Meta: Announcement

Ms. Manitoba just called to say her surgery went fine, and although she won't be blogging for a while (just like Milagrito's spokesfeline Sirenita Lake), she'll be back as soon as she's able.

So that's the second blogger from this fine establishment who's been under the knife. (Sirenita Lake had a hip replaced about a month and a half ago.) Ms. Manitoba now has a new knee.

Next under the knife is Yours Truly, who will also have a new knee to boast of. Meanwhile, we take our disgusting medications and loll about in a state of witlessness. At least there's no pain. Court hearing in a couple of weeks (fighting with the insurance provider) and possibly surgery in January.

FoTPC, that leaves you and me to hold the fort till then, kid. Although Milagrito will probably be back soon.

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Meta: Light Blogging

Milagrito and his hoomin, Sirenita Lake, have not blogged lately, and want us all to know why:

I've just had a total left hip replacement. The hip hadda go. It was all gnarly and knobby and cartilage-free. No question, its day was past. Plus, I am the greatest candidate for surgery. High threshold of pain. Lots of extra muscles for getting around using one less limb. Unfailing appetite. A squirrel-like compulsion to store food on me and in the fridge. I had a world-class surgeon, a big noise down at Stanford and apparently on other continents as well. Everything looked auspicious so I went for it. Except for a bout of anemia from blood loss, I breezed through the surgery. The hospital was another story.

I spent three days in the Girls' Reformatory known as Stanford Hospital and was paroled on Thursday. Stanford is weirdly dysfunctional, but there were some bright lights. Here are a couple of my favorite nurses.


The girl on the left was the smartest on the floor, knew fucking everything. The girl on the right was my favorite of all. She was new and inexperienced, but she did her tasks like someone who had read the manual the night before. We supported each other. They came together to start a new IV on me, the experienced nurse there to supervise the new nurse. I'm a great medical dummy — it's almost impossible to hurt me with a needle. It was a stress-free moment for everyone. I shot the picture after success was achieved.


The other picture shows a strange man indicating the array of amenities and decorating touches that brightened up the room, especially since I was cut off from the window by a drawn curtain between my bed and my roommate's.

The woman in the next bed and I communicated through the curtain. She was a crime victim, which I suppose explained why I was confined to a narrow tunnel of curtains the whole time. Nevertheless, we spoke. She told me how she had been hit in her car by a reckless driver, and her little boy killed. She had numerous broken bones and a head injury.

Cops came to see her, and relays of doctors, and about 30 discharge planners. (Which is how I know they have them, since none ever came near me.) We became allies, to the limited extent possible in the environment. We sneered at the nurses who scolded her for not being able to pee. "You didn't pee! The patient didn't pee!" The cry would be taken up by others — "The patient didn't pee? No, she didn't pee!" — and then nothing would be done about it. Hollering and getting excited seemed to be the protocol for handling most problems.

My roommate and I checked on each other and pushed the call button when the other needed something. The third time my defective oxygenation meter alarm went off, I angrily called the station and informed them that I was disconnecting it because my roommate was not getting any sleep. When I was ready to leave, dressed and up on my feet, I finally went around the curtain and held her hand for a moment and wished her well.

As a patient, you are at the mercy of the nursing staff. What I found amazing was how much individual personalities determined the standard of care. Not just how careful or smart someone was, but whether they needed you to be passive, dependent and submissive, or whether they could actually look at you as an individual who had achieved a certain level of recovery and was entitled to a bit of autonomy and privacy, and who could call out her own issues.

I argued for hours that I could no longer stand the Foley catheter, that it was a size too large and positioned in an irritating way. I was told, in different ways, that the world would end and I'd never pee again if I had the Foley out. I finally threatened to get a bladder infection on the spot if they didn't take it out immediately. So they did and washed their hands of me. Spouse and I got me to pee in two seconds with a glass of warm water. The nurses in the picture are among the good ones, not only because they don't need you to be a pitiful, dependent recipient of their charity, but because they don't fear that the universe will tip over if you change a procedure a smidgen.

The other thing, besides the primacy of personality on the floor, that made my life miserable was the lack of charting of changes and progress and the assessments that supported them. One shift would determine that I could stand up and walk, the next shift thought I had run amok when they saw me on my feet. One shift decided to take off the compression stockings, the next shift asked accusingly, "Where are your stockings?" as though I had absconded with them. The PT girl checked me out on toilet use and determined that I did not need a seat elevator as I was very short, and that I was able to lower myself safely onto the seat.

The next day, the OT girl burst in on me on the toilet, throwing open the door to the crowd in the room, because I might be in terrible danger. God forbid I should take a piss on my own and in privacy. She said brightly, "I've come to help you!" and I growled, "I don't need help, I know how to pee. Go away!" I must remember next time to bring stakes to drive into the hearts of the cheerful, intrusive ones. Doesn't anybody chart things? "Patient passed all tests and is now qualified to pee on her own. Signed, dated." Every bit of progress I made I had to defend against the incoming shift.

We sneer at American culture, if any, but when you're in the hospital you really notice that American notions of privacy and independence are lacking and that your nurses often come from cultures where a woman in the hospital has no voice, where the more fussing a nurse does, the better her performance.

The last night in the hospital, I got a horrible pain from an irritated nerve. After a couple of hours of trying to convince Judy, my Filipina nurse, that I needed something other than a Vicodin, I finally fell asleep in spite of the pain, only to dream that I was at a loud party where everyone spoke Tagalog.

I woke up and thought groggily that the noise must be coming from a TV. The third time I had the dream and woke up, I noticed the clock — 11:00 p.m. — shift change. I jolted awake with anger — the incoming shift was hollering their greetings and raising the dead, such as me. I thought, screw Judy, I'm chewing those girls out. I pulled myself out of bed and stumbled to my walker, which Judy had placed out of reach so I could not stand up without calling for help. I was arranging my tubes and lines and ready to undock the mothership (it's not your mother's IV stand) when Judy herself came in.

"You're up!" She was shocked, but I beat her to the scolding. "I'm going to tell those nurses to pipe down. This is a hospital, not a party!" Judy saw the justice of this and said she would go herself. She even forgot that I had been practically AWOL. The noise level dropped and my pain level climbed, until it felt like every muscle in my left leg was spastic, though it might have been an artifact of a nerve irritation. I couldn't lie still. They had my legs spread apart by a thing like an enormous cheese wedge, no relieving elevation, no room to move.

I was imagining a long night of gritting my teeth when in walks Catherine — baggy pants, t-shirt, long graying hair. An old hippie! I'm saved! The first thing she did was unhook me from the IV, which was only pumping fluid that I did not need. I told her the problem and she went to try to get an order from the doctor. He didn't answer.

At a certain point, I could no longer lie in the bed, and my walker and I went to the nurses' station. I had realized finally what I needed was something specific for nerve pain, and I told her exactly what and how much. I leaned on my walker by the nurses' station looking like the Ghost of Christmas Past, waiting for a response from the doctor. I watched Catherine struggle with the computer system with only grudging help from the younger clique and gathered she was a registry nurse.

Finally, I stumbled back to my room and Catherine followed soon after. She had been unable to order the required drugs in the required dosages using the computer, so rather than make me wait, she went to the cupboard to see what they had and was able to make up the right dose by cutting one pill in half and getting two of the other. A nurse that used her head! A nurse that told the computer to get fucked when it wasn't helpful. An independent-minded American nurse!

The best thing about being in the hospital is that you get to leave — on your feet or in a pine box. By the time I left, I didn't much care how. I'm home now. My leg is fine. Tends to swell, but I can walk up a storm and the weird pain never came back. I bought a couple of decent years of walking around making trouble, and if some of the nurses thought I was a problem and a mystery, a couple thought I was a model of guts and strength. I hope someone fixes our hospitals, particularly by reintroducing the good old Western values of privacy, independence and autonomy for patients, to the extent that it's clinically feasible, before I go in for the next surgery.

Crankily,
Sirenita Lake

Well, darling, great to hear you're still able to live up to your reputation as a TroubleMaker. Hopefully Milagrito has all he needs by way of cat treats so that he will soon be inspired to write a rantish sort of post. La Casa de Los Gatos appears to be suffering a bout of sleeping sickness brought on by gimpy limbs and autumnish weather and pain meds. At last count, stretched out sleeping around the foot of the bed, Zingiber, Madu, Gustav, Gojira. Bandicoot's probably outside gathering baby slugs to use as belly decor. He's SO not into piercings. Maybe we'll make him blog.

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Economy: Milagrito's Analysis

The Miracle of Finance
My friend Icebox brought this quote, attributed to Fraser Tytler, to my attention:

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

1. From bondage to spiritual faith;
   
2. From spiritual faith to great courage;
   
3. From courage to liberty;
   
4. From liberty to abundance;
   
5. From abundance to complacency;
   
6. From complacency to apathy;
   
7. From apathy to dependence;
   
8. From dependence back into bondage.

This quote is compelling (though it's not clear whether Tytler, an 18th century literary translation theorist, said it) as it seems to provide a clear explanation of why great nations fall: the growth of the welfare state. Of course, not every democracy is a great civilization and not every great civilization is a democracy. You would also need ignore other influences, such as war and natural disaster, as well as the fact that some people remain in poverty throughout the lifespan of a nation.

Nevertheless, you feel intuitively that this guy Tytler is on to something. You've seen this cycle in families, where the grandparents started with nothing, the parents worked hard to secure their place in society, and the kids are spoiled brats. However, the greatest appeal of this quote is to fiscal conservatives, as it seems to prove their point: the government should not help people. Only by letting people — or companies — sink or swim on their own can we avoid the fatal step of dependency, and the subsequent slide into bondage.

I do see our society bouncing around between complacency, apathy and dependence, though we are not quite the lotus eaters that the theory assumes. Society experiences waves of fear and anguish as well, our working class still has a foundation of ambition and determination, compassion and engagement are visible in the political activity of the young. The average person has their greedy, lazy moments, and also their inspired, committed, or just plain dogged years of work.

There are events that shake us out of complacency. Did you notice how patriotic and unselfish we all became after 9/11? Sometimes we want to make sacrifices and contribute to the common good. But in the long run, humans face a dilemma: rational economic behavior is not hard-wired in them. On the contrary, their circuitry induces them to act for short-term gain, which, when they were swinging from the trees, was what kept them alive.

People are stranger than cats. Back in the prehistoric days, they were capable of learning that if they ate the fruit and tossed the pit, they would survive for a day, but if they ate the fruit and planted the seed, they would do well in the future. But they had to learn this, and relearn it every generation; it’s not hard-wired. Achieving preservation and increase of resources requires cultural transmission. Once the hard-wired quick-score instinct gets loose, humans bite the hand that feeds them. Look at how farming turned out — somehow, humans have managed to turn agriculture from an exercise in husbandry to a form of rape.

Greed is a funny thing. It doesn't even work for the rapers half the time, and it surely doesn’t work for the rest of us. It creates structures (such as markets in ephemera like bundled mortgage securities) that any cat with an ounce of sense could tell were unstable and bound to crash. Then when the loud noise happens, everybody runs away at the same time, thereby making sure that the building and the people in it perish completely. Then come the scavengers. In the current scenario, these are the short-sellers, who make money from stocks going down and apparently, through their enthusiastic bets that the market is going down, can actually make the market go down.

So what happened to the idea that you could plant a seed and nurture it? When communities are so large that we cannot influence each other and promote this idea, and when there are a variety of opinions, cultural subgroups and emotional types throughout society, I can only think of one solution, one that causes a lot of pain to my independent and Republicat friends: you need law as the agent of cultural transmission. The only thing large and powerful enough to provide the needed regulation and control is the federal government.

As I get older, I get more frustrated and tired of human mistakes. Since my predecessor, Wilbur, lived in the 70s, there has been a steady decline in wise economic policy and respect for human rights by our government. However, I still think that we can promote a kind of government that provides the cultural transmission of ideas that would happen naturally in small communities. It’s our only alternative, or else we really are at Tytler’s seventh step. The government has to embrace principles that promote stability, different principles than it now represents. The government needs to focus on preserving and nurturing of our economic resources, making slow gains rather than providing scope for people to do anything at all for a short-term profit. The government needs to rein in the exploiters for the benefit of us all.

If this idea sounds like socialism, please refer to the Old Testament and the rules about fallowing land, leaving ears of corn for the gleaners, and not exploiting one’s neighbors economically. (Remember, before I was a presidential candidate, I was the Feline Pope-in-exile, so I’m never wrong about these things.) It would take several books to outline all the steps the government should take, so I’ll just mention a couple of things that I’m doing.

I’m communicating with my government. I meowed at Barney’ Frank’s congressional Banking Services Committee. They are very involved with the fate of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and I feel strongly that these companies should not be targeted for destruction. The notion that you hear over and over, that the taxpayers would be paying the investors, is a false one. All the government needs to do is to lend these companies the money to tide them over, while suspending interest payments to bond holders and dividends to stockholders, and eventually the companies would find their feet.

There’s a reason why I feel the government has a moral obligation to help out Fannie and Freddie. We used to have banking rules created to prevent the kind of get-rich-quick schemes that got the country into so much trouble in 1929. Starting with Ronald Reagan and most prominently under George W. Bush, the government repealed the rules that would have prevented the subprime mortgage crisis. Now, the Bushies want to destroy Fannie and Freddie, not because they are badly managed or bad for the economy, but, I suspect, as a way of transferring wealth to their rich friends. The Bushies say that the private sector can do the job of providing mortgages to the working class better. Hello? It was the private sector, not Fannie and Freddie, that created the subprime mess.

I’m also proposing a rule change in what’s called disclosure law. I got this idea from Hattie, when she asked why anyone would sign up for a loan they could not afford. The answer is, because they didn’t know they couldn’t afford it. Most defaults leading to the current crisis happened because borrowers did not know how high their payments could go. Disclosure laws make banks tell borrowers the truth about their credit terms. You’ve probably sat on top of Visa bills that have all that verbiage on the back. That’s all disclosures.

A terrible gap in the law exists in mortgages. When you get an adjustable rate mortgage, one that can go up and down (mostly up), the bank or mortgage broker doesn’t have to tell you the maximum possible payment, even though they know it, only the initial payment. Lenders always say they can’t tell you what your payment will be after it adjusts, but that's an evasion. They may not know exactly what your payment will be in a year, but they can calculate the maximum payment and any payment in between your initial rate and the maximum, and they can tell you how soon you could be liable for the maximum payment. I saw a letter in the Times today complaining that Americans’ math skills led to the mortgage crisis (the writer was a physicist), but honestly, who can calculate a mortgage payment without special training?

Then I got a brilliant idea (all my ideas are brilliant, that's why you should vote for me) and started working on a modest proposal for Barney's committee. I downloaded a sample loan document from the Fannie Mae site and I'm reworking it so it shows a borrower what their loan payment might go up to. I ran my idea past several humans. I asked, “If you knew your loan could adjust up to $4000 a month, from $2000, would you still want the loan?” Everybody said “NO!” This is the sort of information the banks should have given borrowers in the first place. It would have prevented the mess. I am telling my government that I want a rule that makes the banks tell people honestly what they’re getting into.

I am also investing. Am I rich? Certainly not. I have an investment budget of around $34.17, so my investments are really symbolic, a way to put my money where my mouth is, not to mention doing the opposite of what the headless chickens on Wall Street are doing. I am looking at financial companies that are strong, with reasonable debt, earnings, and less risky positions, but whose stock price went down because of the overall panic.

I bought Goldman Sachs and American Express and Bank of America at sale prices. I'm looking at Wells Fargo. I should have scored with Fannie Mae, too, because they were a well-managed company with zillions of houses for collateral, who actually refused to get deep into the subprime market. But I am not wasting time feeling sorry for myself over that. I'm worrying about all the working people who won't be able to buy houses if the Bushies kill Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.



Note: ThePoliticalCat is currently posting Milagrito's pieces because Milagrito's Opposable-thumbed Slave has not yet had time to activate her keys to La Casa de Los Gatos. All Milagrito's posts are reflective of Milagrito's opinions alone, although these may or may not be shared, in whole or in part, by other residents of La Casa de Los Gatos.

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Meta: New Blogger Joins La Casa de Los Gatos

Please welcome Milagrito and his charming friend and companion Sirenita Lake to our ranks. Milagrito, with the assistance of Sirenita Lake, writes on varied topics, from finance to health care to legislative issues affecting his state (of California, not of mind). Since he lacks opposable thumbs, Sirenita Lake is instrumental in conveying his thoughts to the masses.

Milagrito, already a powerful political figure as the Feline Pope in Exile, has also decided to toss his hat in the Presidential race ring, as it were. He is campaigning on a platform understood by cats (and their hoominz) everywhere:




Sirenita Lake is not pictured here, preferring to remain in teh background. She is working hard on Milagrito's campaign.

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