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.
I think everybody's ideal is to have an internist or family practice doc who knows you well personally as well as medically, and where you can call or come in anytime if you have a concern. For various reasons this has become elusive.
Based on what I have seen, three trends are growing. The first is the Doc-in-a-Box or, more likely, a PA in a pharmacy.
The second is concierge medicine in which, for a modest annual fee, you have unlimited contact - 24/7 - with your generalist.
The third is generalist docs who will not accept insurance but who charge modest fees and will offer a bill that you can send for your own reimbursement, if any. They can charge modest fees because they do not need to hire a large back office staff for coding and billing.
It's a good idea to have a generalist who knows you and your family. With ObamaCare, I think all three of these modes will grow in popularity, especially the last one. They are all working mostly outside the system. They are not likely to want to make time to see you, however, unless they have met you (except for the PA in a box trend).
Generalist physicians, whether Family Practice, Internal Medicine, or whatever, are the ultimate docs. They see everything, major and minor, and know when to refer. People who want to use their Medicare and Medicaid are going to have a tough time with office visits in the future.
I had always aspired to be a country doc, a generalist, in the New Hampshire countryside, but became too fascinated with what I now do. I had dreams of fixing broken arms, stitching up nasty cuts, treating poison ivy, delivering babies, consoling the terminal, sending appendicitis patients to a surgeon friend, etc. It's kind of funny, but my generalist friends tell me that half of their work is Psychiatry anyway.
With the training I had, I suspect that I could still do those country doc things pretty well, but my malpractice insurance does not cover it. In my training, I caught 42 babies. Some were dangerous and complicated. As I have admitted here in the past, I refused to participate in abortions not because I am so religious but because I did not want it in my memory.
As one who has spent a lifetime studying the humanities, my advice for students is to take their business elsewhere. Until humanists can offer an education that truly prepares one for life -- not just with a marketable degree, but with an education of wisdom and hope -- I would consider a degree in accounting or computer science. Then, after work, one can read all the Shakespeare one likes and not have to be informed that the bard was a racist, an anti-Semite, and gender-challenged to boot.
I think these teen transgenders are probably just terribly mixed-up confused people. Some days I feel like I am trapped inside a human body, and not a particularly wonderful body either.
But I cope with it. I am taking a cute little gal on a fishing trip off Block Island this weekend. How good is that for June 15? Is that a keeper?
What could go wrong? And what are we doing in a Syrian civil and religious war anyway? Do we have a dog in that fight? Those are my tax dollars (more accurately, dollars borrowed from China in my name. Our Chinese credit card).
I have written about the history of the concept of retirement several times, over the years. Basically, I tend to believe that retirement is a bad idea for body and soul. My house painter is 74, and he claims work keeps him young and permits him to take better trips than he could otherwise afford.
Twenty-five years ago, when the New York City public school system seemed permanently mired in mediocrity, a New York Times reporter asked me, “Alright, what’s the answer?”
I said, without thinking really, “One hundred nuns.”
Government requires trust. Government by progressives, however, demands such inordinate amounts of trust that the demand itself should provoke distrust. Progressivism can be distilled into two words: “Trust us.” The antecedent of the pronoun is: The wise, disinterested experts through whom the vast powers of the regulatory state’s executive branch will deliver progress for our own good, as the executive branch understands this, whether we understand it or not. Lois Lerner is the scowling face of this state, which has earned Americans’ distrust.
Whatever inchoate anxieties predated this presidency are now worse: a politics rife with suspicion and retribution, and most of the people believing the government, for starters, threatens their freedom.
“Did you kill any babies, Bruce?” As we lay in bed on New Year’s Eve 1970, this is what the girl asked who a friend had introduced me to when I returned from Vietnam a couple of months before. I got up and drove home in the snowy streets from Queens to Brooklyn. I didn’t even try to date another girl for almost a year after. But, I moved past it and didn’t dwell on that night.
Some returned soldiers and Marines had worse experiences and some had better and almost all just blended back in after an initial adjustment. Studies show that most were more successful in their lives than their non-serving peers. But, what the major media and liberal opinion-setters painted was an image, usually grossly ignorant and mendacious, of a mentally and morally scarred Vietnam veteran. The purpose was to reduce support for the US commitment to South Vietnam. It took several decades before this image from the Left was reversed and due pride in veterans’ service returned to America. Yet, that erroneous and harmful image of Vietnam veterans still lingers in many minds.
Aside from the opprobrium poured upon us Vietnam veterans from the Left in the pop culture and academia, the goal of our war was lost and we had little reason to exhibit pride in the outcome of our service as millions of IndoChinese were murdered by the conquering communists in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The perfidy of so many of our Senators and Congressmen, and the indifference of most opinion-leaders, only deepened the alienation from authority, and increased the vulnerability to the anti-Vietnam messagers.
That’s what the fall of Saigon has to do with the life paths of Vietnam veterans.
Rarely do two books appear on widely different aspects of the Vietnam War which based on meticulous research weave an understanding of the still confusing Vietnam War that, as Paul Harvey used to say, tells us “the rest of the story.”
Pr(A|X) = Chance of having cancer (A) given a positive test (X).
This is what we want to know: How likely is it to have cancer with a
positive result? In our case it was 7.8%.
Pr(X|A) = Chance of a positive test (X) given that you had cancer (A). This is the chance of a true positive, 80% in our case.
Pr(A) = Chance of having cancer (1%).
Pr(~A) = Chance of not having cancer (99%).
Pr(X|~A) = Chance of a positive test (X) given that you didn’t have cancer (~A). This is a false positive, 9.6% in our case.
We've all known for a while that the DHS has been building a potent paramilitary organization. The justification for that eludes me. Of course, the FBI and ATF are paramilitary too. What am I missing among federal paramilitary agencies?
Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 5th July, 2005: “The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn’t statistically significant….”
That was written 8 years ago but I believe, to be more accurate, there has been slight cooling since 1995, not 98.
Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 7th May, 2009: ‘Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’
"Worried"? I thought we were supposed to get worried if it got warmer, not if it didn't...but I don't really care what the weather does. I like any and all weathers except for tornadoes.
Diamonds are not scarce, are not investments (they depreciate), and are no more "forever" than any other rock. Their popularity as stones in engagement rings dates to the 1930s with DeBeers' very effective marketing campaign.
We covet diamonds in America for a simple reason: the company that stands to profit from diamond sales decided that we should. De Beers’ marketing campaign single-handedly made diamond rings the measure of one’s success in America. Despite its complete lack of inherent value, the company manufactured an image of diamonds as a status symbol. And to keep the price of diamonds high, despite the abundance of new diamond finds, De Beers executed the most effective monopoly of the 20th century. Okay, we get it De Beers, you guys are really good at business!
De Beers believes that a fellow should spend two month's income on a diamond. Wiki has a brief history of engagement rings and wedding rings.
Carpe Diem recommends fake diamonds, and real love and reliable companionship.
Sugar protectionism is government planning. It is industrial policy —
government picking winners and losers — applied to agriculture. It is
politics supplanting the market in allocating wealth and opportunity.
And it is perfectly all right with 20 of the 45 Republican senators.
Climatology Prof. Salby explains why the climate models are wrong. It's slightly technical for our handicapped challenged readers who can't do fairly simple math and is intended for a sophisticated audience, but the message is clear. (h/t Powerline)
He is not, of course, the first to note that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere lag behind temperature rises, but he makes a compelling presentation. (It begins in German but quickly switches to English.)
This is a serious man. "The models have no predictive skill."
Would it be criminal to call this guy an un-American jackass? This guy ought to watch the harassment that takes place in every Question Time in the Brit Parliament. The guy is pathetic. Harassment of others is poor manners, but frequently necessary in life because so many deserve it. Including him.
We have a sort of inverted war going on and sadly, that war has enthusiasts on both sides of the aisle. This war is being waged by people who send F-16 fighter jets to Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Egypt, while seeking to limit American citizens to seven bullets in their own defense. It's a war in which our armed forces are emasculated even as domestic agencies amass military weaponry and hardware at an alarming rate, thereby leaving the law abiding citizen vulnerable to both foreign enemies and his own government. This is a war in which an American ambassador and staff are left defenseless during an attack overseas, abandoned by a Commander in Chief who has yet to account for his own actions that day, but who nevertheless scurried about the land for weeks fraudulently insisting that responsibility rested on the head of an American video producer who remains incarcerated to this day. It is a war in which our government labels an attack on US soldiers by a Muslim shouting "Allahu Akbar" as, "Workplace Violence," while labeling Americans who embrace the freedoms enshrined in our founding documents as potential terrorists.
We live in a time in which an Air Force wing commander removes from a base dining facility a Bible verse reading, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God," on word of an unhappy atheist, thereby discovering a heretofore unknown constitutional right not to be offended...
Where is the sane center of sanity these days? I mean, besides here at Maggie's Farm?
I think everybody's ideal is to have an internist or family practice doc who knows you well personally as well as medically, and where you can call or come in anytime if you have a concern. For various reasons this has become elusive. 
Where should transgender teens pee when at school? In some precincts, this seems to be a burning civil rights issue.
These Sunglasses Really 
From George Will's 
Diamonds are not scarce, are not investments (they depreciate), and are no more "forever" than any other rock. Their popularity as stones in engagement rings dates to the 1930s with DeBeers' very effective marketing campaign.