The Legacy of Barack Obama (Pssst--He's Not the Worst!)

By now you've probably heard about the poll that says Obama is the worst president since the end of World War II. We've still got several years to go, but it seems voters have made up their minds about the man who was to bring us hope, change, and a post-racial America.

The worst president ever?

You can debate whether or not you agree with President Obama's policies, but you can't argue that he hasn't achieved a majority of them. According to Politifact, Obama has basically achieved 69 percent of what he said he would do. Among some of the most significant "promises kept" include bringing troops out of Iraq, seeking verifiable reductions in nuclear warhead stockpiles, and creating new financial regulations, which include the creation of a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (created by now-Senator Elizabeth Warren), a financial stability oversight council, an audit of the Federal Reserve, credit card rules, and regulation of over-the-counter derivatives.

Admittedly, there are many "promises broken," and it seems that just about all his policies are controversial. But I'd like to focus on several and argue that now only has President Obama been one of our most consequential presidents ever, but he has also been one of the best.

Is it too really early to talk about Obama's place in history? I don't think so, and neither do a variety of opinions, found here, here, here, here, here, and here, with some authors suggesting that (despite this recent decline in his approval rating) his place could be anywhere from seventeenth best to fourth best. So what is the Obama legacy? We don't have time to go over everything--every accomplishment, every failure, every debate--but I'd at least like to make a few points on the following:  

Health Care and the Economy. President Obama has transformed the U.S. healthcare system profoundly. The Affordable Care Act (aka "Obamacare") alone makes him the single most consequential president in a generation or more.

To understand its significance, one must first understand the state of American healthcare. As John McDonough of the Harvard School of Medicine explains, the U.S. has "far and away" the costliest healthcare in the world. As he has put it, if we're spending so much money relative to other countries, "one might expect we would be doing significantly better." Since 1980, however, costs have skyrocketed.

How are we doing compared to other nations? Not so good. Compared to other higher-income nations, the U.S. usually ranks the lowest (with the U.K. and the Netherlands ranking as the highest). Among care effectiveness and safety, efficiency, and equity, we are usually among the worst. Even though spending is so high (for a variety of reasons), healthcare here isn't performed as well as other developed nations.

The ACA helps fix that. Among its ten titles, the first title alone would be the most aggressive reforms ever. Consider the reforms in Title I (based on Romneycare): Young adults can stay on their parents' plans until 26. Now there is a Medical Loss Ratio, in which insurance companies have to write a rebate check if premium dollars spent were not related to medical costs. (Billions of dollars have been referred back to patients.) Subsidies are now rewarded for people above the Medicaid threshold, and (despite a terribly pathetic start), there are at least 27 federally facilitated marketplaces. All of these allow consumers to better compare which health plan is right for them. All of those are simply in Title I.

Title II was the Medicaid expansion. Contrary to what most people think, for the most part if you're a non-disabled adult with no children, in most states, poor people didn't have access to insurance through Medicaid. Not so anymore. Unfortunately, while the Supreme Court validated Congress' utilization of the individual mandate under its taxing power, it simultaneously declared that states do not have to be forced to be involved in the expansion. 26 states are expanding, while 21 are not (and four are debating). Ohio Republican Governor John Kasich invoked Christianity in his argument to join the expansion: his belief is that when he dies and goes to St. Peter, he's not going to be asked what he did to keep government small, but what he did to help the poor.

But the intransigence of the other Republican governors is puzzling at best and inhumane at worst. Despite the federal government paying 100% of the funds for the first three years, changing the typical 50-80% cost of coverage (so typically, for every dollar a state spends on Medicaid, the feds write a check for 56 cents), many states with conservative governors have refused the funding and instead allow their poorer citizens to continue to suffer. Still, one can be hopeful. Medicaid was crated in 1965 and was optional for states; it took about 5-6 years for a majority of states to join. The last was Arizona--in 1982.

The remaining titles involve changes to Medicare to improve benefits for enrollees to get free annual wellness exams with no cost sharing. Calorie labeling is required on chain restaurant menus for every item. Helping patients quit tobacco is now covered. The cost of the law--about $950 billion (mostly from Titles I and II) are completely self-financed, often through taxes, such as those on tanning beds. And it is expected to lower the federal deficit (although only by a bit).

Beyond the ACA, there was the American Recovery Act, or the "stimulus." There have been few laws as consequential as this one. While most American presidents barely get half of a major bill signed in one term, Obama essentially had five in one within his first month in office: the largest investments in healthcare and science since LBJ, the largest tax cut since Reagan, the largest infrastructure spending since Eisenhower, and the largest investment in education ever. This law has fundamentally changed the country for the better. As Michael Grunwald has written in "The New New Deal," the Recovery Act injected an emergency shot of fiscal stimulus into an economy hemorrhaging 700,000 jobs a month. Moody's, IHS Global Insight, and the CBO have all agreed that it helped enormously.

We have recently had five straight months of job gain above 200,000, the highest since the 1990s tech boom. But have we heard much about it? No. Instead, we hear a lot about this particular poll about how terrible Obama is. President Clinton likes to cite statistics that in the roughly equal amount of years that Democrats and Republicans have controlled the White House since World War II, Democrats have created more jobs. Jordan Weissmann of the Atlantic (of all places) says this is more complex, that it's more due to luck and that there hasn't been consistency among the parties' presidents and their ideologies within their own parties. True to some extent: Barack Obama is not Bill Clinton, who wasn't Jimmy Carter, who wasn't Lyndon Johnson. Ronald Reagan is far different from Dwight Eisenhower. But the point I'd like to make is that Obama has been liberal but also pragmatic on the economy and on other issues, willing to be advantageous (the GM rescue, the Bin Laden raid) and willing to fail (as is the case with gun control, but this is more due to an ignorant Congress and an even dumber--yet tiny--part of the public). Second, Obama has indeed been liberal, and yet liberals have grown cynical of him. And so I ask this of liberals: Is the fervor and excitement you have for Senator Warren any different than what you had for then-Senator Obama? Would a President Warren really be so much more progressive than President Obama? Has there ever been a president who has accomplished as many liberal goals as this one? Even before the regulations of healthcare, the financial institutions, and polluters, the Left, under Obama, got tobacco regulation, massive forest protection, and the Matthew Shepard Act, things they were trying to achieve for years.

Incidentally, "fiscally responsible" House Republicans--who created a several trillion dollar hole in eight years--offered their own version of stimulus in 2009 in the form of a $715 billion, and yet that gets to be defined as fiscal responsibility. And, according to Grunwald, there is a bit of hypocrisy involved: Paul Ryan requested money for green-job training in Wisconsin, Michelle Bachmann and Joe "You Lie!" Wilson also requested funds, as did Mitch McConnell, who wrote five letters for electric car factories in Kentucky. Governors Rick Perry and Jan Brewer both accepted the funds.

These very Republicans like to tell us that the stimulus failed. It did not, at least not according to the 80% of University of Chicago survey of economists who said it lowered unemployment and increased GDP to 3.8% at its peak.

Foreign Policy
When I voted for Obama in 2008, I never, in a million years, figured Osama bin Laden would be killed. I assumed he was long, long gone (dead or alive). But now he's dead, and Obama's the one who got him. As William Dobson said, Obama "exorcised" the demons of the foreign policy mistakes during the Carter and Clinton era.

But what about the crisis in Iraq with ISIS? That's all Obama's fault, right? Well, first of all, it was the Bush administration that not only invaded the country on false pretenses (and recall that it was Obama who rightfully called it a "dumb war"), and it was the Bush administration which negotiated the end date, and it was the al-Maliki regime that insisted (under pressure from the Iranians--oh, the irony) that the Americans leave. This crisis is not Obama's fault, and leaving the country remains one of his greatest accomplishments.

Dylan Matthews at Vox reminds us of six numbers that no one should ever forget: over 126,000 civilian deaths; 4,486 dead American service members; 2 million refugees; $817 billion lost in direct costs and trillions more in indirect costs; Freedom House's rating Iraq's "democracy" as a 6, or "not free," (with the worst possible number being 7), meaning it is essentially as democratic as Iran; and finally, perhaps the most important--0, which is the amount of weapons of mass destruction found. A war based on false pretenses that has completely destroyed a nation. Is it the fault of the current occupant of the Oval Office, or his predecessor?

President Obama's foreign policy has, simply put, been a success.

The Environment
Global warming is the ultimate tragedy of the commons. Coined by Garret Hardin in the 1960s, the idea of the tragedy of the commons is that people share a finite resource but are motivated by their own self-interest. Hardin used the idea of a pasture with competing farmers and their cows; one farmer might notice that another farmer has more cows, so he tries to compete. The obvious solution is that the resource is destroyed. "The population problem," he wrote, "has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension of morality." Hardin quoted William Foster Llyod, who wrote, "The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things." In other words, the problem is not fixable--the resource (the planet, our only home)--is doomed.

President Obama hasn't taken that attitude. He has acted, many times alone without the help of Congress. The fuel efficiency standards he set are estimated to eliminate 1/6 of U.S. aid on imports by 2025. There are also now tightened efficiency standards for light bulbs, furnaces, refrigerators, dishwashers, and air conditioners. Cold-drink vending machines now will reduce enough energy demand to power over a million homes. At least 680,000 low-income homes have been weatherized. Solar power now is the fast-growing industry.

The President should be applauded for his efforts. His administration's record includes pumping tens of billions of dollars into renewable energy and making it immensely difficult for any new coal plant to open unless it can effectively capture its carbon and store it (which at this point is fairly impossible). On June 2, in what Matt Yglesis called the single most important day in Obama's second term, Obama's EPA announced their intent to regulate the CO2 emissions from the nation's coal plants. The New York Times reports that this could result in a 20 percent reduction in CO2 emissions.

One more thing. If somebody has the gall to say that because we had a bad winter, global warming is not man-made, please remind them that not only does the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change strongly state that global warming is happening and humans are behind most of it, but also that the U.S. National Academy of Sciences found that 98 percent of scientists agreed with the theory that mankind was exacerbating global warming. Incidentally, it's called global warming, not Northeast Ohio warming. To paraphrase Justin Gillis, a snowstorm in Cleveland does not extinguish a severe drought in California or devastating forest fires in Russia.

LGBT Issues
Andrew Sullivan and Newsweek were right to call Obama our first gay president. While initially appearing unwilling to fight for these causes, Obama is officially the first sitting president to support same-sex marriage; his Justice Department stopped defending the Defense of Marriage Act (which the Supreme Court eventually partly nullified); he signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Act to classify crimes against LGBT individuals as hate crimes. (The law had been blocked for more than a decade.) He proudly repealed a discriminatory and waste-of-money law that never should have been written in the first place: Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Now, LGBT soldiers can serve openly. Regarding transgender equality, he has been the best (and there is no second place among his fellow presidents).

Obama seems to be a communitarian who deeply values human rights and dignity. E pluribus unum is frequently mentioned by him. But would he have been committed to these actions and policies if he were president in 2001? Probably not. In 1996, he claimed to support same-sex marriage (and if this is accurate then he was way ahead of the country) but then he became a senator and ran for president in 2008, the year of California's infamous (and now gone) ban on marriage equality. He changed his mind on marriage equality, before changing it again famously before the 2012 election. It has been asked if Obama is leading the fight or riding its waves. It's probably the latter. His actions regarding equality and rights have been phenomenal, though it does seem that his cautiousness has guided him more than a belief that he is marching the country down the moral arc of the universe.

Which brings me to my next point: President Obama certainly has his failings, as all presidents do. He has unfortunately sometimes surrounded himself with bad advisers, especially on education issues. Here's what former under-Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch has to say about the President's record on education:

"The most unexpected supporter of corporate reform was President Barack Obama. Educators enthusiastically supported Obama, expecting that he would eliminate the noxious policies of President Bush's No Child Left Behind. They assumed, given his history as a community organizer and his sympathy for society's least fortunate, that his administration would adopt policies that responded to the needs of children, rather than concentrating on testing and accountability.

The first big surprise for educators occurred when President Obama abandoned Linda Darlin-Hammond and selected Arne Duncan, who had run the low-performing schools of Chicago, as secretary of education. The second big surprise--shock, actually--happened when the Obama administration released the details of Race to the Top, its major initiative, which was designed in Secretary Duncan's office with the help of consultants from the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and other advocates of high-stakes testing and charter schools.

There was very little difference between Race to the Top and NCLB. The Obama program preserved testing, accountability, and choice at the center of the federal agenda. Race to the Top was even more punitive than NCLB."

Obama is also partly to blame for the death of immigration reform, and his lethal and criminal use of drone strikes could have fundamentally destructive effects in the future. Battles he has fought could likely define him as a war criminal. Ryan Cooper at The Week fiercely declares that Obama could have helped create over a million more jobs had he not become so invested in deficit reduction. He should be held accountable for all these actions.

But still, I am not looking for perfection, for surely there never has been, nor will there ever be, a perfect president. All the presidents, regardless of party or ideology or era, seem to be guilty of at least one terrible thing or another. It seems criminal behavior is simply a job requirement. I am not a single-issue voter, and I avoid litmus tests. As the Vice President likes to say, "Don't compare me to the Almighty--compare me to the alternative."

Mark my words: warts and all, Barack Obama will be remembered as one of America's greatest presidents.

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Bigger Than Life: The Movie That Speaks to Me

“Only great pain, the long, slow pain that takes its time... compels us to descend to our ultimate depths... I doubt that such pain makes us "better"; but I know it makes us more profound... In the end, lest what is most important remain unsaid: from such abysses, from such severe sickness, one returns newborn, having shed one's skin... with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever been before.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Gay Science"

The movie spoke to me. It was too close to home. How often have you heard such comments from people after viewing a motion picture? I have to admit some honesty--movies rarely, if ever, "speak to me" or are "too close to home." My favorite films--"The Godfather," "Onibaba," "The Great Dictator" and others--are mostly completely unrelated to me and my experiences. But while watching a practically forgotten film from 1956, I began to feel an eerie resemblance to my situation. The movie is called "Bigger Than Life."

So let me begin with my story:

On September 26, 2012, after a somewhat long day of teaching, I had a raspy sore throat that I expected would go away. After all, several weeks before, during a remarkably stressful start to the quarter, I had suffered from a terrible cold that left me in bed most of the weekend. The sore throat didn't go away, nor would it for months and months. Since that day in September, I have had roughly a dozen or so symptoms; among the worse have been heartburn, morning throat irritation, dysphagia (discomfort when swallowing), globus (a feeling of the throat clenching in), and odynophonia (pain when speaking), the chief symptom.

But before I reveal my thoughts on "Bigger Than Life," I really need to elaborate on just what it is I've been going through. I mentioned an eerie connection to the film. Here is an eerie passage from a book called "The Chronic Cough Enigma."

A twenty-five-year-old female grammar school teacher came to see me [a laryngologist and author of the book] with a nine-month history of a sensation of a lump in her throat, breathly hoarseness (dysphonia), vocal fatigue, intense pain with voice use (odynophonia), and cough. Her cough, voice, and odynophonia made it hard for her to get through the day. By the afternoon, she was miserable, and by the end of the week she was in tears because of her voice and throat pain. Nine months earlier, she had been completely healthy with no symptoms whatsoever; her problems began following an upper respiratory infection (URI). She described having a cold that turned into severe laryngitis and pleurisy. Weeks later when she started teaching, she was already having severe symptoms that just grew worse as the school year wore on. When she came to see me, she was desperate. From my initial patient intake forms, I saw that her reflux symptom index (RSI) of 33 was very high (normal < 15), indicating severe reflux. Her glottal closure index (GCI) of 18 was also very. The GCI measures voice symptoms and is very useful in determining if a person has problems with the vocal cord nerves, specifically if the vocal cords are paralyzed or partly paralyzed. This patient’s high GCI of 18 suggested that she likely had vagus nerve damage. Examination of the voice box by transnasal flexible laryngoscopy (TFL) confirmed that she had a paretic (weak, partially paralyzed) left vocal cord. Special vocal cord function testing called stroboscopy showed that the left vocal cord was floppy, also indicating vocal cord paresis. Finally, her larynx showed severe reflux. The patient underwent tests for reflux and for vocal cord paresis (e.g., laryngeal electromyography), all of which indicated that she had suffered a post-viral vagal neuropathy. To complete this clinical anecdote, the patient responded well to an intense antireflux program and to two medications used to treat neurogenic cough and vagal neuropathies (amitriptyline 10 mg . before bed, and gabapentin 100 mg. four times a day). The drugs were given in this case for her cough and throat pain. Within six weeks, she was asymptomatic and within six months, she was off all medication.

Eerie indeed. Like this unfortunate individual, I was a twenty-five-year-old teacher when my symptoms first appeared. Unlike that teacher, however, I did not suffer from a cough, but I did (and still do) suffer from odynophonia, and as a teacher, the pain has made my job much more challenging and less enjoyable.

It was the first week of class. We were desperately short on teachers, so I had two classes of students. The first group had less than twenty, but the next class had about 40. With back-to-back classes and almost no time to eat, teaching eight hours straight from 7:30-3:30 left me exhausted and eventually suffering from a terrible upper respiratory infection by the end of the week. I remember being in bed most of the weekend, as my voice had been shattered. But I recovered in time and returned to work. A new teacher had arrived and he took over one of the classes.

About a few weeks later, just like that other teacher, I suddenly had a bad sore throat at the end of the day, but I thought nothing of it. Surely, it will go away during the weekend, I thought. It did not. Nor did it for the new few weeks. So I went on vacation to Taiwan and despite the humidity and relaxation, it seemed to be getting worse. Back in Saudi Arabia, I was told I had a fungal infection, but when the medicine didn't alleviate the pain I was told I had acid reflux, and that the reflux was reaching my larynx. I took the pills and ate "healthier" food and yet the pain did not go away. Back in Ohio, doctors at a "prestigious" clinic (I'll leave the terribly overrated institution unnamed) "ruled out" reflux (but were wrong). They explained to me that that awful cold I had months earlier could have sort of messed up my nerves, creating a neuropathy, or neurogenic pain. "Okay, whatever. I'll buy it." But that medicine didn't work and so I stopped taking it all together. "Your symptoms are atypical," they told me as they washed their hands of me and moved along. And as the one year anniversary approached, I thought to myself that if I woke up on the one-year anniversary of first feeling symptomatic, then there indeed would be proof of a God.

Instead, the opposite happened. I woke up and I had never experienced pain quite like that in my throat. I didn't know how I would be able to get to work. I truly believed I was on the verge of a breakdown. A friend calmed down and told me about Nietzsche and his struggles with chronic pain. So I picked myself up a bit and saw a (rather expensive) specialist in New York City. After five terribly uncomfortable tests, I was given quite a plateful of diagnoses: gastroesophageal reflux disease, severe laryngopharyngeal reflux, post-viral vagal neuropathy, and bilateral vold fold paresis.

What the hell does that all mean?

Everyone knows GERD--it's heartburn, or stomach acid and pepsin refluxing (flowing up) back into the esophagus. But what about LPR? LPR, reflux into the throat, is unfortunately a much more difficult battle. Whereas more than fifty reflux episodes constitute GERD, as little as three qualify as LPR. PVVN? Many patients complain of suffering from a bad upper respiratory infection and weeks later, out of nowhere, they're either hoarse or coughing or suffering from odynophonia. It's a little complicated, but essentially the infection is potent enough to damage one's vagus nerve, the nerve that runs from your brain down to your lower esophageal sphincter. Because the vagus nerve "calls the shots," it has profound effects on one's system. Allow me to quote one research article: "Patients with this condition may present with breathy dysophina, vocal fatigue, effortful phonation, odynophonia, cough, globus and/or dysphagia, lasting long after resolution of the acute viral illness." The article goes on to describe that this can lead to paresis of the vocal cords (which the director of Google, who suffered from this, can explain) and LPR.

I'm told that my LPR has essentially been cleaned up (though new problems have presented themselves due to this fight--long story), even though my vocal cords appear a bit pink. (Incidentally, refluxers are very, very vulnerable to several different types of cancer.) But unlike that teacher who required only several hundred milligrams of neurontin and 10 milligrams of amitrptyline, I have tried much, much more, and while the pain is probably not as bad as before, it remains, and I'm afraid it will do so forever.

I could go on for hundreds and hundreds of more words--on a broken healthcare system, my feelings of the pharmaceutical industry, skepticism of alternative medicine and supplements, the de-mythologizing of "doctors-as-God" complexes, the disgusting over-usage of antibiotics, my jealousy of people who can eat whatever the fuck they want--but that is not my intent. Instead, I want to describe how Nicolas Ray's "Bigger Than Life" "spoke to me." (Note: This isn't technically a review of the film.) Based on an article called "Ten Feet Tall" (a line spoken in the movie when the protagonist describes how he feels after beginning his treatment), "Bigger Than Life" stars James Mason, who also produced the film, as a school teacher. (You've probably seen at least one of Ray's two biggest films--"King of Kings" and "Rebel Without a Cause.") Mason plays a teacher (another eerie resemblance) named Ed Avery, but from the very first time we see him, he writhes in pain. Yet he refuses to show anyone, and he's under a considerable amount of pressure as he works two jobs (and he hides one of them from his wife for fear of embarrassment).

But eventually he collapses and is rushed to the hospital. Doctors there diagnose him with a rare inflammation of the arteries which will likely kill him. He is proscribed a new drug (cortisone). It begins to work: he has his life back, and soon he feels "ten feet tall." But, as expected, he begins to misuse his medication. A parent-teacher night turns into a bizarre (yet quite funny) tirade comparing the parents' children to apes. His loyal friend, the physical education teacher (played thanklessly by Walter Matthau, who is still sorely missed) tries to intervene, but this only causes suspicion from Ed. His condition worsens, and he soon becomes more and more hostile and alarming (and dangerous) to his wife and son. There's a haunting and wonderfully-shot scene where Avery, now virtually madden by it all, confronts his son after the boy tries to destroy the cortisone. It's incredibly ominous.

It should be obvious why I feels a connection to this film and its central character (though, I assure you, I've never tried to harm young children and I've never abused drugs). I am more or less on a new regime that I am cautiously optimistic about. While I am fortunate to have doctors who care about me, I'm afraid I might fall forever in the mindset of Voltaire's famous quote: "Doctors are men who proscribe medicine of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing." I could compare myself to Mason's character and succumb to the idea that "it could be worse," though this is a sort of "illness porn" that I don't think is always the best route. My mood changes frequently: sometimes feeling depressed, sometimes feeling fortunate, sometimes feeling bitter. Fear is probably the most common. It does provide one with a heightened sense of what really matters in life. I now know that I can find the rapidest increase in happiness through providing a kindness and through smiling, even if I'm not happy (try it, it works!).

I am often reminded about information I found at inc.com on happiness, specifically a quote from George Vaillant, the director of a 72-year study of the lives of 268 men: "We are happy when we have family, we are happy when we have friends and almost all the other things we think make us happy are actually just ways of getting more family and friends."

The ending of "Bigger Than Life," though it severely suffers from deus ex machina, embraces this concept. It's actually the worst part of the film. It's so abrupt and damages the pace. (Spoiler alert) We go from an exciting fight between Mason and Matthau to yet another one of Hollywood's embrace of "all's-well-that-ends-well." But regardless, Mr. Avery finds his peace and happiness, and Mr. Vaillant could likely use him in a future study. I only hope Vaillant would add that we are happy when we are healthy.

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Use a Reel Mower!

It's summer time and so begins the lazy, hazy, crazy (and friggan humid) days of summer and the cacophony that is everyone in the neighborhood mowing their lawns. But I have a secret for you: real men and women use reel mowers. What exactly are reel mowers? Ask your father (or grandfather) and he'll tell you. They are, essentially, old-fashioned lawnmowers, or, in today's vernacular, eco-friendly lawnmowers. That pic to the left is my very own pride and joy. Now, why would anyone want to give up their loud, dangerous, expensive, polluting, waste-of-space power lawnmower these days? Here are three simple answers:

1. Save on gas. The average American spends anywhere from $100 to $200 a month (or more than eight percent of their income) on gasoline, and in this economy, you could probably use all the savings you can get. According to the EPA, lawnmowers are responsible for the same amount of emissions as 11 new cars and also 17 million gallons of fuel being spilled while Americans refuel their lawnmowers.

Gasoline prices remain high, and they've increased even higher thanks to the crisis in Iraq. And even if there were no crisis in Iraq, prices would still go up. As researcher Fereidun Fesharaki put it, "The future is one of an unstoppable force--demand--versus an immovable object--supply limitations."

2. Save the planet. Some good news: India has set an ambitious goal of planting 2 billion trees, and deforestation has fallen 70% in Brazil. Germany has set a record of generating 75% of its electricity from renewable energy. Texas, of all places, leads the nation in wind power generation. And, Kentucky, the state with the worst pollution in the nation, is beginning to cut its coal use.

But our planet is still in peril. Global warming has become so bad that rising sea levels in the Pacific have washed the remains of Japanese soldiers from World War II onto the island shores. And yet there are still Americans who offer the most bizarre responses. "Why did the dinosaurs go extinct?" is one question a congressman actually asked. Speaker Boehner simply said that he was "not qualified" to discuss the subject because he wasn't a scientist. (This is a common response among politicians, who conveniently happen to be experts on everything else.) Here's how one scientist responded to that answer: "What if we asked: 'Senator, do you advocate drinking toxic sludge?...would the response still be 'I don't know, I'm not a scientist'?" President Obama put it a bit better: "When President Kennedy...set us on a course for the moon, there were a number of people who made a serious case that it wouldn't be worth it...but nobody ignored the science. I don't remember anybody saying that the moon wasn't there, or that is was made of cheese." (Incidentally, the EPA administrators of the Nixon, Reagan, and both Bush administrations support regulating CO2 emissions.)

And yet even John Podesta, one of Obama's senior advisers on climate, has warned that their efforts simply aren't enough to prevent the worst effects of climate change. Brad Plumer at Vox puts this succinctly and pessimistically: "The idea that the world can stay below two 2 degrees Celsius looks increasingly delusional."

While we're making progress, there is much, much more to be done. As Thomas Friedman wrote in his book "Hot, Flat, and Crowded," cleaning up our planet is not supposed to be fun and easy. There is nothing easy about this. We are way beyond the point where we can just change our light bulbs and feel better about ourselves. Is mowing the lawn with a reel mower easy and convenient? Of course not. Tiny twigs constantly and annoyingly halt my mowing. Will it eliminate the problem? No, but it's one more step we can take to help.

3. Exercise It's no secret that America has a severe health crisis, with more than a third of American adults suffering from obesity. What better way to shed some pounds walking? Walking has numerous benefits, including aiding digestion, improving blood pressure and lowering the risk of coronary heart disease, serving as a slight antidepressant, and many more. As Hippocrates said, "walking is man's best medicine." And what better way to walk than while pushing a reel push mower?

But what's that? You don't want to walk with a push reel mower and instead stay seated on your nice, comfy ride mower? Well, I have some bad news for you: A recent study has found that too much sitting raises the risk of cancer. The study found that spending the majority of one's day sedentary--whether at an office, in a car, or in front of a TV--creates a 24 percent increase of getting colon cancer. It's even higher for uterine cancer--a 32 percent increase!

The reasons are obvious. Use a reel mower--you'll help save your wallet, the planet, and your life. Now you can't beat that.

Here's a decent video on reel mower maintenance:

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Lawrence of Arabia

"Lawrence's endurance seemed so great to the local people at Jerablus that they could not believe in his death, for 'he could outride, outwalk, outshoot, and outlast the best of them.'

[Shaykh Hamoudi, the chief local foreman at Carchemish, said to an interviewer] 'Tell them in England what I say. Of manhood the man; in freedom free; a mind without equal; I can see no flaw in him.'"
-"A Prince for Our Disorder," John E. Mack

As expected, Maurice Jarre's exciting theme sets the tone immediately. We see T.E. Lawrence, and he is about to go for a ride--so are we, frankly. This is how "Lawrence of Arabia," the great British epic, begins. Forgive me for the "ride" sentence, not only for its corniness, but for seemingly approving of the bizarre adventurous sentiments, one of the few legitimate arguments against the film. Yes, few films are faultless, but "Lawrence of Arabia" is arguably the best film Great Britain has given the world.

We're soon introduced to Lawrence the character, and he is quite an eccentric one, extinguishing matches with his bare fingers and possessing a "funny sense of fun," according to the bureau man, played by Claude Raines, whose opinion it is to send Lawrence to Arabia, where Bedouin tribes have attacked the Turks at Medina. And from there, we go to the desert, a big sea of sand accompanied by Jarre's iconic score. Lawrence befriends a Bedouin who serves as a guide; that is, until he is mercilessly shot by a rival Arab. This Arab is named Sherif Ali, and he is played by Omar Sharif, who would go on to star in Lean's "Doctor Zhivago." From here we see more of the film's romantic embrace of the desert; Lawrence decides to return to the desert to rescue a man who has fallen off his camel, but Sherif Ali warns him that they will both die, for "it is written." Lawrence shouts back that nothing is written. Lawrence appears to believe that he is the master of his fate and the captain of his soul; to Sherif Ali, he is a blasphemer. But Lawrence pulls it off. "Nothing is written," he repeats, before succumbing to exhaustion and falling to a carpet to sleep.

Before I continue, I have to first simultaneously defend and acclaim Peter O'Toole and David Lean. Both are at the top of their game, but unfortunately, not everyone agrees with me. David Thompson's "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film" is not so kind to O'Toole, claiming that O'Toole played the character with "desperate intensity." Thompson may be unflattering towards O'Toole, but he is vicious toward Lean. Thompson accuses Lean of suffering from "the Selznick syndrome," and that "Lawrence of Arabia" is the only Lean epic where the spectacle is "sufficient to mask the hollow rhetoric of the scripts." Lean slowly became "the prisoner of big pictures, a great eye striving to show off a large mind." Those are serious allegations. Thompson is likely accurate that Lean's films are best appreciated if one can tolerate the weakness in character development and especially dialogue. Is the script hollow? Yes, especially the dreadful scene where Lawrence first gains the attention of Prince Faisal (Alec Guinness, a player in many Lean films). Over the panic of a superior military officer (Anthony Quayle) and the barks of Sherif Ali (with a tremendous amount of overacting in this scene), Lawrence somehow gains favor by comparing the desert to the ocean, and it is here where Thompson is accurate in his description of O'Toole's desperate intensity. The screenplay isn't awful but it's not exactly Shakespeare. All I can say is there is nothing wrong with spectacle; "Gone With the Wind" may be a guilty pleasure for some, but to paraphrase Benthem, the quantity of pleasure being equal, spectacles like "Lawrence of Arabia"can be as good as "12 Angry Men."

Is there a lot of overacting? Some folks on Reddit seem to think so, as does the blogger behind "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die." But other epics could also be criticized for bad acting and emphasizing style over substance. "Seven Samurai" by Akira Kurosawa (a director so rarely criticized) comes to mind. You might be hard-pressed to find worse acting in such a respected movie than "Seven Samurai," and, for that matter, virtually all of Kurosawa's films. Does this sole element make "Seven Samurai" or "Throne of Blood" or "Ran" bad films? Of course not. Viewers must observe films holistically. (To be fair to Mr. Thompson, he doesn't appear to care for Kurosawa either.)

I don't mean to pick on its screenplay, but there is one final note I want to address: Lawrence's odd simplicity. As he establishes himself as a leader in the Arab fight against the Turks, Lawrence claims that he loves the desert because it's clean. With all due respect to my current host country, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, this is not the case anymore. The Jarre theme--its light, romantic crescendo--quickly vanishes from one's head when one sees an omnipresent sight of Coke cans, Snickers wrappers, and plastic bags (which are killing camels at alarming rates). While Jordan (where the film took place and was shot) is still, for the most part, one of the great beauties of the world, I wonder if "Lawrence of Arabia" gave me premature images of such a wonderful, clean ocean of a desert (and I do hope Saudis--particularly the youth--start taking better care of their country).

"Lawrence of Arabia" is great fun. At three-and-a-half hours, it can often test one's limits of patience, but, at least for me, the only scenes that dragged are the final thirty minutes. Flawed? Certainly (see above). A masterpiece? Definitely. It's a beautiful film that you owe yourself to see.

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