Sunday, June 1. 2014
Like many if not most medical students, I spent some time at the VA hospital attached to the school. I did a thoracic surgery rotation and a psychiatry rotation there, at least. Also worked in their ER, which was inexplicably and redundantly separate from the general hospital's ER a block away.
The joint medical school-VA staff there were wonderful and more practically-minded than the full-time academics and researchers at the med school. They let us do things and procedures which the regular med center would never have let us do, and that was good experience. The patients, mostly WW 2 and Korea vets, but some Vietnam vets (they were still youthful and healthy then) were poor, on the whole, lacking in financial and overall life resources. There were plenty of veterans admitted to the regular medical center too but, at the time, I had no interest in how these systems worked.
Now I understand the the VA is plain old government medicine. Here's Charles Krauthammer, MD:
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: If you are non-ideological, if you brought in some experts and say how do you attack the problem right now? You give everybody on the list a voucher to go anywhere they want and they'll get their care within days. And if the budget won't hold it, then you do a separate appropriation. I can't see anybody in Congress who would oppose that. However, as you point out, this administration has been arguing for five years that the government knows best, it should allocate resources, and we won't even think of this.
And for the long-run, I think the question is this -- you know, this was started by Abraham Lincoln after the Civil War and at the time it made sense. But now that the country is so much larger, medicine is so much dispersed in areas of the country where there are other expertise. The budget for the VA is $85 billion a year, the number of patients is 6.5 [million] or so. Do the math. That's almost $10,000 a year per patient.
Why not have each of those vets get a voucher for $10,000 to purchase private insurance and to go anywhere? But of course an administration like this would never even contemplate that. But it is a question. If these problems are systemic and chronic, and they are from the bureaucrat structure of a government-run system, why wouldn't you contemplate voucherizing and privatizing it?
This article is good: Transform The VA Into A Pro-Growth Model For First Rate Health Care. There is no reason for the VA to exist today. It's an obsolete government program and does no favors to American vets.
Friday, May 30. 2014
WHEN will The People finally realize that the Veterans Administration is National Health -- what you get when the government runs a healthcare system? Its shabby service and uninterested administration are followed every decade or so by a scandal and the resignation of an administrator or two. Doctors in private practice must build their reputations for quality service, and then their incomes will follow. Doctors in national health are secure in their income, and indifferent to their reputations. When will we ever learn such a simple lesson?
(I am a Vietnam vet.)
 A book: DNA USA: A Genetic Portrait of America by Bryan Sykes
A data-driven exploration of the evolution of chess: Popularity of openings over time
Remains of massive 2nd c. building found in France
From Eat Without Fear:
My nonprofit for schoolteachers, Stossel in the Classroom, offers free videos that introduce students to economics. This year, we ran an essay contest inviting students to write on the topic "Food Nannies: Who Decides What You Eat?"
I was happy to see that many students understood that this debate is about more than safety. It's really about freedom. Sixteen-year-old Caroline Clausen won $1,000 for her essay, which contained this sarcastic passage: "Congress shall have the power to regulate the mixing, baking, serving, labeling, selling and consumption of food. Did James Madison's secretary forget to copy this provision into the Constitution?"
The Campaign for Junk Food - Michelle Obama on Attempts to Roll Back Healthy Reforms
Survey: Detroit Needs $850 Million Just to Clear Abandoned Homes
Why the New York Times was right to publish Michael Kinsley’s views about the freedom of the press.
Princeton’s “White Privilege” Denier Tackles “Academic Justice”
Obama's West Point Speech signals a presidency in deep trouble
Michael Bloomberg Blasts Ivy League For Liberal ´Censorship´
More: Mike Bloomberg Warns Today’s College Kids, Profs to Knock Off the Neo-McCarthyism
Union Demands Bereavement Leave for Dead Pets
China sinks VN fishing boat; deploys 3 nuclear subs to South China Sea; troops
on VN border
Congress Funds Army’s Hypersonic Missile After Chinese Strike Vehicle Test
Thursday, May 29. 2014
Actually, all of those adjectives c ome from the New York Times...
Tuesday, May 27. 2014
I have a very optimistic long-term outlook regarding our society. There are moments, however, which question my resolve. This is one of them.
It's articles like this that remind me Jean Baudrillard was right and I realize this isn't reality. It is an alternate reality, though. It seeks to simulate what the rest of us live. Kanye may feel comfortable calling out people like George W. Bush, or anyone else he doesn't like, but it's pretty clear he hasn't been in touch with reality for a long time.
The real question is why people like this continue to get coverage. My guess is they fear slipping into obscurity, and the best way to avoid it is to be outrageous and 'make news'.
Since real news isn't important to many people anymore, people like Kanye and the Kardashians can continue to dominate. Analysis is meaningless, the only thing important today (and don't think Obama isn't well aware of this) is a good photo, a headline, some Tweets to your peeps, and positive coverage on "The Daily Show" and any other Comedy Central program that purports to 'deliver the news'.
 I forget where I found that image (ok, reader reminds that it was our friend Vanderleun)
The Retail Death Rattle Grows Louder
Can homeopathy 'work' even when there's no evidence?
The Rise of the Master’s Degree
Packing your kid for camp for $1000
From Williamson's The Cloud in the Machine,Or, you can never have the same traffic-jam twice.
Our political discourse assumes, sometimes implicitly but often explicitly, that there exists a predictable, linear, straightforward relationship between the formal enactment of a given policy and the real-world outcomes that will be experienced as a result of it. This is a convenient fiction, and sometimes even the authors of that fiction roll their eyes at their own work, as when the Congressional Budget Office scored the Affordable Care Act and then added the caveat that its analysts did not believe that the policy would be implemented the way the law’s authors intended and the White House promised, thereby communicating that its report should be consumed only in saline solution.
Politics is mostly words about words, but it has real-world consequences, and death is not an uncommon one. The truth, which in Washington is an unspeakable truth, is that almost the entirety of our conversation about politics is predicated on a fundamental error in our understanding of reality. Unlike a certain Entity with Whom presidents and senators sometimes seem to confuse themselves, politicians cannot speak reality into being. (“Let there be . . . health care.”) The situation at the VA should not surprise us; what did we expect, having no way of even knowing what we should have expected? This outcome was at least as likely as any other, and certainly more likely than one in which reality matched policy through some obscure divine office unknown to us.
Ben Carson on Progressive Tolerance: 'Only Works in One Direction'
Rethinking Tax Benefits for Home Owners
European elections 2014: This is one peasants’ revolt that Brussels can’t just brush aside
Thailand: Economic growth is not enough
The Muslims’ War Against Fun Is Killing Them
Coyote:
...climate scientists are trying to create some kind of weird world where model results have some sort of independent reality, where in fact the model results should be trusted over measurements when the two diverge. If this is science -- which it is not -- but if it were, then I would be anti-science.
Monday, May 26. 2014
About internet security, government spying, etc: Everything is Broken. He begins:
Once upon a time, a friend of mine accidentally took over thousands of computers. He had found a vulnerability in a piece of software and started playing with it. In the process, he figured out how to get total administration access over a network. He put it in a script, and ran it to see what would happen, then went to bed for about four hours. Next morning on the way to work he checked on it, and discovered he was now lord and master of about 50,000 computers. After nearly vomiting in fear he killed the whole thing and deleted all the files associated with it. In the end he said he threw the hard drive into a bonfire. I can’t tell you who he is because he doesn’t want to go to Federal prison, which is what could have happened if he’d told anyone that could do anything about the bug he’d found. Did that bug get fixed? Probably eventually, but not by my friend. This story isn’t extraordinary at all. Spend much time in the hacker and security scene, you’ll hear stories like this and worse.
 The good news for today: Having Kids Probably Won't Destroy the Planet
Whew
It’s Not the VA: It’s Government-Run Health Care
Are mass shootings increasing in the US?
Now That's Some Good Bias: Networks Devote More Time to Christie's "Bridgegate" Pseudoscandal in Four Days Than They Devote to the VA Scandal In an Entire Month
Psychologist: PC Trigger Warning Craze Is Terrible
PJ O'Rourke: My Commencement Speech to Rutgers’ Geniuses: Go Forth and Fail - Greetings, Class of 2014. So Condoleezza Rice was too offensive for you. Just wait until Monday morning. Did you learn how to spell KFC?
Down Under, the Immigration "Rules Have Changed"; "Anyone seeking to illegally enter Australia … will never make Australia home
Making School Lunches Healthier Doesn't Mean Kids Will Eat Them - A new study found that less than half of students took a vegetable from the lunch line and ate some of it.
Are Americans Too Ignorant to Buy Good Mediterranean Food?
Who-d a-thunk it? Communist dictator Fidel Castro lives life of capitalist luxury with luxury homes, diamonds, and yachts?
‘Walk of Shame Shuttle’ to offer riders chance to air confessions on national TV
Life After Wartime - Combating the Veteran-as-Victim Narrative
Sunday, May 25. 2014
I have mostly exhausted my interest in posting about the complexities of the "mad or bad" topic but in this case, based on minimal evidence, I'd guess "bad."
Psychiatry has little influence over evil. That's for theology. Evil fantasies are things we (and everybody, pretty much) deal with routinely, but actions are another matter. The devil is stronger than we doctors are. Some evil is everywhere, from boardrooms to government to priests and pastors to teachers to cities to campuses. Please do not tell me that this kid had "PTSD," or an "anger management problem." Some people lack a moral compass almost entirely, but that moral compass spectrum spans from none to spotty to obsessionally scrupulous and fearful. We can deal with the latter relatively easily, but not the former.
The truth is that some people are "born to be hanged," and, at the least, removed from the gene pool. We too often piously imagine that happy and good are default settings for humans as if we could get everybody there with a rearranged psyche and a right environment (we term that "psycho-utopian"). It's an evil lie and an evil vision because it denies the existence of evil itself. My life, and history, have taught me that sin has great power. For all we know, violence, deceit, and destruction of good cheer are the default settings, and civilized behavior a special, difficult undertaking. That happens to be what Freud concluded, and he was smarter and a deeper thinker than I am. Not to mention many prophets, and Christ himself.
It is a positive comment on our level of Western civilization that we are surprised by gross acts of evil rather than taking them for granted. Quite remarkable in human history.
Good and evil remain the basics, as they always have done.
Addendum: I realize that my metaphors sounded as if I believed that evil is genetic. What I mean is that some people simply seem destined for trouble.
Saturday, May 24. 2014
Got up at 4 this morning for the meteors. Clouds and light drizzle, so headed to Dunkin Donuts instead.
Excellent travel site: Travel Insider
All-You-Can-Eat Taco Bars Deemed Offensive
Pope Francis 'Not Pleased' About Scandalous Canonization Banquet
When Sprawl Hits the Wall
The Hungry Kids Act of 2010
WHY THE MONA LISA STANDS OUT
Famous for being famous
How the Hiring Process Marginalizes Candidates on the Autism Spectrum
How Do We Feel about Incarceration?
Team Obama knew about VA’s cooked books for years
The VA Really is Socialized Medicine – That’s Why It’s Terrible
Immigration Creates Political Earthquake In Britain
A Blow to Campus Barbarism - A former Princeton president stands up against student-radical intimidation
A big part of the reason why more young people don’t vote conservative (i.e., as a practical matter, Republican) is that they have no freaking idea what is going on.
Perhaps, but Repubs have their share of low-information voters too
Radical chic and today's politicians
Radio Hosts Fired for Failure to Revere Transsexual Freakazoids
Everyone knows that they have major "issues," but it's not permitted to say it. Except here.
Hamas: We'll Use Unity Accord To Move Terrorism To West Bank
Friday, May 23. 2014
 I forget where that image came from
California’s New Solar Plant: Burning Up Taxpayer Money, Land, and Wildlife
AVI on a book I enjoyed too: 1493 by Charles C Mann
Driscoll on Mark Steyn's new book: Mark Steyn Surveys the Passing Parade
Here's What Happened When I Went To Vegas With 1,800 Hedge Fund Managers
Derb: Confessions of a Middlebrow
The Rise of Mob Rule in America
Where VA has taken veterans, Obamacare is leading all Americans: Kevin O'Brien
3 Ways to Make Obamacare Less Horrible
Bernard Mandeville, Psychiatrist in the Marketplace
Will America’s Future Be Whiter Than We Think?
It is a good thing that president Obama watches the news
Barack Obama has a strange habit of acting like somebody else has been president these past years. It’s really odd.
Europe's Soaring Revulsion Against "Europe" In One Chart
A commenter there noted "The peoples of European countries never voted for, and don't want, a "United States of Europe". They want individual sovereign States within a Free Trade Area, which IS what was voted for."
Russia Shifts to China After Ukraine Crisis
Chart below via Watts:
Thursday, May 22. 2014
 See how much it costs to hire your favorite band…or your least favorite, for that matter
A book: The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World*
Postal service: Committee OKs end to door-slot mail for millions
Lipson:
At a recent meeting with two dozen Chicago leaders, some Democrats, some Republicans, I asked a simple question, “Can anyone name a significant American achievement in world affairs over the past five years?”
The room was completely silent. Since the group had traveled widely, I posed a second question, “Have any of you visited countries where relations with America are better than five years ago?” Again, silence.
Chatting With ‘A Climate Heretic’
Hooray! You Can Fast To Stop Climate Change Typhoons!
Critics call Obama funding plan for health insurer losses a 'bailout'
You have a right to be offended
Billionaire plans to target Republicans in seven states
Folding knives in NYC
Chipotle and Guns: Three Separate Issues
Tiananmen: How Wrong We Were
*The
Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World - See more at:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/the-impossible-exile-stefan-zweig-at-the-end-of-the-world.html#sthash.6j5BmCEQ.dpuf
Wednesday, May 21. 2014
Pic above is the NYC central PO, the James Farley US Post Office. Once a beehive, now pretty empty inside the grand building. A temple to commerce, paper communication - and Christmas mail.
They are communal spaces where everybody goes - or used to. They employ many people who might not be easily employable elsewhere. They lose money, but so do schools, libraries, parks, highways, passenger rail, and the US Navy. Everything governments do loses money. Organizations and institutions exist, in part, to do things that are difficult or unprofitable to do otherwise.
Naturally, whenever large numbers people are involved, politics enters and, at that point, money mainly is about votes.
Why is the Post Office any different?
Well, perhaps it isn't any different. What seems different today is that many government civic "amenities" and "services" have competition from private operations who carry the risk, so taxpayers are less willing to throw their money away to governments who don't really worry about the money.
Parks are operated by operations like Coyote's, libraries have to compete with Kindles, government schools have to compete with charter schools, government rail has to compete with cars and air, and even the military hires tons of private contractors. Despite the massive increase in the size of government, there are more and more people willing to provide traditionally (meaning since the Progressive Era) government services more efficiently, more cheaply, and unburdening the hapless taxpayer of the risk of money-losing services.
What's your take on it?
Tuesday, May 20. 2014
Confirmed: NO GLOBAL WARMING in 17 Years and 9 Months
But but but...
The Ideal Climate Citizen? North Korea
The Obama Coalition Is About to Come Apart - He owes it all to the Keystone Kops of the leisure class.
People making above $100,000 and below $40,000 vote Democratic. The people in the middle vote Republican.
I think it's more the women who vote Dem, at any income level.
Pic of photographer pigeon from World War I in Photos: Animals at War
Scientists discover how to turn light into matter after 80-year quest
The Power of Character on ‘Mad Men’
The Knightly Ideal
How to get and keep a job
Nanny State University: Students Campaign for Warnings on “Offensive” Books
Fragile little totalitarian bullies. Trigger Warning for Maggie's Farm: "Danger!!! Reading this site might cause you to lose your hatred of Libertarian/Conservatives after a while."
Why the "Check Your Privilege" Crowd Won't Win
The extremist error was to draw the attention of the broader public in the first place. They can only win in undemocratic spaces, spaces where an elite minority can act without an effective majoritarian backlash. The radicals prefer to seize control of these spaces, to achieve influence on them, or to carve out fiefdoms within them. Failing that, a small but vocal minority can badger elites unused to dealing with bad press and public pressure. Indeed, all of the recent radical victories have been confined to elite, undemocratic spaces. The media? A salon for well-educated Northeasterners. Universities? Opaque bureaucracies flush with cash. Corporate boards in the tech industry? They’re corporate boards in the tech industry. And that’s the dark truth of Cultural Marxism: While it claims to stand for equality and against elite privilege, its method has always been to become the elite, not to destroy it.
A Connecticut Yankee in Appalachia - Alice Ely Chapman wages a one-woman war on poverty
Reynolds: Higher ed becoming a joke
Thomas Sowell – Campus Rape Cases Should be Handled by the Criminal Justice System
Goldberg: The Washington Post, Life & the Trouble with Experts
Greg Mankiw feels that Summers has the best review of Piketty
Behold the power of Power Line: It appears The Nation has scrubbed the politically incorrect comments we highlighted here.
Settled science and saturated fats
Warmist Bill Moyers is utterly concerned with saving the planet from “climate change”, so, obviously, he recommends that Warmists practice what they preach, and has promised to give up his own use of fossil fuels!
The IRS’s Media Firewall
EPA to Unveil Carbon Regs Next Month
The insanity of the Left’s opposition to voter ID Laws summed up in one poster
The Logic of Castro’s Nomination:
It’s More Than Identity Politics
The New Palestinian "Journalists"
Monday, May 19. 2014
College Bans Fencing Team from Practicing w/their “Weapons”
Deep question: Is a Hump Day camel … racist?
California Chrome's run in Belmont Stakes in doubt over nasal strips?
Want to Know If Your Food Is Genetically Modified? Across the country, an aggressive grassroots movement is winning support with its demands for GMO labeling. If only it had science on its side.
Three Ways of Looking at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
15 Examples Of "Liberal Privilege"
Check Your Own Damn Privilege Week at College Insurrection
Spying Is Meant to Crush Citizens’ Dissent, Not Catch Terrorists
Minimum wage: Learning the laws of economics the hard way
An Idea Whose Time Has Ended? Take our poll: Should the federal government get out of the student loan business?
Kerry tells Yale grads to keep faith in government
What???
The Great Society at 50
What LBJ Wrought - After 50 years of his anti-poverty policy, a “tangle of pathologies” has spread dramatically.
The Real Palestinian Refugee Crisis
Sunday, May 18. 2014
I'll bet anybody $1000 that Miami will not be underwater in ten years. Any takers?
Here's the scare headline: Miami Will Likely Be Underwater Before Congress Acts on Climate Change. Oh no - I'm scared. Not Miami! Not the US Congress! Yikes. Only Congress can save us from drowning. Or do they mean in 4000 years, when they do not realize next ice age will have lowered the oceans once again so that you can walk from Britain to France as they used to do before our SUVs ruined everything? I am deeply, deeply, seriously concerned, and it keeps me up at night. If you are not "deeply concerned" about something, there must be something morally wrong with you.
We all must become deeply, seriously concerned about something. Otherwise, what's the point of our existence? How do we otherwise justify it, right? We are foolish animals, me included. OMG, I think I accidentally ate a non-organic, GMO tomato last night. I am doomed.
Meanwhile, backtracking climate gurus warn that you should not expect their models to be correct. Not to worry, I do not and will not worry about models of any sort. All of the genius market models have been wrong, and those guys are much smarter than climate scientists.
Saturday, May 17. 2014
 An interesting website: American Renaissance
From Duck Vaginas to Bumblebee Sex: The Amazingly Overlooked Science of Genitals
"Overlooked"? Who has ever overlooked genitals?
"Gluten Sensitivity" May Be a Misnomer for Distinct Illnesses to Various Wheat Proteins
I am yet to be convinced that it exists
Here’s what’s not sustainable: organic farming
No matter what the boss says about flextime, get to work early
Berkeley students say their biodegradable caps and gowns aren’t green enough and it’s an embarrassment
Sure is an embarassment, but not in the way they think
On Top of Piketty - The new Marxism has nothing to offer us but chains.
... Marx has never vanished from the academy. The stubborn refusal of applied Marxism to produce anything but mass murder merely led to efforts to reframe the philosophy. Through much of the 20th century, Marx was clearly the greatest economist of all time, but his ideas had never been properly put into practice. Then he might have dwindled as an economist but was indisputably an important historian. When that didn’t pan out, Gramscian “cultural Marxism” allowed overwhelmed graduate students to avoid economics and history altogether in order to focus on Batman. When all else failed (and with Marxism, it always fails), Marx lived on through the claim that while his ideas may have faded, he was still an important figure of literature — a particular howler to anybody familiar with his clotted, vituperative, headache-inducing prose.
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Warning label for 
Dallas Willard's
Due cappuccini, at a highway rest stop. Some cocoa powder dusting on top. Yes, cappuccino is a morning/breakfast drink.