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.
There are about 40-thousand Catholic priests in the US and about 220,000 parishes serving about 70+ million Catholics, over 20% of the US population. -- If not religious, skip to about 1:25 minutes.
I obtained some inside information. A local, solo practitioner guy nets, for himself, $1.4 million per year. His gross is almost double that. He works hard, keeps three rooms going at a time, and around 40% of his practice is children's Medicaid which apparently pays well. The rest is self-pay plus some dental insurance.
He has two hygienists, a receptionist, and a billing person in the office. A small businessman.
I saw a Killdeer with three teensy, just-hatched miniature Killdeer chicks running around a large gravel parking lot during my morning walk today.
That was a sight which gladdened my heart and sweetened my soul.
The Killdeer is found, either breeding or wintering, in all states of the US. It's a plover of open ground, and not particularly associated with water like most plovers.
You will never find them in tall grass or woodlands, but you can occasionally see them doing their run-and-pause bug-hunting technique on pebbly shorelines.
Their "killdeer" call, sometimes heard at night, and the rusty flash of tail, are distinctive.
You can read about this not-uncommon bird here. Every good person loves the Killdeer.
When in the chronicle of wasted time I see descriptions of the fairest wights, And beauty making beautiful old rhyme In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights, Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty's best, Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow, I see their antique pen would have express'd Even such a beauty as you master now. So all their praises are but prophesies Of this our time, all you prefiguring; And, for they look'd but with divining eyes, They had not skill enough your worth to sing: For we, which now behold these present days, Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.
My good friend Larry Bailey retired from the Navy in 1990 after a 27-year career as a SEAL, rising to Captain. Captain Bailey's most significant military assignment was as Commanding Officer of the Naval Special Warfare Center, where all Navy SEALS undergo basic and advanced training.
Bailey and others from across the spectrum of US special forces have banded together to form Special Operations Speaks. I'll let them speak for themselves:
Honorably discharged veterans of the Special Operations communities of all the Armed Services have organized an effort to elect Mitt Romney President of the United States. This group, “Special Operations Speaks,” or “SOS,” will be structured along quasi-military lines, with an umbrella organization coordinating the efforts of several subordinate Service-unique specialties. The Army will be represented by “Rangers Speak Out” and “Green Berets Speak Out;” the Navy by “SEALs Speak Out;” the Air Force by “Air Commandos Speak Out;” and the Marine Corps by “MARSOC Speaks out.”
SOS is configured as a “Super Political Action Committee” (Super PAC) that will enable it to exert maximum influence as an advocate for the election of Mitt Romney as President of the United States. Subsequent to the 2012 campaign, SOS will continue to exert pressure on behalf of the Special Operations community.
Of particular interest to SOS is the urgency of maintaining the level of secrecy that has heretofore been a hallmark of Special Operations. The recent leaking of highly classified information from the offices of the Commander-in-Chief himself clearly indicates the need to protect sensitive information from the public (and enemy’s) eye. SOS will educate the public and its representatives in the US Congress about this issue.
Until November 6, 2012, SOS will organize and execute operations designed to help elect Mitt Romney and to defeat Barack Hussein Obama.
There's a petition at the site for an investigation by the House Homeland Security Committee into who leaked the secret information about the SEAL raid that got bin Laden. Please sign up.
Also, rest assured that just as they defended us during their active duty, our special operations forces are still doing the job.
P.S.: Here's a 2007 interview by me with Larry Bailey, when he organized 40,000 in D.C. for a No Cut, No Run rally.
As in so many other cases, international media usually seeks out and features negative news about Israel or exaggerates it or treats it in a biased manner. So, too, on this issue.There is a natural, and commendable, empathy for peoples in dire straits or whose experience, by large stretches of analogy, may be compared to other groups, like Hispanics or Blacks in the US, but that alone does not merit the one-sided coverage of this issue and the lack of facts and context.That lack of context and partial facts has been the case with most of the reporting about African illegal immigrants in Israel.
As in the US, it is difficult to count the number of illegal immigrants, so hard numbers of illegal African immigrants in Israel are estimates.According to Wikipedia, there were about 26-thousand in July 2010 and 55-thousand in January 2012. Estimates of new arrivals are about 1-thousand a month, which would bring the June 2012 number to over 60-thousand.Two-thirds are estimated to be in south Tel Aviv and another 20% in the resort city of Eilat. Some other estimates of illegal African immigrants in Israel are higher. This is a lower percentage of illegal immigrants than in the US, but Israel should not wait until it is as large a problem as here. There are also about 150,000 Black Ethiopian Jews in Israel. Black Ethiopian Jews were brought in by Israel.
As in the US, there is certainly racism against Blacks within Israel.There is also acceptance and substantial aid within Israel, as in the US for its illegal immigrants.
...you’ve been pampered, cosseted, doted upon, helmeted, bubble-wrapped. Yes, capable adults with other things to do have held you, kissed you, fed you, wiped your mouth, wiped your bottom, trained you, taught you, tutored you, coached you, listened to you, counseled you, encouraged you, consoled you and encouraged you again. You’ve been nudged, cajoled, wheedled and implored. You’ve been feted and fawned over and called sweetie pie. Yes, you have. And, certainly, we’ve been to your games, your plays, your recitals, your science fairs. Absolutely, smiles ignite when you walk into a room, and hundreds gasp with delight at your every tweet. Why, maybe you’ve even had your picture in the Townsman! And now you’ve conquered high school... and, indisputably, here we all have gathered for you, the pride and joy of this fine community, the first to emerge from that magnificent new building...
But do not get the idea you’re anything special. Because you’re not.
There is nothing easy about leading an "ordinary" life - whatever that is - and you will always be precious to your parents.
“Imagine a world in which hunger is vanquished by crops that don’t depend on the soil, water or fertilizer, or pesticides to thrive; they’re just around the corner.”
Except for some clearly defined, obvious ailments (eg dementia, the schizophrenias, PDD, autism, addiction, melancholia), most diagnoses in the handbook (the DSM, which many of us refer to as "the insurance manual") attempt to define common clumps of symptoms or behaviors without assuming any validity (ie, without any assumption that the clumping refers to any one cause or underlying abnormality) to those clumps.
Many of our "diagnoses" are akin to saying that a patient has a fever. There's a problem of some sort, but you don't know what it is yet, or whether it's serious or not. Lots of them are "life problems." The DSM is, sorry to say, largely pseudo-scientific. That's because we have very little validity to demonstrate.
Since the validity of most of our diagnoses cannot be tested in any way, all people do is to test their reliability (ie how often will two docs make the same diagnosis in a given patient). In a sense, measuring reliability is nothing but a measure of group-think and, in Psychiatry, the reliability of our diagnoses is quite low - in the "poor" range. (This is measured by a "kappa" score of inter-rater reliability.)
Landis and Koch45 have proposed the following as standards for strength of agreement for the kappa coefficient: ≤0=poor, .01–.20=slight, .21–.40=fair, .41–.60=moderate, .61–.80=substantial, and .81–1=almost perfect. Similar formulations exist,46–48 but with slightly different descriptors. The choice of such benchmarks, however, is inevitably arbitrary,29,49 and the effects of prevalence and bias on kappa must be considered when judging its magnitude.
OK, Psychiatry has only a few rare spots of validity, but even its reliability is mostly in the "poor" to "fair" range. The good Psychiatrist here discusses the abysmal reliability of Psychiatric diagnoses.
As Robin Hanson discusses, Psychiatry uses "depressingly low standards" for reliability. Indeed, most of the time Psychiatrists disagree on how to label a given patient because few patients fit the molds, and most sort-of "fit" multiple categories. Furthermore, many diagnoses fade imperceptibly into normal variants: ADD, anxiety, mild depression, pbobias, PTSD, Bipolar 2, and OCD, and personality disorders, for some common examples. (I recently read that 40% of people have some obsessional symptoms at some point in their lives.)
In Psychiatry, you have to be able to tolerate ambiguity. It's not a mechanical profession except for the amateurs. Most if not all people on the sidewalk are at least what we might term "normal-neurotic" in some ways.
As a result, the American Psychiatric Association recommends that the DSM not be applied clinically in the cook book manner in which it is written, but as a guideline to which clinical experience - and understanding the patient in as much depth as possible - inform one's clinical impression. As Dr. Frances says, "It's not a Bible," and should not be applied as if it were.
Indeed it is not. Scientifically, it's mostly a failure but it's a kind of casual dictionary. I do not take it too seriously, and often use diagnostic descriptions which do not appear in the DSM (such as "neurosis"). I can usually find a way to help people anyway, regardless of how I might label them (and often I do not bother to label them at all). Generally, the more clinical experience a doc has under his belt, and the more psychodynamically-oriented he is, the less seriously he takes the diagnostic obsessional nit-picking.
We muddle through, struggle to understand, and still are able to help lots of people in the end. A true diagnosis of a patient goes far beyond anything in the superficial DSM. For example, a real diagnosis must consider the nature and quality of somebody's "object relations," their character strengths and weaknesses, their sublimatory capacities, their defensive structure, their superego functioning, etc. etc. In other words, really knowing what a person is all about.
...the single-mother revolution has left us with the following reality. At the top of the social order is a positive feedback loop, with kids raised in stable, high-investment, and relatively affluent homes going to college, finding similar mates, and raising their own children in stable, high-investment, and relatively affluent homes. At the bottom is a negative feedback loop, with kids raised by single mothers in unstable, low-investment homes finding themselves unable to adapt to today’s economy and going on to create more unstable, single-mother homes.
Not only do we have more poverty, inequality, and immobility; we have the makings of a caste society, with an inherited elite and an entrenched proletariat. That’s not an America that anyone finds very attractive.
Raising kids as a single parent is something that only extraordinary people can do well.
The obesity epidemic is a convoluted way of saying that the problem with government health care is the people. But that's not the problem. Obesity may not be healthy, but if we ban sodas and force everyone to exercise in the yard before work, the numbers still won't balance. Because the real problem with government health care is government.
When offering a product or service, the most elementary thing to do is calculate the cost of making the product and the price that people are willing to pay for that product. If you can't bring the two together, then you don't have a product. You have a disaster waiting to happen.
Obama promises the progressive agenda — more executive aggrandizement, more marginalization of Congress, more latitude for unaccountable experts to supervise our lives, more regulatory suffocation of society. Romney promises the reverse.
...consider ... that we were born into the freest, strongest, and wealthiest nation that mankind has ever known—and elected as our president a man who promised to “fundamentally transform” it.
Yes, I think that may have been where we made our mistake. We wished to have an orange for a head.
To the extent that these unions shape the Democratic agenda, Democrats aren’t just the party of government; they are the party of inefficient, expensive, unresponsive, bureaucratic government. They are the party of government workers first and foremost, and if there is a clash between the interests of the providers of government services and their consumers (between, for example, unqualified, unmotivated life-tenured public school teachers and kids), the unions come at these issues from the standpoint of protecting workers first, others second.
In terms of the blue social model, they are the party of the bitter clingers: the power of public sector unions among Democrats is a power that inhibits Democrats from putting forward innovative, future-facing ideas (about schools, health care, and so on) and keeps them focused firmly on the defense of the past.
The left’s analysis of its loss in Wisconsin resorts to some classic tropes: it is despair masked as defiance in order to avoid deep introspection...
A rational Liberal, is Prof. Mead. Slick writer too.
Harvard's Michael Sandel is a rock star political/moral philosopher. I've never read him. All I know about him is from this review of his new book, What Money Can't Buy, in The Guardian.
So just a brief thought about the article, not the book. It seems to me as if Sandel has created a straw man of money - or maybe of markets, and wishes people would consider more elevated, more moral views of life.
But don't markets simply reflect what people want, and the decisions and choices people make? Many people seem to want to buy his ideas, which is why his book is making him big bucks in the marketplace of the bookstores.
Sandel makes the illuminating observation that what he calls the "market triumphalism" in western politics over the past 30 years has coincided with a "moral vacancy" at the heart of public discourse, which has been reduced in the media to meaningless shouting matches on cable TV – what might be called the Foxification of debate – and among elected politicians to disagreements so technocratic and timid that citizens despair of politics ever addressing the questions that matter most.
"There is an internal connection between the two, and the internal connection has to do with this flight from judgment in public discourse, or the aspiration to value neutrality in public discourse. And it's connected to the way economics has cast itself as a value-neutral science when, in fact, it should probably be seen – as it once was – as a branch of moral and political philosophy."
"Illuminating observation"? That's new?
It may be true that profs of Economics have attempted to make their area of study as value-neutral as physics, but economics as practiced by the individual person in a free society is as far from value-neutral as can be. After all, there are "markets" in values and morals too and everybody seeks different versions of these products.
Free markets in everything, from ideas, to religion, to dating, to education, to health, to business. That's America to me. Just don't expect me to approve of your choices.
Help me out, gentle readers. What contradictions can you see in Sandel, as seen through the article?
In my post yesterday, Dr. Frances discussed "diagnosis inflation" and "medicalization" of normal life troubles. It would seem obvious that not everybody with a problem has an illness.
However, labeling a problem as an illness does help obtain insurance coverage. That may be the whole point. This topic is discussed briefly here.
While leaning against a wall sweating after my heroic aerobics the other day, at 5:45 AM, I decided to interview a sweet little (but muscular and fit) trainer about some details on the roughly 60 people who show up when the doors open at 5.
She told me that it is not the same people every day, but it tends to break down like this:
- around 1/3 are Moms who do an early work-out before going home to make breakfast for their kids (while Dad is still home and the kids are sleeping). She said this early-bird approach is increasingly popular with Moms around here, where men typically leave for work at 6 or 6:30. - most of the rest of the folks, 50-50 men and gals - are there before work, with their dress clothes with them on hangers
Plus
- about 7-10 muscular hunks doing weight training - mostly guys but always a couple of gals - and usually an "anorectic or two" on the treadmills
I saw a Killdeer with three teensy, just-hatched miniature Killdeer chicks running around a large gravel parking lot during my morning walk today.
Via Insty, 
Some 
