We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
It's been a giant cultural change in medicine. Half of medical students are women these days. Many of them are Asians.
Today, college men are beginning to consider it to be a chick profession. Including cardio-thoracic surgery. Heck, I even know a lady urologist in Boston. Why not?
Many of the young women I know are going into Emergency Medicine. If you walk into your local ER, you will see if full of cute young ER MDs. Women going into medicine today tend towards the areas where they can work definite hours for a paycheck, work part-time, and have no on-call duties. ER, Radiology, Dermatology. They want a regular paycheck, benefits, and regular hours, and do not want the burdens, stress, and risks of opening a private practice. And, as as a gender, I think we tend to be more comfortable with rules and protocols than men and thus make better employees. Male docs hate rules and enjoy defying them.
The culture of medicine is changing, for better or worse. The older male docs will say, in confidence, that medicine is becoming "pussified." Their old school view is that medical practice is not meant to be either convenient, comfortable, or a partial dedication, but rather more like a priesthood.
Worse case, I can see a future of salaried docs happy to be working in government clinics. You patients will not like that.
Vermont and Maine are the least urbanized states in the US, and close to the bottom of average GDP per hour worked.
Our friends at Vermont Tiger see these data as a problem, but I don't see what the problem is. These states are in control of their development, their industrialization, their welfare payments, etc. Apparently they do not seek growth or development. What's wrong with that? It's their choice, and apparently most people who live in those states like it that way. Money isn't everything: some seek it, some just want enough to survive until the Social Security gravy train kicks in, paid for by the labor of the folks in the wealthier states. Rural and rustic, with the good and bad (see the Rumford (Maine) Meteor) that come with that.
If those folks want more jobs and urban life, there is a simple solution: bathe, shave, get a haircut, and pile your stuff in a U-Haul and move to the resurgent Bronx in a few short hours. Job choice, no big snow problems, walk to the Stadium, lots of bars and bodegas, quick express subway to the Metropolitan Museum. How bad is that?
I like the idea of each state following its own heart. Each one is crazy and/or corrupt in its own way.
Opinion polls suggest that Americans are dissatisfied with government. Yet whenever another crisis hits, the natural human instinct is to say, "Why doesn't the government do something?"
That's a question I have discussed often here, along with the history of higher ed. Yes, we all understand that college has become a job credential, a social credential, and a professional prerequisite. Why that is has never been clear.
The common assumption among policymakers is that, in order to maintain its higher living standards against emerging markets competition, the United States must invest more in higher education. To achieve this, the government has instituted a massive student loan guarantee program, with over $1 trillion outstanding and an average of $25,000 in debt for every graduating student with debt. Yet millions of students continue to graduate with degrees that have no obvious real-world benefits. There’s a disconnect here, and it is beginning to appear that the current U.S. obsession with higher education is misguided.
The traditional idea of higher education was to train the literate for the Church, whether Catholic, Episcopalian or other Protestant. However a hundred years ago, for the elite on both sides of the Atlantic, a very different approach had been devised. This was best illustrated in Evelyn Waugh’s immortal “Brideshead Revisited” in which the protagonist Lord Sebastian Flyte wanders round Oxford with a teddy bear, drinking champagne, eating quail’s eggs and occasionally throwing up onto other students’ carpets. Americans will scoff at this depiction, but really the Harvard of Theodore Roosevelt was not very different, except in that it involved the occasional life-threatening game of football.
Flyte’s Oxford was not intended to train him for real life, it was intended as a highly enjoyable 3- or 4- year holiday before real life intruded. For the middle classes whose fathers were not Marquesses – a majority at Oxford even in Flyte’s time; there are only 34 Marquesses – the system applied a gloss of social polish and connections that was useful in later life, but did not impart more than a modicum of knowledge. Certainly the education provided was not expected to involve a huge amount of work, or to be useful in a subsequent career.
Growing Out of Poverty- A World Bank report makes clear how free markets—and U.S. leadership—have led millions to better lives:
Thirty years ago, half of the planet lived in utter misery, and many commentators argued that poverty was destiny. At best, most pundits conceded that pockets of poverty could be alleviated through international aid. Only a handful of economists begged to differ: Theodor Schultz, Milton Friedman, and Peter Bauer were the mavericks advocating free-market policies for every nation as the way out of poverty. They have been proven right. China’s economy has been growing since the mid-1980s—when Deng Xiaoping, its de facto leader, abandoned central planning, opened the borders for foreign investment, and promoted entrepreneurship at home.
In politics, few talents are as richly rewarded as the ability to convince parasites that they are victims. Welfare states on both sides of the Atlantic have discovered that largesse to losers does not reduce their hostility to society, but only increases it. Far from producing gratitude, generosity is seen as an admission of guilt, and the reparations as inadequate compensations for injustices — leading to worsening behavior by the recipients.
Some people say that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. But the runaway taxes of our time are the price we pay for being gullible.
It's a truism that recipients of charity must always hate the giver. It's about pride.
Hansen’s unscientific yammering about global warming has ruined the reputation of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and gravely damaged the image of NASA.
Hansen has lost it, and his colleagues finally are daring to admit it.
Somebody I know did the Winemaker vacation. Sounds like a cool way to get a small taste of what other people do without quitting your day job. Vocation Vacations.
I grew up in my working class neighborhood with friends of different races, ethnic backgrounds, religions, and sexual orientations. Although there were stereotypes and jokes that, in retrospect, are embarrassing, we all talked openly and understood each other. That bred mutual respect and defense of each’s rights to fair treatment based on merit, whether socially, in school, jobs or sports. We carried that into our adult lives and actions.
Inside Higher Ed, respectfully liberal, published the results of a study of college students’ attitude toward the question, "How important to you personally is helping to promote racial understanding?" To the researchers’ surprise, it became less important as the students went from freshmen to seniors, and that finding held across races. The conclusion as to Backwards on Racial Understanding:
"These findings cast doubt on research and conventional wisdom that argues for the liberalizing effects of higher education on racial attitudes. Instead, it suggests that, for some students, negative experiences with diversity may dampen the relatively progressive racial views they hold when entering college," write the authors in their conclusion.
Look at the right side of the linked page for some job listings for “diversity” positions at colleges. Multiply. Such positions are the fastest growing category of jobs at campuses.
Preaching “multiculturalism” but not practicing it due to allowing and encouraging narrow campus “victimology” groups’ vituperance aimed at other groups and their shouting down or criminalizing contrary ideas may stifle but, at the same time creates resentment and dislike. The actual experience for many students is the noted reduction in commitment to promoting racial understanding.
The study does indicate that having friends of different races and ideas does increase mutual understanding and engagement in promoting racial understanding. That is often referred to as civil discussion. That is increasingly difficult to accomplish on campuses where division and extremist challenges are common and defended by “diversity” ideology that promotes division and protects extremism.
College is the beginning for most students of competition to rise in society. If the rules absorbed are that one must be defensive, instead of mutually supportive, then no wonder commitment to promoting racial understanding declines. As merit of behavior and argument is given second place behind relativistic notions, justice is reduced and society’s future leaders become hypocrites mouthing multicultural platitudes but practicing defensive seperateness.
Physicians, like clergy, are more comfortable with terminal illness and death than others. Routine proximity to death and dying makes it feel natural and normal instead of a great enemy. From the WSJ'sWhy Doctors Die Differently - Careers in medicine have taught them the limits of treatment and the need to plan for the end:
Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. It was diagnosed as pancreatic cancer by one of the best surgeons in the country, who had developed a procedure that could triple a patient's five-year-survival odds—from 5% to 15%—albeit with a poor quality of life.
What's unusual about doctors is not how much treatment they get compared with most Americans, but how little. Charlie, 68 years old, was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice and never set foot in a hospital again.
It's a rare doc who elects heroic and torturous treatments for his own terminal ailment.
These dolphins picked the wrong beach for a mass suicide attempt. Sea mammal schools do this sometimes. for mysterious reasons. Like Blackfish (Pilot Whales) on Cape Cod. In the old days before McDonald's, such events were a windfall of oil and meat.
I can remember some rotting Blackfish carcasses on Cape Cod. Now, they drag them out to deep water again, but they just end up doing the same thing somewhere else.
Of course expensive and extensive testing is ordered, these days, partly because of malpractice. Any doc will say so. It's about CYA.
As a consequence, young docs are being trained to rely more on the tests they can order than on old-fashioned inexpensive clinical, hands-on evaluation and diagnosis. Thus a vicious cycle begins. And it's all free, because "insurance pays for it." So you get the patient's family in on it too: "Doc, we want you to do every possible thing and do every possible test to check out Granny." Is that an argument a physician wants to have?
No doctor enjoys being on the witness stand answering the question "So, Dr., you elected not to order a CAT scan for Mrs. Jones' headache because you trusted your clinical judgement, and felt the expense-benefit ratio was wrong?"
That is the thing about America that most Americans don't realize. For all the hopeful speeches made by American leaders about exporting the Des Moines way of life to Baghdad or Kandahar, what people in those parts of the world see when they look at America isn't democracy and freedom, it's wealth and power. Those are the things they want, and they don't understand why American leaders keep chattering on about democracy and freedom, no more than we understand why Muslims keep going on about the Koran.
They're not interested in what we believe, but in what we have, and they can't make the connection between one and the other, as far as they are concerned they already believe the right things. Muslims see the West in purely mercantile terms, decadent but rich. Dubai and Riyadh are in their own way crude imitations of us, or how they think we are. Luxury cars, gold encrusted things, prostitutes and tall buildings. The same goes for Moscow and Beijing, which gave rise to their own ruling mafias riding around in limousines, squandering fortunes, building tacky towers and imagining that they are outdoing the West.
Melissa Keith, also of KSU, continued the anti-West, anti-imperialist theme by recycling 1970s feminist theory in her paper titled, "Defining the Erotic Mystical Global Paradigm: From Inanna to the Bhagavad-Gita to Audre Lorde." The feminist discovery of the "wild" (thanks to Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Judy Grahn) dismantled the archetypical story of the West, that of the hero, with God as the patriarch. Lorde's rescuing of the "erotic" from its association with the "pornographic" and overturning--again--the old "dualities" of spirit over nature, was enthusiastically hailed. "Reclaiming" and "renaming" private body parts (this was soon after the Vagina Monologues season, after all) leads to staking out "intellectual space." As for implementation, Keith said teaching the explicit poetry of Judy Grahn in a small class of "mature" students provides "quite an amazing experience."
They seem to be betting that a decided shift in our political culture in the past decade has transformed class envy and save-government-spending demagoguery into a way to win a majority.
My old friend Bob Turner served in Vietnam in various capacities. He then went on to law school and teaches national security law at the University of Virginia, having also headed up that section for the American Bar Association. Want to be impressed? Read his bio at the link of his name above. Below, he writes about the last days of South Vietnam and what brought them about. This is slightly edited from another piece he recently wrote.
Congress did not totally cut off assistance to South Vietnam in 1975; but as a scholar who has been studying and writing about Vietnam for more than forty-five years (who was the last congressional staff member to leave Vietnam during the April 1975 final evacuation), I can assure you that the U.S. Congress was the most decisive factor in the Communist conquest of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in 1975.
To keep things in context, it is important to note that in the post-war era, Hanoi has repeatedly admitted that its leaders made a decision on May 19, 1959, to open the Ho Chi Minh trail and send tens of thousands of soldiers and countless tons of equipment and supplies south to "liberate" South Vietnam by armed force. That was more than 5 years before the U.S. decided to send combat units to Vietnam, and our purpose was precisely the purpose for which we sent troops into South Korea in 1950 -- to uphold the non-aggression principles of the UN Charter and oppose the expansion of Communism by force.
Viet Cong defectors used to laugh and express shock at how successful their campaign to portray the "National Liberation Front" to the west as something other than a classic Leninist "front" organization had been. (Hanoi actually published an English-language translation of the proceedings of the Third Party Congress in 1960, including the resolution it approved calling for "our people" in south Vietnam to set up a front under Party leadership three months before the NLF was allegedly formed by non-Communist resistance leaders in Ben Tre.) American "scholars" who fell for this ruse should be ashamed of themselves.
We went downtown to the Fremont Street Experience. I won't show you the tacky details. Nor will I show you the insides of most of the hotels. Overdone. The street reproduction efforts at the New York, New York, Paris, Venetian are worth a brief stroll. The crowds were too large in front of the Mirage for its Volcano show and in front of Treasure Island for its Pirate show (worth seeing) for me to get any decent photos.
Caeser's Palace has grown and grown since its opening as the first over the top class hotel on the new Strip, as the classic hotels one-by-one were torn down for bigger ones. Here's two shots of inside Caesers. The Atlantis show sunk.
Before going on to the better sides of the Strip, across Las Vegas Blvd. from the Monte Carlo is a 4-story M&M store, filled with kitch, at high price tags. These cylindars are full of different varieties of M&Ms @ $10/lb. Free samples? Yes, just two M&Ms per person!
There were so many grossly obese persons walking the Strip, the boys started calling them M&M people.
I first went to Las Vegas in 1954. Somewhere in my garage are the black-and-white photos I took with my Kodak Brownie. We stayed at the TravelLodge on the Strip, where the Imperial Palace now stands. The Strip ended a short way south from there. Most hotels had a Western theme. Downtown, there was only the Golden Nugget and Fitzgeralds, now the Fremont Experience of lights and tacky. After 5PM, men wore suits or sport jackets, women wore cocktail dresses. Dinner and a show, with top headliners, was $10. All-you-can-eat Prime Rib was $1.99. Gorgeous women in skimpy outfits served free drinks to gamblers. Pit bosses gave free decks of used cards to kids. When my poor family in Detroit migrated to LA in the 1930s, my trusting great-uncle Sam was suckered out of a week's wages, a few dollars, for a tiny parcel of desert land. In the mid-'60s, he got twenty-thousand dollars for it, equal then to two-years of middle-class salary, where the Luxor now stands. For twenty-years I stayed at the Desert Inn, until it was the last of traditional, classy Las Vegas, and haven't returned for 17-years.
Now? Don't ask. OK, I'll tell you anyway. The hotels are humongous and glitzy and expensive. Almost everyone is in jeans and shorts and T-shirts. Has-been shows cost a small fortune. Buffets are $15-$30. There are half as many cocktail waitresses and, really, most are 40-70 years old. One moved so slow, we looked around for her walker. (The pretty young things are off-Strip, like at the Rio.) Used decks of cards have to be bought for $5 or more. Corporate Las Vegas squeezes every penny of costs and dollars out of tourists. Fortunately, always being with my pesky, wandering boys, and my eagle-eyed wife, probably saved several thousand dollars, as I never escaped to the tables.
Early morning and late afternoon is the best time to see and appreciate the desert, as the angles of the sun make colors clearer and shadows more dramatic. This morning we went just west of Las Vegas to Red Rock Canyon. The greater Las Vegas basin once was under an inland ocean, so you can see the strata of sediments on the exposed sides of the hills. Unfortunately, I have an old camera, making the distinctions less clear than from the new fangled digitals, but look closely anyway.
Along the road, we met a friendly burro. I told the boys that is what burritos are made from, and they believed me, for a while anyway.
It's been a giant cultural change in medicine. Half of medical students are women these days. Many of them are Asians.
Document Deep Dive: 
