Howzit Howard

Are medical news stories harmful to your health?

The World Health Organization has made a more or less official decision that cell phones might possibly cause cancer even though researchers have tried for years to prove it without success.

The story has gotten huge coverage worldwide because 5 billion people carry cell phones and it might possibly matter to them.

But let me tell you the story in my own way and then you can evaluate the risk for yourself.

The World Health Organization has a specific list of categories for pigeonholing carcinogens, noncarcinogens, and possible carcinogens.

It has pigeonholed cell phones being held against your ear as a possible carcinogen because one study shows a possible link with glioma, a kind of cancer in your head that is not very common.

The determination has clearly been made with an abundance of caution because numerous other studies, including at least one that tracked tens of thousands of people, found no brain cancer link.

When you read the different categories you'll see the WHO researchers more or less had to put cell phones on this particular list, not because of any fresh concern but for bureaucratic reasons - no other list fits.

The most telling thing about research on cell phone use is this: researchers all over the world are trying to find a link between cell phones and cancer and if there is one it should be obvious by now since cell phone use has exploded worldwide and we've had hundreds of millions of people using cell phones a lot for years.

The response to that by people who are convinced there is a link anyhow is that it must show itself slowly and we'll see an epidemic of brain tumors in 10 or 20 years.

 I follow pretty closely any research into health problems tied to electricity, partly because I've spent a lifetime working in broadcasting and years working in close proximity to radio transmitters.

From 1972 to 1975 I worked at a desk that was in the transmitter room - I could lean back and rest my head on the glass window of the transmitter, and the tower was just outside, a couple hundred yards from the building. I always wondered if that caused the pea-shaped bump on the back of my scalp, which I had removed a few years ago (benign, thanks for asking) and which has not grown back.

My mother died of a brain tumor, the existence of which was unknown to us until it began causing facial twitches and stroke symptoms. She died three months to the day after the doctors gave her three months. This is not an impersonal matter for me.

I also know that data can be fiddled. Studies of the health effects of high-tension power lines managed to play down any possible effects by calculating data in a circle around a power source, when any electrician can tell you the effects, if any, would probably be confined to a more narrow area where the polarity was just right.

But apart from a statistically suspicious incidence of childhood leukemia really close to power lines, researchers spent years, decades even, trying to find a connection between power lines and serious disease without ever quite nailing it.

So even though humans are notorious for playing down the risks of anything they deal with on a daily basis, I've got to tell you that I'm starting to wonder if the electrical industry is right in saying cell phones are, because of the very low amounts of current involved, safe to use.

Eric Barnouw, in his three-volume history of U.S. broadcasting "A Tower in Babel," wrote that when radio was new a farmer wrote to complain that one of his cows died and he thought some radio waves had struck it. The farmer wrote the letter in the 1920s. I read the book in the 1970s. I wonder if, a couple decades hence, we'll laugh at our worries about wireless devices, or the studies that told us now that we're too serious.

For now, I feel safe in saying the greatest risk of cell phones is that you'll be t-boned running a red light while distracted by a cell phone call.

What, exactly, is "civilized"?

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who just hosted a gathering of captains of Internet industry in Paris, has called for a more "civilized" Internet.

While it is always desirable to have civility praised by someone of Sarkozy's stature (reportedly 5'5" - and I mention this to tease the geese, as the French say, because he Goes to great lengths to conceal his lack of, uh, great lengths) one can't help but wonder what, precisely, Sarkozy regards as civilized.

Sarkozy doesn't measure up to Dominique Strauss-Kahn in the philandering department, but he's on his third marriage and has had an affair from time to time, and allegedly forced out the head of the magazine Paris Match for publishing an item about an ex-wife's similar proclivities.

So Sarkozy's call for online civility raises questions about censorship, which is anything but civilized, even though one should spare at least a little sympathy for Sarkozy and his current wife, who have lately had their feathers ruffled by Twitter chatter of affairs by each of them.

France, of course, has a long history of tolerating uncivilized behavior by great men. Claude Debussy slept around so much that not one but two of his lovers attempted suicide - Paul Gauguin quit his job as a stockbroker and abandoned his wife and children to move to the tropics.

France hasn't got a monopoly on that sort of thing. Don't get me started on Wagner. But I digress.

The fact is that a lot of calls for a more civilized Internet do in fact mean a more censored cyberspace. China has always pretended its online censorship is merely an attempt to keep licentious Western content from the eyes of sensitive Sinotots.

There are legal issues, too, including piracy - China has never seemed to have a much of a problem with online piracy, so much of which originates in China - and copyright violation - Sarkozy unsuccessfully sued a maker of Sarkozy voodoo dolls claiming he had a right to his own image - in most countries including France and the United States, copyright law makes explicit "fair use" exceptions for both news coverage and parody.

So when the rich and powerful talk about fencing in the Internet to make it civilized, they often are talking about controlling the content themselves, which has little to do with being civil.

But what of actual civility and its lack? What about the nasty stuff we all see in cyberspace?

It's not the Internet. It's civilization. "We used to be such a classy bunch," said the mole in "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" to a colleague and former friend whose wife he bedded.

Maybe this is the time to trot out the line, "Be the change you wish to see."

The Internet will be civilized when, and to the extent, that we are.

 

What do you want to save in Honolulu that's old?

Joni Mitchell's famous line is "they paved Paradise and put up a parking lot," but just before that she sings an older sentiment, that we don't know what we've got till it's gone.

There is a clear reason for this and it's something we can change, but it requires a collective willingness to do some homework and think strategically.

There are wins and losses in the game of saving what we feel is part of our paradise. "Save Sandy Beach" succeeded. The hotel proposed there was defeated and it looks like we've got a good shot of saving a little bit of rugged wilderness from Sandy Beach to Makapu'u Point forever. Excellent.

Wow. I'm looking a huge frigate bird floating over Wild West Waikiki. He seems to be eyeing the fish in the Ala Wai. Now... where was I?

Sometimes we drop the ball. The grand old organ and the beautiful theater front in Waikiki were removed with almost no objection (the Palace Theatre in Hilo got the organ, fortunately).

The Natatorium, we have been told, is beyond repair. Everyone would like to save it, but it may not be feasible. There are sixtysomething locals who can remember learning to swim there and being warned not to touch bottom because of the erosion of the facility, and that was in the 1960s.

The underused Queen Liliuokalani Elementary was rightly closed - we should spend school funds on students, not buildings, and keeping every underused school open for the convenience of neighborhood parents is a disservice to the many more students attending other schools, diverting money that should really be spent on education. But the good news is that the historic building will be saved, as it should.

More cherished landmarks and scenic areas would be saved were it not for the fact that almost no one makes an effort to save them until there is a group ready to do the opposite.

It would be easier for citizens, easier for officials, even easier for developers, if we could identify what we care about before there are development plans, and get those places set clearly off-limits.

The North Shore has a number of tracts of land like this. You do gore someone's ox if they hope to sell their land for a lot of money one day so the new owner can develop it - but the goring is more merciful than if you wait until they have a purchase agreement in hand.

And at such an early stage you are more likely to be able to enlist allies. In the case of the North Shore you can probably find allies among adjacent land owners, including the Army, which has forthrightly confirmed its own interest in the least possible development adjacent to its lands up on the hills.

A peculiar but wonderful aspect of life in Hawaii is that there are sound business reasons for business people to be tree huggers. So long as a particular hotel owner isn't itself committed to a development project, it has a vested interest in preserving scenic tracts. The key is to build the coalition early so you're not fighting a lot of money.

What would you like to save?

Music Post: He made such an Impression on Debussy and Ravel

Gabriel Faure isn't as famous a fin de siecle French composer, but without him we might not have had either Debussy or Ravel. At a bombastic time for classical music, Faure made the world safe for music that's quiet and composers that don't pontificate.

Faure entered music the way some children used to enter monasteries. Born May 12, 1845 near the French border with Spain, he showed musical talent early and his father, on the advice or others, sen him to Paris for musical education.

Faure became a student boarding at the newly-founded School of Classical and Religious Music and stayed there living under almost monastic conditions from the age of nine until he was 20. In his teen years the founder of the school died and Faure's new composition teacher was Camille Saint-Saens, then in his mid-twenties. They became lifelong friends.

When Faure graduated, he took the first of a series of church organist positions. He was fired from the first post - in the sticks, Brittany - for sneaking out for smokes during services and - the last straw, apparently, showing up for Sunday mass still wearing the clothes he had worn Saturday to party. But he landed on his feet with a post at a church in suburban Paris. He did military service and then taught in Switzerland for awhile.

By his late twenties he was an organist back in Paris working under Charles-Marie Widor, whose rip-roaring Toccata is still played. Saint-Saens was well-connected throughout the Paris art community by now and introduced Faure around. He knew Bizet, Franck, Chambrier, Massenet, Lalo, everybody. There was an engagement in these years, broken off by the woman. Faure married a sculptor's daughter when he was 38 and they had two sons, but there were affairs and Faure eventually formed a closer attachment to one mistress than he had with his wife.

This is a good place to point out a number of interesting contradictions in Faure's life:

• Despite a close friendship with Saint-Saens, who in some accounts is portrayed as gay and possibly a pedophile as well, Faure himself seems to have been a serial heterosexual.
• Despite a tempestuous personal life when you set it down in a few sentences as I'm doing, he seems to have been a quiet, unassuming, likable man.
• Despite earning a living all his life by playing the organ, Faure never composed anything for the instrument and didn't seem even to like it much.
• Despite traveling with Saint-Saens to hear Wagner's "Ring" Cycle, studying it intensely, and even composing a satire on it with Saint-Saens, Faure never showed any sign of Wagner's influence in his own music.

Faure was well-known in French musical circles but he had no international reputation and not all that much standing even in Paris until he was 40. The head of the Paris Conservatory, no supporter of Faure, died. Jules Massenet probably had a lock on the job until he demanded to be appointed for life. The directors appointed Theodore Dubois, a friend of Faure, and Massenet quit in a huff. That left an opening for Massenet's old job as professional of composition. Dubois appointed Faure.

The year was 1896. Claude Debussy was in his early thirties. Maurice Ravel was 21. Faure taught both men, and George Enescu, and Nadia Boulanger, and a whole generation of composers we associate with the 20th century. Faure was staggeringly popular because most music teachers in those days were autocratic and Faure was openminded. Ravel recalled that Faure didn't like Ravel's string quartet, but then a few days later said maybe he was wrong and asked to see it again.

Nine years later there was a scandal at the Conservatory when its top prize was not awarded to Ravel, whose talent was already pretty apparent to everyone. Dubois had to resign and Faure himself became head of the Conservatory. He revolutionized the place. He set up outside judges to handle competitions, provoking the resignations of several ossified professors. Then he introduced both older and newer music to the narrow repertory that had been taught.

In 1909 some younger composers including Ravel founded a rival musical society to counter the main musical society in Paris. Faure accepted the presidency of the upstart group remaining a member of the other one, and remained on good terms with composers on both sides. Tchaikovsky, Elgar, Albeniz, Richard Strauss and even Aaron Copland met and admired Faure. Faure retired in 1920 because he was losing his hearing. He died in 1924 at age 79.

On my Saturday morning radio show, I'll play music by Debussy, Ravel and Charles Tomlinson Griffes that shows the influence of Faure himself and the Faure years at the Paris Conservatory. From Faure himself you'll hear several obscure pieces in the 5 a.m. hour and then, after the news at 6.a.m., two versions of his "Sicilienne," and his "Pavane" back-to-back with Ravel's "Pavane for a Dead Princess."

Hawaii Public Radio airs "Howard's Day Off" live every Saturday morning between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. It is broadcast on KHPR Honolulu, KKUA Wailuku and KANO Hilo and steams live on www.hawaiipublicradio.org. The Howard's Day Off Listener Appreciation Society on Facebook was founded by Max Cacas of Washington, D.C.

 

What the Council on Revenues did: When no news is good news

In the 1882 Gilbert & Sullivan opera "Iolanthe - the Peer and the Peri," immortal fairies clash with the British House of Peers. In one song it is sung that in times of crisis the House of Peers "did nothing, and did it extremely well." The Council on Revenues did likewise this week as it met to review the latest economic data and concluded it would not change its forecast for the current or coming fiscal years.

No news is good news, indeed, because any worsening of the numbers in the forecast, the official basis of all Hawaii state government budgets, could have forced state lawmakers into emergency session, creating fresh opportunities for higher taxes, cuts to state programs, or both. Instead, the Council on Revenues is sticking to its prediction that the current fiscal cycle will end June 30 with a shortfall of 1.6% and the next one starting July 1 will have 11% more tax revenue to work with.

Let's be clear. The eggheads on the Council, the best and the brightest of economists in Hawaii, are not predicting the economy will grow 11% in 12 months. This has to do with an accounting trick done a year ago by Gov. Lingle and the Legislature. They delayed paying tax refunds from 2009 - ordinarily paid by June, until July, pushing refund payments from the 2009-2010 fiscal year to the 2010-2011 fiscal year that we're in now.

This made the last budget cycle, 2009-2010, look less severe than it really was, reducing pressure to do more state employee furloughs including actual layoffs. But it also meant that throughout the current budget cycle, 2010-2011, the state government couldn't touch part of the revenue it was collecting, that revenue having been used for the late refunds. Gov. Abercrombie decided not to repeat this accounting gimmick, with the result that the current budget cycle ends 1.6% in the red, but it means a lot more money will be available in the next cycle, 11% more.

I guess you could call that a gimmick, too, since it suggests more economic growth than there actually will be, but Abercrombie is at no loss for critics after that remarkable contract agreement with HGEA and doesn't need me piling on. So what can be said about the economy itself?

That it's really sturdy, considering what it's been through. Let's not forget that the forecast the Council on Revenues did in March, the one it stuck with today, was literally issued the same day as the big earthquake in Japan. Council Chairman Paul Brewbaker drove home from the meeting and turned on the TV to find Hawaii under a tsunami alert. Some things you can't forecast, I don't care how many spreadsheets you look at.

I checked the state arrivals by air count as of today, and Japanese arrivals so far this month are still down 24%, yet visitor traffic as a whole remains within a fraction of last year, with visitor spending up quite a lot, much more than inflation. Hotels are getting away with charging 10% more than last year even during slow weeks (as the last three weeks were, on neighbor islands) and many of our visitors are staying more days than usual, which means the raw visitor count doesn't entirely convey how much things are improving.

Considering that the quake and the waves sent Japan back into recession (earlier in the week we got word of a second straight quarter of economic shrinkage in Japan) and gave it the first monthly trade deficit in 31 years - auto parts exports from Japan are a third of normal due to factory damage - and considering that oil spent several weeks over $100 a barrel and is back in that territory today, the continuing recovery of the Hawaii recovery is truly amazing.

 

 

Is this the real reason you're fat?

A third of us are obese, and it's our own damn fault, according to Hollywood, Madison Avenue, Jenny Craig and the company that sells lap bands, which, incidentally, has responded to declining sales with a new ad campaign targeting teenagers.

Like the old story about the guy who assiduously reads the Bible because he's looking for loopholes, we've all hoped someone would discover that some exculpatory evidence. We knew we often snacked, or ate too much, or left out the good foods; yet we saw skinny people doing it, too. Were we really plumping up due entirely to shameful gluttony? Couldn't we blame this on someone else? Even partly? We've seen people try to blame the farm lobby (corn syrup) and the fast-food industry (Ronald McDonald made my kids fat!) and any food company increasing portions.

Because of a personal preference for plumper women - "Real Women Have Curves" should be my family crest - I have always been fascinated by this, even when I was younger and slimmer myself. My personal interest stemmed from the lack of self-esteem of so many of my favorite females, something I felt they didn't deserve. So, yes, I was looking for loopholes. And I noticed early on that doctors, especially thin doctors, were quick to accept any medical finding that supported fatophobia but highly skeptical of anything contrary.

In the past decade this has changed. Several large medical studies shed new light on the situation. Abundant research found that the human body tries to hold onto the weight it has acquired, shedding muscle instead of fat, and lowering metabolic rates, so that most people who lose a lot of weight will regain it with interest. Someone else noticed that the trigger for adult onset diabetes seemed to be, not weight, but lack of activity. Then a large study found that a surprisingly small amount of exercise, like going for a walk every day, gave you most of the health benefits of all the strenuous exercise you're too fat to manage.

Pulling all of this together, many doctors have begun telling their fat patients to stop wrecking their health with fad diets and, instead, eat more vegetables and climb some stairs every day. This works better than you might think. When you start eating your vegetables, you crave fewer foods of other sorts. And the body works more to digest vegetables, lowering blood sugar. 

Now comes a new study that adds a diabolical new angle to the exercise part of this. 

The New York Times, citing a study published in an obscure scientific journal this week, reports that in 1960 half of all jobs required moderate exercise, but now only 20% do. This translates to an average 120 to 140 daily calories not burned, enough to account for the entire collective weight gain of the nation since 1960. This will delight Ronald McDonald, who can now say, hey, I told you it wasn't my fault!

But apart from that, this is a new piece of the puzzle, suggesting that we really need to work even the smallest bit of physical movement back into our daily life.

Enough. I'm going for walk.

Politics makes strange bedsores

The U.S. Senate today defeated Ryancare, with five Republican senators crossing over to join the majority. But the outcome doesn't exactly cover either side in glory. Here are the glory details.

Ryan is Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., a backbencher come to the fore with his proposal to wipe out Medicare in favor of a voucher program supported by block grants. The key to the program is that the block grants are nowhere close to what Medicare pays, so seniors would suddenly find themselves paying thousands of dollars more per year on medicine and health care. The federal government would save trillions per decade - somehow that sounds better than a few hundred billion per year - assuming it did not otherwise have to pay for unintended consequences of seniors suddenly have less health care.

Most experts - though I caution that you arguably cannot be an expert on something that hasn't been tried yet - think that as a practical matter Ryancare would be a boon for the insurance industry because most people would find it cheaper to take out much more health insurance than to wait to get sick and then start writing checks on their fixed income. Would the plan have made some people sicker? Absolutely, and anyone who says different is lying or delusional.

Senator Akaka, among the 57 senators voting nay to a plan already approved in the GOP-controlled House, said the plan puts insurance company profits above the well-being of seniors. AARP Hawaii wasn't an enthusiastic support of Ryancare, either. Actually, five Republican senators voted against it, too, but four of them face re-election battles in mostly blue states and the other one was Rand Paul of Kentucky, who thought the plan didn't cut enough.

A more sensible Kentucky senator, Mitch McConnell, said Democrats have an obligation to come up with their own plan. He's right.

But at this point both parties are putting things off the table that should be on the table. No glory in that, even if it's to be expected in an election campaign.

When penny-wise sounds foolish

How much do you spend on Pay Per View, Kindle or Nook downloads, text-messaging and other telephone services, and MP3s? Is it $20 a month? $30? $40? More than $50?

It's probably more than $50, and if you know, I'll bet you were surprised when you did add it up. If you don't know, that's not surprising. I've just enumerated a variety of things you can spend money on without pulling out your wallet. You just consume these products and forget about the cost.

I know a lot of people who are in high dudgeon about spending few dollars more to fill up the tank, but never give a moment's thought to what they spend on entertainment per month.

The evil genius in online spending is that the individual fees are pretty small and there is no mechanism to remind you as they mount. On the other hand, we remind you every single day what gas costs.

I've often thought that if we priced milk every day, tracking every penny change in it, the legislature would be talking about a milk cap. (We sort of do have a milk cap, requiring regulatory approval of price changes at the dairy level, and it helped drive all but two Big Island dairies out of business.)

Anyway, the point here is that some prices are very much on our minds while we give considerably less thought to others. You can spend on this or you can spend on that. Doo-dah-dippety.

I've noted previously that it's silly to spend $50 grand on a monster SUV that won't fit in most Hawaii parking space and then whine about gas prices.

Another pet peeve is buying food at Costco, Wal-Mart or Sam's Club because it's "cheaper," then returning home with so much food that some of it spoils before you can eat it.

You could buy perfectly good food, sometimes better, in reasonable amounts, by purchasing it for higher unit prices at a regular supermarket. Some people buy more food than they need for cheaper unit prices, try to eat it all, then spend several times their savings on the gym.

My readership tends to be both intelligent and reasonable, so I'll just leave you to your best judgment with two words to tickle your brain on this subject: false economy.

 

Privatizing profits, socializing losses: what's wrong with this picture?

Mitsubishi UFJ Financial is the largest bank in Japan. Katsunori Nagayasu, its president, says there is "something wrong" about the idea that his bank should suffer losses for lending money to Tepco, the power company with the nuclear power plant disaster on its hands.

Nagayasu got some covering fire from the chairman of the Japanese Association of Corporate Executives, who also seemed shocked - shocked! - that the Japanese government is not willing to utterly bail out Tepco and the banks that lent money to it.

"Tepco lenders seem to think they should be allowed to collect every yen they would have received if nothing had happened," writes New York Times columnist Floyd Norris. "Maybe even more, since this could serve as a reason to charge higher interest rates to utilities."

It's the same thinking we encountered after the 2008 financial collapse. Everybody on Wall Street felt entitled to a federal bailout and they seemed quite offended when Washington suggested they take smaller bonuses.

So: do you believe in free markets or don't you? Because it's not a free market if you're innoculated against losses. And this is big boy thinking. Little businesses can sometimes grab some extra cash in the form of grants or special loans designed to stimulate growth of new businesses, but they can still fail, and many do.

Tepco stupidly cut corners on safety. For crying out loud, they put the fuel tanks for back-up cooling systems right at the water's edge where they were the first thing the tsunami hit. Tepco deserves to take a financial hit, perhaps even to go out of business. Any investors that bought Tepco stock, and any bank that lent to Tepco, should take their lumps, too. That is how free markets work.

And if Tepco is bailed out after cutting corners on safety, how much do you think other power companies will spend on safety? When the good guys in the board room are arguing for more spending on safety, they'll be laughed out of the room.

 

 

The true lesson concerning the world ending

By now everyone knows he was wrong, that fool in California who was so convinced the world will end. You may or may not be of the Christian faith yourself but he is, and the Bible quite explicitly says it is not for man to know when the world will end. So he should read that particular book more carefully.

As for everyone else - well, you don't have to be pious to know that you probably won't get a tweet telling you when the world will end. But if we can put the current non-event aside for a moment, there is a lesson for the rest of us here.

Let's set aside for the moment the whole issue of the universe as a whole, and consider your own personal life. Your own life will end one day, and chances are slim that you will get any really specific notice.

Furthermore, modern science usually can't give you much information on how much time you have less except in cases where you have an ailment so severe that it impedes your ability to suddenly do stuff you meant to do earlier, making the advance notice of limited usefulness.

If you're dying and have days left, your loved ones have time to come see you, and if you get a couple years' notice you can make up a bucket list and work on it. Nothing wrong with that. But even a couple years' notice isn't enough time to do something really big.

The point here is that if there is something you always wanted to do, that takes years to accomplish, for goodness sake start now. Even a stopped watch is right twice a day, and sooner or later the world may actually end, even if some witling has predicted it, but quite apart from that there are things you want to do before your own personal world ends.