This LAT story on soldiers injured in Iraq deserves a reading, and the soldiers deserve the country's thanks and support. The death toll in Iraq has been relatively low not because the war isn't exacting casualties, but because improved body armor and medical care are saving lives that once would have been lost.
WASHINGTON — The physical therapists on the fifth floor of Walter Reed Army Medical Center have a bulletin board they call their Wall of Heroes. It is crammed with photos of young soldiers in their care — soldiers wounded in the war in Iraq.
The images of the amputees and burn victims stand out, a tragic irony of an important advance in military protective gear.
The new armored vests that soldiers are wearing in this war protect the human torso and have saved countless lives, but often at a terrible price. One day last week, all but 20 of the 250 beds at the center were taken up with casualties of the war. Fifty of them have lost limbs, often more than one. Dozens more suffer burns and shrapnel wounds that begin where their armored vests ended.
On average, they are 23 years old.
Many would have died except for their Kevlar vests, which stopped rounds from a Kalashnikov rifle, a 9-millimeter handgun or fragments from a grenade. There have been more wounded — and over a longer period — than the hospital expected....
A half hour away, at Andrews Air Force Base, the tennis court and gymnasium of the fitness center have become a medical staging facility for those evacuated from the war zone. More than 7,500 have come through since April.
In addition to the nearly 1,900 who have gone on to Walter Reed, another 1,500 have been sent to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., which treats the injured from the Navy and Marines. Several thousand less seriously wounded soldiers have been sent directly to some of the military's dozens of smaller hospitals and clinics around the country.
After reports surfaced last month that the level of care being given at one of those smaller facilities was substandard, the Army took steps to improve services there and began an evaluation of the care at other regional hospitals.....
"We've seen a number of patients that, in our minds, in 'Nam they would not have lived," Mayer, the veteran who volunteers at Walter Reed, said. "One comes to my mind. You see how his wounds stop like a sunburn line right where the body armor started. As soon as you see him, you know that it was the body armor that saved his life."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 09, 2003 • Comments
To get Ben Bernanke's speech and other papers from the Dallas Fed's Friedman conference, go here
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 06, 2003 • Comments
My latest NYT column looks at Milton Friedman's enormous influence on monetary economics, drawing on a speech by Fed Governor Ben Bernanke.
Twenty-five years ago, I took my first economics class. Like many other college students, I wanted to understand why the economy of our teenage years was such a scary mess, with inflation and rising taxes eroding our parents' paychecks, interest rates soaring and unemployment an ever present threat.
By my freshman year, inflation had morphed into "stagflation," combining rising price levels with relatively high unemployment. For most economists, stagflation was a puzzle. There was supposed to be a trade-off--the so-called Phillips curve--between inflation and unemployment. If you had one, you weren't supposed to have the other.
The "Great Inflation" of the 1970's challenged and permanently altered economic theory. It vindicated the once-controversial analysis of Milton Friedman, then at the University of Chicago.
"Friedman's monetary framework has been so influential that in its broad outlines at least, it has nearly become identical with modern monetary theory," said the Federal Reserve governor Ben S. Bernanke, at a recent conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
Not to take anything away from my article, but if you want the full story, you can download a .pdf file of Bernanke's speech here. It's quite well written.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 06, 2003 • Comments
Confirming a prediction I've made in various interviews and post-speech Q&A sessions, reader Raymund Eich writes that even Wal-Mart is (slowly) discovering that improved aesthetics are essential to retail competition:
Reading your blog entry regarding Wal-Mart, I wanted to drop an anecdote about Sam's Club. Until recently, the last time I'd shopped at one had been about 10 years ago--all I remember of that store was gray cinder-block and unfriendly lighting. I recently went to a new (18 month old) Sam's Club, and it was a much more welcoming warehouse, with the outer walls hidden by high shelving and white sheetrock and cooler cases in the grocery section. Lots of colored signs hung high in the grocery section, too, and low aisles in the middle of the store gave a spacious feel. If the old Sam's Club was like Home Depot, the new one was like Lowe's. Plus, bulk Halloween candy was cheap.
I've never been to Sam's Club, but I understand the difference between Lowe's and Home Depot. It's subtle but significant and has paid off mightily for Lowe's. In the face of competition, even utilitarian environments can't be downright ugly.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 03, 2003 • Comments
This long A.P. story scrutinizes the post-9/11 security at the U.S.-Mexico border and finds that it's stopping Latin Americans who want to work, not Islamacists who want to kill Americans. Not terribly surprising, when you consider how much harder it would be for a terrorist type to blend in among Spanish-speaking peasants than among Canadian air travelers. The tighter southern border has everything to do with anti-Latino sentiment in California and elsewhere, and very little to do with stopping terrorism.
From the story:
Several Border Patrol agents along the Arizona-Mexico line said that although they have become increasingly vigilant toward the possibility of terrorists using established people-smuggling routes, they have found none.
"The people who are coming across this border are people who can only pay $1,500 to a smuggler. A terrorist can pay $30,000 or $40,000 and go to the northern border where we don't have the resources to stop them," said agent Matt Roggow.
He navigated his Humvee across ranchers' dirt roads in the hilly desert near Tucson, leaning out the window to "cut sign": search for footprints in the soft dirt that betray the paths of desperate migrants through the vast desert. He knows well how difficult the trip is.
"l'd be willing to bet that a terrorist isn't going to take the chance of coming across this border," he said.
Read the whole thing. As InstaPundit warned within hours of the 9/11 attacks, fighting terrorism provided an all-purpose justification for previously moribund--and previously unrelated--policy proposals.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 03, 2003 • Comments
My father, who reads parts of the NYT I don't, calls my attention to this article on the last frontier in auto styling--making the engines look good:
Photographs of suggestively shaped engine covers have even begun to supplement shots of cars on curvy roads in the marketing materials of automakers. Infiniti's promotional materials, for instance, feature the styled cover of the 4.5-liter V-8 engine from its flagship Q45 sedan. In a photograph, the sculptured black engine cover is softly lighted to make it look as if it is carved from basalt. Light plays over the stone's surface, suggesting the gravitas of the Black Stone of Mecca or the monolith in "2001: A Space Odyssey.""
Under-hood appearance has been an issue for Nissan for about 10 years, although we've really gotten serious within the last four to five," said Sheldon Payne, a product design manager at Nissan Design America, the company's California studio. "Engine covers have been an easy way to address part of our concern, especially since so little routine maintenance is now required. We can create a nice impression with relatively low cost by designing a cover to hide the 'mess.' Our intention is to reassure customers that things have been seen to."
In the days when there was enough room around the engine to see the ground below, the engineer alone ruled the space under the hood. When Mr. Laituri was hired by G.M., he was fresh out of industrial design school. "It was just me, a couple of kids and two old guys left over from the Frigidaire division," he recalled.
But the concept of applying a styling theme to areas not always in the customer's view was beginning to catch on.
"Design had recently cleaned up trunks and glove compartments." Mr. Laituri said. "We rethought the motor and came up with a theme: a diamond on a black velvet pillow. That meant blacking out everything possible around the engine--all the wires and pipes--and covering the engine with a faceted shape bearing the Cadillac crest and shield. The idea was to emphasize high technology. It was not going to be just an engine. It was a power plant."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 03, 2003 • Comments
From 2blowhards.com, which has lots of other good stuff too:
With age, though, I've grown fond of taking note of the ways those who can't handle movie sex discharge their uneasiness. My favorite response to movie sex occurred during a showing of Mira Nair's "Kama Sutra." (I don't recommend the movie, by the way; though it was full of NC-17 nudity and had a lot of sensual qualities, it doesn't have much else working in its favor.) The Wife and I were at a mid-afternoon weekday showing at the cineplex -- bargain-matinee time.
About midway through the movie a scrawny old gent tottered in, evidently having skipped out on another movie. He looked around the dark, shuffled his way to a seat, and only then looked up at the screen, which was full of dusky, damp, humping flesh."Jumpin' Jehosophat!!!" he said, very loudly. "Would you look at what those young people are doing!!!" And he kept up the old-coot commentary throughout what remained of the movie. "That's quite a keister on that princess!!!" he'd squawk. Or "Good lord almighty, what are they doing to each other?!!!"
Not quite in the same league but still pretty amusing was an older Chinese man sitting alone in the row in front of us at "In the Cut" yesterday. He was a small guy with an armful of snacks -- cans of soda, boxes of candy, a huge container of popcorn. I checked him out with concern before the lights went down, but he turned out to be OK -- a discrete and lowkey spectator. Or he was until Meg Ryan's first sex scene, that is, when he began eating his popcorn faster and faster and faster. And louder and louder. The chomping got so frenzied that I looked over at him in alarm; he was moving popcorn from the tub to his mouth about as fast as a human being could. He clearly wasn't doing this to be funny; it was his way of handling the intensity of the scene. I turned my own attention back to the screen; Meg was doing a swell job with her character's erotic moment. And then -- honest to god -- just as the scene's climax was reached, the little Chinese guy popped open a can of soda. Pffffssssst!
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 02, 2003 • Comments
The NBC affiliate in Dallas explores how supermarkets use aesthetics (and other features) to get people to linger and, hence, to buy more. The piece quotes Steve's friend and colleague Ed Fox, a retailing expert.
The piece reminds me of something someone who wishes to remain anonymous told me Wal-Mart shoppers say in surveys.
What's the best part of shopping at Wal-Mart?
Leaving the store.
Or so I'm told. Low prices and a large selection do not, by themselves, make for a happy shopping experience.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 02, 2003 • Comments
I'll be speaking Tuesday afternoon at UCLA, 3-5 pm in Bunche Hall 7373. The talk, which is part of the Center for Governance's "Great Ideas in the Social Sciences" workshop series, is open to the public, but seating is quite limited.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 02, 2003 • Comments