The octuplet mom and her doctors: no doubt she’ll end up with her own reality show

The New Neo Posted on by

The California woman who gave birth to octuplets last Monday is now revealed to be the mother of six other children. What’s more, they are alleged to be living with her and her parents, and not a father in sight—except the grandfather of the (now fourteen) little ones.

Ah, but who are we to judge? Here are two quotes from doctors not directly involved with the case:

Doctors say they advise against higher-order births, but acknowledge the decision is not theirs to make.

“Who am I to say that six is the limit?” said Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg, medical director of Fertility Institutes, which has clinics in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and New York City. “There are people who like to have big families.”

Dr. James Grifo, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the NYU School of Medicine, added: “I don’t think it’s our job to tell them how many babies they’re allowed to have. I am not a policeman for reproduction in the United States. My role is to educate patients.”

I agree with the doctors that they are not the reproductive police. Nor should they force parents who are carrying more than one fetus—even as many as eight, as this woman was—to selectively abort. And don’t get me wrong; I wish the mother, her babies, and in fact all her children (not to mention the grandparents, who probably have a bit of babysitting ahead of them) well.

But although not “police,” doctors make ethical and practical judgments about elective medical treatments all the time (in practice, they even make judgments about life-saving treatments, although they’re supposed to leave that to the patients). To my way of thinking, these two questions should have at least been asked by the doctors: (1) should fertility treatments be given to single parents?; and (2) should fertility treatments be given to people with six children? My answers would have been “yes, under certain circumstances” to question (1) (the circumstances would include age of parent, resources, and emotional health of parent); and “no” to question (2).

We already make similar decisions about whether such parents should be allowed to adopt. And although there are huge differences between the two situations (adoption is about someone else’s biological child, and fertility treatments are about one’s own, albeit with the help of extraordinary measures), the line should be drawn somewhere on both. I’m not a pure libertarian on this issue.

Of course, there is the knotty problem of what number of children a “too-large-for-further-fertility-treatments” family would consist of. Different doctors would draw the line at different points, no doubt. But a line should be drawn, or the doctor is being irresponsible.

It’s not that I don’t have lots of sympathy for people who have trouble conceiving. Hey, I even watch “Jon and Kate Plus 8” on occasion (shh, don’t tell anyone), although I balk at “17 Kids and Counting.” The former family, however, consists of a married couple who had fertility treatments when the only children they had at home were a set of female twins. The latter is another married couple who have had all their children, multiples and singletons, the good old-fashioned way.

The behavior of both of the couples, and their doctors, seem quite defensible. I would never argue that a couple with two children at home should not be helped with having another, or that a couple should be forced to limit the number of its own naturally-conceived biological children, although I could write another article about what I think about their decisions to air their whole families on reality TV.

I can’t help but think that the current octuplet mom has been watching too much TV on The Learning Channel, as have her doctors. How else to explain their decision to help this women have more children? Doctors can set a limit somewhere, as they are supposed to do with cosmetic surgery. There is no absolute right to have either, just because one can afford it.

Of course, the cosmetic surgeons who deal with this man and this woman seem to have the same difficulty just saying “no” to their patients’ requests.

[NOTE: The mother is keeping mum on certain relevant questions, such as whether she had fertility treatments. But since naturally-conceived octuplets are unknown, I think we can safely assume she did.]

Power failures and the financial meltdown

The New Neo Posted on by

The wacky winter weather we’ve been having lately has led to the phenomenon of ice storms and resultant power failures in places such as Arkansas and Texas that seldom see them. As readers of this blog are aware, I had a pretty nasty experience recently with a four-day power failure myself, and so I can relate and commiserate.

The power failures caused by ice storms are understandable: the usual mechanism is that heavy ice weighs down the trees, which fall on the wires and collapse them. The damage can be widespread if the storm covers a wide area. But essentially, it’s a local phenomenon.

The great power blackout of 1965 was a very different animal indeed. I recall it quite well; it involved most of the northeast United States, with twenty-five million losing power in a cascade of events stemming from a single failure in an isolated spot in Canada.

Such a thing wasn’t supposed to be able to happen. But it did:

The cause of the failure was human error that happened days before the blackout, when maintenance personnel incorrectly set a protective relay on one of the transmission lines between the Niagara generating station Sir Adam Beck Station No. 2 in Queenston, Ontario and Southern Ontario. Instead of the relay being set to trip and protect the line if the flow of power exceeded the line’s capacity, it was set for a much lower value.

As was common on a cold November evening, power for heating, lighting and cooking was pushing the electrical system to near its peak capacity, and the transmission lines heading into Southern Ontario were heavily loaded. At 5:16 p.m. Eastern Time a small surge of power coming from Lewiston, New York’s Robert Moses generating plant caused the misset relay to trip at far below the line’s rated capacity, disabling a main power line heading into Southern Ontario. Within seconds, the power that was flowing on the tripped line transferred to the other lines, causing them to become overloaded. Their protective relays, which are designed to protect the line if it became overloaded, tripped, isolating Adam Beck from all of Southern Ontario.

With no place else to go, the excess power from Beck then switched direction and headed east over the interconnected lines into New York State, overloading them as well and isolating the power generated in the Niagara region from the rest of the interconnected grid. The Beck and Moses generators, with no outlet for their power, were automatically shut down to prevent damage. Within five minutes the power distribution system in the northeast was in chaos as the effects of overloads and loss of generating capacity cascaded through the network, breaking it up into “islands”. Plant after plant experienced load imbalances and automatically shut down.

In that power failure and other subsequent ones, the problem was caused by a mechanism designed to protect the system: the interconnectedness of its parts. It may be stretching a metaphor almost to the breaking point, but the current financial crisis that began last fall reminds me a bit of those huge power failures.

How? The problems in the mortgage sector were bound up, bundled, derivatived (is that a word?), tranched, and seeded throughout the entire system. This was supposed to reduce the risk by spreading it around. But in the end it only guaranteed that the infection would affect even banks and institutions that were otherwise solvent. And the interconnectedness of the entire financial world guaranteed that the problem would not be kept to one country.

Was Madoff’s operation a hedge fund?

The New Neo Posted on by

Starting with this comment in a previous thread about Madoff, a discussion ensued about whether the operation he ran that turned out to be a Ponzi scheme could be called a hedge fund.

Here are some definitions of “hedge fund.” It seems to me to be a fairly loose term, and that Madoff’s scheme (at least as presented to investors) would qualify.

Of course, in reality it seems to have been no sort of fund at all, but rather a pure Ponzi scheme—or, as this writer states, a virtual reality game—with some very nasty consequences in the real world.

Updike At Rest

The New Neo Posted on by

9361731.JPG

John Updike has died at seventy-six.

In the last decade or two, his work had increasingly grappled with issues of aging and death, so perhaps his actual death should come as no surprise. But somehow it does—as it may have to him, if a passage from one of his early stories, “Pigeon Feathers, ” is any guide:

The story is about a boy, David, who is forced to shoot some pigeons in a barn and then watches, fascinated, as their feathers float to the ground. “He was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever.”

“Prolific” is a term often used to describe Updike. The man spewed forth words at an almost alarming clip, churning out approximately one book of fiction or short stories a year throughout his long literary life, not to mention a simultaneous outpouring of book reviews and other essays. It would be surprising if all of them were very good, and of course they’re not. But an astonishing number are.

Updike’s fictional oeuvre wasn’t really my cup of tea. The trials and adulterous liaisons of hard-drinking suburban men of the 1950s and 1960s, or the similar doings of former basketball stars in small-town Pennsylvania, aren’t my favored reading topics. But even though I’m not much of a novel-reader in general, I managed to voluntarily get through quite a sampler of Updike’s fictional output, mostly because of his amazing ability to write.

In this he reminds me of another (and less prolific) literary stylist of very different background and subject matter: Vladimir Nabokov. But where Updike celebrates the ordinary and accessible, Nabokov delves into the arcane and mysteriously complex. Where Updike is somewhat warm (although at times repellent), Nabokov is very cold (and at times repellent). But both are almost unsurpassed in their ability to string words together beautifully in what are often very long sentences that nevertheless retain their clarity of meaning.

These are virtuoso performances, meant to inspire awe. And they do. Updike also writes from a stance of awe (even religious awe; he was a very religious man) at the entire physical world and especially its amazing human denizens. And although he is often accused of being a misogynist because of the way he draws many of his female characters, I have always perceived a sort of grudging respect (and perhaps even awe) for women’s emotional depth and tenaciousness behind his portraits of a sex that always fascinated him.

My favorite works of Updike are his short stories and his personal essays. I happen to like the short story genre in general better than the novel, and in Updike’s case the shorter form focuses his mind and pen (or typewriter, or computer). Many of his short stories are far more openly autobiographical than his more wide-ranging novels; and this suits me, as well. I have always found truth stranger—and far more fascinating—than fiction, even if it is a shaped and slightly altered, more literary, truth.

You may laugh at the word “truth” in the context of fiction writing. But my sense of Updike is that in his writing he was almost ruthless with himself. The heroes fashioned in his image are often flawed men, bent on their own pleasure even at the expense of others, as they struggle with their competing desire to be decent and with their need to reconcile themselves with God. Nothing is simple; even Updike’s serially philandering husbands often experience a poignant and bitter regret when interacting with the divorced wives they left behind—and the regret is not only for the havoc they wreaked on the ex-spouse or the children, but that which they unwittingly inflicted on themselves.

One of my favorite Updike short stories is called “Guilt Gems.” It describes three incidents in the middle-aged male protagonist’s life that have left him with a terrible residue of guilt. These episodes are not what you might think; there is no sex involved, for instance. If I recall correctly (and forgive me if this in in error, because I am doing this from memory) they consist of the following: the narrator banishing the beloved family cat to the basement because he is allergic to it, and seeing the resultant stricken and angry look on his son’s face; the narrator allowing his elderly mother to drive home alone from the airport; and the narrator tagging out his daughter in a neighborhood baseball game.

The subject matter may sound trite, but in Updike’s hands it is not. Both in the descriptive and in the psychological sense, the writing is lusciously beautiful, as Updike’s writing nearly always is.

But perhaps my favorite Updike work is his “memoir,” entitled Self-Consciousness. Eschewing the conventional narrative trajectory of most autobiographies (as does Nabokov’s somewhat similar work, Speak, Memory), it deals with just a few aspects of Updike’s life.

Typically, two of them (his stuttering, his psoriasis) are previously hidden personal flaws that Updike chooses to expose and explore. If that sounds disgusting or vaguely Oprah-ish, Updike manages to avoid that trap. But best of all, the book contains the tour-de-force essay “On Being a Self Forever.” The subject is nothing less than individual human existence.

Now that Updike’s life is over, we will have no more yearly offerings from that singular voice. But the celebration of the ordinary by this extraordinary writer lives on.

[ADDENDUM: For other photos of Updike in varied stages of life, please see this.

The title of this post is a reference to the final book in Updike’s famous “Rabbit” series, entitled Rabbit at Rest, in which hero Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom dies.]

Madoff and his sons: walking the perp walk alone?

The New Neo Posted on by

Bernie Madoff ran quite the little family business. Back in the happier, headier days of 2000, son Mark is quoted as saying:

All of his family members grew up with this being our lives. When it is a family operated business you don’t go home at night and shut everything off, so you take things home with you, which is how all of us grew up.

Madoff practiced nepotism to a degree I assume is somewhat unusual in the world of investment firms, employing not only sons Mark and Andrew, but a host of other relatives: brother Peter, niece Shana, nephews Charles and Roger (the role of wife Ruth in recent years remains unclear).

But Madoff insists that he, and he alone, knew of the fraudulent nature of his hedge fund operations. His sons, not surprisingly, agree.

Of course, Madoff is a liar. So why should we believe him on this one point? The answer is: we shouldn’t. But neither should we automatically assume that his sons absolutely had to be in the know.

I say this not through excess of naivete, although it may sound that way. No, I am fully aware that it is highly possible, not to mention likely, that the sons were cognizant of the Ponzi nature of the operations, and are part of the coverup.

But at the same time I think anyone who assumes Madoff himself could not have been clever enough, secretive enough, and criminal enough to defraud and fool even his own family is suffering from a different sort of naivete (see this).

So, if they weren’t part of the swindle, just what might the sons have been doing all day in their large but perhaps spartan offices (Madoff favored black, white, and gray as a color scheme, and reportedly was so obsessive-compulsive that he had no tolerance for a stray scrap of paper on the desks of employees)? Madoff carefully kept the brockerage arm of the firm—which the sons ran—separate from the fraudulent hedge fund operation. The former was apparently a bona fide business.

This, of course, does not mean the sons were not taken into his confidence. Perhaps the whole structure was carefully arranged merely to give the appearance of separation in order for the sons to exercise plausible deniability later on.

This past weekend’s Wall Street Journal has this to say of what is known so far about their role:

While neither son has been implicated by prosecutors, the sons interacted with some who worked in the Madoff investment operation. As executives at the firm, they met regularly with their father and other senior officials of the firm in closed-door discussions in the company’s offices, according to former employees. They both gave their father some of their own money to manage and occasionally chatted with a key lieutenant who now is a focus of probes into the alleged fraud, and they defended their father’s investment operation against critics.

These associations hardly constitute smoking guns, although they make it clear that opportunities abounded for the sons to learn about the scheme, if Madoff so desired, or if they smelled a rat. But did he, and/or did they?

Son Mark, who once had personal money invested in dad’s hedge fund, pulled it out for undisclosed reasons prior to a divorce in 2000—the strongest evidence, in my opinion, of his possible knowledge. But son Andrew remained heavily invested right up until the revelations of December.

So, what is the likelihood the sons knew? I can’t say; no one can except the parties themselves. But my gut tells me that Madoff senior is the sort of person who likes to feel superior to everybody around. Part of that supreme sort of narcissism and criminality is that it tends to take no one else into its confidence. I agree with those who believe that:

…good old Bernie Madoff might have stolen simply for the fun of it, exploiting every relationship in his life for decades while studiously manipulating financial regulators.

And note that “every relationship in his life,” if true, would include sons Andrew and Mark.

Madoff may have much preferred to walk alone. In fact, that may have been the whole point:

[NOTE: One fact that contradicts my “loner” theory is that someone must have been generating those imaginary reports of transactions for the hedge fund. Could it have been Madoff himself? I submit that, until other evidence surfaces, the answer is “yes.” The guy seems to have been obsessive-compulsive enough to have done so. Here’s how:

Madoff made his reputation on building complex financial systems, covering the full range of investment management””accounts, trades, taxes, clearinghouses, balances.

All he had to do was switch the input signal from real accounts to simulated accounts. And every programmer knows what happens then: GIGO””Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Call it the Madoff Virtual Reality Trading Simulation Game.]

Jackie Kennedy, that dress, and Robert Frost

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s more on that beautiful Grecian-inspired dress of Jackie Kennedy’s, the one I thought would have looked nice on Michelle at Obama’s inaugural ball.

A reader and friend kindly sent me the following photo of Jackie wearing the dress at a gala function:

fb9e813dc577492083ec564d98f9ab29.jpg

And notice who was seated beside Jackie on that distant occasion: none other than poet Robert Frost! Thus it is that two of my posts on the Obama inauguration (see this) intersect.

I’m guessing that Frost must have enjoyed himself mightily that evening. And who was the regal-looking and lucky lady on JFK’s right? Pearl Buck, that’s who—the first woman Nobel laureate in literature, although recently she has fallen on harder times, critic-wise, than Frost (the Nobel eluded him to the end, despite four Pulitzers).

Here’s another view of the Kennedy dress on its original model, as well as Frost:

c.jpg

Love those gloves, too.

Senator Winfrey: the politics of celebrity and identity

The New Neo Posted on by

When governors have been called on to appoint senators in the past, they’ve tended to stick with party regulars and other established politicians.

But I suppose, after the serious consideration given to neophyte Caroline Kennedy to replace Hillary Clinton, it should come as no surprise that Governor Blagojevitch of Illinois thought about appointing TV superstar Oprah Winfrey to fill Barack Obama’s senatorial shoes—and that Oprah thought herself qualified to have accepted the offer, although she wasn’t really all that interested. She’s too busy doing other things.

Well, Oprah is indeed a busy gal. She’s got a lot of clout, and a vast number of projects over which she exercises a great deal of control. So I can hardly blame her for not being eager to take on the somewhat boring career of Senator. It involves a lot of down time, and one person usually can’t accomplish a whole lot there (actually, a hundred people often can’t accomplish a whole lot, either—but that’s another story).

The whole question got me wondering just who is best qualified to be appointed senator.

When a person runs for election to the Senate, the public uses its judgment to make that decision. Often (as with Barack Obama), the winner has at least some experience at the state legislative level.

But not always. For example, Hillary Clinton was judged qualified by the voters of New York. But she hardly lacked political experience; although she had never run for office before, she certainly had watched the sausage of government being made (as it were).

War heroes are the type of celebrities that have often entered politics successfully. But in recent years non-military celebrities, usually in the entertainment field, have sometimes been elected governors—witness Arnold Schwarzenegger of California (who also married into a celebrity political family), and wrestler Jesse Ventura of Minnesota. And then of course there’s the most successful celebrity of all, actor Ronald Reagan, also of California.

Minnesota has the additional distinction (a dubious one, IMHO) of having just (probably) elected a celebrity senator in Al Franken. He’s not the first, though; consider former basketball player (and Rhodes Scholar—always mentioned in nearly the same breath) Bill Bradley, who served for nearly twenty years as New Jersey’s senator. As for celebrity members of Congress, Sonny Bono comes to mind. But he worked his way up in time-honored fashion in local politics—even if his venue was celebrity-town Palm Springs.

But at least all these people slugged it out in the arena of open elections, and won. Now we’re talking about bypassing that process and relying entirely on celebrity and identity—including racial identity in the case of Winfrey and the non-celebrity pol who was actually appointed instead of her, Roland Burris. Both are a racial match for the outgoing Obama.

The same pattern is true in the gender arena for Hillary’s replacement. Caroline Kennedy is a woman, although not a politican. Non-celebrity politician Kirsten Gillibrand, the actual appointee, also matches in gender, although her political orientation is less liberal than Hillary’s or Kennedy’s. Perhaps actual political policy is considered less important than identity these days.

Tale of the camps: Guantanamo, al Qaeda, and Saudi re-education

The New Neo Posted on by

It should come as no surprise that one of the released Guantanamo prisoners has set up camp as deputy head of al Qaeda operations in Yemen. How these people must laugh at our delicate—and self-destructive—sensibilities!

One of the things in the article that caught my eye was that Said Ali al-Shihri, the “militant” in question, passed through a Saudi re-education/rehabilitation program on his way from Guantanamo to Yemen. Suffice to say he is not their most successful graduate, at least according to Saudi lights.

I became curious as to how these operations work, and found this description. It seems they are run by psychologists (good luck, folks) and religious teachers. They feature attempts to counter the incorrect religious notions of terrorists with passages from the Koran that challenge their beliefs and replace them with a kinder, gentler form of Islam and jihad.

Not a bad idea, actually. The Saudis report great success. Wonder if it’s true.

Those Crayola colors and the 50s childhood

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day I came across this chronology of Crayola crayon colors. Although I must confess that Crayolas were something I hadn’t thought of in decades, it all came back in a rush.

First there was the initial pack for the toddler, those big fat crayons with an exceedingly limited palette. Their lack of pointiness made it extra-challenging to color and keep within the lines, not to mention the difficulty of finding a suitable tint for filling in faces and other skin:

52048656-177é—150-0-0.jpg

Ah but then, finally, after various transitional packages, I graduated to the wonder of the 64-pack, the one with the sharpener in the back:

482_hi.jpg

They were skinny and suitably pointy. But best of all was the variety of the beautiful colors. There was one called “flesh” that eased, without totally solving, the problem of filling in skin (the hue is still there, but renamed “peach” in 1962, for obvious politically correct reasons).

Some of these crayons—the least favored ones—seemed to last forever. But the most attractive and/or most useful got broken and worn down to nubs very quickly. It was a sad day when a favorite got so small it could no longer be sharpened.

Of the ones I loved (and “loved” is really the correct word), the top of the heap were the deep rich tones of “Burnt Sienna” and “Prussian Blue.” The latter has, for some inexplicable reason, been renamed “Midnight Blue” (hard to believe it’s a reaction to storms of protest by storm troops of angry Prussians, but who knows?)

“Burnt Sienna” seems to have survived, as have the red-brown roofs of the town that gave it its name. But I hestitate to offer any attempt at showing you this or any other Crayola color online. All the sites I checked were every bit as inadequate as this one, which purports to offer the proper shades but is so far off as to be worse than useless.

It’s hard to overestimate the importance Crayolas had in the life of the child of the 50s. Looking back, I recall that we (at least we girls) colored almost incessantly—that is, when we weren’t busy with our other major concerns, which were: jacks, jumprope, card games (Canasta and War, primarily) and hopscotch, listed in no particular order. Television was a distant fifth, although good for the times when we couldn’t scare up partners for our usual pursuits, which tended to be done in groups.

One would think that coloring with Crayolas would be a mostly solitary activity. But if one would think that, one would be wrong. We crayoned in groups, too, in a sort of parallel play—or at least in pairs. We used the supposedly creativity-draining coloring books. We drew our own pictures freehand. We made paper dolls and then we designed fanciful clothes for them, and colored them all with our trusty Crayolas.

We often faced the knotty choices of the Crayola aficionado: press down hard and make the color dark and true, and risk fatigue of the hand and arm, not to mention boredom? Or take the easy way out, and use less force? And, if the latter, was it better to fill in the page completely or would a few strokes do, in a sort of impressionist (or perhaps expressionist?) minimalism?

[NOTE: I am sorry that I missed the 50th birthday of the 64-pack last April. Or perhaps it’s just as well, since the ever-moving-forward Crayola folks celebrated by issuing eight new colors with the following sappy and non-descriptive names, reflective of the sentiments (and failings, in my humble opinion) of the present generation: Super Happy, Fun in the Sun, Giving Tree, Bear Hug, Awesome, Happy Ever After, Famous, and Best Friends.

You may be pleased to note, however, that Crayola has addressed and more or less solved the knotty political problem of skin color. The following photo is not a joke, nor is it photoshopped:

bin008w.gif

It offers a nice sampler of eight shades suitable for coloring the peoples of the world: White, Apricot, Peach, Mahogany, Tan, Burnt Sienna, Sepia and Black.]