e-Builder and Estate Planning

The Miami Herald's Business Monday of yesterday features e-Builder, based in Plantation [Broward County, just north of Miami-Dade], a firm that

has developed cloud-based software for construction program management that makes it simpler for builders and developers to efficiently manage the enormous complexity of major construction projects, and helps reduce costs.

The company’s Web-based system allows its clients — mostly builders and developers of multiple projects — to see and manage every detail of a project. It also permits other players, such as subcontractors and engineers, to view their particular section of a project and immediately communicate with each other via desktop computers, tablets or smartphones.

Its a great story in so many ways.  Two brothers, Jon and Ron Antevy, from "a family of construction contractors", working together (such a potent sort of partnership) to create a business that serves builders of complex construction projects as far away as California.  Their business bio shows fine educations,  hard work, creative minds.  They wed all that with enterprise software, which, to me, is ideation applied to the marketplace, one reality linked to another in such a productive way.  Plato and Aristotle, together at last.

The software is collaborative, involving people at all levels of the management of a complex construction project.

It fascinates me because where the Antevy brothers live is, on a much larger scale, where I live as an estate planning lawyer, dealing with ideas of what the future should look like, preparing a grand document that expresses that idea and marshaling a client's assets so that, when the contingency, no, the certainty, arises, those assets track the idea efficiently and effectively.  Where the horizon of e-Builder is relatively near and relatively certain, I have to deal with a horizon that is certainly there, death, but just when it will arise is usually of great uncertainty.  Meanwhile, however, we have developed with our client a plan for what should happen when the certainty arises.  And we have assets in the here-and-now that must be linked the plan, and there's the rub: making that link and then, once we make those links, tending those idea-asset links into that future, as circumstances will always change over the balance of the client's life.

I collaborate as well, with the client of course, and sometimes with members of his family, with business partners of that client sometimes, with bankers, accountants, financial advisers, insurance agents, people who also serve the client and ought to be involved with the estate plan build.

I have often thought of using enterprise software on the micro-scale of estate planning.  There are many, many variables in such planning, not only in terms of the potential collaborators, but crucially at the asset level.  It is too expensive for lawyers to do the work at that level. Staff can do that work, however, as long as they are well trained and well-directed.  The well-direction, it seems to me, can largely come from the right enterprise software, it seems to me.  What lives in my head, after 40+ years as a lawyer, ought to be transferable in significant part.  Just as the education and experience of the Antevy brothers, the owners of e-Builder, were transferred to their software, why not something like that being transferred to the loss-leader of all loss-leaders in the trusts and estates world, estate planning.  There is huge market for estate planning, that is, there is a huge need for estate planning, if we could only get the price right.

Little Boy Humor and a Remarkable Mind

Eight-year old grandson is visiting us with his family: a mom, a dad, and little(r) sister.

Last night, at the supper table no less, but at least after we finished eating and were just talking, the children  wandered into the dangerous topic of putting things up one's nose.  It was all just cracking the kids up. 

Finally mother had to warn the small people that if they put something up their nose and it wouldn't come out, then we would have to go to the emergency room, where they would put instruments up one's nostrils to extract the object.

More laughter!

"And what would instrument that be?!!," Grandson chortled, "A viola or a violin??!!"

The American Middle Class: Seeking Like Gentiles

When we turned the American dream into a dream about materialism, we disheartened our young, who now are forced to achieve what we've defined as success in a straitened economy.

-Peggy Noonan in "How Obama Wooed the Middle Class" in today's WSJ.

²⁴ “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.
 
²⁵ “Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? ²⁶ Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? ²⁷ Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?

²⁸ “So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; ²⁹ and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. ³⁰ Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?

³¹ “Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ ³² For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. ³³ But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you. ³⁴ Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.

-Jesus in Matthew 6: 24-34 (NKJV).

Well, I think it's weird.

I'm not sure I could have survived to adulthood had not my dad, granddad, uncles, and various other grown-up men (and a few women) encouraged me to finish my supper with "Eat it!  It will put hair on your chest!"  The subtext was always this:  The amount of hair on one's chest and (by extension) everywhere else on one's body it might grow, has a direct relationship to the amount of manhood.  And being a man, by the way, was always a good thing.

Now this:  All along, Gillette tells us, women have wanted hairless men.  That's what they really want.

Just another reason, I suppose, why people should keep their clothes on until after they marry.

Got Fruit Juice? Got Diabetes?

The fruit juice industry has essentially taken the 'apple-a-day' mentality and used it to sell fruit juices as healthy," said Barry Popkin, a professor in the department of nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Gillings School of Public Health.

Popkin and other experts would rather see people eating whole fruit. Because most juicing methods remove the produce's fiber, drinking juice omits one of the key benefits of eating fruit, while delivering huge amounts of sugar and calories.

"Every one of the long-term studies of the health effects of fruit juices shows that you increase your risk of diabetes and weight gain" with regular juice consumption, Popkin said.

One 2010 study in the American Journal of Epidemiology followed more than 43,000 adults in Singapore for five years and found that those who consumed two or more servings of fruit juice per week had a 29 percent higher risk of developing diabetes than those who didn't drink juice regularly — not far behind the 42 percent increased risk for weekly soda drinkers.

-from "Fruit Smoothies Dangerous for Your Health?" by Abby Olena of the Chicago Tribune.  (In the Miami Herald home delivery edition today.)

The abstract for the study to which the article refers is here.

About that Old Hard Drive

Today, the WSJ reports that a federal jury found GoldmanSachs trader Fabrici Tourre "liable for misleading investors in a mortgage-linked deal that collapsed during the financial crisis, delivering a historic win for a U.S. regulator [the SEC] eager to prove its mettle inside the courtroom."

According to the WSJ article, smoking guns included emails Tourre sent to his girl friend:

Several emails from Mr. Tourre to his girlfriend, Marine Serres, a Goldman saleswoman at the firm's London office, revealed that Mr. Tourre shared some pessimism about the market.

At his trial, Mr. Tourre translated what he wrote, partly in French, to Ms. Serres: "The entire building is at risk of collapse at any moment. Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab (as Mitch would kindly call me, even though there is nothing fabulous about me…) standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all the implications of these monstrosities."

Mr. Tourre called the note a "silly romantic email to my girlfriend, sent as I was very stressed that day," and said it was referencing a newspaper article he had forwarded to Ms. Serres.

How the government got those emails and others are the subject of this post by Bianca Boscar of the Huffington Post:

Fabrice Tourre (a.k.a. the "Fabulous Fab"), the Goldman Sachs mortgage trader who has become synonymous with Wall Street shenanigans, has now become synonymous with something else: the worst possible way to dispose of an old computer.

Among the more titillating passages in a front-page New York Times expose about Tourre's private correspondence with his lawyers is a disclaimer that the newspaper obtained his e-mails via a computer someone found "discarded in a garbage area in a downtown apartment building."

The computer was then passed on to someone else, who noticed that it continued to pull down fresh e-mails -- messages sent to someone with Tourre's name, a name suddenly in the news. The e-mails, correspondence between the trader and his lawyers, discussed how to handle accusations that he and his employer, Goldman Sachs, had played a key role in engineering a near-financial apocalypse.

Dishonest. Dumb.  Great combination.

The Orange Blossom Special Train Wreck

Florida insurance regulators unveiled for the first time Wednesday the prices proposed by private insurers for individual health plans to be sold on the state’s federally-run exchange, which is scheduled to launch Oct. 1.

But the proposed health plans and prices — and the state’s analysis that federal healthcare reform would cause premiums to rise — were hardly definitive of the actual costs that Floridians are likely to pay for health insurance next year.

That’s because the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has yet to approve the proposed health plans for Florida’s exchange, and those plans, including the prices, may change as they have in other states.

And while Florida insurance regulators said this week that the Affordable Care Act will cause the price of individual health plans sold in 2014 to rise 30 to 40 percent higher than similar plans sold today, and small group plan premiums could rise by 15 to 20 percent, they also conceded that those projections were based on a “hypothetical” health plan that does not exist anywhere in the state.

What’s more, the price projections released by the state do not factor in substantial government subsidies that will be available to many consumers based on household income, which will offset their actual out-of-pocket

-from the front page of today's Miami Herald.

Read carefully the "What's more" paragraph - an editorial gloss by your friendly journalists, who otherwise orchestrate the tone of this article into a "surely it won't be so bad" key.  Those "substantial government subsidies" come from the taxpayers and from those insureds paying the increased premiums, persons to whom those subsidies will not be available "based on household income."

But we shall see, won't we?  Sometime after the mid-term Congressional elections, of course.  One only hopes that the writers of this article (and their editors) will someday bear the full "out-of-pocket" impact of the AFA.

"The Biggest Government Bond Bubble in History" [UPDATED]

 So Andrew Haldane, a top official at the Bank of England, declared in June of his own institution, as quoted in "The Near-Zero Interest Rate Trap", an opinion piece in today's WSJ,  written by Robert I. McKinnon, a professor at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.  Professor McKinnon writes that the bubble is not limited to the Bank of England:

The Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, and European Central Bank all have used quantitative easing to force down their long-term interest rates. The result is that major industrial economies have all dramatically increased the market value of government and other long-term bonds held by their banks and other financial institutions. Now each central bank fears long-term rates rising to normal levels, because their nation's commercial banks would suffer big capital losses—in short, they would "de-capitalize."

 

With less capital, we would have banks reducing lending even further, and there we go again: staring at deflation.  Meanwhile, the stock market struggles upward, because investors and savers, rejecting those bonds already, have nowhere else to go.  What are the investors and savers to do, then, bury their cash in the back yard, buy gold?  The market rules, and it will finally make its will effective, whether the politico-bankers are in Washington, D.C. or some other first-world capital.

As to the stock-market, which had a "Great July" this year, one has to view its return in a 15 or 20 year perspective and, then, discount its rise by the inflation that has occurred during that period.  Furthermore, with respect to a tax-paying investor, one has to further reduce those returns by the income tax that the taxpayer must pay on that investor's returns.

China Fouls Its Farm Lands

Estimates from state-affiliated researchers say that anywhere between 8% and 20% of China's arable land, some 25 to 60 million acres, may now be contaminated with heavy metals. A loss of even 5% could be disastrous, taking China below the "red line" of 296 million acres of arable land that are currently needed, according to the government, to feed the country's 1.35 billion people.

Rural China's toxic turn is largely a consequence of two trends, say environmental researchers: the expansion of polluting industries into remote areas a safe distance from population centers, and heavy use of chemical fertilizers to meet the country's mounting food needs. Both changes have been driven by the rapid pace of urbanization in a country that in 2012, for the first time in its long history, had more people living in cities than outside of them.

-from a story in today's Weekend Edition of the WSJ, entitled "China's Bad Earth".

Among other things, the rice harvest is becoming increasingly toxic and in decline.

Not enough little girls and younger women, the air fouled by pollution, resulting in shorter life-expectancies, and now this. What is to become of China? Believe me, that bell will toll for us.

Lower Suicide Rates for Coffee Drinkers

These results from three large cohorts [of American adults] support an association between caffeine consumption and lower risk of suicide.

-The conclusion from a study published in the World Journal of Biological Psychiatry.

A cup of coffee certainly lifts my spirits. Drinking coffee raises Dr. McDougall's eyebrows, however.  The plant-strong people don't like it either.

I have a list of spirit-lifting, physical activities.  Coffee drinking is up there, but certainly not at the top.

It would be helpful to know who funded the linked-to study.

A High Calling

[God] has "told [us] what is good" (Micah 6:8), in the Bible, in the person of his Son, and in the gift of conscience.  He has given us faculties to discern the divine order in the world.  Law is thus not merely a means of social control to be manipulated by those in power to achieve their ends.  Making, interpreting, and executing law consistent with divine ordering is a high calling, not a power-grab or arbitrary assertion.

-from "Evangelicals and Catholics Together on Law: The Lord of Heaven and Earth - a Joint Statement by Evangelical and Catholic Legal Scholars", just published and accessible to read through the Journal of Christian Thought, the Summer 2013 issue, and the Journal of Catholic Social Thought.

This part of the joint statement (and the whole of it) I find to be profoundly encouraging and moving.  Practicing law can become so wearisome and such an invitation to cynicism.  In the hands of Christians at least, the process is potentially transformed.  While we Christian lawyers are liable to lose sight of our calling, non-lawyer Christians seem to fail utterly to see it. 

The faith community has generally lost the idea of vocation except as it applies to religious-workers.  How many times did I hear, growing up a Southern Baptist, that this person or that is giving himself to "full-time Christian service", as he marches off to seminary or the mission field.  No minister I ever heard of ever recognized a young person going off to law school that way! 

At best, the church communities tend to view the lawyers among them as leadership resources for the congregation or denomination and sources of financial support, and, at worst, as Christians who are caught in terrible tension between the dark demands of the law and their Christian faith.  The question I have been asked over the years, when the subject of being a Christian lawyer comes up, is a variation of the theme "How can you be a lawyer and a Christian."  The answer is that God calls Christians into the profession, and he will not call us into something in which he will not also be absolutely involved.

(Speaking of vocation, I would suggest that the next project for a joint statement is Evangelicals and Catholics Together on Business: The Lord of the Marketplace.)

Shirley Jones on the Diane Rhem Show Today

Wow, what a woman, Shirley Jones, a fixture at our house when the kids were growing up, when the main VHS cassette we had was "The Music Man".  "Oklahoma!" was the first screened musical I can remember seeing, and a wide-screen one at that at a Miami top of the line theater.  It even had an intermission.  Mom and I went.  (We were real movie-pals.) I had never seen Shirley Jones before in anything, and I found her simply amazing.

She has a new book out, entitled Shirley Jones: a Memoir, and Diane Rhem interviewed her today on NPR.  That interview is worth a visit.

UPDATE:  I downloaded the book via Kindle and have read the first third or so of it.  I think the interview will do for most people.  The author startles with details of her sexual history (and in the interview, one is forewarned of it).  The story, simply written, provides a window into the entertainment world and that world is as troubled as we bourgeoisie believe it to be.  Miss Jones was an extraordinarily gifted young-woman, in the right place and at the right time.  She appears not really to have been prepared for the fantastic world she entered.  (A Universalist religious upbringing.  No reading of the Great Books or equivalent life-apprentice experience, apparently.)  Approaching 80 years of age, however, she can write purple (and wear it) if she chooses.  She chooses.

And of course I'll finish the book.

SECOND UPDATE:  Finished the book.  It is an entertainment.  Ms. Jones is an entertainer.  The book, easy to read, has substance to it, however, as there clearly is substance to Ms. Jones herself.  Why did she remain devoted to her first husband for so long?  I think the fundamental answer is her devotion to her children, although she writes of him in indearing terms consistently, perhaps too consistently.  Dealing with him was obviously a terribly difficult situation for all of them.  She got their children, his son, and herself through it all with a sort of iron will, independence, and remarkable gifts.   

Ol' Dan Tucker died with Plantar Faciitis

Ol' Dan Tucker (or "Old Dan Tucker") is an old song I learned with a number of others as a very little boy.  I had a record player that was in a little suit case with a handle.  I could lay it down flat, open the top, plug in the cord, set a record on the turntable, turn it on, and place the needle at the edge of the 78 rpm disk. I remember a particular record - it was yellow - that had Oh Susannah, Ol' Dan Tucker, some nursery rhyme songs.  I played it all the time.

But I could never figure out the lyric that reports that Ol' Dan Tucker "died with a toothache in his heel."  Your teeth are in your head, I carefully reasoned.  How can you have a tooth ache in your foot?  I laughed.  Somebody was making a joke.

Somebody was telling the truth.

I hurt my right foot, specifically my right heel, at CrossFit a couple of months ago.  I ignored the pain, and the pain only got worse.  I finally limped to a podiatrist.  His diagnosis, after an x-ray and an MRI (I do what I can to support the medical profession these days), was plantar faciitis.  I had this problem once before, but the pain was centered at my arch.  This pain is in my heel.  Like a sharp nail is buried in it, point up.

And its killing me.  I probably won't die, but I finally understand what happened to Ol' Dan Tucker, poor guy.

Ali Ahmed: the 12-Year-Old Boy who Put Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood to Shame

Artificial Sweeteners, Diabetes, Obesity, Heart Disease, and Stroke

On NPR's Science Friday yesterday, Ira Flatow interviewed Susan Swithers, Professor, Behavioral Neuroscience,  Purdue University, (PhD from Duke), and author of an "opinion paper" published in the journal Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism with the following thesis:  artificial sweeteners may change your brain's sweetness pleasure centers and cause "metabolic derangements."  (The abstract of the paper, entitled "Artificial sweeteners produce the counterintuitive effect of inducing metabolic derangements" is here and the full text is here.)

Here are excerpts from the NPR interview, the full text of which and the audio as well are at the link in the first line of this post:

FLATOW: I'm very interested in what goes on in the brain, and reading your opinion paper and from scientific studies we have done in the past on this, it seems like your brain and your body sort of get confused about what's happening when they taste artificial sweeteners.

SWITHERS: Exactly. That's what we think is the big problem. So if we think about a world there are no artificial sweeteners, when we taste something sweet, it's often a sugar, and that means when the sweet taste hits our mouth, our bodies, our brains, based on this experience can learn to anticipate that calories and sugar are going to show up. And as a result, we'll start to produce changes, physiological changes, like the release of hormones and the activation of our metabolism so that we can deal with the arrival of those calories in that sugar. And we think that's kind of a learning process, and that helps us not only regulate how much we eat but also to keep our blood sugar in a more healthy range.

And now if you introduce an artificial sweetener, what you do is you get this very strong sweet taste in your mouth, but you don't get the consequences that normally ought to show up. No calories show up. No sugar shows up. And so your body will then adjust to that new reality by saying wait a minute, I've tasted something sweet. I have no idea what's going to happen. I'm not going to release those hormones, or I'm not going to release as many of those hormones. And that's what we really think the confusion comes from.

*   *   *

[W]hat [the confusion is] doing is making it so that when people taste something sweet that does deliver sugar and calories, they don't have as strong an ability to deal with that. So they drink a regular soda or they eat a piece of fruit, anything that taste sweet and does provide the sugar and calories, and their bodies can't anticipate that those are going to show up. And if these physiological processes normally help us regulate things like food intake, then that's where you run into the problem. We eat a chocolate cake. We don't know what's going to happen. And so we end up with these negative outcomes.

*   *   *

[O]ne of the things that might be happening is that some of these same hormones that are released in response to sugar that help us regulate food intake are also implicated in helping regulate not only blood sugar but having cardio-protective effects. And one of the things we tried to do in this paper was to sort of use converging approaches, so looking not only at large epidemiological studies in people but use more basic research where we can get more directly at mechanisms.

And those studies, for example, have suggested that there's a hormone named GLP-1 that is thought to play a role not only in helping regulate blood sugar [ed.: think diabetes] but also in satiety [ed.: think obesity] and also to have cardio-protective effects. So if it turns out that these artificial sweeteners blunt the release of a hormone like GLP-1, then over the long term we're going to be losing out on those sort of protective effects.

The entire entire interview (which is very short) is well worth reading (or hearing).

Professor Swithers has done earlier work that indicates a link between artificial sweeteners and weight-gain.

Phil Gramm on Tax Reform

In today's WSJ.

A wonderful dream, but still a dream.

The getting there would require a revolution.

Dan Lopez, a "Young Invicible", is not Stupid

Dan Lopez rarely gets sick and hasn’t been to a doctor in 10 years, so buying health insurance feels like a waste of money.

Even after the federal health overhaul takes full effect next year, the 24-year-old said he will probably decide to pay the $100 penalty for those who skirt the law’s requirement that all Americans purchase coverage.

“I don’t feel I should pay for something I don’t use,” said the Milwaukee resident, who makes about $48,000 a year working two part-time jobs.

Because he makes too much to qualify for government subsidies, Lopez would pay a premium of about $3,000 a year if he chose to buy health insurance.

“I shouldn’t be penalized for having good health,” he said.

Persuading young, healthy adults such as Lopez to buy insurance under the Affordable Care Act is becoming a major concern for insurance companies as they scramble to comply with the law, which prohibits them from denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions and limits what they can charge to older policy holders.

Experts warn a lot of these so-called “young invincibles” could opt to pay the fine instead of spending hundreds or thousands of dollars each year on insurance premiums. If enough young adults avoid the new insurance marketplace, it could throw off the entire equilibrium of the Affordable Care Act. Insurers are betting on the business of that group to offset the higher costs they will incur for older, sicker beneficiaries.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/07/05/3486990/health-insurers-fear-young-people.html#storylink=cpy

Study: China's Policy on Air Polution Cuts Life Expectancy by 5.5 Years

“Evidence on the impact of sustained exposure to air pollution on life expectancy from China’s Huai River policy”

This paper's findings suggest that an arbitrary Chinese policy that greatly increases total suspended particulates (TSPs) air pollution is causing the 500 million residents of Northern China to lose more than 2.5 billion life years of life expectancy. The quasi-experimental empirical approach is based on China’s Huai River policy, which provided free winter heating via the provision of coal for boilers in cities north of the Huai River but denied heat to the south. Using a regression discontinuity design based on distance from the Huai River, we find that ambient concentrations of TSPs are about 184 μg/m³ [95% confidence interval (CI): 61, 307] or 55% higher in the north. Further, the results indicate that life expectancies are about 5.5 y (95% CI: 0.8, 10.2) lower in the north owing to an increased incidence of cardiorespiratory mortality. More generally, the analysis suggests that long-term exposure to an additional 100 μg/m³ of TSPs is associated with a reduction in life expectancy at birth of about 3.0 y (95% CI: 0.4, 5.6).

-the Abstract of a study paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, July 8, 2013.

NIH: "Only Half of U.S. Youth Meet Physical Standards"

And those standards aren't so high.

What ever happend to the President' Council on Youth Fitness?  Ike introduced that program in the mid-1950s.  I clearly remember our phys ed teachers talking about it.  It had a very important impact.

Well, it's morphed into something else.  And our phys ed programs in the public schools are being cut.

If, however, we fight our wars with drones from an easy chair and a joy stick, what difference does it really make?  Right?

We will become like the dreaded Kaldanes in Edgar Rice Burroughs, the Chessmen of Mars:

[T]the Kaldanes are almost all head, but for six arachnoid legs and a pair of chelae. Their racial goal is to evolve further towards pure intellect and away from bodily existence:

It is only your brain that makes you superior to the banth, but your brain is bound by the limitations of your body. Not so, ours. With us brain is everything. Ninety per centum of our volume is brain. We have only the simplest of vital organs and they are very small for they do not have to assist in the support of a complicated system of nerves, muscles, flesh and bone. We have no lungs, for we do not require air. Far below the levels to which we can take the rykors is a vast network of burrows where the real life of the kaldane is lived. There the air-breathing rykor would perish as you would perish. There we have stored vast quantities of food in hermetically sealed chambers. It will last forever. Far beneath the surface is water that will flow for countless ages after the surface water is exhausted. We are preparing for the time we know must come -- the time when the last vestige of the Barsoomian atmosphere is spent -- when the waters and food are gone. For this purpose were we created, that there might not perish from the planet Nature's divinest creation -- the perfect brain. 

-from the Wikipedia article on the Kaldane. 

Except, somehow, I don't think the rest of the world is going to sit back and let us evolve that way.  You see, we have this nice lunch set before us every day, and the rest of the world wants to eat it.

Besides, John Carter made short work of the Kaldanes.  He had a terrific body and knew how to use it.  (His girlfriends weren't half bad either.)

Women More Vulnerable to Alcohol

Women are more vulnerable than men to alcohol's toxic effects. Their bodies have more fat, which retains alcohol, and less water, which dilutes it, so women drinking the same amount as men their size and weight become intoxicated more quickly. Males also have more of the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase, which breaks down alcohol before it enters the bloodstream. This may be one reason why alcohol-related liver and brain damage appear more quickly in heavy-drinking women than men.

*    *   *

[Is there a  female] drinking problem? Doctors around the world differ. The National Institutes of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the Department of Health and Human Services say that for American women, anything more than a drink a day is risky. In countries such as France, Italy and Spain, where life expectancy for women is longer, authorities set the safe threshold at double that—and sometimes higher.

-from the "Saturday Essay" in yesterday's Wall Street Journal by Gabrielle Glaser, entitled "Why She Drinks: Women and Alcohol Abuse."

It was hands off alcohol in my life until I went to college.  I cannot remember my parents telling me not to drink.  But they would not drink themselves.  We were Southern Baptists, and my dad told funny stories about how Baptists drank only behind closed doors with the shades pulled down.  In that way, I knew early on that drinking was something Baptists were not to do, if not for themselves personally but as an example to others who might have a sort of fatal propensity about liquor - we were to look out for our brother and be careful for ourselves.  I learned that Baptists sometimes would drink anyway - I learned about hypocrisy, alcohol, and the power of alcohol.

My dad told stories about men who had ruined their lives with alcohol, men whose intellect and drive he admired.  Stories were the way he made his points - he never preached at me.  And I didn't feel manipulated.  I could tell that he absolutely feared what could happen to himself and, then, to his family if he failed in this way (or any other way).   (He warned me about the  risks of sex outside of marriage this way: one example was a story he told me several times, about one of his friends in the Navy, who contracted what we now call an STD while they were stationed in Brazil during WWII.  And died of it.  He talked about what a fine man this fellow was, from a good Midwestern family.)

As to women and alcohol, I remember during Freshman Rush at Duke attending a frat party the ATO's threw.  It was the first time I had ever seen drunk women.  Furthermore, the women I saw were my age, and I was shocked.  They were so pretty and fresh, and so loose with "the brothers" in their conduct.  It simply depressed me, Baptist boy.  It still depresses me to see an inebriated woman.  Why is that?  I think I fear for them. They are defenseless and unprotected.

Years later, Carol and I attended a big party at the Indian Creek Country Club, a very exclusive place.  People were all dressed up.  It was something out of a movie.  The alcohol flowed.  Toward midnight, as the party was breaking up, Carol and I saw two women trying to make their way from the tables toward the exit.  They were stumbling drunk, and we were embarrassed for them.  We still talk about it now and then.