributing to Ms. Derks’s care. Taxpayers now pay Beehive Homes about $32 daily for her care.

“Long-term-care insurance is supposed to result in less pressure on Medicaid, not more,” said Ms. Senkewicz, the former executive at the insurance commissioners’ association.

For Mrs. Derks’s family, things have already broken down.

“How many other people are out there who don’t have a family to fight for them and have just given up?” asked Jackie Wheeler. “This company should be ashamed.”

Bob Morris- wanker

2007-03-10T00:44:00.000-08:00

The Age Of Dissonance

The Little Puritans

By BOB MORRIS

Published: March 11, 2007

Not long ago, after a nice outdoor dinner on Jamaica, my brother and I ordered drinks and lighted cigarettes. My delightful nephew, who is 12, became miserable. “You really have to put those out,” he told us. “You could die.”

After a few nights of his saying the same thing, it became a bore, especially when he held his napkin to his face like a gas mask for secondhand smoke.

I explained firmly that his father and I are social smokers, who like the occasional cigarette, and that secondhand smoke isn’t an issue outdoors on the water. He went off to sulk. I felt bad.

But later, my brother, a caring father, said he was grateful I had spoken up.

“He won’t accept that the occasional cigarette isn’t going to kill you,” he said. “He’s been brainwashed by all his school programs, and it’s become oppressive.”

I know other parents who say the same. Their younger children are having nightmares from graphic antismoking films they see in school or thinking that their relatives with bad habits are bad people.

One nonsmoking father, Robert Warren, who records albums for children as Uncle Rock, wrote a controversial song he never recorded called “I Love Someone Who Smokes.” His gentle son, in first grade at the time, was grappling with how to reconcile frightening information he was getting in school with his feelings for a beloved grandmother with a nicotine habit.

Still, it would be irresponsible not to applaud the good intentions of substance-abuse programs. And it would be wrong not to note that smoking is linked to 450,000 deaths a year, and that for most people my moderate social smoking is not an option, given the addictive quality of nicotine.

“We’re telling kids in schools all over the country that smoking is addictive and causes cancer and heart disease,” said Joseph Califano, the president of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia. “And there’s no way that they’re not going to bring that message home. Kids can have a very potent effect on us.”

But is it possible that the effect they’re having is a little too potent?

Call me a crabby old baby boomer, but I’m tired of parents who let children commandeer every conversation. And should they be allowed to bully us with their concerns? Maybe they’re telling us they’re tired of the pressure to get into the right college. Maybe they’re getting back at parents fixated on their nutrition or video games.

It can’t help that children are living in a transfat-banning, nanny-state culture.

They are asked to sign pledges at school never to smoke, drink or try drugs. They are inspired by zealous organizations to monitor parental drinking. One father I know was called a drug addict by his son for having a couple of beers after work.

Yes, they have good reason not to want parents to smoke, drink or abuse drugs.

But does that mean a 9-year-old from Connecticut should propose a smoking ban in cars where there are minors? That happened last year, when a boy, with his mother’s help, contacted his state representative and collected 200 signatures. The proposed ban has been introduced into the state legislature.

Of course, parents are also touched by children concerned for their health.

That’s why one mother I know has quietly endured Post-it notes all over her home asking, “Do you want to die?” Others let children pull cigarettes out of their mouths and the mouths of their friends. Another mother I know, who smokes occasionally, tells her son she appreciates his concern, but she has to make her own decisions. It’s as if she’s explaining herself to a strict father.

“I think it’s nice to respect the wishes of young people,” said Ann Dexter-Jones, a smoker and mother of five grown children. “But we’ve forgotten who makes the rules in our society. And there’s a fine line between showing concern and bad manners.”

It all comes down to that, doesn’t it?

As for my nephew, he has agreed to lighten up when we light up.

“So we’re O.K. on the occasional smoking thing?” I asked him.

“Sure, Uncle Bob,” he said. “But we still have to talk about drinking.”

Bartender!

A nappy for your thoughts: VTAY 13/10/2005

2007-02-09T00:17:00.000-08:00

A Fast Track to Toilet Training for Those at the Crawling Stage

By TINA KELLEY

Published: October 9, 2005

Hannah Rothstein, 7 months old, has double thighs and a dimpled bottom, but very svelte German underwear. She can still fit into her birth-to-3-month-old clothes because she lacks her peers' familiar bulge in the rear. She can sleep all night without a diaper. And during the day, every so often, after her mother, Melinda, of Newton, Mass., places her on a plastic potty and makes a little "pss-wss-wss" sound like the one used to call a cat, Hannah uses the toilet.

For many parents in the United States, the idea of potty training before a baby is able to walk, or even before age 2, is not just horrifying but reprehensible - a sure nightmare for parents and baby, not to mention a direct route from the crib to the psychiatrist's couch. But a growing number of parents are experimenting with infant potty training, seeing it as more sanitary, ecologically correct and likely to strengthen bonds between parent and child.

About 2,000 people across the country have joined Internet groups and e-mail lists to learn more about the techniques of encouraging a baby - a child too young to walk or talk - to go in a toilet, a sink or a pot. Through a nonprofit group, Diaper Free Baby (www.diaperfreebaby.org), 77 local groups have formed in 35 states to encourage the practice. One author's how-to books on the subject have sold about 50,000 copies.

"It's just so simple," said Lamelle Ryman, who recently attended a support meeting at an apartment on the Upper West Side. Ms. Ryman, the mother of 7-month-old Neshama, added, "I feel like it's been such a gift in our relationship."

Adoption of the approach in the West is in its infant stage, so to speak. Moreover, the philosophy behind it flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Dr. Benjamin Spock, the last word in child rearing for many American families through much of the 20th century, recommended against any training in the first year, believing that it could lead to rebellion later through bedwetting.

Once, however, breastfeeding also was a rarity.

With early toilet training, there is a broad body of knowledge and experience to draw on. Parents in at least 75 countries, including India, Kenya and Greenland, embrace the practice, with Chinese babies often wearing pants with split bottoms for easy squatting (available for $1 in Chinatown, according to savvy mothers in New York).

Some parents who adopt children from other countries say they are startled to find that their babies arrive ready to use the toilet. More than 50 percent of the world's children are toilet trained by the time they turn 1, according to Contemporary Pediatrics magazine.

From birth, the reasoning goes, infants are aware of their needs to eliminate, and although their muscles are not developed, they can soon learn to go on cue. Conversely, by relying on disposable diapers, modern parents are in effect teaching babies to ignore the signs that they have to go, making potty training at a later age more difficult.

Ingrid Bauer, author of "Diaper Free! The Gentle Wisdom of Natural Infant Hygiene" (Natural Wisdom Press, 2001), believes it is easiest to begin toilet training in the first six months. To start, parents are taught to hold the baby by the thighs in a seated position against their stomachs and to make an encouraging hiss or grunt. With practice, parents learn their child's rhythms; some parents sleep next to their children and keep a potty at arm's reach, or diaper their babies overnight.

For families who practice the technique, the advantages are many: savings in the cost of diapers, which can reach $3,000 a child; less guilt about contributing to the 22 billion disposable diapers that end up in landfills every year; no diaper rash, and a nursery that doesn't reek of diaper pail. They also note that age 2, a common age for toilet training, is a time of notorious willfulness and a terrible age to start teaching any child anything.

Most important, they say, is an increased emotional bond with the baby, forged by the need for the parent to pick up on subtle signs and act on them quickly. Proponents of the practice use the phrase "elimination communication."

"It is enhancing that interaction and closeness, the intimacy between baby and mother," said Thomas Ball, a psychologist in California who is helping develop a documentary about the technique. Unquestionably, in a child-rearing culture that thrives on sanitation and parental convenience, the prospect of supervising 20 deposits a day in the first busy months of infancy is daunting.

"It doesn't sound like anything I would ever even attempt to try," said Erinn Marchetti, who has two preschool-age children and was shopping recently at Toys "R" Us in Times Square. "It's hard enough when they're 2 and 3."

Another mother in Toys "R" Us, who offered her opinion but wanted to remain anonymous, was aghast at the notion. "Have you read Freud?" she asked, worrying about the method's long-term effects. "I imagine it's going to come out in sexual ways."

Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, the renowned child-rearing expert, said parents need not worry about psychologically damaging their child. Dr. Brazelton, author of "Toilet Training: The Brazelton Way" (Da Capo Press, 2004), has always advocated a child-centered approach to training: do it when a child is ready, without too much pushing or even encouraging.

How appropriate is it to potty train before a baby is able to walk?

"I'm all for it, except I don't think many people can do it," he said of elimination communication. "The thing that bothers me about it is today, probably 80 percent of women don't have that kind of availability."

As with breastfeeding, a turn toward infant potty training would represent a leap into the past. Before the 1800's, babies in Western societies were swaddled, which restrained them and contained their wastes, Laurie Boucke said in "Infant Potty Training" (White-Boucke Publishing, 2002), one of several books she has written that advocate the technique. When cleanliness became a virtue in the 19th century, Ms. Boucke wrote, infants were regularly held over a chamber pot until they learned the habit of using it.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, in its current "Toilet Training" pamphlet, says children have no control over bladder or bowel movements when they are younger than a year and little control for six months afterwards.

"Even if you're getting them to go in a pot as a young infant, I don't know if it will have any long-term impact for all the effort you have to go through," said Dr. Mark Wolraich, author of the academy's "Guide to Toilet Training" (Bantam Books, 2003). "The risk is, if it's not working and the parents are frustrated, they're creating more negative interactions with their child."

But parents of diaper-free babies said working with a child's signals is a rewarding experience.

A mother in Medford, Mass., Sarabeth Matilsky, said elimination communication helped strengthen her bond with her son, Ben, who began using a potty when he was about 10 weeks old and who was colicky as an infant.

"When I started doing this, I got to start seeing him as a little person with abilities," she said.

At two recent meetings of support groups, mothers and one father shared signals their babies gave: kicking, nose-rubbing, getting loud, getting quiet, hiccupping, feeling warm to the touch, shivering.

Ms. Boucke, the author, noted that many fathers enjoy infant potty training. "They can't breast-feed, but they can work on the other end," she said.

She knows it can be challenging, she said. "I tell people, you cannot be a perfectionist with this," Ms. Boucke said. "No one is going to be there all the time. They won't have a life."

fixing broken links on VTAY

2007-02-08T20:16:00.000-08:00

Unhappy Meals

2007-01-29T17:11:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times:

Unhappy Meals

By MICHAEL POLLAN
Published: January 28, 2007

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I’m tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words. I’ll try to resist but will go ahead and add a couple more details to flesh out the advice. Like: A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat “food.” Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

Uh-oh. Things are suddenly sounding a little more complicated, aren’t they? Sorry. But that’s how it goes as soon as you try to get to the bottom of the whole vexing question of food and health. Before long, a dense cloud bank of confusion moves in. Sooner or later, everything solid you thought you knew about the links between diet and health gets blown away in the gust of the latest study.
Last winter came the news that a low-fat diet, long believed to protect against breast cancer, may do no such thing — this from the monumental, federally financed Women’s Health Initiative, which has also found no link between a low-fat diet and rates of coronary disease. The year before we learned that dietary fiber might not, as we had been confidently told, help prevent colon cancer. Just last fall two prestigious studies on omega-3 fats published at the same time presented us with strikingly different conclusions. While the Institute of Medicine stated that “it is uncertain how much these omega-3s contribute to improving health” (and they might do the opposite if you get them from mercury-contaminated fish), a Harvard study declared that simply by eating a couple of servings of fish each week (or by downing enough fish oil), you could cut your risk of dying from a heart attack by more than a third — a stunningly hopeful piece of news. It’s no wonder that omega-3 fatty acids are poised to become the oat bran of 2007, as food scientists micro-encapsulate fish oil and algae oil and blast them into such formerly all-terrestrial foods as bread and tortillas, milk and yogurt and cheese, all of which will soon, you can be sure, sprout fishy new health claims. (Remember the rule?)

By now you’re probably registering the cognitive dissonance of the supermarket shopper or science-section reader, as well as some nostalgia for the simplicity and solidity of the first few sentences of this essay. Which I’m still prepared to defend against the shifting winds of nutritional science and food-industry marketing. But before I do that, it might be useful to figure out how we arrived at our present state of nutritional confusion and anxiety.

The story of how the most basic questions about what to eat ever got so complicated reveals a great deal about the institutional imperatives of the food industry, nutritional science and — ahem — journalism, three parties that stand to gain much from widespread confusion surrounding what is, after all, the most elemental question an omnivore confronts. Humans deciding what to eat without expert help — something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees — is seriously unprofitable if you’re a food company, distinctly risky if you’re a nutritionist and just plain boring if you’re a newspaper editor or journalist. (Or, for that matter, an eater. Who wants to hear, yet again, “Eat more fruits and vegetables”?) And so, like a large gray fog, a great Conspiracy of Confusion has gathered around the simplest questions of nutrition — much to the advantage of everybody involved. Except perhaps the ostensible beneficiary of all this nutritional expertise and advice: us, and our health and happiness as eaters.

FROM FOODS TO NUTRIENTS

It was in the 1980s that food began disappearing from the American supermarket, gradually to be replaced by “nutrients,” which are not the same thing. Where once the familiar names of recognizable comestibles — things like eggs or breakfast cereal or cookies — claimed pride of place on the brightly colored packages crowding the aisles, now new terms like “fiber” and “cholesterol” and “saturated fat” rose to large-type prominence. More important than mere foods, the presence or absence of these invisible substances was now generally believed to confer health benefits on their eaters. Foods by comparison were coarse, old-fashioned and decidedly unscientific things — who could say what was in them, really? But nutrients — those chemical compounds and minerals in foods that nutritionists have deemed important to health — gleamed with the promise of scientific certainty; eat more of the right ones, fewer of the wrong, and you would live longer and avoid chronic diseases.

Nutrients themselves had been around, as a concept, since the early 19th century, when the English doctor and chemist William Prout identified what came to be called the “macronutrients”: protein, fat and carbohydrates. It was thought that that was pretty much all there was going on in food, until doctors noticed that an adequate supply of the big three did not necessarily keep people nourished. At the end of the 19th century, British doctors were puzzled by the fact that Chinese laborers in the Malay states were dying of a disease called beriberi, which didn’t seem to afflict Tamils or native Malays. The mystery was solved when someone pointed out that the Chinese ate “polished,” or white, rice, while the others ate rice that hadn’t been mechanically milled. A few years later, Casimir Funk, a Polish chemist, discovered the “essential nutrient” in rice husks that protected against beriberi and called it a “vitamine,” the first micronutrient. Vitamins brought a kind of glamour to the science of nutrition, and though certain sectors of the population began to eat by its expert lights, it really wasn’t until late in the 20th century that nutrients managed to push food aside in the popular imagination of what it means to eat.

No single event marked the shift from eating food to eating nutrients, though in retrospect a little-noticed political dust-up in Washington in 1977 seems to have helped propel American food culture down this dimly lighted path. Responding to an alarming increase in chronic diseases linked to diet — including heart disease, cancer and diabetes — a Senate Select Committee on Nutrition, headed by George McGovern, held hearings on the problem and prepared what by all rights should have been an uncontroversial document called “Dietary Goals for the United States.” The committee learned that while rates of coronary heart disease had soared in America since World War II, other cultures that consumed traditional diets based largely on plants had strikingly low rates of chronic disease. Epidemiologists also had observed that in America during the war years, when meat and dairy products were strictly rationed, the rate of heart disease temporarily plummeted.

Naïvely putting two and two together, the committee drafted a straightforward set of dietary guidelines calling on Americans to cut down on red meat and dairy products. Within weeks a firestorm, emanating from the red-meat and dairy industries, engulfed the committee, and Senator McGovern (who had a great many cattle ranchers among his South Dakota constituents) was forced to beat a retreat. The committee’s recommendations were hastily rewritten. Plain talk about food — the committee had advised Americans to actually “reduce consumption of meat” — was replaced by artful compromise: “Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake.”

A subtle change in emphasis, you might say, but a world of difference just the same. First, the stark message to “eat less” of a particular food has been deep-sixed; don’t look for it ever again in any official U.S. dietary pronouncement. Second, notice how distinctions between entities as different as fish and beef and chicken have collapsed; those three venerable foods, each representing an entirely different taxonomic class, are now lumped together as delivery systems for a single nutrient. Notice too how the new language exonerates the foods themselves; now the culprit is an obscure, invisible, tasteless — and politically unconnected — substance that may or may not lurk in them called “saturated fat.”

The linguistic capitulation did nothing to rescue McGovern from his blunder; the very next election, in 1980, the beef lobby helped rusticate the three-term senator, sending an unmistakable warning to anyone who would challenge the American diet, and in particular the big chunk of animal protein sitting in the middle of its plate. Henceforth, government dietary guidelines would shun plain talk about whole foods, each of which has its trade association on Capitol Hill, and would instead arrive clothed in scientific euphemism and speaking of nutrients, entities that few Americans really understood but that lack powerful lobbies in Washington. This was precisely the tack taken by the National Academy of Sciences when it issued its landmark report on diet and cancer in 1982. Organized nutrient by nutrient in a way guaranteed to offend no food group, it codified the official new dietary language. Industry and media followed suit, and terms like polyunsaturated, cholesterol, monounsaturated, carbohydrate, fiber, polyphenols, amino acids and carotenes soon colonized much of the cultural space previously occupied by the tangible substance formerly known as food. The Age of Nutritionism had arrived.

THE RISE OF NUTRITIONISM

The first thing to understand about nutritionism — I first encountered the term in the work of an Australian sociologist of science named Gyorgy Scrinis — is that it is not quite the same as nutrition. As the “ism” suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology. Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it’s exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather, all pervasive and virtually inescapable. Still, we can try.

In the case of nutritionism, the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. From this basic premise flow several others. Since nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists (and to the journalists through whom the scientists speak) to explain the hidden reality of foods to us. To enter a world in which you dine on unseen nutrients, you need lots of expert help.

But expert help to do what, exactly? This brings us to another unexamined assumption: that the whole point of eating is to maintain and promote bodily health. Hippocrates’s famous injunction to “let food be thy medicine” is ritually invoked to support this notion. I’ll leave the premise alone for now, except to point out that it is not shared by all cultures and that the experience of these other cultures suggests that, paradoxically, viewing food as being about things other than bodily health — like pleasure, say, or socializing — makes people no less healthy; indeed, there’s some reason to believe that it may make them more healthy. This is what we usually have in mind when we speak of the “French paradox” — the fact that a population that eats all sorts of unhealthful nutrients is in many ways healthier than we Americans are. So there is at least a question as to whether nutritionism is actually any good for you.

Another potentially serious weakness of nutritionist ideology is that it has trouble discerning qualitative distinctions between foods. So fish, beef and chicken through the nutritionists’ lens become mere delivery systems for varying quantities of fats and proteins and whatever other nutrients are on their scope. Similarly, any qualitative distinctions between processed foods and whole foods disappear when your focus is on quantifying the nutrients they contain (or, more precisely, the known nutrients).

This is a great boon for manufacturers of processed food, and it helps explain why they have been so happy to get with the nutritionism program. In the years following McGovern’s capitulation and the 1982 National Academy report, the food industry set about re-engineering thousands of popular food products to contain more of the nutrients that science and government had deemed the good ones and less of the bad, and by the late ’80s a golden era of food science was upon us. The Year of Eating Oat Bran — also known as 1988 — served as a kind of coming-out party for the food scientists, who succeeded in getting the material into nearly every processed food sold in America. Oat bran’s moment on the dietary stage didn’t last long, but the pattern had been established, and every few years since then a new oat bran has taken its turn under the marketing lights. (Here comes omega-3!)

By comparison, the typical real food has more trouble competing under the rules of nutritionism, if only because something like a banana or an avocado can’t easily change its nutritional stripes (though rest assured the genetic engineers are hard at work on the problem). So far, at least, you can’t put oat bran in a banana. So depending on the reigning nutritional orthodoxy, the avocado might be either a high-fat food to be avoided (Old Think) or a food high in monounsaturated fat to be embraced (New Think). The fate of each whole food rises and falls with every change in the nutritional weather, while the processed foods are simply reformulated. That’s why when the Atkins mania hit the food industry, bread and pasta were given a quick redesign (dialing back the carbs; boosting the protein), while the poor unreconstructed potatoes and carrots were left out in the cold.

Of course it’s also a lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a potato or carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as strole victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness.

EAT RIGHT, GET FATTER

So nutritionism is good for business. But is it good for us? You might think that a national fixation on nutrients would lead to measurable improvements in the public health. But for that to happen, the underlying nutritional science, as well as the policy recommendations (and the journalism) based on that science, would have to be sound. This has seldom been the case.
Consider what happened immediately after the 1977 “Dietary Goals” — McGovern’s masterpiece of politico-nutritionist compromise. In the wake of the panel’s recommendation that we cut down on saturated fat, a recommendation seconded by the 1982 National Academy report on cancer, Americans did indeed change their diets, endeavoring for a quarter-century to do what they had been told. Well, kind of. The industrial food supply was promptly reformulated to reflect the official advice, giving us low-fat pork, low-fat Snackwell’s and all the low-fat pasta and high-fructose (yet low-fat!) corn syrup we could consume. Which turned out to be quite a lot. Oddly, America got really fat on its new low-fat diet — indeed, many date the current obesity and diabetes epidemic to the late 1970s, when Americans began binging on carbohydrates, ostensibly as a way to avoid the evils of fat.

This story has been told before, notably in these pages (“What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?” by Gary Taubes, July 7, 2002), but it’s a little more complicated than the official version suggests. In that version, which inspired the most recent Atkins craze, we were told that America got fat when, responding to bad scientific advice, it shifted its diet from fats to carbs, suggesting that a re-evaluation of the two nutrients is in order: fat doesn’t make you fat; carbs do. (Why this should have come as news is a mystery: as long as people have been raising animals for food, they have fattened them on carbs.)

But there are a couple of problems with this revisionist picture. First, while it is true that Americans post-1977 did begin binging on carbs, and that fat as a percentage of total calories in the American diet declined, we never did in fact cut down on our consumption of fat. Meat consumption actually climbed. We just heaped a bunch more carbs onto our plates, obscuring perhaps, but not replacing, the expanding chunk of animal protein squatting in the center.

How did that happen? I would submit that the ideology of nutritionism deserves as much of the blame as the carbohydrates themselves do — that and human nature. By framing dietary advice in terms of good and bad nutrients, and by burying the recommendation that we should eat less of any particular food, it was easy for the take-home message of the 1977 and 1982 dietary guidelines to be simplified as follows: Eat more low-fat foods. And that is what we did. We’re always happy to receive a dispensation to eat more of something (with the possible exception of oat bran), and one of the things nutritionism reliably gives us is some such dispensation: low-fat cookies then, low-carb beer now. It’s hard to imagine the low-fat craze taking off as it did if McGovern’s original food-based recommendations had stood: eat fewer meat and dairy products. For how do you get from that stark counsel to the idea that another case of Snackwell’s is just what the doctor ordered?

BAD SCIENCE

But if nutritionism leads to a kind of false consciousness in the mind of the eater, the ideology can just as easily mislead the scientist. Most nutritional science involves studying one nutrient at a time, an approach that even nutritionists who do it will tell you is deeply flawed. “The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science,” points out Marion Nestle, the New York University nutritionist, “is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of food, the food out of the context of diet and the diet out of the context of lifestyle.”
If nutritional scientists know this, why do they do it anyway? Because a nutrient bias is built into the way science is done: scientists need individual variables they can isolate. Yet even the simplest food is a hopelessly complex thing to study, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in complex and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another. So if you’re a nutritional scientist, you do the only thing you can do, given the tools at your disposal: break the thing down into its component parts and study those one by one, even if that means ignoring complex interactions and contexts, as well as the fact that the whole may be more than, or just different from, the sum of its parts. This is what we mean by reductionist science.

Scientific reductionism is an undeniably powerful tool, but it can mislead us too, especially when applied to something as complex as, on the one side, a food, and on the other, a human eater. It encourages us to take a mechanistic view of that transaction: put in this nutrient; get out that physiological result. Yet people differ in important ways. Some populations can metabolize sugars better than others; depending on your evolutionary heritage, you may or may not be able to digest the lactose in milk. The specific ecology of your intestines helps determine how efficiently you digest what you eat, so that the same input of 100 calories may yield more or less energy depending on the proportion of Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes living in your gut. There is nothing very machinelike about the human eater, and so to think of food as simply fuel is wrong.

Also, people don’t eat nutrients, they eat foods, and foods can behave very differently than the nutrients they contain. Researchers have long believed, based on epidemiological comparisons of different populations, that a diet high in fruits and vegetables confers some protection against cancer. So naturally they ask, What nutrients in those plant foods are responsible for that effect? One hypothesis is that the antioxidants in fresh produce — compounds like beta carotene, lycopene, vitamin E, etc. — are the X factor. It makes good sense: these molecules (which plants produce to protect themselves from the highly reactive oxygen atoms produced in photosynthesis) vanquish the free radicals in our bodies, which can damage DNA and initiate cancers. At least that’s how it seems to work in the test tube. Yet as soon as you remove these useful molecules from the context of the whole foods they’re found in, as we’ve done in creating antioxidant supplements, they don’t work at all. Indeed, in the case of beta carotene ingested as a supplement, scientists have discovered that it actually increases the risk of certain cancers. Big oops.

What’s going on here? We don’t know. It could be the vagaries of human digestion. Maybe the fiber (or some other component) in a carrot protects the antioxidant molecules from destruction by stomach acids early in the digestive process. Or it could be that we isolated the wrong antioxidant. Beta is just one of a whole slew of carotenes found in common vegetables; maybe we focused on the wrong one. Or maybe beta carotene works as an antioxidant only in concert with some other plant chemical or process; under other circumstances, it may behave as a pro-oxidant.

Indeed, to look at the chemical composition of any common food plant is to realize just how much complexity lurks within it. Here’s a list of just the antioxidants that have been identified in garden-variety thyme:
4-Terpineol, alanine, anethole, apigenin, ascorbic acid, beta carotene, caffeic acid, camphene, carvacrol, chlorogenic acid, chrysoeriol, eriodictyol, eugenol, ferulic acid, gallic acid, gamma-terpinene isochlorogenic acid, isoeugenol, isothymonin, kaempferol, labiatic acid, lauric acid, linalyl acetate, luteolin, methionine, myrcene, myristic acid, naringenin, oleanolic acid, p-coumoric acid, p-hydroxy-benzoic acid, palmitic acid, rosmarinic acid, selenium, tannin, thymol, tryptophan, ursolic acid, vanillic acid.

This is what you’re ingesting when you eat food flavored with thyme. Some of these chemicals are broken down by your digestion, but others are going on to do undetermined things to your body: turning some gene’s expression on or off, perhaps, or heading off a free radical before it disturbs a strand of DNA deep in some cell. It would be great to know how this all works, but in the meantime we can enjoy thyme in the knowledge that it probably doesn’t do any harm (since people have been eating it forever) and that it may actually do some good (since people have been eating it forever) and that even if it does nothing, we like the way it tastes.

It’s also important to remind ourselves that what reductive science can manage to perceive well enough to isolate and study is subject to change, and that we have a tendency to assume that what we can see is all there is to see. When William Prout isolated the big three macronutrients, scientists figured they now understood food and what the body needs from it; when the vitamins were isolated a few decades later, scientists thought, O.K., now we really understand food and what the body needs to be healthy; today it’s the polyphenols and carotenoids that seem all-important. But who knows what the hell else is going on deep in the soul of a carrot?
The good news is that, to the carrot eater, it doesn’t matter. That’s the great thing about eating food as compared with nutrients: you don’t need to fathom a carrot’s complexity to reap its benefits.

The case of the antioxidants points up the dangers in taking a nutrient out of the context of food; as Nestle suggests, scientists make a second, related error when they study the food out of the context of the diet. We don’t eat just one thing, and when we are eating any one thing, we’re not eating another. We also eat foods in combinations and in orders that can affect how they’re absorbed. Drink coffee with your steak, and your body won’t be able to fully absorb the iron in the meat. The trace of limestone in the corn tortilla unlocks essential amino acids in the corn that would otherwise remain unavailable. Some of those compounds in that sprig of thyme may well affect my digestion of the dish I add it to, helping to break down one compound or possibly stimulate production of an enzyme to detoxify another. We have barely begun to understand the relationships among foods in a cuisine.

But we do understand some of the simplest relationships, like the zero-sum relationship: that if you eat a lot of meat you’re probably not eating a lot of vegetables. This simple fact may explain why populations that eat diets high in meat have higher rates of coronary heart disease and cancer than those that don’t. Yet nutritionism encourages us to look elsewhere for the explanation: deep within the meat itself, to the culpable nutrient, which scientists have long assumed to be the saturated fat. So they are baffled when large-population studies, like the Women’s Health Initiative, fail to find that reducing fat intake significantly reduces the incidence of heart disease or cancer.

Of course thanks to the low-fat fad (inspired by the very same reductionist fat hypothesis), it is entirely possible to reduce your intake of saturated fat without significantly reducing your consumption of animal protein: just drink the low-fat milk and order the skinless chicken breast or the turkey bacon. So maybe the culprit nutrient in meat and dairy is the animal protein itself, as some researchers now hypothesize. (The Cornell nutritionist T. Colin Campbell argues as much in his recent book, “The China Study.”) Or, as the Harvard epidemiologist Walter C. Willett suggests, it could be the steroid hormones typically present in the milk and meat; these hormones (which occur naturally in meat and milk but are often augmented in industrial production) are known to promote certain cancers.

But people worried about their health needn’t wait for scientists to settle this question before deciding that it might be wise to eat more plants and less meat. This is of course precisely what the McGovern committee was trying to tell us.

Nestle also cautions against taking the diet out of the context of the lifestyle. The Mediterranean diet is widely believed to be one of the most healthful ways to eat, yet much of what we know about it is based on studies of people living on the island of Crete in the 1950s, who in many respects lived lives very different from our own. Yes, they ate lots of olive oil and little meat. But they also did more physical labor. They fasted regularly. They ate a lot of wild greens — weeds. And, perhaps most important, they consumed far fewer total calories than we do. Similarly, much of what we know about the health benefits of a vegetarian diet is based on studies of Seventh Day Adventists, who muddy the nutritional picture by drinking absolutely no alcohol and never smoking. These extraneous but unavoidable factors are called, aptly, “confounders.” One last example: People who take supplements are healthier than the population at large, but their health probably has nothing whatsoever to do with the supplements they take — which recent studies have suggested are worthless. Supplement-takers are better-educated, more-affluent people who, almost by definition, take a greater-than-normal interest in personal health — confounding factors that probably account for their superior health.

But if confounding factors of lifestyle bedevil comparative studies of different populations, the supposedly more rigorous “prospective” studies of large American populations suffer from their own arguably even more disabling flaws. In these studies — of which the Women’s Health Initiative is the best known — a large population is divided into two groups. The intervention group changes its diet in some prescribed manner, while the control group does not. The two groups are then tracked over many years to learn whether the intervention affects relative rates of chronic disease.

When it comes to studying nutrition, this sort of extensive, long-term clinical trial is supposed to be the gold standard. It certainly sounds sound. In the case of the Women’s Health Initiative, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health the eating habits and health outcomes of nearly 49,000 women (ages 50 to 79 at the beginning of the study) were tracked for eight years. One group of the women were told to reduce their consumption of fat to 20 percent of total calories. The results were announced early last year, producing front-page headlines of which the one in this newspaper was typical: “Low-Fat Diet Does Not Cut Health Risks, Study Finds.” And the cloud of nutritional confusion over the country darkened.

But even a cursory analysis of the study’s methods makes you wonder why anyone would take such a finding seriously, let alone order a Quarter Pounder With Cheese to celebrate it, as many newspaper readers no doubt promptly went out and did. Even the beginner student of nutritionism will immediately spot several flaws: the focus was on “fat,” rather than on any particular food, like meat or dairy. So women could comply simply by switching to lower-fat animal products. Also, no distinctions were made between types of fat: women getting their allowable portion of fat from olive oil or fish were lumped together with woman getting their fat from low-fat cheese or chicken breasts or margarine. Why? Because when the study was designed 16 years ago, the whole notion of “good fats” was not yet on the scientific scope. Scientists study what scientists can see.

But perhaps the biggest flaw in this study, and other studies like it, is that we have no idea what these women were really eating because, like most people when asked about their diet, they lied about it. How do we know this? Deduction. Consider: When the study began, the average participant weighed in at 170 pounds and claimed to be eating 1,800 calories a day. It would take an unusual metabolism to maintain that weight on so little food. And it would take an even freakier metabolism to drop only one or two pounds after getting down to a diet of 1,400 to 1,500 calories a day — as the women on the “low-fat” regimen claimed to have done. Sorry, ladies, but I just don’t buy it.

In fact, nobody buys it. Even the scientists who conduct this sort of research conduct it in the knowledge that people lie about their food intake all the time. They even have scientific figures for the magnitude of the lie. Dietary trials like the Women’s Health Initiative rely on “food-frequency questionnaires,” and studies suggest that people on average eat between a fifth and a third more than they claim to on the questionnaires. How do the researchers know that? By comparing what people report on questionnaires with interviews about their dietary intake over the previous 24 hours, thought to be somewhat more reliable. In fact, the magnitude of the lie could be much greater, judging by the huge disparity between the total number of food calories produced every day for each American (3,900 calories) and the average number of those calories Americans own up to chomping: 2,000. (Waste accounts for some of the disparity, but nowhere near all of it.) All we really know about how much people actually eat is that the real number lies somewhere between those two figures.

To try to fill out the food-frequency questionnaire used by the Women’s Health Initiative, as I recently did, is to realize just how shaky the data on which such trials rely really are. The survey, which took about 45 minutes to complete, started off with some relatively easy questions: “Did you eat chicken or turkey during the last three months?” Having answered yes, I was then asked, “When you ate chicken or turkey, how often did you eat the skin?” But the survey soon became harder, as when it asked me to think back over the past three months to recall whether when I ate okra, squash or yams, they were fried, and if so, were they fried in stick margarine, tub margarine, butter, “shortening” (in which category they inexplicably lump together hydrogenated vegetable oil and lard), olive or canola oil or nonstick spray? I honestly didn’t remember, and in the case of any okra eaten in a restaurant, even a hypnotist could not get out of me what sort of fat it was fried in. In the meat section, the portion sizes specified haven’t been seen in America since the Hoover administration. If a four-ounce portion of steak is considered “medium,” was I really going to admit that the steak I enjoyed on an unrecallable number of occasions during the past three months was probably the equivalent of two or three (or, in the case of a steakhouse steak, no less than four) of these portions? I think not. In fact, most of the “medium serving sizes” to which I was asked to compare my own consumption made me feel piggish enough to want to shave a few ounces here, a few there. (I mean, I wasn’t under oath or anything, was I?)

This is the sort of data on which the largest questions of diet and health are being decided in America today.

In the end, the biggest, most ambitious and widely reported studies of diet and health leave more or less undisturbed the main features of the Western diet: lots of meat and processed foods, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything — except fruits, vegetables and whole grains. In keeping with the nutritionism paradigm and the limits of reductionist science, the researchers fiddle with single nutrients as best they can, but the populations they recruit and study are typical American eaters doing what typical American eaters do: trying to eat a little less of this nutrient, a little more of that, depending on the latest thinking. (One problem with the control groups in these studies is that they too are exposed to nutritional fads in the culture, so over time their eating habits come to more closely resemble the habits of the intervention group.) It should not surprise us that the findings of such research would be so equivocal and confusing.

But what about the elephant in the room — the Western diet? It might be useful, in the midst of our deepening confusion about nutrition, to review what we do know about diet and health. What we know is that people who eat the way we do in America today suffer much higher rates of cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity than people eating more traditional diets. (Four of the 10 leading killers in America are linked to diet.) Further, we know that simply by moving to America, people from nations with low rates of these “diseases of affluence” will quickly acquire them. Nutritionism by and large takes the Western diet as a given, seeking to moderate its most deleterious effects by isolating the bad nutrients in it — things like fat, sugar, salt — and encouraging the public and the food industry to limit them. But after several decades of nutrient-based health advice, rates of cancer and heart disease in the U.S. have declined only slightly (mortality from heart disease is down since the ’50s, but this is mainly because of improved treatment), and rates of obesity and diabetes have soared.

No one likes to admit that his or her best efforts at understanding and solving a problem have actually made the problem worse, but that’s exactly what has happened in the case of nutritionism. Scientists operating with the best of intentions, using the best tools at their disposal, have taught us to look at food in a way that has diminished our pleasure in eating it while doing little or nothing to improve our health. Perhaps what we need now is a broader, less reductive view of what food is, one that is at once more ecological and cultural. What would happen, for example, if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?
In nature, that is of course precisely what eating has always been: relationships among species in what we call food chains, or webs, that reach all the way down to the soil. Species co-evolve with the other species they eat, and very often a relationship of interdependence develops: I’ll feed you if you spread around my genes.

A gradual process of mutual adaptation transforms something like an apple or a squash into a nutritious and tasty food for a hungry animal. Over time and through trial and error, the plant becomes tastier (and often more conspicuous) in order to gratify the animal’s needs and desires, while the animal gradually acquires whatever digestive tools (enzymes, etc.) are needed to make optimal use of the plant. Similarly, cow’s milk did not start out as a nutritious food for humans; in fact, it made them sick until humans who lived around cows evolved the ability to digest lactose as adults. This development proved much to the advantage of both the milk drinkers and the cows.

“Health” is, among other things, the byproduct of being involved in these sorts of relationships in a food chain — involved in a great many of them, in the case of an omnivorous creature like us. Further, when the health of one link of the food chain is disturbed, it can affect all the creatures in it. When the soil is sick or in some way deficient, so will be the grasses that grow in that soil and the cattle that eat the grasses and the people who drink the milk. Or, as the English agronomist Sir Albert Howard put it in 1945 in “The Soil and Health” (a founding text of organic agriculture), we would do well to regard “the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject.” Our personal health is inextricably bound up with the health of the entire food web.

In many cases, long familiarity between foods and their eaters leads to elaborate systems of communications up and down the food chain, so that a creature’s senses come to recognize foods as suitable by taste and smell and color, and our bodies learn what to do with these foods after they pass the test of the senses, producing in anticipation the chemicals necessary to break them down. Health depends on knowing how to read these biological signals: this smells spoiled; this looks ripe; that’s one good-looking cow. This is easier to do when a creature has long experience of a food, and much harder when a food has been designed expressly to deceive its senses — with artificial flavors, say, or synthetic sweeteners.

Note that these ecological relationships are between eaters and whole foods, not nutrients. Even though the foods in question eventually get broken down in our bodies into simple nutrients, as corn is reduced to simple sugars, the qualities of the whole food are not unimportant — they govern such things as the speed at which the sugars will be released and absorbed, which we’re coming to see as critical to insulin metabolism. Put another way, our bodies have a longstanding and sustainable relationship to corn that we do not have to high-fructose corn syrup. Such a relationship with corn syrup might develop someday (as people evolve superhuman insulin systems to cope with regular floods of fructose and glucose), but for now the relationship leads to ill health because our bodies don’t know how to handle these biological novelties. In much the same way, human bodies that can cope with chewing coca leaves — a longstanding relationship between native people and the coca plant in South America — cannot cope with cocaine or crack, even though the same “active ingredients” are present in all three. Reductionism as a way of understanding food or drugs may be harmless, even necessary, but reductionism in practice can lead to problems.

Looking at eating through this ecological lens opens a whole new perspective on exactly what the Western diet is: a radical and rapid change not just in our foodstuffs over the course of the 20th century but also in our food relationships, all the way from the soil to the meal. The ideology of nutritionism is itself part of that change. To get a firmer grip on the nature of those changes is to begin to know how we might make our relationships to food healthier. These changes have been numerous and far-reaching, but consider as a start these four large-scale ones:

From Whole Foods to Refined. The case of corn points up one of the key features of the modern diet: a shift toward increasingly refined foods, especially carbohydrates. Call it applied reductionism. Humans have been refining grains since at least the Industrial Revolution, favoring white flour (and white rice) even at the price of lost nutrients. Refining grains extends their shelf life (precisely because it renders them less nutritious to pests) and makes them easier to digest, by removing the fiber that ordinarily slows the release of their sugars. Much industrial food production involves an extension and intensification of this practice, as food processors find ways to deliver glucose — the brain’s preferred fuel — ever more swiftly and efficiently. Sometimes this is precisely the point, as when corn is refined into corn syrup; other times it is an unfortunate byproduct of food processing, as when freezing food destroys the fiber that would slow sugar absorption.

So fast food is fast in this other sense too: it is to a considerable extent predigested, in effect, and therefore more readily absorbed by the body. But while the widespread acceleration of the Western diet offers us the instant gratification of sugar, in many people (and especially those newly exposed to it) the “speediness” of this food overwhelms the insulin response and leads to Type II diabetes. As one nutrition expert put it to me, we’re in the middle of “a national experiment in mainlining glucose.” To encounter such a diet for the first time, as when people accustomed to a more traditional diet come to America, or when fast food comes to their countries, delivers a shock to the system. Public-health experts call it “the nutrition transition,” and it can be deadly.

From Complexity to Simplicity. If there is one word that covers nearly all the changes industrialization has made to the food chain, it would be simplification. Chemical fertilizers simplify the chemistry of the soil, which in turn appears to simplify the chemistry of the food grown in that soil. Since the widespread adoption of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers in the 1950s, the nutritional quality of produce in America has, according to U.S.D.A. figures, declined significantly. Some researchers blame the quality of the soil for the decline; others cite the tendency of modern plant breeding to select for industrial qualities like yield rather than nutritional quality. Whichever it is, the trend toward simplification of our food continues on up the chain. Processing foods depletes them of many nutrients, a few of which are then added back in through “fortification”: folic acid in refined flour, vitamins and minerals in breakfast cereal. But food scientists can add back only the nutrients food scientists recognize as important. What are they overlooking?

Simplification has occurred at the level of species diversity, too. The astounding variety of foods on offer in the modern supermarket obscures the fact that the actual number of species in the modern diet is shrinking. For reasons of economics, the food industry prefers to tease its myriad processed offerings from a tiny group of plant species, corn and soybeans chief among them. Today, a mere four crops account for two-thirds of the calories humans eat. When you consider that humankind has historically consumed some 80,000 edible species, and that 3,000 of these have been in widespread use, this represents a radical simplification of the food web. Why should this matter? Because humans are omnivores, requiring somewhere between 50 and 100 different chemical compounds and elements to be healthy. It’s hard to believe that we can get everything we need from a diet consisting largely of processed corn, soybeans, wheat and rice.

From Leaves to Seeds. It’s no coincidence that most of the plants we have come to rely on are grains; these crops are exceptionally efficient at transforming sunlight into macronutrients — carbs, fats and proteins. These macronutrients in turn can be profitably transformed into animal protein (by feeding them to animals) and processed foods of every description. Also, the fact that grains are durable seeds that can be stored for long periods means they can function as commodities as well as food, making these plants particularly well suited to the needs of industrial capitalism.

The needs of the human eater are another matter. An oversupply of macronutrients, as we now have, itself represents a serious threat to our health, as evidenced by soaring rates of obesity and diabetes. But the undersupply of micronutrients may constitute a threat just as serious. Put in the simplest terms, we’re eating a lot more seeds and a lot fewer leaves, a tectonic dietary shift the full implications of which we are just beginning to glimpse. If I may borrow the nutritionist’s reductionist vocabulary for a moment, there are a host of critical micronutrients that are harder to get from a diet of refined seeds than from a diet of leaves. There are the antioxidants and all the other newly discovered phytochemicals (remember that sprig of thyme?); there is the fiber, and then there are the healthy omega-3 fats found in leafy green plants, which may turn out to be most important benefit of all.
Most people associate omega-3 fatty acids with fish, but fish get them from green plants (specifically algae), which is where they all originate. Plant leaves produce these essential fatty acids (“essential” because our bodies can’t produce them on their own) as part of photosynthesis. Seeds contain more of another essential fatty acid: omega-6. Without delving too deeply into the biochemistry, the two fats perform very different functions, in the plant as well as the plant eater. Omega-3s appear to play an important role in neurological development and processing, the permeability of cell walls, the metabolism of glucose and the calming of inflammation. Omega-6s are involved in fat storage (which is what they do for the plant), the rigidity of cell walls, clotting and the inflammation response. (Think of omega-3s as fleet and flexible, omega-6s as sturdy and slow.) Since the two lipids compete with each other for the attention of important enzymes, the ratio between omega-3s and omega-6s may matter more than the absolute quantity of either fat. Thus too much omega-6 may be just as much a problem as too little omega-3.

And that might well be a problem for people eating a Western diet. As we’ve shifted from leaves to seeds, the ratio of omega-6s to omega-3s in our bodies has shifted, too. At the same time, modern food-production practices have further diminished the omega-3s in our diet. Omega-3s, being less stable than omega-6s, spoil more readily, so we have selected for plants that produce fewer of them; further, when we partly hydrogenate oils to render them more stable, omega-3s are eliminated. Industrial meat, raised on seeds rather than leaves, has fewer omega-3s and more omega-6s than preindustrial meat used to have. And official dietary advice since the 1970s has promoted the consumption of polyunsaturated vegetable oils, most of which are high in omega-6s (corn and soy, especially). Thus, without realizing what we were doing, we significantly altered the ratio of these two essential fats in our diets and bodies, with the result that the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 in the typical American today stands at more than 10 to 1; before the widespread introduction of seed oils at the turn of the last century, it was closer to 1 to 1.

The role of these lipids is not completely understood, but many researchers say that these historically low levels of omega-3 (or, conversely, high levels of omega-6) bear responsibility for many of the chronic diseases associated with the Western diet, especially heart disease and diabetes. (Some researchers implicate omega-3 deficiency in rising rates of depression and learning disabilities as well.) To remedy this deficiency, nutritionism classically argues for taking omega-3 supplements or fortifying food products, but because of the complex, competitive relationship between omega-3 and omega-6, adding more omega-3s to the diet may not do much good unless you also reduce your intake of omega-6.

From Food Culture to Food Science. The last important change wrought by the Western diet is not, strictly speaking, ecological. But the industrialization of our food that we call the Western diet is systematically destroying traditional food cultures. Before the modern food era — and before nutritionism — people relied for guidance about what to eat on their national or ethnic or regional cultures. We think of culture as a set of beliefs and practices to help mediate our relationship to other people, but of course culture (at least before the rise of science) has also played a critical role in helping mediate people’s relationship to nature. Eating being a big part of that relationship, cultures have had a great deal to say about what and how and why and when and how much we should eat. Of course when it comes to food, culture is really just a fancy word for Mom, the figure who typically passes on the food ways of the group — food ways that, although they were never “designed” to optimize health (we have many reasons to eat the way we do), would not have endured if they did not keep eaters alive and well.

The sheer novelty and glamour of the Western diet, with its 17,000 new food products introduced every year, and the marketing muscle used to sell these products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and marketing to help us decide questions about what to eat. Nutritionism, which arose to help us better deal with the problems of the Western diet, has largely been co-opted by it, used by the industry to sell more food and to undermine the authority of traditional ways of eating. You would not have read this far into this article if your food culture were intact and healthy; you would simply eat the way your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents taught you to eat. The question is, Are we better off with these new authorities than we were with the traditional authorities they supplanted? The answer by now should be clear.

It might be argued that, at this point in history, we should simply accept that fast food is our food culture. Over time, people will get used to eating this way and our health will improve. But for natural selection to help populations adapt to the Western diet, we’d have to be prepared to let those whom it sickens die. That’s not what we’re doing. Rather, we’re turning to the health-care industry to help us “adapt.” Medicine is learning how to keep alive the people whom the Western diet is making sick. It’s gotten good at extending the lives of people with heart disease, and now it’s working on obesity and diabetes. Capitalism is itself marvelously adaptive, able to turn the problems it creates into lucrative business opportunities: diet pills, heart-bypass operations, insulin pumps, bariatric surgery. But while fast food may be good business for the health-care industry, surely the cost to society — estimated at more than $200 billion a year in diet-related health-care costs — is unsustainable.

To medicalize the diet problem is of course perfectly consistent with nutritionism. So what might a more ecological or cultural approach to the problem recommend? How might we plot our escape from nutritionism and, in turn, from the deleterious effects of the modern diet? In theory nothing could be simpler — stop thinking and eating that way — but this is somewhat harder to do in practice, given the food environment we now inhabit and the loss of sharp cultural tools to guide us through it. Still, I do think escape is possible, to which end I can now revisit — and elaborate on, but just a little — the simple principles of healthy eating I proposed at the beginning of this essay, several thousand words ago. So try these few (flagrantly unscientific) rules of thumb, collected in the course of my nutritional odyssey, and see if they don’t at least point us in the right direction.

1. Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.

2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They’re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best. Don’t forget that margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was more healthful than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks. When Kellogg’s can boast about its Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars, health claims have become hopelessly compromised. (The American Heart Association charges food makers for their endorsement.) Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.

3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number — or that contain high-fructose corn syrup.None of these characteristics are necessarily harmful in and of themselves, but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed.

4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer’s market; you also won’t find food harvested long ago and far away. What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of nutritional quality. Precisely the kind of food your great-great-grandmother would have recognized as food.

5. Pay more, eat less. The American food system has for a century devoted its energies and policies to increasing quantity and reducing price, not to improving quality. There’s no escaping the fact that better food — measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often correspond) — costs more, because it has been grown or raised less intensively and with more care. Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is shameful, but most of us can: Americans spend, on average, less than 10 percent of their income on food, down from 24 percent in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation. And those of us who can afford to eat well should. Paying more for food well grown in good soils — whether certified organic or not — will contribute not only to your health (by reducing exposure to pesticides) but also to the health of others who might not themselves be able to afford that sort of food: the people who grow it and the people who live downstream, and downwind, of the farms where it is grown.

“Eat less” is the most unwelcome advice of all, but in fact the scientific case for eating a lot less than we currently do is compelling. “Calorie restriction” has repeatedly been shown to slow aging in animals, and many researchers (including Walter Willett, the Harvard epidemiologist) believe it offers the single strongest link between diet and cancer prevention. Food abundance is a problem, but culture has helped here, too, by promoting the idea of moderation. Once one of the longest-lived people on earth, the Okinawans practiced a principle they called “Hara Hachi Bu”: eat until you are 80 percent full. To make the “eat less” message a bit more palatable, consider that quality may have a bearing on quantity: I don’t know about you, but the better the quality of the food I eat, the less of it I need to feel satisfied. All tomatoes are not created equal.

6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Scientists may disagree on what’s so good about plants — the antioxidants? Fiber? Omega-3s? — but they do agree that they’re probably really good for you and certainly can’t hurt. Also, by eating a plant-based diet, you’ll be consuming far fewer calories, since plant foods (except seeds) are typically less “energy dense” than the other things you might eat. Vegetarians are healthier than carnivores, but near vegetarians (“flexitarians”) are as healthy as vegetarians. Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he advised treating meat more as a flavoring than a food.

7. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren’t a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn’t still be around. True, food cultures are embedded in societies and economies and ecologies, and some of them travel better than others: Inuit not so well as Italian. In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats, as well as to what it eats. In the case of the French paradox, it may not be the dietary nutrients that keep the French healthy (lots of saturated fat and alcohol?!) so much as the dietary habits: small portions, no seconds or snacking, communal meals — and the serious pleasure taken in eating. (Worrying about diet can’t possibly be good for you.) Let culture be your guide, not science.

8. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden. To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for our sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be cheap and easy; that food is fuel and not communion. The culture of the kitchen, as embodied in those enduring traditions we call cuisines, contains more wisdom about diet and health than you are apt to find in any nutrition journal or journalism. Plus, the food you grow yourself contributes to your health long before you sit down to eat it. So you might want to think about putting down this article now and picking up a spatula or hoe.

9. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases. That of course is an argument from nutritionism, but there is a better one, one that takes a broader view of “health.” Biodiversity in the diet means less monoculture in the fields. What does that have to do with your health? Everything. The vast monocultures that now feed us require tremendous amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to keep from collapsing. Diversifying those fields will mean fewer chemicals, healthier soils, healthier plants and animals and, in turn, healthier people. It’s all connected, which is another way of saying that your health isn’t bordered by your body and that what’s good for the soil is probably good for you, too.

Wanker parents breeding rocker kids

2006-11-18T06:56:00.000-08:00

Mama Was a Riot Grrrl? Then Pick Up a Guitar and Play

Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times

Lucio Westmoreland and Care Bears on Fire performing this month at the CMJ Music Marathon in a showcase for bands of 10- to 17-year-olds.

By JESSICA PRESSLER

Published: November 19, 2006

THE children whispering and fidgeting in front of the stage at Union Hall in Park Slope, Brooklyn, looked like any kids awaiting, say, a storyteller. Then Zora Sicher and Hugo Orozco, the two 11-year-olds who make up the band Magnolia, climbed onstage and broke into a hard-driving original song called “Volume.” It was clear this was not quiet time.

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Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times

Left to right, Josh Barocas, Charlie Klarsfeld and Oliver Ignatius of Hysterics.

“Wooooo!” a dreadlocked woman shouted from the back of the room, where a crowd of adults, many in vintage concert T-shirts and cardigans, looking like kids themselves, cheered and sipped bloody marys.

A clump of teenagers looked on appreciatively during the set, part of a showcase of all-kid bands on a Saturday afternoon this month at the CMJ Music Marathon in New York. When the Magnolia duo paused to adjust their instruments — Zora on guitar, Hugo on drums — a babe in arms wailed. “Are you crying because they stopped, honey?” Mom cooed.

For this set of performers and audience members, indie rock is as familiar as a lullaby. “We like punk, classic rock, metal, riot grrrl,” said Hugo, an elfin-face sixth grader from Brooklyn, who was given her first drum set at 7.

Magnolia, like other bands on the Union Hall bill — Care Bears on Fire, Tiny Masters of Today, Fiasco, Hysterics — is more than a novelty act. It is developing a following on New York’s burgeoning under-age music circuit, where bands too young for driving licenses have CDs, Web sites and managers.

“Oh my god, there’s like a huge, huge kid-rock scene here,” said Jack McFadden, known as Skippy, who booked the show at Union Hall. “It’s really very indicative of Park Slope, since so many of the parents who live around here are hip and have these hip little kids that they dress in, like, CBGBs T-shirts.”

It makes sense: in this family-friendly part of Brooklyn every other brownstone seems to house creative professionals who urge their children to march to — or become — a different drummer.

Nearly every weekend 10- to 17-year-olds play shows in the afternoon at bars like Union Hall, the Liberty Heights Tap Room in Red Hook and Southpaw in Park Slope, which has begun a teenage rock series, the Young and the Restless. In Manhattan there are all-ages shows at the Knitting Factory in TriBeCa, Arlene’s Grocery and afternoon Death Disco parties at Cake Shop on the Lower East Side.

“They could call it kid-core,” said Rich Egan, the owner of Vagrant records in Los Angeles, who signed the New Jersey-based band Senses Fail as teenagers and is wooing a younger band he first heard on MySpace.

Preteens and teenagers have found success in bands almost since the birth of rock. The Jackson 5, Hanson and New Kids on the Block were all big-selling acts, formed by parents or impresarios. But those acts recorded mainstream pop. The latest kid bands are emerging in the traditions of garage, hardcore and indie rock, a reflection of their hipster parents’ tastes and their 1980s and ’90s CD collections.

Hugo’s mother, Molly Gove, who said she was in a few riot grrrl bands herself in the ’90s, enrolled her daughter in the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls in New York, where children 8 to 18 learn the playlist of bands like Bikini Kill and the Pixies.

Across the country kid-core acts have emerged, including a pair of brothers 8 and 11 in Detroit, who play with their father in the Jack White-produced band the Muldoons; sisters 12 and 14 who make up the Seattle-based duo Smoosh; and the Nashville-based band Be Your Own Pet, which toured with Sonic Youth in the summer.

Many teenage rockers connect through MySpace, where they post sample tracks, videos and announcements of gigs, as well as leave one another messages of support. In a message to Magnolia, Forrest Fire Gray, 14, whose father was the monologuist Spalding Gray and who is the frontman of Too Busy Being Bored, wrote, “Can’t wait to play with u guys.”

More than a few of New York’s baby-face rockers have famous parents in the entertainment business, who have encouraged their children’s artistic streaks and served as role models for professional success. Lucian Buscemi, 16, the son of the actor Steve Buscemi, along with Julian Bennett-Holmes and Jonathan Shea, both also 16, have become something like the kingpins of the Park Slope kid-rock scene, ever since their band, Fiasco — previously known as StunGun — became the first youth band to play the Liberty Heights Tap Room.

Pale and thin, with fluffy manes of rocker hair, Lucian and Julian are also partners in a record label, Beautiful Records, which has recorded Care Bears on Fire and Magnolia, using equipment that Lucian was given for his eighth-grade graduation, soon after a baby sitter introduced the two boys to ’80s punk.

“We were into, like, Rancid and Blink 182 at the time,” said Julian, cringing at his junior-high lack of cool. “That ended when we heard Minor Threat.”

Many kid-core bands cite that hardcore act from the ’80s as a big influence. The adults who attend kid-rock shows couldn’t be happier. This is the music they loved as teenagers. “This is the first generation of parents who have grown up listening to rock ’n’ roll, so they’re thrilled about it,” said Stephen Depulla, the owner of Liberty Heights Tap Room. Not least because it provides an opportunity for bonding.

Kathie Russo, Forrest Fire Gray’s mother, said she and her son swap music like friends. “I suggested he cover ‘Angie’ by the Rolling Stones, and he introduced me to Modest Mouse and the Vines,” she said. “Last night we were in the car singing along to Audioslave. I can’t imagine that with my parents.”

She also probably can’t imagine her parents acting as roadies, which many of the young rockers’ moms and dads do.

The most prominent band on New York’s junior-varsity rock scene is Hysterics, a “psychedelic” quartet founded at the artsy St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn. The week after performing at Union Hall at the CMJ Marathon, the band members gathered at the studio of Jeff Peretz, their manager. Mr. Peretz also guides the Tangents, whose bass guitarist, Miles Robbins, 12, is the son of Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins.

Members of Hysterics discussed their coming gig, a party for a new Valentino perfume, which was organized through a friend of the fashion photographer Pamela Hanson, whose son, Charlie Klarsfeld, 17, is the group’s guitarist. The evening, at 7 World Trade Center last Thursday, turned out to be a pileup of celebrity children with music careers, including the DJs Lola Schnabel and Mark Ronson.

“Are we going to get swag?” asked Josh Barocas, 17, the quiet bassist, whose enormous Afro speaks of a somewhat louder interior personality.

“What’s swag?” Charlie asked.

“It’s free stuff they give to famous people,” Mr. Peretz said.

“Every teen band in New York wants to be Hysterics,” he added. The group was discovered two years ago, when a science teacher at St. Ann’s posted one of its songs on his blog, and its cool factor rocketed after signing a record deal with independent v2. The company took the musicians for cookies and milk at the City Bakery. As high school juniors and seniors, they are old enough for the gesture to be ironic.

NOT so the Tiny Masters of Today. On a Friday evening in November, Ada, the bassist, 10, a slight girl with a heart-shape face, was reading “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” at Piano’s, a Lower East Side bar, while waiting to go on with her brother, Ivan, 12, the lead guitarist. (Their father requested that the family name not appear in print to protect the children’s privacy.)

After the set, during which they performed, among other songs, Ada’s mournful “Pictures” — “It’s about my friends in second grade and how awful they were to me,” she said — an adult in the audience called the band “the new Raincoats,” a reference to an experimental British act of the late ’70s.

Ivan is familiar with their music, although he said he prefers louder stuff like the Stooges. “And I’m really into Apollo Sunshine right now,” he said, perched on a bar stool and chewing thoughtfully on a cocktail straw. “I go through phases.”

Their father has worked for the indie label Caroline and once pulled the kids out of school early to see the White Stripes. His children’s affection for indie rock, he said, is a reaction to mainstream tastes. “They’re rebelling against, like, Walt Disney.”

Or maybe Britney Spears. “Our parents had the Clash, the Who, Bowie,” said Alana Higgins, 17, the bassist for the band Modrocket. She was at a Dunkin’ Donuts in the East Village near the space where her band rehearses.

“The scenes back then were so much better. Rock music now — it’s upsetting. Our kids are going to look back at our music and it’s going to be like —— ”

“Kelly Clarkson,” interjected Alice Blythe, 17, Modrocket’s singer.

The kid-core sound is far less slick than the pop and R & B that animates “American Idol,” either because the musicians are just learning to play or because their musical influences trace to the DIY roots of garage rock.

Tiny Masters of Today was on the Oct. 11 cover of the British magazine Artrocker. “They’re making this kind of primitive, unprocessed, unfiltered music,” their father said.

It was that sound that attracted Russell Simins, the grown-up drummer in Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, who found the Tiny Masters on MySpace last year. He now accompanies them on drums during live sets.

“They have this unadulterated way of saying things, ” Mr. Simins said, sipping a beer at Piano’s. “It’s perfectly not thought out. They don’t have angst. Or their angst is simpler: it’s about being precocious and being kids who want to have fun and eat ice cream or about being bored. They’re not asking why they’re bored,” he said with a laugh. “They don’t have, like, existential malaise.” When Mr. Simins plays with the group, his hulking 36-year-old frame is a perfect foil to the children’s Lemony Snicket-character bodies.

He insists that he is not actually in the band, even though he’ll be on their coming album, which will also feature guest appearances by Fred Schneider of the B-52s and the singer and songwriter Kimya Dawson.

And Mr. Simins occasionally practices with them at home in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. “Sometimes I’ll stay over for dinner — you know, pizza or spaghetti or quesadillas or whatever,” he said. “Like I’m a kid.”

The joys of private health 'care' in the US II

2006-11-15T15:19:00.000-08:00

Insurer Sued for Refusing to Pay Costs of Anorexia

By TINA KELLEY

Published: November 9, 2006

NEWARK, Nov. 8 — A New Jersey couple filed suit against Aetna Inc., the Hartford-based insurance company, on Wednesday, claiming that it refused to fully cover their daughter’s treatment for anorexia.

The suit was filed in United States District Court here. The couple, Cliff and Maria DeAnna of Mountainside, N.J., said Aetna refused to pay for nearly 10 weeks of their daughter’s inpatient treatment, saying her eating disorder was not “biologically based.” Insurers have balked at covering mental illnesses that they say do not have a proven physiological basis.

Ms. DeAnna, who declined to provide her daughter’s given name for privacy reasons, said by phone that she had been hospitalized for 101 days so far this year but that Aetna U.S. Healthcare H.M.O. would pay for only 35 inpatient days. Symptoms of anorexia include excessive dieting and exercise and a distorted belief that one is overweight.

The case is an example of what advocates for the mentally ill call longstanding inequities in insurance coverage for psychological ailments. The family’s lawyer, Bruce Nagel, said state law required insurers to provide the same coverage for mental and nervous conditions as for physiological diseases, like heart ailments or emphysema. The suit estimates that hundreds of people in New Jersey have had similar difficulties receiving coverage, and it seeks certification as a class action. Ms. DeAnna estimates that her family has paid almost $100,000 in medical bills this year alone, with the help of a home equity loan. Her daughter, who is 20 and stands 5-foot-6, weighed 102 pounds when she last went into the hospital.

A spokeswoman for Aetna, Cynthia B. Michener, said the company had not yet been served with the suit and could not discuss a particular case without written authorization from the family involved.

Anorexia has a high mortality rate, said Lynn Grefe, the chief executive of the National Eating Disorders Association, a nonprofit group based in Seattle.

While many lawmakers and insurance companies have struggled to define anorexia, some medical experts question the usefulness of the term “biologically based” to describe a disease. Ms. Grefe said that Thomas R. Insel, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, has said research has established that the disease is a brain disorder.

“While the symptoms are behavioral, this illness has a biological core, with genetic components, changes in brain activity and neural pathways currently under study,” he wrote in an Oct. 5 letter to her.

Ms. Grefe said she was not aware of any other class-action suits seeking insurance coverage for anorexia, “but it’s about time.”

According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, a nonprofit organization based in Highland Park, Ill., a judge in a 1989 case against Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Greater New York ruled that starvation resulting from anorexia is a physical state that should be covered by medical benefits.

In 2001, Blue Cross and Blue Shield agreed to pay $8.2 million to the state of Minnesota to settle a suit filed by the state involving treatment denied to a 21-year-old anorexic woman who committed suicide. Her family paid for her treatment but sued Blue Cross for refusing to pay for it. The insurer also settled with the family for $1 million.

From the New York Times

The joys of private health 'care' in the US

2006-11-15T15:17:00.000-08:00

When Choice of a Doctor Drives Up Other Bills

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

Published: September 11, 2006

Irene Greco knew she would have to pay from her own pocket to use the surgeon she wanted, rather than one in her insurer’s network, but she thought she knew how much the additional cost would be. She was wrong — by almost $5,000.

She had her operation at a hospital that was in Oxford Health Plans’ network. But Oxford, her insurer, says that because the surgeon was outside its network of doctors, the hospital bill as a whole would also be considered out of network, and therefore subject to less coverage.

Oxford says its coverage policy is straightforward and properly communicated to its customers. But some health care experts say this policy is so unusual that they have never seen it before, and the hospital industry calls it the latest in a string of unfair practices by Oxford and its parent company, UnitedHealth Group, that are designed to avoid paying what is owed.

The Healthcare Association of New York State, the main lobbying group for the state’s hospitals, has filed a complaint over Ms. Greco’s case with Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s office, which is looking into the matter. The group’s leaders say they cannot recall ever making such a complaint against an insurer.

Oxford, one of the largest insurers in the metropolitan area, insists that everyone involved should have understood in advance how it would handle Ms. Greco’s bills. It was spelled out “in the certificate of coverage the member receives when they sign up for the plan,” said Maria Gordon-Shydlo, a spokeswoman for Oxford.

Ms. Greco, 45, had surgery at Mercy Medical Center in Rockville Centre, N.Y., a hospital in Oxford’s network, so she expected everything except the surgeon’s fee to be completely covered. Instead, she learned months later that she was being charged a $1,000 deductible and 30 percent of all remaining costs, more than $4,700 in all.

When she received the bill, she and her husband were both recovering from major medical treatment, they were out of work, they expected to lose their health insurance within months and they were trying to sell their home.

“We had no idea how we were going to pay it,” she said. “I just sat at the kitchen table and cried.”

Ms. Greco said, “It’s an unreasonable policy that an in-network hospital suddenly becomes an out-of-network hospital just because you use a different doctor.”

Officials at the hospital and the Healthcare Association said they had never heard of such a practice until she complained to them. They say they have since learned of a few insurance policies with similar provisions, but that in those cases, the rules are more clearly stated.

Ms. Greco’s troubles began more than two years ago, when she and her husband, Richard, were living in Smithtown, N.Y. Mr. Greco, an accountant and business consultant, had lymphoma and was forced to stop working. He had endured chemotherapy and was awaiting a bone marrow transplant.

Expecting their insurance policy to run out in a few months, Ms. Greco had gastric bypass surgery in June 2004 at Mercy, using a surgeon she had met. “My biggest concern was, because I was very overweight and he had a catastrophic illness, we weren’t going to be able to get insurance again,” she said.

She knew she had to pay 30 percent of the surgeon’s fee because he was not in Oxford’s network, but she thought that everything else would be covered completely. She learned otherwise in the bill from Mercy.

Mercy also stood to lose because of Oxford’s position. Hospitals generally charge insurers higher prices for out-of-network patients than for others. When a hospital joins an insurer’s network, they negotiate a contract that includes much lower charges, and Mercy had such a contract with Oxford.

Oxford paid the hospital based on the lower, in-network rates, even though the insurer told Ms. Greco that the service was out of network. And even at those lower rates, Oxford declined to pay the full amount, saying that Ms. Greco was responsible for the deductible, plus 30 percent of the remainder.

Ms. Greco and the hospital say the only information Oxford gave them in advance about her operation was in written notices authorizing the surgery, which said nothing about her treatment being out of network. Oxford does not dispute that.

Ms. Gordon-Shydlo said that when the surgeon’s office called Oxford to authorize the surgery, the insurer explained that hospital services would be considered out of network. But the surgeon had little reason to focus on coverage for the hospital bill.

Chris Hendriks, spokeswoman for Catholic Health Services of Long Island, Mercy’s parent company, said the hospital went through the usual steps to verify the service would be covered, and got no hint that Oxford would pay anything less than the full bill. “Our finance people say they have never encountered this before,” she said.

Ms. Greco appealed her bill to an Oxford review board and lost. She said when she asked Oxford for an explanation, it cited a single passage in her handbook dealing with out-of-network coverage: “When you receive covered services from network providers but not in accordance with the H.M.O.’s guidelines, those covered services will be covered under this certificate in accordance with its terms and provisions.”

Ms. Gordon-Shydlo pointed to that line and two others. One says that if a patient is treated by an in-network provider, but in a way that does not follow Oxford’s rules, “the covered services will be treated as if they were delivered by a nonnetwork provider.” Another line says Oxford pays on an out-of-network basis for seeing doctors without its approval, but it does not mention services like hospital stays.

Ms. Gordon-Shydlo said the combination of the three passages, separated by several pages, makes it clear that using a nonnetwork doctor makes the entire treatment out of network.

Daniel Sisto, president of the Healthcare Association, said, “Nobody would understand what it’s supposed to mean.”

Many hospitals and doctors in the region say that while they clash constantly with insurers, Oxford is more severe than its competitors, particularly since UnitedHealth took it over in 2004. Jamaica Hospital in Queens has accused Oxford of refusing to pay promised rates and threatening to exclude the hospital from its network, and the hospital has asked law enforcement agencies to investigate.

The state Department of Health has charged that United frequently violates state rules, often by denying payment to doctors. And doctors complain that Oxford, much more than other insurers, accuses them of years of overbilling, based on minimal evidence, and demands large repayments.

Officials at United and Oxford say such complaints come from providers who have benefited from sloppy practices. They say that in making sure rules are followed, they are helping consumers by limiting health care costs.

From the New York Times

Israel Kills 2 Women During Mosque Siege

2006-11-03T16:35:00.000-08:00

Israel Kills 2 Women During Mosque Siege

Suhaib Salem/Reuters

Israeli forces opened fire on a group of women who streamed to a Gaza mosque to serve as human shields for gunmen holed up there. Two women were killed and about 10 injured, hospitals said.

By GREG MYRE

Published: November 3, 2006

JERUSALEM, Nov. 3 — Israeli troops fired at a large crowd of unarmed Palestinian women in the Gaza Strip today as the women approached a mosque to help Palestinian militants holed up inside. Two women were killed and about 10 were injured, according to hospital workers.

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One of the Palestinian woman who ringed a mosque in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun fell to the ground after being wounded.

The shooting provoked widespread outrage among Palestinians.

The Israeli military said its fire was directed at Palestinian gunmen who were hiding among the women as they marched toward the Um al-Nasir mosque in Beit Hanun, the town in the northeastern Gaza Strip where Israeli troops and militants have been battling for the past three days. The Israelis said eight militants were shot, and that they were not aware that women were hit, but were investigating.

Ismail Haniya, the Palestinian prime minister, angrily called on the international community to “come here and witness the daily massacres that are being carried out against the Palestinian nation.”

Mr. Haniya also praised the women “who led the protest to break the siege of Beit Hanun.”

The shooting, which was captured by television cameras, was the most dramatic episode so far in the fighting in Beit Hanun. Israeli forces entered the town early on Wednesday in an attempt to stop Palestinian militants from firing rockets from the area into Israel.

As Israeli forces pursued the militants in the town on Thursday, an estimated 60 gunmen dashed inside the Um al-Nasir mosque, initiating a standoff that lasted through the night.

Israeli troops in armored vehicles surrounded the mosque. For several hours, soldiers used loudspeakers to call on the militants to surrender, and several did, according to the military. The Israelis also fired tear gas and stun grenades into the mosque in an attempt to force the gunmen out.

Around 3 a.m. today, the gunmen in the mosque began firing on the Israeli soldiers, who shot back, and heavy exchanges ensued, the military said.

The Israeli army called in an armored bulldozer and used it to knock down one wall of the mosque compound, the military and Palestinian witnesses said.

Early this morning, a Palestinian radio station called on women in the town to march to the mosque and support the gunmen inside. A short time later, hundreds of women, dressed in flowing black abayas and wearing head scarves, headed to the the scene.

As they approached the mosque, shots rang out, but the women continued marching. A moment later, a number of women were hit, and the crowd scattered. Some of the wailing women turning back, while others kept advancing toward the mosque, climbing over improvised dirt barriers set up by the Israeli forces.

“We heard the call for women to help the fighters, and we decided to go,” said Mona Abu Jasir, 37, who was hit by a bullet in the right leg. “We had no weapons, and we were walking toward the mosque when I was shot.”

Television footage showed at least one man in the crowd, though there was no indication that he had a weapon. The man was shot and fell to the ground, and was surrounded by women until rescue workers arrived.

One marcher, Suhad el-Masri, 28, said she and several of her relatives were carrying abayas — long flowing gowns — and scarves to give to the men.

“We took them so they could disguise themselves as women and escape,” said Ms. Masri. Her sister, Hiba Rajab, 20, sustained serious injuries when she was shot in both legs and her left arm.

In the ensuing chaos, some women reached the mosque, and the gunmen managed to slip away, the Israeli military and Palestinian witnesses said. It was not clear whether the gunmen dressed as women to facilitate their escape. Shortly after the standoff ended, the roof of the mosque collapsed, apparently from the cumulative damage sustained in the fighting.

Palestinian hospitals identified the two women who were killed as Amna Abu Oudah, 42, and Intissar Ali, 40.

Later in the day, about 1,000 women marched outside Egypt’s diplomatic mission in Gaza City, denouncing the Israeli actions and calling on Egypt to intervene.

Also in Beit Hanun, two young Palestinian males, ages 15 and 18, were killed by Israeli fire, Palestinian medical workers said. Over the past three days, more than 20 Palestinians have been killed, including militants and civilians, as well as one Israeli soldier.

So far, the Israeli incursion has not reduced the Palestinian rocket fire, which has continued for the past three days. Militants fired several more rockets from northern Gaza into southern Israel today, but there was no damage or injuries, the Israeli military said. Meanwhile, in the West Bank, Israeli soldiers arrested the Palestinian minister for housing and public works, Abdel Rahman Zaidan, who belongs to Hamas, the radical Islamic group that leads the Palestinian Authority. Israel has arrested more than two dozen Palestinian legislators and cabinet ministers from Hamas in the West Bank over the past four months.

The crackdown began after Palestinian militants, including those from Hamas, staged a cross-border raid and captured an Israeli soldier, and then took him into Gaza. That event also prompted the Israeli military to return to Gaza, which the army had left in September 2005.

Taghreed El-Khodary contributed reporting from Gaza.

================================

Women left dead as gunmen escape

Panic … Palestinian women run for cover after Israeli troops opened fire.
Photo: Reuters/Suhaib Salem

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Shams Odeh in Beit Hanoun, Gaza
November 4, 2006

SLOWLY at first, then with growing confidence, the crowd of veiled Palestinian women approached the outer wall of the Gaza mosque.

Inside, 60 Palestinian gunmen were hiding out, pinned down by Israeli tanks and troops positioned just a few hundred metres away, on the other side of an earth barricade.

The women, about four dozen of them, some elderly and some teenagers, were hoping to help the gunmen flee, or at least act as "human shields" and press for their release unharmed.

Two of the women were to die - and all of the gunmen to escape.

As the women walked down a deserted road towards the mosque yesterday, pressing themselves up against a high sandstone wall on their right, with Israeli troops off to their left, gunfire rang out from the Israeli positions.

The women pushed on, walking faster and pressing closer together, encouraging one another as they went.

More shots cracked overhead as the Israeli troops tried to force the women to turn back. Some did turn around, but most pushed on.

Then, up ahead, towards the front of the procession, several gunshots rang out from Israeli troops, and one woman, dressed in a traditional tan-brown hijab, fell to the ground. Another, critically wounded, fell nearby.

The Israeli Army said later it had fired at armed Palestinians but was investigating whether it had also shot the women.

Screaming and panicked, several of the women's colleagues rushed to help. As one of the women lay motionless on the pavement, her cream veil fell away. A trickle and then a steady stream of blood emerged from under her body and ran into the drain at the side of the road.

"Bring an ambulance! Bring an ambulance!" screamed the women, throwing their arms up in the air and wailing.

Others grabbed one another and began to flee, then turned back and pushed on.

Within seconds two ambulances were on the scene, and the woman, her limbs hanging lifelessly, was bundled onto a stretcher. The critically wounded woman nearby was also picked up, and later died in hospital. Six more were wounded.

"World, where are you?" screamed a woman towards a television camera. "People are being killed. There are martyrs."

Moments later several women ran back down the road from the direction of the mosque, struggling to carry among them another of the wounded, a young woman in a black hijab, the bottom of her jeans showing.

On the street, another woman held a patterned black headdress coated in blood.

"Look! The brains of a woman of the resistance, splattered on her scarf. Look at it," she said, staring into a camera.

At a nearby hospital, men waited to find out what had happened to their wives.

"I urged my wife to join the other brave women who went to help end the siege of the hero fighters," said Khaled Faleh, a 34-year-old husband. He did not know if she was still alive.

The dramatic events came on the third day of an Israeli assault on the town of Beit Hanoun, the largest operation it has conducted in the Gaza Strip in months, designed to put a stop to militants firing homemade rockets into Israel. The gunmen had holed up in the al-Nasir mosque on Thursday evening.

In the melee, the gunmen fled the mosque, and Hamas, the Islamist militant group that heads the Palestinian Government, said they had also managed to escape from Beit Hanoun, which is almost entirely surrounded by Israeli troops. The Israeli Army confirmed the gunmen had escaped.

Reuters

New Scleroderma Treatment

2006-08-07T20:53:00.000-07:00

New Treatments Offer Hope in the Fight Against a Cruel Skin-Hardening Ailment

By FRANCINE PARNES

Published: August 8, 2006

Before Steve Nickerson, a photographer at The Rocky Mountain News in Denver, began his treatments for systemic scleroderma, the illness had already sabotaged his body on multiple fronts.

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Scleroderma Foundation

Cyclophosphamide versus Placebo in Scleroderma Lung Disease (NEJM)

SCOT Study

His skin and fingers were so severely stiffened — “tough as rhino hide,” he recalled one doctor saying — that he could not tie his shoes and could barely hold his Nikon. His lungs became scarred. He became so weak that he could not climb a single step without gasping for breath.

Even eating became arduous: his mouth would not open sufficiently for a normal bite.

“I can tear an apple apart, sort of animal-like,” said Mr. Nickerson, who measures the progress of his treatments according to increased jaw opening. “I have gone from 23 millimeters to 27,” he said.

Scleroderma means “hard skin,” a hallmark of the illness that can turn hands purple as if from frostbite and can curl fingers into woodlike nonfunctioning. Rare and enigmatic, it is a chronic, often progressive rheumatic disease in which the immune system overproduces collagen, which can stiffen and thicken the skin, typically on the hands, arms, legs and face.

The symptoms and their severity can vary greatly among patients, and the illness takes two main forms. Systemic scleroderma — which can ravage not only the skin but internal organs like the heart, lungs and kidneys — can be life-threatening. Localized scleroderma can be limited to patches of thickened or discolored skin, while internal organs are spared. This form does not lead to systemic scleroderma and is not fatal.

There is no cure for scleroderma. But doctors are using a growing number of treatments for people like Mr. Nickerson, who have the more serious systemic form, also called systemic sclerosis. As recently as June, The New England Journal of Medicine reported on a new study in which a drug called cyclophosphamide, or Cytoxan, modestly helped slow thickening of the skin and deterioration of lung function.

“For people with scleroderma, it really is the best and worst of times,” said Chris Underation of the Scleroderma Foundation in Danvers, Mass. “The best part is that there are now more treatment options than ever, and more are coming. But the worst part is that many of these treatments are beyond the financial reach of most people if their insurance will not cover them.”

Some newer treatments like stem cell transplants have shown great promise over the last few years, said Mr. Underation, the group’s communications manager. “But these new treatments,” he added, “are considered experimental and can easily run into five figures each time a patient receives one. Costs quickly rise, and patients quickly become financially desperate.”

At the Rocky Mountain Cancer Center in Aurora, Colo., on roughly two consecutive eight-hour days every month, Mr. Nickerson, 49, is hooked up to an intravenous drip that is “exhausting, boring and time-consuming,” he said.

His friends and colleagues raised $83,500 for his intravenous immune globulin treatments, which infuse blood and give him new antibodies. Mr. Nickerson’s insurer considered the treatments experimental and denied coverage. They cost around $37,000 each; 13 were ordered.

“The treatments are saving my life,” said Mr. Nickerson, who felt strong enough last month to increase his work schedule from three days a week to four. “I was a wreck last year at this time.”

By studying scleroderma, researchers are learning more about autoimmune diseases and the process that underlies them, the odd phenomenon of a body attacking itself. “While scleroderma is a rare disease, the lessons we learn from it will help us in the treatment of many common and uncommon diseases,” said Dr. Fredrick M. Wigley, director of the Johns Hopkins Scleroderma Center in Baltimore. He is also Mr. Nickerson’s doctor.

About 300,000 Americans have scleroderma, including 100,000 with the more serious form, said Dr. Daniel E. Furst, professor of rheumatology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

About 20 percent of those with systemic sclerosis have a severe manifestation of the disease, Dr. Furst said, with 50 percent mortality over five years. Scleroderma occurs most frequently among women in their childbearing years, Dr. Furst said.

Emily Woods, 35, of Plano, Tex., is one of them. She was so sick at one point that she dropped to 87 pounds.

“She was close to death until a stem cell transplant saved her life,” said Mr. Underation of the Scleroderma Foundation. “She was unable to clothe and feed herself. Now she drives and is quite active and enjoying her young daughter.”

With more research, the face of the disease is changing, Dr. Furst said. “Until around 1995, many patients with the worst kind of scleroderma, particularly those with pulmonary hypertension, died very quickly,” he added. “In this last year, a lot of new and hopeful things have happened in scleroderma research.”

“We understand the genetic background of this disease better,” Dr. Furst continued. “And new drugs to treat pulmonary hypertension in scleroderma — increased blood pressure in the lungs, which formerly caused 50 percent mortality in two years from diagnosis — are coming out in a steady stream. Within a year, we hope there will be five drugs to treat pulmonary hypertension in scleroderma.”

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Scleroderma Foundation

Cyclophosphamide versus Placebo in Scleroderma Lung Disease (NEJM)

SCOT Study

There is other encouraging news. Besides controlling symptoms of pulmonary arterial hypertension and heart failure, Dr. Wigley at Johns Hopkins said, new drugs are being used to treat the gastrointestinal manifestations of the disease, stop the progression of lung disease and reverse the rapid renal failure that can occur.

New medicines can also control arthritis associated with the illness and help people cope, for example, by easing depression, he said.

Dr. Keith M. Sullivan, a professor of medicine who specializes in stem cell transplantation at the Duke University Medical Center, sees other developments on the horizon.

The research suggests that a regimen of intensive chemotherapy or total body irradiation, followed by a treatment in which stem cells are removed from a patient’s blood and then given back, “may actually reset the immune system,” Dr. Sullivan said, “leading to long-term control of autoimmune disease.”

“The patient receives back the purified stem cells, which regenerate the marrow and immune systems,” he said.

Beyond that, large clinical trials of new treatments for scleroderma also offer hope. Dr. Sullivan is the principal investigator for a trial called Scleroderma: Cyclophosphamide or Transplantation, or SCOT, and Dr. Furst is principal rheumatologist.

The trial compares the potential benefits of a stem cell transplant with high-dose monthly treatment with cyclophosphamide, a chemotherapy drug given for chronic immunosuppression.

A Web site, sclerodermatrial.org, provides patient information and the locations of centers across the United States that are enrolling patients with severe forms of systemic sclerosis.

“The proof of this hope lies not only in our scientific publications and data, but also in the patients’ own voice,” Dr. Sullivan said.

He described how, at a recent meeting to discuss the clinical trial, a patient who had been treated for scleroderma addressed the assembled doctors. “She was several years after transplant and described the new normalcy of her life,” Dr. Sullivan said. “Rarely have I seen a group of 80 doctors close their laptops, sheath their BlackBerrys and give undivided attention to such a compelling story. That is the hope and the message.”

Religious bigotry in small town USA

2006-07-30T16:47:00.000-07:00

Families Challenging Religious Influence in Delaware Schools

Jamie Ross for The New York Times

Mona Dobrich and her daughter, Samantha, above, playing a board game in their new home.

By NEELA BANERJEE

Published: July 29, 2006

GEORGETOWN, Del. — After her family moved to this small town 30 years ago, Mona Dobrich grew up as the only Jew in school. Mrs. Dobrich, 39, married a local man, bought the house behind her parents’ home and brought up her two children as Jews.

For years, she and her daughter, Samantha, listened to Christian prayers at public school potlucks, award dinners and parent-teacher group meetings, she said. But at Samantha’s high school graduation in June 2004, a minister’s prayer proclaiming Jesus as the only way to the truth nudged Mrs. Dobrich to act.

“It was as if no matter how much hard work, no matter how good a person you are, the only way you’ll ever be anything is through Jesus Christ,” Mrs. Dobrich said. “He said those words, and I saw Sam’s head snap and her start looking around, like, ‘Where’s my mom? Where’s my mom?’ And all I wanted to do was run up and take her in my arms.”

After the graduation, Mrs. Dobrich asked the Indian River district school board to consider prayers that were more generic and, she said, less exclusionary. As news of her request spread, many local Christians saw it as an effort to limit their free exercise of religion, residents said. Anger spilled on to talk radio, in letters to the editor and at school board meetings attended by hundreds of people carrying signs praising Jesus.

“What people here are saying is, ‘Stop interfering with our traditions, stop interfering with our faith and leave our country the way we knew it to be,’ ” said Dan Gaffney, a host at WGMD, a talk radio station in Rehoboth, and a supporter of prayer in the school district.

After receiving several threats, Mrs. Dobrich took her son, Alex, to Wilmington in the fall of 2004, planning to stay until the controversy blew over. It never has.

The Dobriches eventually sued the Indian River School District, challenging what they asserted was the pervasiveness of religion in the schools and seeking financial damages. They have been joined by “the Does,” a family still in the school district who have remained anonymous because of the response against the Dobriches.

Meanwhile, a Muslim family in another school district here in Sussex County has filed suit, alleging proselytizing in the schools and the harassment of their daughters.

The move to Wilmington, the Dobriches said, wrecked them financially, leading them to sell their house and their daughter to drop out of Columbia University.

The dispute here underscores the rising tensions over religion in public schools.

“We don’t have data on the number of lawsuits, but anecdotally, people think it has never been so active — the degree to which these conflicts erupt in schools and the degree to which they are litigated,” said Tom Hutton, a staff lawyer at the National School Boards Association.

More religion probably exists in schools now than in decades because of the role religious conservatives play in politics and the passage of certain education laws over the last 25 years, including the Equal Access Act in 1984, said Charles C. Haynes, senior scholar at the First Amendment Center, a research and education group.

“There are communities largely of one faith, and despite all the court rulings and Supreme Court decisions, they continue to promote one faith,” Mr. Haynes said. “They don’t much care what the minority complains about. They’re just convinced that what they are doing is good for kids and what America is all about.”

Dr. Donald G. Hattier, a member of the Indian River school board, said the district had changed many policies in response to Mrs. Dobrich’s initial complaints. But the board unanimously rejected a proposed settlement of the Dobriches’ lawsuit.

“There were a couple of provisions that were unacceptable to the board,” said Jason Gosselin, a lawyer for the board. “The parties are working in good faith to move closer to settlement.”

Until recently, it was safe to assume that everyone in the Indian River district was Christian, said the Rev. Mark Harris, an Episcopal priest at St. Peter’s Church in Lewes.

But much has changed in Sussex County over the last 30 years. The county, in southern Delaware, has resort enclaves like Rehoboth Beach, to which outsiders bring their cash and, often, liberal values. Inland, in the area of Georgetown, the county seat, the land is still a lush patchwork of corn and soybean fields, with a few poultry plants. But developers are turning more fields into tracts of rambling homes. The Hispanic population is booming. There are enough Reform Jews, Muslims and Quakers to set up their own centers and groups, Mr. Harris said.

In interviews with a dozen people here and comments on the radio by a half-dozen others, the overwhelming majority insisted, usually politely, that prayer should stay in the schools.

“We have a way of doing things here, and it’s not going to change to accommodate a very small minority,’’ said Kenneth R. Stevens, 41, a businessman sitting in the Georgetown Diner. “If they feel singled out, they should find another school or excuse themselves from those functions. It’s our way of life.”

The Dobrich and Doe legal complaint portrays a district in which children were given special privileges for being in Bible club, Bibles were distributed in 2003 at an elementary school, Christian prayer was routine at school functions and teachers evangelized.

“Because Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior, I will speak out for him,” said the Rev. Jerry Fike of Mount Olivet Brethren Church, who gave the prayer at Samantha’s graduation. “The Bible encourages that.” Mr. Fike continued: “Ultimately, he is the one I have to please. If doing that places me at odds with the law of the land, I still have to follow him.”

Mrs. Dobrich, who is Orthodox, said that when she was a girl, Christians here had treated her faith with respectful interest. Now, she said, her son was ridiculed in school for wearing his yarmulke. She described a classmate of his drawing a picture of a pathway to heaven for everyone except “Alex the Jew.”

Mrs. Dobrich’s decision to leave her hometown and seek legal help came after a school board meeting in August 2004 on the issue of prayer. Dr. Hattier had called WGMD to discuss the issue, and Mr. Gaffney and others encouraged people to go the meeting. Hundreds showed up.

A homemaker active in her children’s schools, Mrs. Dobrich said she had asked the board to develop policies that would leave no one feeling excluded because of faith. People booed and rattled signs that read “Jesus Saves,” she recalled. Her son had written a short statement, but he felt so intimidated that his sister read it for him. In his statement, Alex, who was 11 then, said: “I feel bad when kids in my class call me ‘Jew boy.’ I do not want to move away from the house I have lived in forever.”

Later, another speaker turned to Mrs. Dobrich and said, according to several witnesses, “If you want people to stop calling him ‘Jew boy,’ you tell him to give his heart to Jesus.”

Immediately afterward, the Dobriches got threatening phone calls. Samantha had enrolled in Columbia, and Mrs. Dobrich decided to go to Wilmington temporarily.

But the controversy simmered, keeping Mrs. Dobrich and Alex away. The cost of renting an apartment in Wilmington led the Dobriches to sell their home here. Mrs. Dobrich’s husband, Marco, a school bus driver and transportation coordinator, makes about $30,000 a year and has stayed in town to care for Mrs. Dobrich’s ailing parents. Mr. Dobrich declined to comment. Samantha left Columbia because of the financial strain.

The only thing to flourish, Mrs. Dobrich said, was her faith. Her children, she said, “have so much pride in their religion now.”

“Alex wears his yarmulke all the time. He never takes it off.”

Male Smokers can't get it up.

2006-07-20T15:13:00.000-07:00

Sexuality: Smoking and Obesity Raise Risk of Erectile Woes

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

Published: July 18, 2006

Smoking increases the risk of erectile dysfunction by 50 percent, and obesity nearly doubles the risk, new research suggests. Researchers tracked the diet and health of more than 22,000 male health professionals from all 50 states from 1986 through 2000.

Stuart Goldenberg

A Prospective Study of Risk Factors for Erectile Dysfunction (Journal of Urology)

At the start of the study, after controlling for other factors, they found that men with good or very good erectile function had a lower prevalence of smoking, a lower body mass index, and less hypertension, heart disease and diabetes than those who reported fair, poor or very poor function.

Among men who started with good or very good function, those who expended energy equivalent to running 1.5 hours a week reduced their risk of future erectile dysfunction by 30 percent compared with the group that exercised least.

But at any level of exercise, being overweight increased the risk of dysfunction. Men who were both overweight and physically inactive had a risk two and a half times that of men who were active and of normal weight.

The findings, published in the July issue of The Journal of Urology, were partially financed by Pfizer, and one of the six authors has a financial relationship with that company.

Smoking and obesity also increase the risk for heart disease, but they lead to erectile dysfunction at an earlier age, in time to begin preventive measures.

“The magnitude of risk is quite impressive,” said Eric B. Rimm, an associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard and the senior author of the study. “A 2½-times risk if you’re overweight and don’t exercise should be a pretty strong incentive for people to start on a regular exercise program and lose weight.”

Breast Feeding

2006-06-15T03:09:00.000-07:00

Breast-Feed or Else

By RONI RABIN

Published: June 13, 2006

Warning: Public health officials have determined that not breast-feeding may be hazardous to your baby's health.

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Breast-Fed Babies May Have a Leg Up in the Battle Against Childhood Obesity (June 13, 2006)

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Kenneth Dickerman for The New York Times

Kymberlie Stefanski has nursed all three of her daughters.

There is no black-box label like that affixed to cans of infant formula or tucked into the corner of magazine advertisements, at least not yet. But that is the unambiguous message of a controversial government public health campaign encouraging new mothers to breast-feed for six months to protect their babies from colds, flu, ear infections, diarrhea and even obesity. In April, the World Health Organization, setting new international bench marks for children's growth, for the first time referred to breast-feeding as the biological norm.

"Just like it's risky to smoke during pregnancy, it's risky not to breast-feed after," said Suzanne Haynes, senior scientific adviser to the Office on Women's Health in the Department of Health and Human Services. "The whole notion of talking about risk is new in this field, but it's the only field of public health, except perhaps physical activity, where there is never talk about the risk."

A two-year national breast-feeding awareness campaign that culminated this spring ran television announcements showing a pregnant woman clutching her belly as she was thrown off a mechanical bull during ladies' night at a bar — and compared the behavior to failing to breast-feed.

"You wouldn't take risks before your baby's born," the advertisement says. "Why start after?"

Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, has proposed requiring warning labels, on cans of infant formula and in advertisements, similar to the those on cigarettes. They would say that the Department of Health and Human services has determined that "breast-feeding is the ideal method of feeding and nurturing infants" or that "breast milk is more beneficial to infants than infant formula."

Child-rearing experts have long pointed to the benefits of breast-feeding. But critics say the new campaign has taken things too far and will make mothers who cannot breast-feed, or choose not to, feel guilty and inadequate.

"I desperately wanted to breast-feed," said Karen Petrone, an associate professor of history at University of Kentucky in Lexington.

When her two babies failed to gain weight and her pediatrician insisted that she supplement her breast milk with formula, Ms. Petrone said, "I felt so guilty."

"I thought I was doing something wrong," she added. "Nobody ever told me that some women just can't produce enough milk."

Moreover, urging women to breast-feed exclusively is a tall order in a country where more than 60 percent of mothers of very young children work, federal law requires large companies to provide only 12 weeks' unpaid maternity leave and lactation leave is unheard of. Only a third of large companies provide a private, secure area where women can express breast milk during the workday, and only 7 percent offer on-site or near-site child care, according to a 2005 national study of employers by the nonprofit Families and Work Institute.

"I'm concerned about the guilt that mothers will feel," said Ellen Galinsky, president of the center. "It's hard enough going back to work."

Public health leaders say the weight of the scientific evidence for breast-feeding has grown so overwhelming that it is appropriate to recast their message to make clear that it is risky not to breast-feed.

Ample scientific evidence supports the contention that breast-fed babies are less vulnerable to acute infectious diseases, including respiratory and gastrointestinal infections, experts say. Some studies also suggest that breast-fed babies are at lower risk for sudden infant death syndrome and serious chronic diseases later in life, including asthma, diabetes, leukemia and some forms of lymphoma, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Research on premature babies has even found that those given breast milk scored higher on I.Q. tests than those who were bottle-fed.

The goal of a government health initiative called Healthy People 2010 is to get half of all mothers to continue at least some breast-feeding until a baby is 6 months old. Though about 70 percent of new mothers start breast-feeding right after childbirth, just over a third are breast-feeding at 6 months and fewer than 20 percent are exclusively breast-feeding by that time, according to the 2004 National Immunization Survey. Breast-feeding increases with education, income and age; black women are less likely to breast-feed, while Hispanics have higher breast-feeding rates.

For women, breast-feeding can be an emotionally charged issue, and a very personal one. Even its most ardent supporters acknowledge that they have made sacrifices.

"It's a whole lifestyle," said Kymberlie Stefanski, a 34-year-old mother of three from Villa Park, Ill., who has not been apart from her children except for one night when she gave birth. "My life revolves around my kids, basically." Ms. Stefanski quit working when her first child was born almost six years ago, nursed that child until she was 4 years old, and is nursing an infant now.

She said she wanted to reduce the risk of breast cancer for herself and for her three daughters, referring to research indicating that extended breast-feeding may reduce the risk for both mother and daughters.

Scientists who study breast milk almost all speak of it in superlatives. Even the International Formula Council, a trade association, acknowledges that breast-feeding "offers specific child and maternal health benefits" and is the "preferred" method of infant feeding. The American Academy of Pediatrics states in its breast-feeding policy that human breast milk is "uniquely superior for infant feeding."

Dr. Haynes, of the Health and Human Services Department, said, "Our message is that breast milk is the gold standard, and anything less than that is inferior."

Formula "is not equivalent," she went on, adding, "Formula is not the gold standard. It's so far from it, it's not even close."

Formula manufacturers say infant formula is modeled on breast milk and emphasize that it is the only safe alternative recommended by pediatricians for mothers who cannot, or choose not to, breast-feed.

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Suzanne Haynes says it's risky not to breast-feed.

Breast-Fed Babies May Have a Leg Up in the Battle Against Childhood Obesity (June 13, 2006)

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But while formula tastes the same way at every feeding, advocates of breast-feeding say, the smells and flavors of human breast milk change from day to day, from morning to evening, influenced by the mother's diet. Many nutritionists believe that exposing an infant to this bouquet of flavors early on may make for less fussy eaters who are more flexible about trying new foods and more likely to eat a healthy, varied diet.

"I think of human milk not just as food, but as a sophisticated and intricate infant support system that has evolved over millions of years to provide the infant with nutrition, protection and components of information," said Dr. E. Stephen Buescher, a professor of pediatrics at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, who heads the inflammation section in the school's Center for Pediatric Research.

"It isn't just calories," Dr. Buescher said.

The protection that breast-feeding provides against acute infectious diseases — including meningitis, upper and lower respiratory infections, pneumonia, bowel infections, diarrhea and ear infections — has been among the most extensively studied of its benefits and is well documented, said Dr. Lawrence M. Gartner, chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics' breast-feeding section.

Breast-fed babies have 50 percent to 95 percent fewer infections than other babies, Dr. Gartner said, adding, "It's pretty dramatic."

One reason for the reduction in the incidence and the severity of infections is the antibodies contained in the mother's milk. "A lot of this has to do with the mother and baby interacting," he explained. "Whatever the baby is exposed to, the mother is exposed to, and the mother will make antibodies within three to four days." The baby absorbs them through breast milk.

Breast milk also protects the baby through other mechanisms. For example, it contains agents that prevent bacteria and viruses from attaching to cells in the baby's body, so the foreign agents are expelled in the stool, Dr. Gartner said.

The protection is not ironclad, so breast-fed babies will often get a mild infection that does not make the baby sick but acts almost like a vaccine. "What we think is that human milk creates an environment where you get your immunity without the cost of an infection, the vomiting and the diarrhea," Dr. Buescher said. "That's a bargain."

Neonatologists are urging the mothers of their tiniest patients to express breast milk because premature and low-birth-weight babies are particularly vulnerable to infections. Studies have found that premature babies who get breast milk are discharged earlier from the hospital and are less likely to develop necrotizing enterocolitis, a potentially deadly disease.

Breast milk has also been shown to lift the cognitive development of premature babies, presumably because it contains certain fatty acids that aid brain development.

Experts say it is possible that human breast milk produces permanent changes in the immune system, in a sense "educating" the baby's immune system, Dr. Gartner suggested. That may explain why children who were breast-fed appear to be at lower risk for autoimmune diseases like Crohn's, asthma and juvenile diabetes. Several studies also indicate that breast-fed children are at reduced risk for the cancers lymphoma and leukemia.

Officials with the International Formula Council say there is not enough evidence to prove a relationship between early feeding and serious chronic diseases.

Dr. Myron Peterson, director of medical affairs for Cato Research, a private independent research organization which reviewed the literature on breast-feeding for the council, said that studies have found a link between nursing and health benefits but that they do not prove a causal relationship. "It's like the old statement about the rooster crowing making the sun come up," he said. "If you did an observational study on that, what would you say?"

An unpublished report the council commissioned from Cato says "it is not scientifically correct to conclude the lack of exclusive breast-feeding plays a causative role in the development of these diseases."

But scientists are so intrigued about the potential to protect children from juvenile diabetes that a large 10-year multinational study called Trigr (for Trial to Reduce Insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus in the Genetically at Risk) is under way to find out whether breast-feeding protects at-risk children from developing the disease.

And public health officials, excited about mounting evidence suggesting that children who were breast-fed are at lower risk of being obese, have been promoting breast-feeding as a strategy to combat alarming rates of childhood obesity.

The health benefits of breast-feeding may extend to mothers as well. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, extended breast-feeding reduces the risk of ovarian cancer and breast cancer. New studies have also found that women who breast-feed face a lower risk of adult-onset or Type 2 diabetes, and they seem to be at lower risk for osteoporosis later in life.

Immediately after childbirth, nursing accelerates healing by reducing the amount of bleeding and causing the uterus to contract more rapidly back to its normal size. Making milk burns up to 500 extra calories a day, so nursing mothers get help shedding extra pounds from pregnancy, experts say, especially if they nurse for an extended period.

Experts say lactation also seems to have a calming effect on the mother, which may be an adaptive mechanism to ease the transition to life with a new baby. Every time a mother nurses, she gets a spike in oxytocin, which may have an antianxiety effect and help promote bonding with the new baby, said Kathryn G. Dewey, a professor of nutrition at the University of California, Davis, and an expert on breast-feeding.

Nursing may even produce a euphoric feeling, she said.

Dr. Michael Kramer, a professor of pediatrics and of epidemiology and biostatistics at McGill University's medical school in Montreal who has been studying the health effects of breast-feeding among infants in Belarus, found a strong protective effect against gastrointestinal illnesses and a lesser protective effect against respiratory infections. Dr. Kramer is still analyzing data on obesity, I.Q., behavior and blood pressure.

"It can't do all of the things that are being claimed for it," Dr. Kramer said, injecting a note of caution into the debate. "But it probably does some of them."

Family wiped out in beach shelling

2006-06-09T15:22:00.000-07:00

Family wiped out in beach shelling

by Mehdi Lebouachera in Al-Sudania

June 10, 2006

BROKEN camping tables, childrens' sandals and lumps of flesh lay on the sands of Gaza's Sudania beach overnight after the Israeli shelling of a picnic party left seven dead.

Stunned witnesses who witnessed the bloodshed first-hand recounted how the calm of a day out at the seaside turned into a scene of carnage.

While the Israeli military pledged to investigate the circumstances behind the tragedy, survivors insisted that there was no reason why the army had chosen to target the area, causing the complete wipe-out of one family.

The five members of the Ghali family, who were enjoying a picnic on the beach, were all killed instantly when Israeli shells landed on the beach in the late afternoon: husband and wife Ali and Raisa and their three children aged one, three and ten.

Picnic hampers and red plastic sandals lay scattered on the beach where crimson blood spattered the yellow sand. Fragments of chairs had been thrown dozens of metres from the scene of the shelling.

A teenaged woman writhed and wailed in anguish next to the body of a man who had been killed in the strike.

"Father! Father!" she screamed.

Ahmed Abu Amrene, one of those who had been at the beach at the time, was still in a state of shock several hours later.

"I was swimming in the sea when we heard the sound of a shell," said the 20-year-old.

"We rushed over and saw the five members of the family dead on the sand," he recounted in a trembling voice.

Pointing towards the debris, he said: "The family was sitting right here. They were just having a meal."

A fleet of ambulances was rapidly dispatched to the scene. In less than an hour, all the seven dead and 35 other injured had been transferred to hospitals in Gaza City and the nearby Jabaliya refugee camp.

Ahmed el-Douch, 25, said he could not understand why the Israeli military had fired at people taking a picnic on the seaside.

"Why did they target a family on the beach? This is a long way from anywhere used by the resistance to fire rockets against Israel. They are not being launched from here," he said.

"The Israelis just fire indiscriminately," he added, struggling to contain his anger.

His sense of fury and bewilderment was matched by another bather, Jaber Mughani, who said that everyone had "just come to have a drink and something to eat at the beach" on one of the hottest days of the year.

The Israeli military said that it had launched an investigation into the incident which capped an upsurge of bloodshed in Gaza where seven other Palestinians have been killed in Israeli air strikes in less than 24 hours.

The Australian

Slap on wrist over protest deaths

2006-06-05T01:34:00.000-07:00

Slap on wrist over protest deaths

Rowan Callick, China correspondent

June 03, 2006

THE legal outcome of the first major incident of Chinese security forces shooting dead protesters since the Tiananmen massacre has emerged.

At least three villagers from Dongzhou in Guangdong province, adjacent to Hong Kong, were killed six months ago, when they demonstrated against the lack of compensation for land taken for a wind power plant.

Local media have now reported that, after a closed trial lasting three days, 13 farmers were jailed for up to seven years for participating in the demonstration, convicted of illegal possession of explosives, illegal assembly and disturbing public order. As for the punishments handed out to the officials responsible for the shootings, Wu Sheng, vice-director of Shanwei Public Security Bureau, who gave the order to fire at the villagers, was given a "stern internal warning" and sacked from his position, according to the Guangzhou Daily.

Liu Jinsheng, the Shanwei Communist Party vice-secretary, responsible for law and order in the area, was reprimanded, and vice-mayor and police chief Li Min and construction bureau director Chen Huinan were given warnings as to their future conduct.

After the incident, the Government conceded that "policemen accidentally killed and injured protesters".

Amnesty International described the attack as the most serious since the Tiananmen massacre, which happened 17 years ago tomorrow.

Brad Adams, Asia director of US-based Human Rights Watch, said: "When protesters are held incommunicado and convicted in a closed trial, but officials get a slap on the wrist, there is hardly a pretence of legality."

The shootings took place after village leaders negotiating for compensation for the seizure of land were arrested, and a large crowd gathered to protest. The area was sealed off and roadblocks set up.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,19346294-2703,00.html

2006-05-26T01:56:00.000-07:00

Casual Staff May Cost More

2006-05-15T23:11:00.000-07:00

Casual staff may cost more: research

By Samantha Baden

May 16, 2006

BOSSES who hire casual workers to save money and gain flexibility could end up paying more in the long run because of the hidden health and safety costs of temporary staff, research shows.

A study by University of NSW (UNSW) PhD student Maria McNamara has found that casual workers are at a greater risk of being injured compared to permanent employees, creating significant costs for companies.

Lower motivation and productivity also impose a further hidden cost on employers of casual workers, the research says.

Casual workers are often considered a cheaper alternative to permanent staff because they are not entitled to either paid holiday leave or sick pay.

"(But) there is a growing body of international research linking casual employment with an increased risk of occupational injury and illness as well as other adverse outcomes," Ms McNamara says.

"These adverse outcomes include increased staff turnover, lower motivation and job satisfaction, lower productivity and higher costs to companies."

With 2.3 million casual workers in Australia, more than one in four Australian workers are casual workers, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

While it is too early to tell what effect the federal government's Work Choices legislation will have on the prevalence of casual labour, Ms McNamara says it could encourage even more companies to employ casuals.

"In making it generally easier for employers to restructure work arrangements, Work Choices may encourage the use of more temporary workers," the report says.

"On the other hand, the reduced access to unfair dismissal protection may make some employers less reluctant to take on permanent workers."

Whatever the effect, Ms McNamara says companies need to focus on ensuring temporary workers are properly trained.

"Companies that want to lessen the risks associated with a temporary workforce should pay attention to ensuring that all casual employees get appropriate levels of induction training and on-the-job supervision," Ms McNamara says.

"There have been many recent court cases where inadequate supervision of casual workers has been cited as contributing to increased accidents and injuries."

SouthWest Airlines Staff Profit-Sharing

2006-05-15T23:08:00.000-07:00

On Some Flights, Millionaires Serve the Drinks

Misty Keasler for The New York Times

When Sandra Force went to work for Southwest, she was one of the upstart airline's employees to catch the eye of publications like Esquire.

By JEFF BAILEY

Published: May 15, 2006

DALLAS — To earn his pay, Mike Mitchel collects boarding passes and helps passengers onto airplanes. At age 56, he lives with his mother, takes a yearly vacation to Las Vegas when the room rates are cheapest, and counts movies and music CD's as extravagances.

The New York Times

"I like to save," Mr. Mitchel said. "I'll pick up a penny."

Mr. Mitchel, though, could readily afford to walk past any dropped change. As one of the 17 remaining active employees who helped start Southwest Airlines 35 years ago, he is rich. Quite rich. A beneficiary of Southwest's profit-sharing program — like all the airline's regular employees — he owns about 50,000 shares of Southwest stock, valued at roughly $800,000. And that is just a quarter of a portfolio that makes Mr. Mitchel a multimillionaire.

"I could retire tomorrow," he said.

So why doesn't he? After all, very few long-tenured workers in the airline industry even have that option, given that the pensions and wages of most have been sharply reduced in recent years in bankruptcies and other cutbacks.

But for Mr. Mitchel and his Southwest colleagues from the first days — eight flight attendants, five operations workers and four executives, each a millionaire — it is not about the money. Ask them why they stick around and they mention frugality and pride in earning their keep. And they say they simply like to work.

That is not all. Bound together by Southwest's initial struggle to survive, they are reluctant to end careers that for many of the 17 have defined their lives.

"My friends who left early at Southwest regret it so much," said Deborah Stembridge, who began as a flight attendant when the airline was just getting off the ground.

Accustomed only to success, it is as if they do not want to miss out on the rest of the story. They helped Southwest send big-name airlines like Pan Am and Eastern to the junk heap, and more recently helped bring United and Delta to their knees. Sure, it is hard work. But, they wonder, what might be next?

"This place has pushed employees to the breaking point," said Dan Johnson, 55, who started in 1971 as a Southwest ramp worker and now works in air traffic control. "It's part of why we're successful."

"I don't need to work," Mr. Johnson added at a recent reunion. "In fact, I paid off the house two weeks ago."

The original workers were lucky to be hired on to what at the time seemed a long-shot business proposition. And they had to show some grit to stick it out.

Sandra Force, an elementary school teacher and one-time beauty pageant winner from Memphis, was floating on a raft in the swimming pool of her Dallas apartment building one summer day in 1971, she said, hoping to attract the attention of a fellow tenant.

Rather than ask her out, however, he told her that a new local airline was hiring flight attendants. " 'And you wear hot pants,' " he told her. "I got up off my raft, dried off and went into my apartment and called Southwest," Ms. Force said. "They said, 'Please wear a dress,' because they wanted to see my legs." She was hired on the spot.

"My mother was devastated: 'Sandra, if you were going to quit your teaching job, why didn't you go with a well-known airline like Braniff?' " Braniff, which competed directly with Southwest in Texas, later failed.

Along with her fellow flight attendants, clad in orange hot pants and white vinyl go-go boots to attract attention to the new airline, Ms. Force initially flew between Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. "One time I did 12 trips back and forth to Houston in one day," she said. "My feet were killing me."

When Southwest's zany service and skimpy flight attendant outfits drew national attention, Ms. Force ended up on the February 1974 cover of Esquire magazine, a not altogether happy experience for the graduate of a Baptist college. The photo made her appear shapelier than she was. "They airbrushed," she said. "They didn't tell me they were going to do that."

But it fitted Southwest's image. "We were selling sex," Southwest's current president and one of the original 17, Colleen C. Barrett, said of the early years.

Southwest has always taken an underdog attitude. And early on, at least, the company actually was an underdog. It took four years from incorporation to the airline's first flight in 1971, largely because other airlines sued to prevent Southwest from operating.

Southwest's scrappy lawyer at the time, Herb Kelleher, is now its chairman. And perhaps one of his greatest accomplishments was keeping Southwest workers thinking like underdogs — even though the company now essentially sets the industry pace for fare prices and has a stock market value nearly as big as all the other domestic airlines combined.

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Misty Keasler for The New York Times

Ms. Force quit her job as an elementary school teacher in 1971 to become a flight attendant for Southwest Airlines. Now, she’s a millionaire.

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Audio Slide Show: Airbrushed Through the Skies

Descending a staircase in the lobby of Southwest's very plain headquarters here, trailing smoke from a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth, Mr. Kelleher, 75, called out to the original employees, assembled for an anniversary photograph: "I told you you'd never last."

Though Southwest has just about the lowest costs in the industry, it now pays the highest wages to many worker groups, making up the difference with higher productivity and by holding down its costs in a number of ways. Its planes fly longer hours and sit at the gate for fewer minutes.

But higher wages or other job benefits do not alone explain the loyalty of the idiosyncratic few who have stuck it out; many Southwest employees work longer hours and hustle more than counterparts at other airlines.

The most senior Southwest flight attendants can make more than $100,000 a year if they want, by working charter flights that pay double time. By comparison, United Airlines' top international flight attendants are paid at best about $50,000, according to their union, after some big wage givebacks during the carrier's bankruptcy.

Of the original flight attendants, "everybody is a millionaire," said one of them, Linda Pinka, 59. She drives a Ford pickup and lives with her parents.

Unlike older airlines, Southwest never had a pension plan, but rather started a profit-sharing plan, much of it paid in Southwest stock in the early years. Shares purchased for $10,000 in 1972 would be valued at about $12.6 million today.

Last year, Southwest paid $142 million into profit-sharing accounts, or 7.5 percent of each worker's salary. But that was down substantially from $180 million, or 16.2 percent of salary, paid out in 2000, when profits were higher and salaries were much lower. With such a stake in the airline's success, "you have a tendency to work a little harder," Ms. Pinka said.

Brenda Gruslin, another original flight attendant, had only been on an airplane a couple of times before being hired. On a lark, she accompanied a friend who was interviewing at Southwest. Sitting in a waiting area, a manager approached Ms. Gruslin and talked her into applying.

"I got the job and my friend didn't," she said. "We weren't friends after that."

Just 19 when she started, she followed her instincts and took seriously orders to have fun. "Passengers — you get a feel how far you can go with them," she said. "We had businessmen in suits pass out peanuts and pick up trash. We'd see how many people we could lock up inside the lavatory. They loved it. We had them on top of each other. Seven or eight? Quite a few. And those lavatories are pretty small."

Willie Wilson, originally a mechanic, who now works in flight operations, left and came back. In 1979, his profit-sharing account hit about $800,000. "The only way you could get access to it was become 100 percent disabled, die or quit," he said.

Leaving Southwest, he handed the money to an investment firm and watched as options, commodities and stock-trading burned through most of it. "I paid to go broke," he said.

Mr. Wilson took his family to Saudi Arabia and trained pilots there, earning a great wage. "My kids took taxis to school," he said.

But in 1983, when a Southwest manager called him on a Friday, saying there was a job for him if he arrived on Monday, "I said 'O.K.,' " Mr. Wilson recalled. Southwest includes him and another mechanic, Charlie Marcell, who left during the same period, in the original 17.

Though a union shop, Southwest is less bound by work rules than most other airlines. "If you saw something that needed to be done, and you thought you could do it, you did," Mr. Wilson said.

Mr. Wilson, 64, sold most of his Southwest stock five years ago, but said he still owned 31,000 shares, valued at about $500,000. He trades for himself now in other airline shares and in oil drilling companies.

The original workers stick around, even through injury and illness. Mr. Mitchel, the frugal ground terminal worker, has had two hernia operations. Mr. Marcell, 64, lost a kidney to cancer and more recently the disease showed up in a lung. He is on medicine to control its spread. "I'm going to work until I can't work anymore," he said. "I just like to work."

And Ms. Force, the one-time Esquire cover model, who is 61 and single, just completed chemotherapy for breast cancer and, after six months off, returned to work this month. She does not need the paycheck, with more than 100,000 shares of Southwest stock, valued at about $1.6 million.

"I love to work," she said. "Southwest is kind of my family and my husband."

Miranda Devine on Bill Shorten

2006-05-11T00:33:00.000-07:00

IT'S Bill Shorten's 39th birthday tomorrow. But the head of the Australian Workers Union has already had his present: the rescue of Tasmanian miners Todd Russell and Brant Webb, which also happened to catapult him onto the national stage just in time to fulfil the political ambitions which many say will take him all the way to the Lodge.

He has not squandered the opportunity, keeping ego in check and displaying faultless instincts, apart from raising a beer to his lips a bit too ostentatiously in front of Channel Nine's cameras at the Beaconsfield pub after the miners walked free on Tuesday.

Whether the man suits the times or the times suit the man, it is clear that the diminutive, Jesuit-educated lawyer with an MBA covered himself in glory during the 14-day marathon rescue.

When the nation's media were crying out for news on the trapped miners, it was Shorten who delivered. Available night and day, he spoke articulately and engagingly, and livened up his commentary with original descriptions of prosaic mining matters. For instance, when rescue workers struggled to drill though solid quartz at the end of the rescue operation, he described their efforts as "like throwing Kleenex at rock".

He was quite poetic: "In a modern age of technology this has been physical force and willpower against nature and rock."

He was empathetic: "Don't worry about the 10-tonne rock in the cage where the men have been trapped. This was a 10-tonne emotional rock on the backs of all the families."

He was self-effacing, while grabbing the limelight. Three hours after the rescue, he was at the pub being interviewed by Channel Nine: "The rescuers deserve all the credit … It's their day. If you're ever in trouble you want the people behind me in this pub to come and get you 'cos they never give up."

He gave excellent, generous sound bites. Authenticity cannot be learnt, and it is hard to think of Kim Beazley in the same position saying anything that didn't appear to be shouted at an imaginary crowd.

Shorten also resisted the temptation when 60 Minutes reporter Richard Carleton prodded him to criticise mine management on safety issues: "I know that people … want explanations for this disaster. But we cannot afford to distract from the issue of rescuing the men. These men are still trapped in the earth and we want them back. And any behaviour that distracts from that, to be blunt, just has to wait."

Wearing his trademark AWU chambray shirt with matching bomber jacket, Shorten managed to work in the union line liberally, but it always seemed appropriate: "It's good workers are being recognised and, frankly, it's good unions are being recognised." He did more for the image of the union movement than any number of ACTU ads of working mothers weeping. "Today I rejoin the union," wrote Dorin Suciu of Bronte, in a letter to the editor yesterday.

A class act takes a step into the light

May 11, 2006

Timing is everything in politics. Just ask union leader Bill Shorten, writes Miranda Devine.

Whether the man suits the times or the times suit the man, it is clear that the diminutive, Jesuit-educated lawyer with an MBA covered himself in glory during the 14-day marathon rescue.

He was quite poetic: "In a modern age of technology this has been physical force and willpower against nature and rock."

He was empathetic: "Don't worry about the 10-tonne rock in the cage where the men have been trapped. This was a 10-tonne emotional rock on the backs of all the families."

Unions have themselves to blame in many ways for their predicament, with union participation in the private sector down to 17 per cent and an inglorious history of using health and safety issues as bargaining weapons. Thugs from the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union were notorious for doing snap inspections and closing down building sites for spurious reasons just to flex their muscles during contract negotiations.

But thanks to Shorten, the Beaconsfield mine disaster showed the best of the union movement, perhaps enough for the public to question if the pendulum is swinging too far away from workers' rights.

Cynics in the media mutter that "Showbag Shorten" capitalised on the miners' plight to boost his political fortunes. He will contest the next federal election as the Labor candidate for Maribyrnong after the incumbent, Bob Sercombe, stepped aside, saying: "He's not the messiah … He's just a naughty right-wing boy."

Shorten's biggest obstacle is probably the messiah syndrome, with many in Labor seeing him as the party's best chance as prime minister, the only person since Bob Hawke and Paul Keating capable of making the structural changes Australia needs to remain competitive with the least social disruption.

Now the nation has seen him in action, it's easy to see why he is hailed. After all, there's not a lot you can hide about yourself when you are on live TV for 14 days straight.

Shorten revealed a little of his world view when he spoke of where the trapped men drew their strength: "Having met their families I do realise the power of family and their support. The wives love their husbands. I think that's important to their wellbeing. Great kids, great parents. You get a sense, I think, that your family helps make you who you are."

Shorten grew up in working-class outer-suburban Melbourne where his late father, Bill, was an English migrant and wharfie, who rose to dock master. His mother, Ann, was a schoolteacher, descended from the Irish McGraths, O'Sheas and Nolans who came to Australia in 1853 to discover gold. She worked full-time so the family could afford to put Bill and his twin brother, Robert (an investment banker in Sydney), through Melbourne's Catholic Xavier College. She went on to study for a PhD and a law degree.

Shorten is married to stockbroker Debbie Beale, whom he met while they were both studying for their MBAs. She is the daughter of Julian Beale, a wealthy Melbourne investor and former federal Liberal MP. They live in Moonee Ponds, a gentrified working-class inner-Melbourne suburb.

Though he is criticised for "marrying the Liberal Party", people who know the couple say she is more left-wing than he. He comes from the traditional Catholic right wing of the ALP which John Howard has managed to woo in recent years and where the future success of the ALP probably still lies.

Shorten's next test comes in his response to the Beaconsfield mine collapse, which he will hammer out in a meeting with union members today.

The nation will be tuned in to his career now with more than passing interest.

The Height of Fashion

2006-04-14T00:52:00.000-07:00

Stilt Walking Into Spring

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Among this season's higher heels are, left to right, Balenciaga's gladiator stilettos, Geppettos by Gucci and Azzedine Alaïa, Lanvin peep-toe stiletto from Michael's, suede platforms by Balenciaga, and Geppettos by Christian Louboutin.

By CATHY HORYN

Published: April 13, 2006

THIS was going to be great, I told myself. I was going to march into Michael's on West 55th Street, wearing the highest heels to come out of Paris, Lanvin's peep-toe stilettos with five-and-a-half-inch cone heels and a two-inch platform, and they were all going to look up from their Cobb salads with demiportions of Roquefort and — well, it was going to be great.

Even for someone who is used to wearing stilettos and monster platforms, the shoes for spring present a special challenge. You just can't escape the fact that they are taller, more outrageous, involving a great deal more design and expense but also, it must be said, a great many more opportunities to humiliate yourself. Who pictures herself on a gurney? And how do you explain it?

"It's not like you broke your leg skiing in St. Moritz," Candy Pratts Price, the executive fashion director of Style.com, said the other night. "That's a good story. But 'I fell off my platforms'?" Ms. Price smirked.

The desire to be taller, amazonian, seems to fit with a society that likes things pumped up — lips and S.U.V.'s, for example — but that is only a conjecture. A lot of women, in truth, don't need a McLuhan-like explanation of why they want the new shoes.

Lisa Anastasia Reisman, who is blond and tan and from Naples, Fla., was in Barneys on Saturday, shopping with girlfriends. She had on a pair of jeans and an aqua sweater with black peace symbols on it. She strapped on a pair of five-inch Dolce & Gabbana platforms with little flowers embroidered on the sides and stood up.

"Now I'm tall," Ms. Reisman, who is 5-foot-3, said as she set off in the direction of the Lanvin display.

Then there is Esther Chetrit, a mother of five, ages 6 to 17, of Manhattan. Last Thursday Ms. Chetrit was at Bergdorf Goodman. She had already been to Saks Fifth Avenue, where she bought a pair of Yves Saint Laurent heels — "the bondage ones," she said — and now she was on the plumped cushions at Bergdorf, in her jeans and bare feet, looking down at a pair of python and cork platforms from Oscar de la Renta and another style, from Azzedine Alaïa, with black patent leather straps and a curving raffia-covered heel.

"I'm only looking for platforms now," Ms. Chetrit said. "I feel much more balanced in them." She studied a pair of clubhouse green Gucci shoes with a stiletto heel and a one-inch platform. Besides, she added, "I need to be taller than my kids when I yell at them." She shrugged. "I have big kids."

And how tall is she? Ms. Chetrit gave one of those great deadpan New York looks. "I don't know anymore," she said.

Store executives and sales clerks, as well as outfits like the NPD Group, which tracks clothing and accessory sales, say that more women are buying higher heels this spring. Perilous or not, some of the highest shoes quickly sold out, the salesmen at Barneys and Bergdorf say. And before Ms. Chetrit left she put her name on a reorder list for the Alaïas. (They sell for $795.)

Novelty styles, like Balenciaga's towering silver gladiator stilettos, which require the control of a ballerina, are among the hardest to find. And the shoes will get even bigger for fall. Balenciaga's suede platforms top seven inches.

Three weeks ago Kimberly Oser, a public relations executive at Barneys, received a call from a saleswoman at the store, alerting her to a new shipment of Christian Louboutin platforms called Miss Marple. "When I got there, five women were buzzing around the same pair," said Ms. Oser, who bought the shoes, for $710. Later she saw the same style on eBay for $1,500.

Mr. Louboutin said the style, among his tallest, sold out in Paris. "And you don't typically see French women in shoes like that," he said, speculating that such shoes have touched off some sort of tribal feeling among women. "They don't want to be the smallest member of their group," he said.

When I was at Barneys, with my peep-toe Lanvins (which the store expects to have next week, ladies), I took one off and placed it on a table. People came by and admired it as if it were a piece of Zulu sculpture. One guy started to grab it to show the woman he was with.

Hey!

Anyway, as I was saying, I had this idea to wear the Lanvins to lunch at Michael's. The place would be jammed. As I would find out in a few minutes, Joan Rivers was there. So were Anna Wintour, Ralph Lauren and Tina Brown.

At Avenue of the Americas and 55th Street I got out of a taxi. Taking the R train there was out of the question: not only are the heels high and slanted, but they also taper to a point the size of a nailhead. I had thought to take along a pair of ballet flats, which many bright women in New York on their way to a date or a party have no trouble rationalizing. It's like having a limousine without the expense and bother.

I mounted the curb. Now six feet tall, I suddenly felt less invincible than wretchedly vulnerable, to gross stares and gusts of wind. Michael's, barely half a block away, seemed a journey of several miles.

I clumped toward the big "Love" sculpture. I thought: "This won't do. Lunch will be over by the time I get there." Looking around — oh, what was the point! — I ducked behind a pillar and put on my ballet flats. Then I hurried on to Michael's, bolting past Ms. Wintour and the noontime crowd.

In other circumstances, like walking on the wall-to-wall at the office or at a party where I mostly stood, the Lanvins were actually comfortable, and I enjoyed my new height and the giddy looks of fright on the men in the office.

In reality you don't wear a pair of shoes like that if you carry a book bag and share trains with commuters. You invite looks of pity. Shoes like that serve a different purpose: seduction, fun, making men bark.

A friend of mine compared their glamorous constraint to wearing a tight Hedi Slimane suit to a party. "All you can do is lean at the bar," she said. "And make sure your drink comes with a straw."

What It's Like to be Sacked

2006-03-31T05:27:00.000-08:00

Anxieties at work

Being sacked leads to mental and physical ill-health, and job insecurity is just as damaging, writes Elisabeth Wynhausen

March 31, 2006

THOUGH he had been sacked, the man got up early every morning as he always had and went out as if he were going to work. He had been a road worker employed by a government department. But when he was sacked, he couldn't bring himself to tell his wife and family.

"He couldn't face the reality of the situation," says Michael Curtin, managing director of management company Lee Hecht Harrison. By the time one of Curtin's consultants started counselling him, the former road worker, who was in his 50s, had been getting up and pretending to go to work for three or four months.

"For many men, their work is themselves," GPs4Men national convener Greg Malcher says. "Take away their work and you take away a fair chunk of their soul." Malcher was sacked from a job in medicine many years ago. He says he felt as if his heart had been torn out, and he went home and cried.

If some of the gloomier predictions about the effects of the Howard Government's workplace revolution come true, this could soon be a common scenario.

There are 1500 pages of new or revised workplace laws and regulations, but if there is one aspect of the changed IR environment that gives employers the whip hand it is that they have what John Robertson, secretary of Unions NSW, calls "an unfettered right to sack anyone".

"They can't discriminate based on religion age or gender. But if they don't like something else about you they can sack you," Robertson points out.

Companies with fewer than 100 employees have the right to sack them for no reason. Provisions allowing larger companies to dismiss for "operational reasons" can, according to legal experts, give them the power to sack anyone. Employers who sack people on the grounds that the office is being restructured will not be confronted with the spectre of unfair dismissal, at least until the clause is tested in the courts. That is bound to happen sooner or later, with the bill already being portrayed as a lawyers' picnic.

Only last week, Employment and Workplace Relations Minister Kevin Andrews agreed that employers could now get rid of employees if they didn't like them or found them abrasive. "Sometimes relationships don't work out," he said on ABC television. Meanwhile, Prime Minister John Howard told a Melbourne radio announcer: "Some people who have been a disruptive influence in a small firm may not find it as easy to remain."

But it is hard to find out if the senior members of a government making it easier for employers to fire people have ever been sacked from a job themselves.

"I don't know if we'll bother responding to that," says Ian Hanke, spokesman for Andrews' office.

Proponents of the workplace reforms invariably allude to the economic benefits in the offing but some of the changes may involve social costs yet to be calculated.

"Chronic anxiety about the certainty of your continued employment is a major cause of stress," says Ian Hickie, executive director of the Brain and Mind Research Institute at the University of Sydney, who believes that it is not so much the sacking itself that affects a person's health but the corrosive uncertainty that precedes and follows it. "It's the continuous worry that kills you."

IT'S NOT ABOUT THE MONEY

LARGE companies retrenching workers may call in outplacement experts, a service paid for by the employer.

Management consultants say people will sometimes express relief.

"We had someone who still experienced the feelings of sadness, anxiety, fear and anger. But he talked about it as a liberating experience," management consultant Katerina Papamarkou says.

Most people who are sacked walk away and get on with their lives. Though she has since found a job she loves, Lisa Burns says she was devastated when she was suddenly sacked as the co-ordinator of a community organisation. Burns, 43, had taken the job because she wanted to challenge herself after 10 years with another organisation, but says there was resistance to some of the changes she instituted and after four months she found herself on the street.

It was the first time she had been fired. "It's soul destroying to be sacked. You just don't expect it," she says. Burns took her case to the Australian Industrial Relations Commission and her employer settled. "The settlement to me was never, ever about the money; it was sort of like this independent tribunal had to judge what happened, to prove that I wasn't a bad worker. To prove what happened to me was unfair."

If the new workplace environment creates more uncertainty, says Hickie, "it's likely to have an adverse effect on the mental and physical health of people in the work force". He believes those most affected will be young people, trying to figure out what it is they should be doing with their lives while struggling to secure steady employment, a mirage for increasing numbers of people under 25. Other mental health professionals warn that a sudden spate of firings could have dire consequences.

"The most stressful thing in people's lives is when some decision is made about them in which they have no say," Mental Health Foundation of Australia chairman Graham Burrows says. "It's very stressful if someone terminates you and you don't know what the reasons were or if it comes out of the blue."

This is exactly what happened to Sydney woman Donna Niemann, 42, a single mother with two teenage sons. Until a January afternoon nine weeks ago, Niemann was a supervisor for a food distribution company. She had started out as a driver seven years ago and loved it, she says. "I put my heart and soul in the job. The week before I was terminated I worked from four in the morning three days in a row."

Though the atmosphere had changed since the company came under new management in 2004, Niemann says she had no warning she was to be dismissed.

She says she had never had any complaints about her work. But five minutes after the general manager asked her to come and have a chat with him, Niemann had been sacked.

"You come home to the kids, to let them know you've just been fired, you don't even know what you've been fired for," she says.

When she managed to absorb what had happened, she found herself consumed with anxiety. "I was stressing out that I wasn't going to get anything because of my age."

With no savings, she couldn't stop worrying about paying the rent and providing for her younger son, who lives at home with her and has just started Year 11.

But with the help of a former colleague, Niemann managed to find a job as a casual driver a few weeks later. Though she is working 38 hours a week at present and is grateful for the employment, as a casual she no longer has job security.

Niemann, a member of the shop assistants union, plans to take action over her dismissal with the union's help. "I didn't want them to get away with it," she says.

Union officials say nine out of 10 people who start such cases settle and that there are chains of stores that pay from a few thousand dollars to $15,000 to get the cases settled as quickly as possible. But Niemann contends: "It's not about money, it's about respect."

From now on, of course, sacked employees of companies with fewer than 100 workers will have no such recourse, an understandable relief for small companies previously confronted with the threat of legal action if they tried to sack unsatisfactory employees.

But it will deny those who feel they have been unfairly dismissed the chance of asserting some control over a situation that makes them feel powerless, in itself a threat to their health.

"I've known a number of men, tradesmen working for government departments, who lost their jobs when they were in their late 40s or early 50s," says labour lawyer Suzanne Jamieson, a senior lecturer in work and organisational studies at the University of Sydney. "The two I know best both died of heart attacks within a few years of being retrenched." Both had fruitlessly applied for countless jobs. "I saw them disintegrate before my eyes" Jamieson says.

Says Melbourne-based management consultant Katerina Papamarkou, from Chandler Macleod: "Where people believe they're not easily going to find work again - for example, because of their age or their lack of skills - that can affect the intensity of their emotional reaction."

People who have been fired experience grief, Burrows says. Disbelief is followed by anger, then they get depressed. "The fourth stage is to resolve it and move forward, but some people never get over it," he says. "A lot of it depends on the fortitude of the individual." Men and women alike may define themselves through the work they do, but being unable to fulfil their role as breadwinners still gives many older men the feeling of losing all sense of purpose.

Curtin says he has noticed the sense of loss reflected on their faces "They look lost," he says. "Often there's a sense of paralysis. People don't know what to do."

Unlike the women interviewed by The Australian, several of the men insist on anonymity. "It was shocking. I felt terrible," says one, a 42-year-old boilermaker who was unexpectedly fired on Christmas Eve a few years ago.

The owner of the small welding company he was working for did everything wrong, unexpectedly sacking him when he came in five minutes late one morning because the trains weren't running on time. It was the first time he had been late but he was paid off on the spot.

"I walked out with $270 and didn't work again until mid-February. Eight weeks without work," he says. The Newcastle man had never before been unemployed for more than a few days at a time. "A friend had to help me out with money 'til I could get some help from Centrelink. I felt totally useless. I felt like I was just a sponge."

He felt his friends looked at him differently "You could feel it in the air," he says. "You've been out all day, hitting the pavement, looking for work. You come home empty-handed, people think you haven't even been trying."

Though he is a member of the Amalgamated Metalworkers Union and now works in a unionised shop, he says he is warier than he was. "It makes you feel how vulnerable you really are."

The Australian

Beazley to Ban Porn

2006-03-20T20:30:00.000-08:00

Labor to force porn block

March 21, 2006 INTERNET service providers (ISPs) will be forced to block violent and pornographic material before it reaches home computers if Labor wins the next federal election.

Under the policy, announced by Opposition Leader Kim Beazley today, international websites would be banned by the Australian Communications and Media Authority if they contained graphic sexual or violent material, rated R or higher.

The bans would be maintained by ISPs.

The policy aims to protect the two-thirds of Australian households where no internet filters are in place because of a lack of technical knowledge or cost.

Mr Beazley said all households would be included in the policy unless there was a specific request for access to such material.

It was "too hard" for many parents to install internet blockers on their computers to prevent offensive material being downloaded, he said.

"The point at which you can do that (effectively ban such material) is with the ISP," Mr Beazley told Southern Cross Radio.

"The ISP provider can cut it off.

"They (websites) can be controlled by Australian law and they (ISPs) can control them at the point at which they enter the country."

Similar systems operated in Sweden and Britain, he said.

In the past, Mr Beazley has called on the Federal Government to provide free internet blockers to all Australian households.

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