Question 21 a Catch-22 No Longer

Maybe it wasn't exactly a catch-22 but either way question 21 on standard form 86, Questionnaire for National Security Positions, no longer exists. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates quietly removed it last week in an attempt to encourage more military combat veterans to seek mental health help.

Question 21, which Mr. Gates called infamous, asked:

In the last 7 years, have you consulted with a mental health professional (psychiatrist, psychologist, counselor, etc.) or have you consulted with another health care provider about a mental health related condition?

Veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have been reluctant to seek help for depression and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) because they are afraid that doing so will endanger their future employment prospects by making them ineligible for the highest levels of government security clearance.

The military and veterans affairs still have a long way to go before their treatment of soldiers' mental health meets modern standards but eliminating question 21 and the fear and stigma associated with having to answer it is a big step in the right direction.

Morning Edition had a nice piece on Friday, and the Washington Post had coverage with online extras as well, followed by an editorial this (Monday) morning.

Here is the initial video report from the military's own Pentagon Channel (more coverage):



(more coverage here and here)

A Taste of Orzo

So I’ve been in Italy since February. My mother already knows all about the exciting/stressful series of events that brought me from one continent to another and, since I’m pretty sure she’s the only one reading this, I’m not going to bother catching you up. Instead I’m going to write about the holy grail of caffeine consumers: Italian coffee.

Before you say to yourself: “wait, the last time this woman wrote about coffee, she was expounding the joys of Nescafe…” let me just explain two things about Italian caffeine intake.

First: Italians aren’t obsessed with coffee. I haven’t met any that drink more than 2 – 3 a day. Most commonly Italians drink a latte or a cappuccino in the morning and that’s it until maybe an espresso after dinner every once in a while. And let me stress that the portions are much, much smaller; we’re talking about a couple of tablespoons of coffee in a big cup of hot milk here.

Americans have a different set of ideas and expectations about Italian coffee than Italians do. There are bars full of people drinking cappuccinos and lattes all afternoon in the piazzas in Florence, and they’re almost overwhelmingly tourists.

All of the foreigners I meet gush about how good the food/coffee is here. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about the coffee. I just think you could hand a tourist a foul, totally off cup of coffee (maybe Nescafe) and because they’re in Italy it would be transformed into a spectacular liquid joy.

Second: Orzo. What, you might ask, is orzo? Orzo is the Italian word for barley, or Hordeum vulgare. In Italy, it’s roasted, ground up and steeped to produce a dark, coffee like substance that many people drink in the morning as a substitute. I believe that it was widely used during WWII as a coffee alternative because the actual stuff was unavailable.

Why are Italians drinking burned grain product? I don’t get it. I tried some, in the spirit of scientific inquiry, and it tasted pretty much like it smelled. I felt like I was drinking a cup of whole wheat toast that had been cooked until it was just barely shy of being a lump of charcoal. Mmmm, nutty.

Beware the Powertics

I love comic strips, especially when they manage to have a deeper meaning while making me laugh. I enjoy them even more when they step up and take on current events, particularly political ones.

The first time I remember becoming aware of this phenomena was back in the good old days when Bubba was in the White House and Opus called Bloom County home. I think it was a pretty formative and mind bending experience when Bill the Cat knocked up Socks.

Berkley Breathed continues to really just not give a crap, and in a beautifully opulent way he goes where others fear to tread and gets a laugh from it to boot. You can check out Opus' latest adventures on Salon as well as in many Sunday Funnies sections.

Doonesbury deserves its own posting. Really you should just try and find all of them and read them straight through, it'd really be fascinating. I recently picked up an abridged compilation of the first four or five years that really lets you see where the major characters are coming from if you haven't been following the strip since its inception. Doonesbury is in short awesome, always timely and up to date, fearlessly political and often hilarious.

Today's Non Sequitur is a great example of how it stays poignant. The series with Danae and Lucy the Pony and her family certainly deserves mention here, but I enjoy the random Far Side-ish strips like today's even more. (When Non Sequitur first came on the scene I certainly viewed it as a Far Side knock-off and not a terribly good one either. The strip has evolved really nicely and is now one of my few daily reads)



All others aside my favorite strip these days is Get Fuzzy (in a certain way I consider it an heir to Calvin & Hobbes) and this week Rob and the boys have once again dipped their toes into the proverbial political pool. Bucky, as can be expected, is on the warpath and he wants to talk some powertics.

Does Democracy Account For America's Astounding Imprisonment Rates?

There were several surprising headlines on the the front page of the New York Times this morning. If you're into opera, or music in general I suppose, the lead tenor at the Met hit nine high C's in a single aria and then did it all again. Oh and America has about one twentieth of the world's population but nearly one quarter of its prisoners.

Now I knew that the US locked criminals up at an astonishingly high rate, and that the US had the highest incarceration rate on the planet (turns out we lock up 1 out of every 100 adults) but I had no idea that the US had, simply, the most prisoners of any country, and by a lot mind you.

According to the article the US today has nearly 2.3 million people behind bars, second place you may have guessed goes to China. But did you also guess that they're almost a million inmates behind? If you took all of the prisoners in Russia and added them to all of the prisoners in China you'd pass the US's count, but just barely.

The article is shocking, and well worth a look (it also has another great interactive graphic from the Times). It offers a few insights into how the US came to be in this situation.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Locking people up for bouncing a check or being addicted to drugs isn't something that any other civilized countries do (not that many uncivilized ones do either for that matter). But our dedication to democracy may also be to blame.

Most state court judges and prosecutors in the United States are elected and are therefore sensitive to a public that is, according to opinion polls, generally in favor of tough crime policies. In the rest of the world, criminal justice professionals tend to be civil servants who are insulated from popular demands for tough sentencing.

You better be tough on crime if you want to get elected around here. Or better yet, you better appear tough on crime - watch the third season of the Wire for a great contemporary example.

So be good out there boys and girls, don't bounce any checks now.

More Web Fun

Once again I find myself thinking that some people have entirely too much time on their hands. Hey at least this guy is getting creative with it.

Some friends sent this one my way, so thank them and then kick back and enjoy yourself for a few minutes. After all you probably deserve it.


Animator vs. Animation by *alanbecker on deviantART

Yeah yeah, 5 million people have watched this already and you might well be one of them. If so was it worth watching it again?

From His Cold Dead Hands

Charlton Heston died this week. He was known to many as a great actor, who portrayed Moses and Ben Hur, who discovered that Sloylent Green is people, and who uttered among other memorable lines "Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!"

It is for a very different line and an appearance that Mr. Heston made not on the silver screen but in real life that he will be most remembered by many Americans particularly among our younger generations.

Mr. Heston will forever be associated with, as he used to put it, five words- "From my cold dead hands."



Immortalized in Michael Moore's documentary Bowling for Columbine, Mr. Heston spat forth those five words as a taunt to the community and its citizens who had asked him not to hold a pro-gun National Rifle Association rally in nearby Denver, just ten days after the massacre at Columbine High School.

(pertinent section begins at 5:00)



Mr. Heston we're here for your guns.

Best. Story Corps. Ever.

Thats right folks, a really great Story Corps from NPR. Normally when they come on these days I sort of zone out, or sometimes wonder why I'm hearing some inane story from some old lady-which I'm sure is a beautiful and touching moment for her and her family-but come on its six something AM and I have Morning Edition on for the news.

These days I only hear Story Corps on Fridays (it ran everyday when I lived in Connecticut last year, it probably still does) and I missed this one on air. Much to my chagrin I came across it somewhere online (I don't remember where, sorry whoever you are), can you imagine how great it would have been to hear this story while getting ready to face the day?

Well you do have to know the story to imagine hearing it while searching for a clean shirt. The short version goes like this: This guy, Julio Diaz, gets mugged leaving the subway up in the city (yes thats what we call NY in DC), offers the kid his coat too, ends up having dinner with his assailant, tells the kid he has to pay seeing as how he's stolen Julio's wallet , ends up getting the wallet back and buying the kid the meal and giving him twenty bucks for his knife. Not a bad evening of social work.

Seriously though, listen to the actual story, its worth the time.