Blood sugar sex magick

Turbulent times these days. My blood sugar soared over the past few months, unfortunately nothing new. My dietetic negligence caught up with me, knocked me down and sat on my chest for a while. What was new was that reforming and climbing back on the diet wagon had no discernible effect on my glucose readings. This was frustrating, to say the least.

My doctor gave me some encouragement and a choice: he could prescribe some short-acting insulin in addition to my already substantial dose of long-acting insulin, or I could try to bring things in line with diet. I chose diet, and braced for a grim commitment. I’ve done this before.

My doctor recommended the Paleo Diet, which I had heard of but knew nothing about. He described it to me and told me that it made sense to him biochemically. He and his wife are on it. I went home and Googled it. There’s a wealth of information out there about it, much of it conflicting, but I found the Paleolithic Diet Page to be a big help. And of course I ordered a used copy of the book. I got the basics from the Web and began incorporating as many of the principles as I could.

Then my vision blurred. Badly. I wear bifocals, and I could only drive if I looked through the bottom half of the lenses. Forget reading a book or a computer screen. I went to an optometrist, got a new prescription and ordered a pair of glasses. He gave me some contacts to wear in the meantime. After about a week, I noticed that I didn’t need cheaters to see small type, and things in the distance were blurry again. My blood sugar was lower, but still fluctuating.

When my new glasses arrived, I found that they corrected my near vision beautifully — I could read the small print on the face of my watch! Unfortunately, anything beyond six feet from my nose was a blur. I mentioned this when I picked up my glasses from the optometrist, but they dismissed my concerns with a wave of the hand. “You just need to get used to them,” the technician said, beaming.

Right.

I noticed as I drove to an appointment in a town 25 miles away that I couldn’t really read the street signs. When I got indoors, my vision was so blurry my head hurt. After my appointment, night had fallen and it was raining. I got behind the wheel and the nightmare began. What I saw through my wet windshield might have been a collaboration between Claude Monet and Salvador Dali. My eyes burned and my head felt as if it might explode.

Today I visited the eye doctor again. He was clearly irritated with me, but agreed to replace the lenses with the prescription I now need. My blood sugar read normal just a few hours ago and I’ve been observing a strict diet and exercise regimen, so maybe my vision will stabilize.

I’m not really in a position yet to comment on how effective the diet is. It takes some diligence to follow. I’ve been clean today: no dairy, no grains. Taking it one day at a time.

The details

Once again, Sidney Blumenthal draws on phenomenal access to inside information and blends it with Robert Draper’s biography of Bush to paint a devastating and frightening portrait of a president in denial, in over his head, out of touch with reality and proud of it.

Blumenthal quotes one passage from Draper’s book that is particularly illuminating:

“History would acquit him, too. Bush was confident of that, and of something else as well,” writes Draper. “Though it was not the sort of thing one could say publicly anymore, the president still believed that Saddam had possessed weapons of mass destruction. He repeated this conviction to Andy Card all the way up until Card’s departure in April 2006, almost exactly three years after the Coalition had begun its fruitless search for WMDs.”

This explains so much. I’ve often wondered if Bush really believed the WMD line or if he was a willing participant in cynical manipulation. Finding out that he really believed it, and apparently still does, now strikes me as the more depressing of the two possibilities.

Chait’s ‘The Conscience of a Liberal’

Paul Krugman makes many interesting points in his review. I particularly liked this one:

Second, Jon talks at some length about the media, and in particular about the Republican ability to get journalists to harp endlessly on supposed character flaws of Democrats, while their own candidates get a free pass. He emphasizes the right-wing echo chamber, but there’s more to it than that. It’s also – as I can report from my own experience – a result of asymmetrical intimidation. Quite simply, if you point out character flaws in a conservative, there will be an all-out effort, involving major media as well as blogs and talk radio, to discredit and ruin you, personally. This just doesn’t happen on the other side.

So journalists feel that it’s safe to ridicule Democrats, even if the supposed character-defining episode never happened; they choke up and shy away when it comes to Republicans. That’s why even the most grotesque stuff, like Giuliani’s claim that he’s a rescue worker too, or Romney’s remark that his sons are serving the country by helping him become president, doesn’t get picked up.

Interesting. Nauseating, but interesting.

More Jack Goldsmith

Slate has another fascinating excerpt of Jack Goldsmith’s The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration. Goldsmith describes meeting with two FBI agents in a cafe on Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass. They were there to serve him with a subpoena as part of the investigation into the leaking of the secret NSA warrantless-wiretapping program to James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times.

“We wanted to serve you in person as a favor because we expected you’d be mad,” Doe said. “We believe you told us the truth,” he added, assuring me that he did not suspect me as the source of the leak. He said he was not sure why the lawyers at the Justice Department had decided to subpoena me, but he suspected it was because of my contact with Lichtblau.

******

What angered me most about the subpoena I received on that wet day in Cambridge was not the expense of lawyers or a possible perjury trap, but rather the fact that it was Alberto Gonzales’ Justice Department that had issued it. As Doe and Smith knew, I had spent hundreds of very difficult hours at OLC, in the face of extraordinary White House resistance, trying to clean up the legal mess that then-White House Counsel Gonzales, David Addington, John Yoo, and others had created in designing the foundations of the Terrorist Surveillance Program. It seemed rich beyond my comprehension for a Gonzales-led Department of Justice to be pursuing me for possibly illegal actions in connection with the Terrorist Surveillance Program, I told the two wide-eyed FBI agents in Harvard Square.

Gotta get this book.

Carbondale After Dark

H. B. Koplowitz grew up in Carbondale and watched the Strip on Illinois Avenue evolve in the 1960s. He wandered around the country for a while, venturing out to the Pacific Northwest, cutting himself off from everything familiar in the hope that this would develop his character. Perhaps it did. He returned to Carbondale. “I crash landed in my parents’ driveway,” he wrote later.

In 1982 he published a book, Carbondale After Dark. They were sold in a couple of places around town and I snagged a couple of copies. The writing spans a long period in Koplowitz’s life. He wrote some of it as a teenager, but he wrote the history of the Strip much later in life, pounding it out on a manual typewriter while living in a geodesic dome once owned and occupied by R. Buckminster Fuller.

Koplowitz’s book captures some seminal events in Carbondale’s history, such as the campus riots over the Vietnam War and the shootings at Kent State, and there are compelling photographs of the national guard occupying Carbondale and a massive throng of students marching down the strip, led by a guy named “Anteater” on a Harley. That one was taken on May 6, 1970. I was just finishing the first grade.

The books disappeared somewhere, but I often thought about them. Apparently I wasn’t the only one. Copies of the book began appearing on eBay for much more than their original sale price. Intrigued by this, Koplowitz decided to print some more copies and held a contest to determine who would write a new foreword. SIU alumnus Dennis Franz won.

First editions are still selling on eBay for $120.

I had intended to embed a Youtube video promoting the book here, but embedding was disabled. So I’ll just provide a link and invite you to click on through.

Jack Goldsmith on ‘Fresh Air’

Yesterday Terry Gross interviewed Jack Goldsmith, former head of the White House OLC, on her public radio show. Goldsmith is now a Harvard law professor. He was discussing his book The Terror Presidency: Judgment and the Law Inside the Bush Administration. I found some of the interview, such as the part concerning the “torture memos,” truly horrifying.

Writing? Typing? Masterpiece or ‘bucket of foamy word-slop’?

People are still arguing the merits of On the Road. Kerouac was bold, confident and original. He was also a shiftless, financially unsophisticated and sometimes violent alcoholic. His work continues to sell and to inspire many young writers.

Lots of new books. For people who read them, about people who don’t…

Where to begin? There are many good books coming out. I’m particularly eager to read Robert Draper’s Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush, for which digby has provided provocative commentary. And now we have The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration by Jack Goldsmith, former head of the White House Office of Legal Counsel. He clashed with David Addington, Vice President Cheney’s Constitution-shredding chief legal adviser, and eventually resigned.

“Why don’t we just go to Congress and get it to sign off on the whole detention program?” I asked, explaining that the Supreme Court would have a much harder time striking down a wartime detention program that had Congress’ explicit support. Clement concurred, as did John Bellinger, Condoleezza Rice’s legal adviser, and Department of Defense general counsel Jim Haynes. Those men had made this argument before. They had always been shot down, just as I was about to be.

“Why are you trying to give away the president’s power?” Addington responded. He believed that the very act of asking for Congress’ help would imply, contrary to the White House line, that the president needed legislative approval and could not act on his own. The president’s power would diminish, Addington thought, if Congress declined its support once asked, especially if it tried to restrict presidential power in some way. Congress had balked, during the month after 9/11, at giving the president everything he had asked for in the congressional authorization to use force and the Patriot Act. Things would only be worse in 2004 and beyond, Addington believed.

Slate has an excerpt.