Maggie's Farm

This classic Abbot and Costello routine (finally, somebody put it on youTube) reminds me of how the Left reacts if you say the word "Palin." Or "Bush," for that matter.

St. James Church, Woodstock, Vermont.

A re-post from June 30, 2008. Sure is hard to believe that was one year ago, because it feels like yesterday.

With TV, you are more-or-less forced to watch the thing because it tends to grab our passive brains. With blogs and newspapers, you can easily skip stuff you chose to ignore. So if I am boring you with my northern Italy travelogue posts, please skip over them. It's just fun for me to post the photos - and it motivates me to get them organized.

One day last week we took the train up to Domodossola to catch the regular Centovalli train (not the tourists' Lago Maggiore Express which doesn't do much stopping) through the Alps to Locarno, Switzerland, on the northern tip of Lago Maggiore.

It is our travel custom to make things complicated and to plan tight connections - and to thereby create adventures, memorable mishaps, stress, and close calls. The free-spirited Mrs. BD thrives on such things, but I do not. As it turns out, The Dylanologist loves to cut things close, too, and to dash off somewhere when he has a free 3 minutes to spare.

We got off the train halfway at the whistle-stop of Santa Maria Maggiore (nobody else got off) to take a hike in the Alps. We planned to hike up the mountains in a circle through the mountain hamlets of Toceno and Craveggia, and to arrive back down at Santa Maria Maggiore in time for the last train to Locarno, to arrive there with 16 minutes to find and to catch the last boat down Lake Maggiore to where we were staying in the cozy village of Baveno.

We are tireless and intrepid walkers, but we characteristically underestimated the distance of our hike as we always do, and did not expect the heat. No water, and no cafes open. But we did get to stumble into the rarely-visited Alpine village of Craveggia (pop. 730). Eventually, with ten minutes before the train and without knowing our exact location, we swallowed our pride and flagged down a passing house painter who happily and cheerfully got us to the station in his tiny two-door rattletrap car - just as the tiny train pulled into the tiny "Disney Italy" station.

No passport checks, by the way, training into Switzerland. We brought them anyway.

Here's a map showing the northern tip of Piedmont where it pushes into Switzerland. The Centovalli train runs on one track from Domodossola to Locarno, at the tip of the Lake, over fearsome gorges and hairy mountain cliffs.

Let's begin this photo tour, though, with this northern Italian lovely in a cafe on the old square of Domodossola, who our sneaky paparazzi Dylanologist photographed on my dare. I call that "La bella figura." Plenty of real blonds up there.

Travelogue of this side-trip with lots of photos below on continuation page -

Thanks to Vanderleun.

Here's one of them:

A 38' 1928 Matthews Cabin Cruiser, for sale here. Not a lovely boat, in my opinion, but a good-looking hull.

Not your reserved and formal Yankee-style, but darn good fun (h/t, Protein):

Michelle:

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius tried to reassure citizens in New Orleans this week that Obamacare bureaucrats will make sound medical decisions for all Americans. She failed. Under the government-run plan, she promised, a team of health care experts will recommend what should be covered: “I think it would be wise to let science guide what the best health care package is.”

I guess it didn't occur to her that doctors know some science - and they also know something else: they know their patient. No two patients are alike. People do not want an "approved treatment protocol" - they want to work it out with a doc who is working for them, and is not a de facto civil servant. I think what Sebelius means is not "science": she means a board of cost-containing medical efficiency experts.

However, I do not think anybody wants a government to have that sort of power. Governments create omnipotent monopolies.

It's one thing for a private medical insuror to tell you they don't cover in vitro fertilization, and another for the government to tell you that you cannot have it because "science says" that it's not cost-effective. In the former case, it's a freely-entered association, as Milton Friedman would say, and if you want the in vitro badly enough, you can save your pennies and get one. Furthermore, I'd much rather make an appeal to a private biz than to the government.

We suspect that the government wants two things: 1. To get more folks on the Government Plantation and, 2. To control Medicare costs. Re the latter, the O might be right that it may have been unwise for his Grandma to have a hip or knee replacement when she was dying from cancer - but he is correct that 80% of medical costs occur in the final year of life. However, unless somebody has terminal cancer or something comparable, how do you know it's somebody's final year of life in advance?

Another related issue is the equating of "health care" (a dumb term) with medical insurance. I suppose with the high costs of medical technology and hospital treatments, those costs are out of reach for the average person (which is why we buy cheap catastrophic, ie high-deductible medical insurance) but, for most purposes in life, a regular office visit for a bad sore throat or a camp physical doesn't cost very much at all, while an ER visit for your bad sore throat can set you back $750.

We agree that it is foolhardy for anybody who is not wealthy - especially for a family - to carry no catastrophic major medical insurance, because bankruptcy sucks. We also think it is foolish for people to expect insurance to cover every office visit: the whole point of insurance is supposed to be that you hope you never need it.

However, years of Medicaid (for the poor), Medicare (which pays for everything, at low rates), union-driven medical benefits and work-related medical benefits have produced a sense of entitlement and, we would argue, have driven up the cost - and the quality - of medical treatment in the US.

What is the right role for government in medical care? We don't know, and we don't trust anybody who says they know. Fact is, government already controls much of it via Medicare, Medicaid, and now SCHIP. It has been incrementalism at work, with the long socialist view. One thing we do know is that fewer and fewer Docs want to accept Medicare, and few ever accepted Medicaid except for charity clinics and inner city Medicaid mills staffed by foreign medical graduates.

Why do so many Docs opt out of Medicare? Because of the paperwork requirements and the unsustainable rates of reimbursement. When people get a doctor's bill, they often forget that it's not a bill for his time: it's a bill for his rent, his machines, his two nurses, his insurance coder, his bookkeeper, his receptionist, his staff's benefits, his malpractice insurance, etc. Your local Internist and Pediatrician is not getting rich on $65 office visits these days. In fact, they are struggling.

No, the big costs are tests, some medicines, hospitalizations, cancer treatments, dialysis, the ICU, etc. The big ticket items - and those costs are not compressible. They can only be rationed if costs are to be cut. We do not think those costs should be cut, because we believe that such decisions are a matter of personal choice and freedom and, as they always say, "All you have is your health." Or your disease, as the case may be.

We wish we knew the right answers to all of these issues but, despite the problems, we will say one thing: With the best, most innovative and most available medical care in the world, one must be extremely careful about messing with it. Freedom is always messy. We re-link Cardinal at Tigerhawk's defence of American medicine.

From another point of view, a quote from an annoyed Vanderleun's Who, Whom?, which reiterates our Roger's thoughts about The Plunder Economy:

Who—whom?" Who shall be forced to give up the health care that they like (most Americans), and whom shall receive health care they (supposedly) ain't got -- for free -- at a cost to everyone else of trillions in dollars and immeasurable quantities of freedom and privacy and security.

Who (shall give)? You and hundreds of millions of others. Anyone who has a job, or makes things, or owns things that can be taxed. And then have a fee for this or that levied (for the common good). And then taxed again.

Whom (shall receive)? The poor shall be marched to the front of the line; their ragamuffin children with protruding bellies on their shoulders for the photo-op. But right behind them will come.... the slackers, the lazy, the whacked-out, the grifters, the hustlers, the useless, the career recipients of endless government hand-jobs, the hard-core unemployable, the 17% of crack whores that do not work for the government, and a few million others that form the hard, adamantine core of Obama's and the Democrats' aptly named "base."

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," is what's going on here. Except this time the add-on is "Even if you don't need it or want it, because little Susie the crack whore does. P.S. We're gonna slip in some language to pay for her abortion too, just because it will piss you off."

That is a bit cold, Mr. V.

Written by The B and BD together.

Villainous wonders.

That was the title of an EB White/James Thurber classic.

A tip for the gals: from 10 bizarre scientific studies, the useful fact that the length of a guy's index finger correlates with the length of his flaccid penis, when stretched ("stretched"?).

Now please stop staring at my fingers.

A study indicates that the primate brain's reward system for acquiring information seems to follow the same pathways as the reward systems for food and sex.

That is surely why readers read Maggie's Farm: we are stimulating!

Story at Frontal Cortex.

This series of photos came in over the transom, but I see that it was adapted from a NYT story:

"Clingstone, an unusual 103-year-old mansion in Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay, survives through the love and hard work of family and friends."

Sunshine doesn't cause the dangerous skin cancers (h/t, Englishman). People need that sunshine; what we used to term "bennies" - Beneficial Sun Rays. "Going out to catch some bennies and study chem."

Hold the sunblock, and go to the beach (h/t, Tangled):

Or to this one, in China:

Our post yesterday morning moved me to look up some Bedford real estate. Since Bedford pretty much abuts CT, and used to be part of it, one might consider it part of New England Yankeeland.

Here's a pleasant 33-acre horse property on Guard Hill Road, Shannon Stables. It comes with a 2-BR cottage built in 1850. Asking $14.5 million. More photos here.

Above: Lower East Side of Manhattan, 1937, where many waves of immigrants found their first foothold in America. Those 1860s-1890s tenements are still standing, in what is now one of the hippest young neighborhoods of NYC.

Below: Mulberry St., NYC, c. 1900, packed with southern Italian and Sicilian immigrants. The misguided Progressives wanted to tear down these neighborhoods, from the time of Teddy Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson.

What's a "slum"?

The Dylanologist and I have always been interested in the tragedies of urban planning, and fans of the organic, natural growth of urban areas designed by market forces and human desires, not by hubris-infected government experts.

One of his great-grandmothers, 1st generation Irish, raised 5 kids (with great success) in a NYC tenement, using bureau drawers as cribs. The Dyl said to me the other day:

"I lived in tenements for eight years. No elevators: two to three-story walk-ups, no a/c, shared bathrooms down the hall, unreliable heat, no cable, no phone, no wireless, with one tiny room with a dirty window and an old single bed with one thin, lumpy mattress. For the first four years, my parents paid around $30,000 per year for the privilege, and for the second four years, closer to $40,000."

Here's Jane Jacobs:

Painting of a brig off Heligoland by F T Albinus, for sale here.