Friday, January 14. 2011
"The other line always moves faster."
Everybody
Thursday, January 13. 2011
Re Grand Central Station: "It's bloody gorgeous." As I was walking around late this afternoon, making my rounds, a Brit couple, rightly perceiving me to be a friendly, approachable, and respectable bloke, asked where where they might find a cab. We were near Grand Central, so I suggested they try the main exit from the station. Usually some cabs there. "Seen the inside of the station?" I asked. Well, this nice, refined older couple followed me in through the side door and down the escalator to check it out. I hope they found a cab or, as Brits are wont to do, found a cozy nook for a drinky. I did recommend the Campbell Apartment for a good cocktail, which many people do not know about.
As a country boy who lived in the city for around 6 years in younger days, I still get a rush of energy and inspiration just by visiting for a day or two. And that is despite the fact that, most places I go, you cannot smoke a ceegar indoors thanks to the sanctimonious jerk Nanny Bloomberg.
More pics from today, below the fold -
Continue reading "Pics: Hanging out around midtown"
From American Spectator:
Okay, folks. Listen up. There are thousands of great colleges around the nation at which you can learn any skill or profession you choose. And in none of those colleges will you be so indoctrinated in contempt for your nation, its history and values as you will be in the Ivies. Give yourself a boost in life: for all the supposed benefits you'd get in an Ivy League school, you'll learn more and gain a more realistic view of your nation and the world if you attend a college that's not among the Ivies. Learn elsewhere, and graduate without having your nose so stuck in the air that you believe America isn't a force for good in the world. And trust me, guys: chicks dig the uniform, regardless of which college you graduated from.
Read the whole thing. Irony aside, I think we should have ROTC everywhere. In my view, there are four noble (or potentially noble) professions: Medicine, Law, Clergy, and Miltary. The rest of us like me are just regular Citizens - a highly noble thing in itself in America.
FIRE: 2010: A Pivotal Year for Campus Liberty. An update from this fine organization.
HDV video for sports. Mount it on your helmet, your hat, or whatever. The GoPro.
Watch the sample ski helmet-mounted vid on their site. Great stuff.
Another one of those depressing marriage quizzes: The Sustainable-Marriage Quiz.
Is it the job of a marriage to sponsor "personal growth?" That sounds very 1960s. I think it is adolescent to think of marriage as an answer to life's questions, challenges, and dilemmas. A loyal and committed companion and partner is what it is.
When a man makes up his mind without evidence, no evidence disproving his opinion will change his mind.
Robert A. Heinlein, 1978 (h/t, Vanderleun)
Re Cultural Literacy: She asked for it..., the comments were good fun. Thanks, y'all. She enjoyed noting them very much. She watched Seven Beauties last night, That movie was too much for me delicate sensibilities, regardless of Giannini's performance.
Are you familiar with the McSweeny's site? Apparently lots of folks are, but it's new to me.
Verbing? I don't approve of it.
Why Paul Theroux cannot write an autobiography
How many people can the earth support?
The Idea of "Affordable Housing": Memphis
The Vegas IRA: Gambling on Wall Street v. Gambling in Las Vegas (h/t Betsy)
Dr. Sanity: FASCIST PIGS, FANATICAL IDEOLOGUES, AND DELUSIONAL ILLNESS
Insty: HAVE YOU NO DECENCY, SIR?
For EPA, climate tough in Senate
Corn asserts When It Comes to the Rhetoric of Rage, the Right Has the Edge
Twittering Why didn't they kill Palin instead
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED… Death Threats Against Sarah Palin at Unprecendented Level
My Name is Betsy. I'm a Killer
From Coyote:
We libertarians cringe when presented with a “national tragedy” like the shooting of Gabriella Giffords. Not because we are somehow more or less sensitive to vilence and loss of life, but because we begin bracing for the immediate, badly thought-out expansion of state power that nearly always follows any such tragedy, whether it be 9/11 or Columbine or Oklahoma City or even Pearl Harbor. Those looking to expand the power of the state, and of state officials, make their greatest progress in the emotional aftermath of a such a tragedy. These tragedies are the political equivilent of the power play in ice hockey, when defenders of liberty find themselves temporarily shorthanded, and those wishing to expand state power rush to take advantage.
Protein: We know who you are and we know what you’re trying to do. Morons.
Reason: Beware Bipartisan School Reform - If everybody on the Hill is happy, Americans probably shouldn't be.
Surber: Require youths to listen to Rush
Wednesday, January 12. 2011
From Assisted Suicide at Tablet:
The Arabic word taqqiya is frequently used to denote the kind of dissimulation practiced by Muslims in the Middle East. Westerners tend to abuse the term, as if any Muslim who lies, for instance, about a car robbery, was practicing taqqiya, when he’s just trying to avoid arrest as any other suspect would. Taqqiya is a doctrine particular to the Shia, a Muslim minority who, because they have had much to fear over the last millennium from their more numerous Sunni neighbors, are permitted to lie under duress about their real religious sentiments. The concept, however, is a useful reminder that this is a part of the world where saying the wrong thing to the wrong person can be costly.
Nonetheless, Westerners are very sensitive to the idea that some cultures do not value truth-telling in the same way that we do. For reporters it can be embarrassing if your beat is to cover, say, the Palestinian Authority, since the bulk of your work is taking dictation from frequently malevolent fabulists and having to pass it off as though you were interviewing someone actually worth speaking to. But the convention of our press corps is to treat the utterances of Muamar Qaddafi with the same respect due the prime minister of Canada. To fact-check an entire political culture is beyond the pale of Western journalism, so instead we pretend that Arab societies respect the truth as much as we do, for to say otherwise is to sit in judgment over another culture.
Unfortunately, there is no getting around the fact that societies where the truth is just one among many possible narratives are going to fare worse than societies where truth is valued.
Unlike all of the amateurs with their pet theories about why somebody would kill strangers, I offer no opinion. I don't know the guy. I would rather post about something else.
This post was prompted by this case in the UK: Fattest man in the world suing NHS for "letting me grow."
If a patient of mine got fat, or killed people, can I be called liable? I have been twice named in medical malpractice lawsuits. It is an appalling, demoralizing, painful, and time-consuming experience. It makes you want to quit medicine.
The first case was a teenaged gal who got herself knocked up. The claim by the teen and her anti-abortion parents was that, since she was an impulsive kid, it was my medical duty to make sure she used birth control. I had mentioned it to her, but I had not written that down in my deliberately-sketchy notes.
My second was a guy who cut his wrists in a suicide attempt (or gesture?). He and his wife and lawyer decided that they could make a case that I had prescribed an inadequate amount of antidepressants to prevent him from doing this. Even though the guy's main problem was a personality disorder, they found a psychopharmacologist to testify that the fellow's mood swings and tantrums represented Bipolar Disorder. He was wrong, but that didn't matter.
Both cases sued me to triple the max of my insurance. The first case was a charity treatment case, in a clinic to which I donate one day per week. I suspect they figured out on Google that my husband is a banker. Both plaintiffs lost in trial, but both experiences left me feeling dragged through a sewer, slimed. A trial lawyer can always find somebody to pay to say you did something wrong. In my field of work, everything is a judgement call, and there is rarely or never a right and wrong.
I had felt, with both patients, that I had had a good, constructive, and friendly relationship, and that I had helped them quite a bit. Interestingly, both sued me for their behavior and their behavioral choices, as if I were responsible for those - as if I were God.
Like most docs I know, I try to do the best that I can to help the people I see, but my powers are limited. Still, lawsuits are always in the back of every doctor's mind in the US. My guess is that about half of medical tests are done with lawsuits in mind (eg $700 CT scans for tension headaches). Lots of hungry, parasitical trial lawyers out there, and plenty of people who are willing to toss away a relationship with a doctor if they think they can hit the jackpot by doing so. They can always find another doctor (although few doctors are willing to see litigious patients. I will refuse to treat anyone who has sued a physician. In other ways too, I select the people that I am willing to help. It's my prerogative.).
The lesson: Evil lurks in human hearts. No doubt about it.
She was the first person blamed for the Arizona massacre by angry, hate-filled, destructive Lefty fanatics who have had her in their sights for two years. She speaks out now, presidentially.
Aways use your enemy's hand to catch a snake.
Persian Proverb
Harsanyi: This 'Conversation' is Just a Setup:
Jeez, if I've never written anything that could be construed as violent or hateful, even metaphorically (though I'm sure belligerent and offensive vocabulary crept into columns as needed), what could I possibly have to reflect on? My only contribution to the crumbling discourse, it seems, is believing in the tenets of classical liberalism. That, in and of itself, is a sin.
This leaves the person with two choices: Revise your viewpoint, or shut up. Which, of course, is the point.
Related: Hijacking A Massacre
Major snow dump overnight - lost power for a while, lost my links. I'll post this, instead:
Giffords Shot: Now, A Word from Our Gun Control Sponsors…
Rhode Island Governor Bans State Officials from Talk Radio
Dem Congressman: If Violent Rhetoric Didn't Cause This Shooting -- It Will Cause Next One!
Dr. Torrey: A Predictable Tragedy in Arizona - We emptied state mental hospitals starting in the 1960s without providing adequate treatment alternatives.
And "Dr." Matthews
Video: Slain girl’s father says attack the price of “a free society”
OK, that's enough of today's items on the shooting. The original news story should have been "paranoid pothead goes on shooting rampage."
But within hours of the news report, people began to exploit the sad story for their own purposes. Twisting the facts, inventing false narratives, "letting no crisis go to waste" (not that this represents a crisis). It's like Tawana Brawley all over again, the flat-out lie which Al Sharpton rode to seemingly perpetual fame and fortune. Propaganda designed to create a consensus view, or at least a thinkable view regardless of the facts. A snow job:
snow job
n
Slang chiefly US and Canadian an instance of deceiving or overwhelming someone with elaborate often insincere talk
Even the worthy Dr. Torrey did it, above. This kid would not have been hospitalizable, much less long-term hospitalizable, against his will, anywhere in the US. Well, I might be wrong about that: apparently he had been making death threats.
The only sane comment I saw this morning was the slain girl's father. He gets it. Well, this guy gets it too, at Am Thinker via Lucianne, The Media Has Declared War:
Newsrooms and hospitals have one major thing in common: the "hush" is the loudest thing anyone ever hears. The "hush" is the moment when normal activity stops cold for an announcement of major events that will entirely reshape any usual activity. While both newsrooms and hospitals stop on that kind of news -- and then, following it, race into a whirlwind of overdrive -- the similarities end there.
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Comments:
In the crosshairs of the trigger-happy MSM: Sarah Palin
In the crosshairs of the trigger-happy MSM: the 1st Amendment
In the crosshairs of the trigger-happy MSM: anyone who defies the imposition of socialism in America
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Otherwise, the blizzard of exploitation is disheartening, if not sickening.
It's a winter wonderland out there; a perfect day to be 6 or 7 years old.
Tuesday, January 11. 2011
 A Bird Dog pup (pupette, actually) has asked me to help her fill out her college education by listing some things she ought to know and read, but cannot fit into her college schedule as she has mapped it out.
Music to a Dad's ears, of course. Father knows best.
Well, I will just focus on one piece of her request here and now (because it went well beyond entertainment - this is just the fun part). She is a theater rat and reads plays daily for fun. She knows most of Shakespeare pretty well, and loves Pinter too (!). But she says her knowledge of films prior to her era is very limited. "What films should I know?," she asks. (I call them movies because I am a knuckle-dragging clinger.)
Ain't it great when the youths acknowledge their ignorance?
I told her I had once, for fun, made a list of my 100 essential movies (and I am not much of a movie fan), but it went away when my ancient Mac died ten years ago. Naturally, my list had some John Wayne, Gone With The Wind, Bridge Over The River Kwai, Swept Away, Streetcar, Waterfront, Mr. Blandings, Wonderful Life, the hideously painful Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, some James Bond and some WC Fields, Citizen Kane, Days of Wine and Roses, some Jack Lemmon like 7 Year Itch, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, Harvey, Billy Budd, the Alistair Sim Christmas Carol ( which she has seen countless times), and, as one item, all of Charlie Chaplin. I don't want to try to make my list again, and, for a person who is more of a reader than a movie person, I got well over 100 with my list of basic flicks.
If you google "100 essential movies of all time," you can get all sorts of obscure lists by critics. She did take the time from her Christmas-break reading and ski trips to New Hampshire and constant NYC trips to watch Amarcord today, which definitely is on my list.
Man, that movie is rich in memorable imagery, and as Italian as anchovies in olive oil.
So help me out. What's on your essential movies-to-see-to-be-culturally-literate list? (please do not feel that you need to list 100!).
The propaganda issued by the Obama administration to obtain support for ObamaCare is blatant and wrong. An example is touting that ObamaCare has helped small businesses to obtain medical insurance. The federal Department of Health and Human Services cites a Democrat-front organization. The real facts say otherwise.
The federal Department of Health and Human Services website HealthCare.gov offers this “fact”: “According to a new survey from the Small Business Majority, one third of employers that don’t offer health insurance said they are more likely to do so because of the small business tax credits included in the Affordable Care Act, which help small employers afford coverage for their employees.”
But, as an expose in the New York Times says, “As far as the Agenda knows, the Small Business Majority research is the only research that has found that small businesses buy in to pay-or-play. All of the other small-business advocates claim the opposite, and by greater margins.”
What is the Small Business Majority? According to the New York Times expose:
The group has been around since 2004, founded by a tech entrepreneur named John Arensmeyer….Small Business Majority has no membership — if it did, Mr. Arensmeyer says, it could no longer objectively represent all of small business, since memberships are by definition self-selecting. Nor is it funded by small businesses; instead the organization depends almost entirely on foundation grants…. Small Business Majority is nonpartisan only in the most technical sense, in that it is not formally allied with any party. Informally, however, it is allied with the Democratic Party. Mr. Arensmeyer serves as a board member of the Bay Area Democrats, which describes itself as “a network of private citizens active in national Democratic Politics.” Since 2002, Mr. Arensmeyer has given generously, and exclusively, to Democratic candidates, according to F.E.C. records. (“I’ve voted for Republicans,” he offers.)… But when Mr. Arensmeyer insists that his organization is not ideological, he appears to mean that it is not “conservative.” The whole project, frankly, seems fundamentally ideological, and clearly liberal. It’s received a leg up from Demos, the advocacy group that counts among its objectives “a more equitable economy with widely shared prosperity and opportunity” — no initiatives to foster Ayn Rand-style self-reliance here. (Demos serves as a fiscal agent, which allows the group to raise money as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.)
In Business Week, Prof. Scott Shane, of Case Western Reserve University, lays out the reality:
Sellers of small group policies report little change in demand for employee health insurance policies among small business owners. The sellers explain that compensation limits for employees make few small businesses eligible for the credit and that the low value of the credit does little to get business owners to provide employee health insurance.
The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that the uptick in the share of firms offering employee health insurance is an artifact of high failure rates of the most vulnerable small businesses (which tend not to offer employee health insurance) during the economic downturn. With more of the companies not providing insurance out of the sample, the share of those providing insurance has increased for purely mathematical reasons….
Another claim is that the new law is bringing down health insurance premiums. Even if the law might, possibly, maybe, at some time in the future, bring down premiums, it hasn't done that yet. Trade publication Employee Benefit News explains that private companies' spending on health insurance is expected to have increased by 4.3 percent in 2010, a rise from the 2.5 percent expected the month before the PPACA was passed because of changes in COBRA policies….
So why am I challenging the claims of the law's cheerleaders? Because its effect so far has been a net negative. That's because many business owners have formed negative expectations of the future effects of the law. For instance, a survey of 459 businesses conducted by Fidelity Investments in June revealed that 49 percent of small employers expect the new law to increase their costs. Many small business owners are responding to these expectations by passing on health insurance costs to employees, by changing the type of insurance they offer, and by planning to drop employee health insurance coverage in the future.
As to the reduced workforce, this USA Today study points out that employment recovery from this recession is slower and less than from prior ones: “This year's hiring should lower the 9.8% jobless rate to 8.9% or so by the end of the year, Moody's Analytics says. That would still leave about 13 million Americans jobless by year's end and many economists say it will take at least five years for unemployment to return to its normal 5% to 6% rate.”
Why are firms either not hiring or limiting hiring?
The President of the US Chamber of Commerce knows the primary reason, excess regulations and taxes sapping the ability and willingness by entrepreneurs to start or stay in business, or by businesses to expand employment or to retain benefits programs. ObamaCare, for example, “creates 159 new agencies, commissions, panels, and other bodies. It grants extraordinary powers to the Department of Health and Human Services to redefine health care as we know it.” It is time to go back to the drawing board, first by wiping as much of it clean as can be gotten through this Congress and forced upon President Obama. As Obama gears up for his re-election campaign, it should be on his mind that most Americans are not buying the many exposed lies of his false claims for ObamaCare.
Why spend 2 million for the simple cottage we posted yesterday, when you can spend just 8X more for a special ski house with plenty of space for all of your friends?
OK, so it isn't most peoples' idea of quaint little Stowe. I suppose you could buy it just to dynamite this wedding cake.
From The Science of Self Help in the New Atlantis:
It is easy to dismiss the self-help literature as a money-making machine for writer tycoons; so much of it obviously is. But studying self-help seriously not only illuminates the American character but may actually turn up some needed wisdom. So I have explored, gingerly, as one does a cracked tooth, three facets of the self-help genre: first, the self-conscious wisdom literature exemplified by the work of Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, the Sage of Maui, self-described student of American philosophic genius, who has composed a 390-page commentary on Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, and who presents a two-hour disquisition with ten bullet points on your PBS station every time there is a pledge drive; second, the positive psychology movement, which disdains the self-help label and claims to be unfolding “a science of happiness,” and whose vanguard spokesman is Tal Ben-Shahar, an Israeli-born international consultant, lecturer, and writer who was until recently a professor at Harvard, his course informally known as Happiness 101 the most popular at the university; and the achievement masters, who are a sterner lot in general than most self-help boys and girls, and whose eyes burn bright with the latest discoveries in the forging of excellence from quite commonplace human material.
Interesting essay.
Mark Hemingway: Trial lawyer at the center of fake autism study.
A scummy doc, also. Is there any self-policing, or any integrity, in the trial bar? Or is the operating moral paradigm to throw sh-t against the wall to see if any of it sticks with the dumbest jury that can be assembled?
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