Monday, July 27. 2009
 If there's a more loathsome person in the news right now than Henry Louis Gates Junior, I've missed them. It's amazing the amount of attention you can get playing your one-note piano with your foot on all the pedals for the media and academia these days.
Listen to him for a minute and a half, and you can see he's a second-rate intellect with a third-rate sense of respect for his fellow man. Perfect for Hahvahd, now that I think of it. Just like the Widener-shunning alum Teddy Kennedy, only teaching instead of sleeping in class, and driving the affirmative action bus over a cliff instead of an Oldsmobile off a bridge. I can't advise riding with either of them. But then again, a policeman responding to a burglary call isn't in a position to skip talking to Skip. Being wrong at the top of your voice, and a jerk in the bargain, is the sum total of the prestige the Harvard nameplate offers, I guess.
Just when you think you've heard all the drivel you could imagine coming out of the guy's mouth or pen, you hear another topper. According to the AP, on his application to attend Yale, he wrote:
"As always, whitey now sits in judgment of me, preparing to cast my fate. It is your decision either to let me blow with the wind as a nonentity or to encourage the development of self. Allow me to prove myself."
It's really hard to be incoherent, obsequious, and imperious and insulting at the same time, but it appears he's been managing it his whole life. That approach is not without its charms, after all. It's the official foreign policy of the United States right now, for instance.
At about the same time Gates was playing passive aggressive with a Yale admissions office likely bending over backwards to let him in anyway, another man, a much more pleasant and charming man, and a snappier dresser, uttered the same sort of line, but without any malice. Hoping to burst the tension in the words by uttering them along with his fellow man, and he didn't discriminate about who his fellow man was. Viewing the words as an obstacle to get past, not a cow to be milked.
You can only utter half the line now. It's a testament to what Skip Gates and his ilk have accomplished in the intervening years. Everyone used to be able to say both words with impunity, but generally didn't, if for no other reason than it was the mark of bad manners. Now only the pallid portion of the words can be uttered with malice, and often are, thanks to the tireless efforts of Skip Gates et.al. It's still not enough. There will never be enough for the Convent of the Sisters of the Perpetually Afflicted they're running over at Harvard, and in many other, big, important white buildings all over this marvelous country.
Don't call me whitey... Skippy.
A brief Mankiw explanation of his view on government power, in the context of medical care, which echos my views but is more concisely expressed. A quote:
(My) philosophical inclination most likely influences my views of the healthcare debate. The more power a centralized government authority asserts, the more worried I am that the power will be misused either purposefully or, more likely, because of some well-intentioned but mistaken social theory. I prefer reforms that set up rules of the game but end up with power over key decisions as decentralized as possible.
and:
What puzzles me is that Paul (Krugman) seems so ready to trust solutions that give a large role to the federal government. (In the past, for instance, he has advocated a single payer for healthcare.) I understand that trust of centralized authority is common among liberals. But here is the part that puzzles me: Over the past eight years, Paul has tried to convince his readers that Republicans are stupid and venal. History suggests that Republicans will run the government about half the time. Does he really want to turn control of healthcare half the time over to a group that he considers stupid and venal?
Read the whole short piece. Then I saw this interview with Princeton's Utilitarian Philosophy Prof Peter Singer. One exchange in that interview:
Do you really think the government can make choices regarding care fairly and efficiently?
Mr Singer: Since my New York Times article appeared I've had many people write to me with their heart-breaking stories of being denied care, or being unable to afford care, for themselves or for their families .No human system is going to be error-free, but I'm convinced that the government can set up a process that will make choices that lead us to obtain better value for our health-care dollars than the completely uncontrolled system that exists now.
Utilitarians always give me the creeps. It's always about having "experts" in "control" of our lives - preferably them. Speaking of power and control, Kaus makes a comparison with the proposed IMAC with base-closing commissions, with this wise comments:
Why isn't a base-closing style commission the solution to every one of our problems? After all, it's logical that the problems our peculiar system of government--featuring a Congress that gives powerful voice to regional and local interests--hasn't yet solved will be precisely the problems that our peculiar system of government is almost incapable of solving. Otherwise they would have been solved already!
and
The Constitution created an unwieldy system--requiring that every law pass two houses and get approved by the President--that we long ago concluded was incapable of generating the quantity of binding laws a modern society needs. The response was the creation of the administrative state--the "unelected fourth branch of government" that writes enforceable rules subject to nobody's veto (except the lawyers and the courts). At least the base-closing solution grounds the outcome in the consent of elected officials.
The "administrative state." That's the word for it. Like Versailles.
My friend and fellow Vietnam veteran, Bob Caldwell, served for decades as a journalist in major newspapers, retiring recently as member of its editorial board and editor of the San Diego Union-Tribune’s Sunday opinion section. Today, Bob returns to print, in the Washington Examiner, to remind us that’s the way it wasn’t despite Walter Cronkite’s media-pack-panic after Tet ’68.
Nationally syndicated columnist Diana West, also, examines Cronkite’s “offensive history.” West says, admittedly harshly, “No, the Cronkite post-mortem that's needed is for the zombies who conjured up the hollow rapture and the living dead who fell for it.”
If you really don't remember, and before you start arguing from ignorance, you might refresh your knowledge of the facts with reading the comprehensive The Big Story by the Washington Post's Chief of the Saigon bureau during Tet '68, Peter Braestrup. Braestrup doesn't ignore media bias but emphasizes structural, staffing and experiential limitations of the mainstream media of that time, and that these problems "persist to this day." No kidding!
P.S.: Another old friend, Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy In Media delves deeper into the wider range of Cronkite illusions, such as the Soviet threat being exaggerated and that President Carter was the brightest president Cronkite knew.
Sunday, July 26. 2009
Via Gateway, re WH medical care advisor Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (Rahm's brother)
Savings, he writes, will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, "as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others" (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008).
Yes, that's what patients want their doctors to do. But Emanuel wants doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider social justice, such as whether the money could be better spent on somebody else.
That's why they want Docs to be government employees instead of your privately-hired professional.
Synthstuff saw the above and expanded on the topic.
Saturday, July 25. 2009
Diagnostic madness in the DMS-5.
I knew they went over the edge when they began talking about Sex Addiction. Who gets to define that? These are the sorts of thing that makes people think shrinks are nuts, and damage their reputations as serious Docs. You cannot pathologize every human idiosyncrasy, desire, hobby, or preoccupation, because these are the things that make people interesting, unique, and colorful.
But for some sanity, making things out of wood leads to happiness. I have no doubt.
No signs of Wood-Working Addiction Disorder yet, but it's probably coming - right after Book-Worm Disorder, TV-Watching Disorder, Stamp Collecting Disorder, Bird Watching Disorder, and Diagnosis-Inventing Disorder.
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.
Thursday, July 23. 2009
At last night’s press conference, President Obama epitomized what’s gone wrong among our country’s elites.
Without respect for the facts already known and in prejudgment President Obama declared his friend Harvard University professor Henry Gates innocent and that the police “acted stupidly” in arresting him for creating a public disturbance in the street in the middle of the night. (See ABC’s coverage.) Gates is director of the Institute for African and African-American Research named after radical W.E.B. DuBois who in 1953 eulogized Joseph Stalin as “simple, calm and courageous…he knew the common man, felt his problems, followed his fate….He [Stalin] was attacked and slandered as few men of power have been…” Gates is another of President Obama’s unique friends with a chip on their shoulder about America.
In our democracy, the elites are not supposed to be anointed by God or hereditary, nor allowed any special governmental privileges, rights or exceptions from the laws that govern everyone else. Elites in America should earn respect for their character, accomplishments and contributions alone.
Consider how far we’ve gone in another direction, toward self-selected groups flaunting their disregard of common morality and sense, and even the law, as if immune or above the obligations and restrictions necessary to maintaining a society and government of free peoples working in comity and decency toward individual and national advancements above personal benefits and pelf.
Even another liberal and racially defensive Black professor, who (in my opinion) was treated unfairly by blustering, bullying Bill O’Reilly, says of Gates and Obama’s behavior:
I might be kicked out of "The Black scholars club" for saying this, but the truth is that I don't feel sorry for Henry Louis Gates. America is far more capitalist than it is racist, so a distinguished Harvard University Professor like Gates is likely to get more respect than the average White American. The idea that he is somehow the victim of the same racism that sends poor Black men to prison simply doesn't fly with me, and Gates should be careful about appearing to exploit the plight of Black men across America to win his battle of egos with the Cambridge Police Department.
There is no doubt in this professor’s knowledge and experience, nor in mine, that the poor and disheveled, and especially Blacks, are often profiled unequally and unfairly compared to well-dressed, articulate Whites. There is, also, no doubt in this professor’s, nor in mine, that our police work hard under difficult and even life-threatening circumstances to enforce laws in hazy conditions in which they must act quickly and decisively. When called out to investigate what may be a breach of the law, for those questioned to verbally or physically attack the officer is clearly unacceptable and illegal.
Yet, President Obama, as with the local Congressional wannabe whose host and guest did so and whom the local hack defends by waging a media campaign to diss the police, we see from high to low a behavior by a genre of political elite that defies the very basis of our democracy, and gravely undermines it.
This press conference comment by President Obama should not be seen as extraordinary or exceptional but as directly indicative of what’s off base generally with much of our newer elites in politics, education, business who believe they are above the law or morality, and when one examines their acts one too often finds that they have manipulated laws and programs to insulate themselves from the ravages they visit upon other citizens.
BTW, he’s not a racist cop. And, there was a Hispanic and a Black policemen at the scene.
Also BTW, compare to former President Bush's respect for the law.
Wednesday, July 22. 2009
 A good point about arrogance from Stossel:
They intend, as the New York Times puts it, "to reinvent the nation's health care system".
 Let that sink in. A handful of people who probably never even ran a small business actually think they can reinvent the health care system.
Politicians and bureaucrats clearly have no idea how complicated markets are. Every day people make countless tradeoffs, in all areas of life, based on subjective value judgments and personal information as they delicately balance their interests, needs and wants. Who is in a better position than they to tailor those choices to best serve their purposes? Yet the politicians believe they can plan the medical market the way you plan a birthday party.
As Lowry says, these guys are reckless. Recklessness is always a bad thing, and few good things happen in pubs after midnight.
Am Thinker: Obamacare is a sick joke. A quote:
The World Health Organization ranked the United States No. 1 out of 191 countries for being responsive to patients' needs, including providing timely treatments and a choice of doctors. Among those currently insured, 84% are satisfied with their healthcare.
And here's something actually constructive: How to make health care reform bipartisan
And as Althouse says:
The Democrats have dumped a drastic, complicated health care bill on us and they are ramming it through before we can even figure it out. That's what matters, not the fact that the party out of power is squawking about it.
And at NRO:
Trying to impose Government Controlled Healthcare on a nation that doesn’t want it is significantly harder than running against a candidate for president who gets the nomination from the incumbent party whose leader had approval ratings in the mid to upper 20’s (and who’s base didn’t really like him).
And a repeat: How is abortion "healthcare'? It's about killing, isn't it? Not on my nickel. I refuse to pay for your abortion, or your tummy-tuck.
Why the heck do we have to spend so much energy trying to stop the government from doing stuff for us? We can tie our own shoes. As Sissy says, "Just leave us alone." We would rather figure it out for ourselves. We aren't morons.
Photo: I'll bet young readers do not know who that is
Sunday, July 19. 2009
The rarest thing on the Internet is an author thinking deeply and then writing simply and elegantly. So rare as to be practically non-existent. Practically, but not completely. Gerard at American Digest is such a person:
The History of your browser tells me where you have been and what you have seen, but your Bookmarks tell me who you are and what you believe.
Mark Twain remarked, "You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is." Bookmarks are the corn pone from which your 'pinions are baked, but if you have the kind of soul that has run "Clear History" on your life your 'pinions are not likely to have any foundation in the long history of Freedom, but only yearn towards a Utopian tomorrow that never knows.
Much of the current disunity seen in our politics arises between those who ran "Clear History" in November of 2000 and those who saw History return with a vengeance in September of 2001.
One group is determined to deny History expunge the Declaration and shred the Constitution in pursuit of a utopia that's buried in a global network of mass graves. Another group are those who believe in the American idea and are determined let this new birth of freedom work its way across the world. Absent a defining historical event of global significance, this twain shall not meet. There is, of course, a third group of people who want to merely get on with their happy world untroubled by History, either cleared or present as a clear and present danger.
It's three years old and rerun, so you know it's not 20/20 hindsight talking.
Clear History at American Digest.
Thursday, July 16. 2009
 From Big Pharma gets Played in the WSJ:
Democrats remember the failure of HillaryCare, and they blame industry ads that alerted the public to the rationing and loss of choice that will accompany government health care. Their negotiations this time around are intended to buy business silence, at least long enough for Democrats to spring legislation into law before the companies have enough time to educate the public and defeat it.
Big Pharma and others have been played for suckers. We'd say these companies deserve what they get, except that the real victims of government health care will be American patients.
Related at IBD: Reading the fine print:
It didn't take long to run into an "uh-oh" moment when reading the House's "health care for all Americans" bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.
That is what it is all about: everybody on the plantation. That makes it illegal for me to go out and buy my own medical insurance. How come nobody is mentioning that?
Wednesday, July 15. 2009
California’s wise governors have discovered another way to put teenage entrepreneurs out of work. The AP reports that according to a study by tax officials:
The State Board of Equalization report estimates marijuana retail sales [in California] would bring $990 million from a $50-per-ounce fee and $392 million in sales taxes.
The bill introduced by San Francisco Democratic Assemblyman Tom Ammiano in February would allow adults 21 and older to legally possess, grow and sell marijuana.
California faces ongoing structural deficits in its state budget of over $25-billion a year, about 25% of its spending levels. So, let’s have more “sin taxes.” "We can no longer afford to keep our heads in the sand when it comes to marijuana," Ammiano said in a statement.
Nor can we afford to have more political sand thrown in our eyes. We were told that the state lottery would ensure education funding, but it hasn’t. We were told that Indian gaming would boost state revenues, but the Indians have learned since they sold Manhattan for some beads to largely avoid paying back our new Peter Stuyvesants. We were told that increased tobacco and alcohol taxes would pay for targeted treatment programs, but most has been siphoned to other uses.
The odds of winning the lottery are far worse than in any form of gambling, as the poor line up with false hope in their eyes to buy tickets. Ever walk through an Indian casino, particularly in the daytime, and see the seniors looking like tamed zombies from Night Of The Living Dead feed their retirement checks and savings into the slots. And, about all we get is some public service commercials, usually in the middle of the night, telling us not to smoke or to drink responsibly.
Just because there are many who do smoke marijuana, there is no justification that I can accept for making it easier for more to do so. The AP story says, “Marijuana use would likely increase by about 30 percent once the law took effect because legalization would lead to falling prices, the board said.” I’ll bet, taxed or untaxed, the increase in use would be higher.
Marijuana can lead to similar, and worse, unhealthy effects as tobacco. Particularly among teens, in their mentally formative and impressionable years, marijuana has been shown to impede maturing and dealing constructively with everyday life. But, don’t take my word for it. Below the fold are excerpts from the National Institutes for Health’s fact sheet, just updated this month.
California is about 12% of the US’ population. Similar proposals have been made in other states. And, federally, there may be potential for $8.25-billion in similar annual revenues for Washington, D.C. California and Washington, however, have shown no appetite for more careful governance of the many billions of tax dollars they have now, preferring more taxes to eliminating wasteful programs, disappointing their union bosses, or having to actually professionally manage.
Yes, I know many of us have smoked marijuana, and most have gone on to reasonably productive lives. But, think back and remember the many of fellow pot smokers we knew who didn’t. Think deep and honestly about your own experiences, and whether you may have made some better choices if not smoking marijuana. Think about why enlarging harmful behaviors is not justified by their smaller incidence already.
Then, think about our legislators, and I’ll take the bet that a larger proportion are still living in smoke dreams, avoiding the necessity to govern they were elected to do. Indeed, they probably hope that more of us will be so smoked.
Instead, we get such nonsense as this proposal, the “Governing? Don’t Bother Me, Man, I’m High” bill. Don’t give me any libertarian crap on this one, at least until we get legislators who stop being high on our excess taxes.
Continue reading "Governing? Don’t Bother Me, Man, I’m High"
 Mrs. BD loves her Little Lambs. It is a very special paniculata hydrangea.
I have never known anyone who did not enjoy hydrangeas.
Before you mess with hydrangeas, you need to know whether a plant is a macrophylla, oakleaf, arborescens, or a paniculata-type. The handling of each type is different - especially the pruning - and they vary in spring frost hardiness.
A good hydrangea site.
Tuesday, July 14. 2009
In the Summer of ’68, I stayed with a hot French girl in an apartment in Manhattan’s Spanish Harlem. My Spanish was fluent enough then that I’d managed a store in Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant, where many poor Puerto Ricans lived, Puerto Rican Spanish being something like playing a 45-record at 78-speed.
My second-most delight after things French that Summer was eating Puerto Rican stews at local, cheap eateries, the great Eddie Palmieri often playing in the background. I prefer the meat-based ones to the seafood-based ones, but it’s the use of tropical vegetables and spices that make Puerto Rican stews so memorable that my mouth still waters. (Bird Dog, please don’t look for a photo of Puerto Rican stew to add to the post; none look anything like what I’m talking about, appearing Americanized, and the recipes on the Internet don’t resonate. I don’t want to mis-steer our readers.)
Years later, after a barefoot cruise deeper in the Caribbean I stopped off in Puerto Rico for a week, and was gratefully steered to a very busy neighborhood restaurant near Old San Juan reputed to have the best Puerto Rican stew. Sitting at a long lunch counter along the right wall, the elderly lady on the next stool turned out to be the aunt of the fantastic Puerto Rican actor Raul Julia, politically active on the Left but an authentic superb professional. She helped guide me to an afternoon of additional delectable tastings.
I’ve eaten at several Puerto Rican restaurants in the US outside NYC, and never have found those unique flavors. I guess the ingredients don’t travel too well and the recipes are adjusted to Americans’ tastes (don’t even start me on how I’ve never found a pizza elsewhere to equal New York’s).
So, what does this have to do with Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, of Puerto Rican heritage? My fondness for Puerto Rican food and music are far more authentic – indeed may I say honest -- than hers about her legal positions and speeches at her confirmation hearing. Although the overwhelming Democrat majority in the Senate guarantees her a yea vote, and there’s no evidence of her “hiking” the Appalachian trail, Sotomayor is making a bad hash of the truth before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Even the Associated Press leads its coverage with, “It’s a good thing Sonia Sotomayor speaks Sotomayoran,” as she baldly stirs false ingredients into her resume.
Sotomayor expects us to believe she didn’t really mean it when she repeatedly over the years said her “wise Latina” view of Justice should prevail over the clear law. Sotomayor expects us to believe that although she headed the Litigation Committee of the Board of the Puerto Rican Legal and Education Defense Fund (PRLEDF), she “never reviewed those briefs” from the PRLEDF that argued radical positions before courts.
I can accept that Sotomayor is a liberal replacement for a liberal retiring Supreme Court Justice. I can accept trying to defer to the selection of the sitting President. I cannot accept that she is publicly making a hash of the truth knowing, as with her overturned Ricci decision, she is making a legal mockery of the facts. Reasonably explaining yourself is one thing. Putting rotten ersatz ingredients in the public’s stomach is another. Puerto Rican stew is to be savored. Her hash should to be spit out.
Also, check out PowerLine’s “Sotomayor’s Nose Grows Longer” , and the other posts at PowerLine on Sotomayor, and at the Washington Post Eva Rodriguez writes “I'm surprised and disturbed by how many times today Sonia Sotomayor has backed off of or provided less-than-convincing explanations for some of her more controversial speeches about the role of gender and ethnicity in judicial decision-making.”
 The weather is finally (just barely) warm enough for smokin' season.
I have had a gigantic, fat-covered pork shoulder in this thing for a few hours, covered with my good tasty stuff pork smoking rub.
With the cool breezes today - still waiting for real summer - it will take quite a few hours more until it is fork-tender.
This cheapo electric smoker never quite gets hot enough. My big smoker-grill is great, but I only have time to tend it on weekends.
The smell of the meaty, peppery, fatty smoke from the fresh pear tree chunks is at least half of the pleasure.
Policy wonks, and I guess I am one, love to discover or create statistics to guide our judgments. Statistics seem to provide authority and greater certainty. The problems with this reliance upon statistics, among others, is that they’re by nature retrospective, easily manipulated or faulty – even moreso when used to forecast or to bolster a partisan argument, and can be so complex and confusing even when exhaustively and correctly collected that even extremely sophisticated multi-correlation computer-statistical techniques like factor analysis are beyond the ken or budget of even the most skilled users.
An excellent example is the post at the American Enterprise Institute blog with a seemingly startling graph about the parallel rise in spending upon human and veterinary medicine.
This stimulated many of my factual and prejudicial beliefs. Luckily, before I went too far in ruminations, Maggies News Junkie (below) reminded me to check in with another prominent blogger, of similar factual and prejudicial beliefs on many subjects. You have to read all the many comments at her post to get some understanding of how there are too often “lies, damn lies and statistics.” The last comment up at the time I’m writing this gives the flavor:
In five years we went from 147,580,000 to 172,329,000 pets, a 16% increase
Pet care went from 8b in 2001 to what looks like will be 10.5b in 2007. So, per pet, care costs were $54.21 per pet in '01 and $60.93 in '07, a 12% increase
Meanwhile, human population in 2001 was 278,058,881 and in '07 it was 301,621,157 which is only a 8.5% increase
Meanwhile costs went from 1600b to 2400b based on my poor reading of the graph.
So, per person costs were $5,754 per person in '01 and $7,957 in '07 a 38% increase.
So, 12% more spending per pet, vs 38% per human in the same time frame, so much for cost control.
I hate to say this, Megan, but you might have been duped by a pretty graphic.
This does undermine the reliance upon the graphic's statistics. But, a bigger point is made, I think, the one in my opening paragraph about the limitations of relying upon complex or inadequately analyzed statistics.
There’s another important point to be made. Just as rising societal wealth and its distribution correlates with reduced child bearing, as most choose and have powers of choice to spend time and funds on other priorities, it also correlates with increased numbers and households with pets, another way to have companionship and express caring. Aside from any value judgments about this or its economic portents, the point is that it’s primarily a cumulation of free individual choices.
Similarly, our increased national and per capita spending on health care is the cumulation of free individual choices. Polling shows the tilt against ObamaCare, regardless of all the underlying opposing and supporting statistics, actually not regardless but because they've been considered and synthsized by sane individual calculations. The core understanding of free people is increasing that the essence of Obamacare is neither cost reductions nor improved health care. Its essence is transferring our individual choices to the imperfect, impersonal, and – even with the best of intentions and efforts, though required rationing is always life endangering to at least some – naturally politicized and prejudiced hands of Washington bureaucrats and their NGO hanger-ons who gain power and profit from controlling our lives. There's some nuggets within ObamaCare that may be worth further exploring or experimenting with, but ObamaCare buries them within a wholesale, rapid, complete takeover of America's health care and rejection of other worthy but non-liberal nuggets.
ObamaCare's polling rejection is a reliable statistic that cuts through all the other murkier ones. If we allow Washington politics to override that, there’s no going back, except maybe in a retrospective statistic of what we’ve irretrievably lost as life-saving and quality of life medical innovation and our rapid access to quality diminishes.
Nice pub to stop by after a morning riding over hill and dale. h/t, Theo. I wish we had their like here. Nice trimming of the thatch on top.
The only place I know of around here where you can tie your horse up and go in for breakfast or lunch is The Bedford Post in the prosperous horsey village of Bedford, NY. The area has linking riding trails everywhere. You can ride for many hours because the trail system has rights of way through both public and private lands.
Bedford was originally part of CT. Somehow, it got away. Given their property taxes, their Westchester County taxes, and their NYS taxes, I'll bet they regret it now. Here's the Bedford Post Inn and restaurants (good for breakfast, too expensive for dinner):
In the USA, Bedford passes as fairly antique -
Monday, July 13. 2009
 A lightbulb just went off in my head.
Instead of paying doctors to treat patients, have the government pay doctors not to treat patients. For every patient who needs tests or treatments, pay the doc half of what those would have cost if he promises not to have them done.
It's so simple, really. All you have to do is to modernize that old-fashioned, no longer applicable Hippocratic Oath to bring it up to date (just like the Constitution). All waste and unnecessary costs will be eliminated, with the potential to cut medical costs almost in half.
But would the trial lawyers go for my plan?
Sunday, July 12. 2009
 As a seafood lover, I have had 100s of crabmeat salads. Better than Maine lobster, in my opinion - and I eat plenty of lobsters.
When you go to Cooks.com, you can find tons of recipes. I object to all of them, because the meat of the Blue Crab is too special, precious, and too subtle to dilute with other random flavors like red peppers and mayo.
Here's my theory for the perfect crab salad: Finely chop some sweet red onion, mix with the cooked meat, and toss lightly with a regular or balsamic vinaigrette. Chill, and serve on Buttercrunch lettuce.
Ed. note: Get the crabs. I see Brooks Brothers has their crab chinos on sale.
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:
Saturday, July 11. 2009
Story at Never Yet Melted.
My familiarity with Ubuntu is limited indeed, but I am familiar enough with Christianity to suspect that the Bishop is proposing to invent a new religion based on communitarian political principles rather than on the search for a sustaining personal relationship with Christ and God.
Most of us can figure out our relationships with other humans relatively well on our own, without the Bishop's instructions. It's God that we need help with.
Friday, July 10. 2009
 There is no convincing evidence that "healthy eating" - whatever that is (eating "organic" vegetables?) - or a "healthy lifestyle," eg exercising daily or whatever - has any beneficial effect on your long-term medical future.
Those things might - or will - make you feel better, happier, and more functional, and nobody likes to carry 30 lbs. of unecessary lard around with them, looking like a muffin-top or worse. Nothing to do with health, though. And that is why "Lifestyle Medicine" is quackery which has been foisted on a credulous public.
One quote:
...it’s little wonder, then, that the results of every major randomized, controlled clinical trial of healthy eating and lifestyles to date have been ignored, downplayed, or explained away... or their benefits greatly overstated. As incredible as it seems, they have failed to demonstrate significant benefit in preventing chronic diseases of old age, like the big three diabetes, heart disease or cancers, or in living longer. Nor has any healthy eating intervention been credibly shown to give everyone a government-approved BMI.
Other than avoiding smoking and substance abuse, and taking our medicines, our fates are sadly not in our hands.
Carpe diem: every day could be your last.
 It's John Calvin's 500th Birthday today (1509-1564). He was indeed one of the shapers of the Western world.
Marvin Olasky offers Three Cheers for John Calvin.
Here's a Calvin quote via Marginal Rev:
Whatever be the kind of tribulation with which we are afflicted, we should always consider the end of it to be, that we may be trained to despise the present, and thereby stimulated to aspire to the future life. For since God well knows how strongly we are inclined by nature to a slavish love of this world, in order to prevent us from clinging too strongly to it, he employs the fittest reason for calling us back, and shaking off our lethargy.
Wednesday, July 8. 2009
From a piece at Junk Science, The Vision of our Healthcare. These are the correct rates for docs as determined by the geniuses at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid:
 Emergency medicine is valued at $38.36/hour, while chiropractors are at $65.33/hour (even 31% higher than previously) and osteopathic manipulative therapy is valued at $53.93/hour. Endocrinology (think especially diabetes and obesity) was valued by the PPIS at nearly twice what the CMS had been using to determine physician payments, and is now at $84.39/hour. Family medicine saw a similar increase and is now valued at $90.15/hour. In contrast, for example, Cardiologists’ value was cut nearly in half to $88.04/hour. Allergy and Immunology care was increased to $162.68/hour and Dermatology was increased to $184.62/hour.
When you’re injured or have a real medical emergency, or actually develop a disease, which of the best doctors will you hope are available to care for you: emergency medical physician, cardiologist, family medicine doctor, chiropractor or dermatologist?
News to me that chiropractors are covered by government insurance but, for all I know, they may cover massage too. Anyway, are these numbers insane? No doc could pay his school debt and his malpractice insurance on those fees, plus office and staff overhead.
This is valuing ER docs lower than what I pay my part-time secretary. But my real comparisons are my excellent plumber ($125/hr) and the local electronics repairman ($175/hr).
Read the whole piece. Another interesting bit he has in there is about the quackery of "Lifestyle Medicine." He has it right:
The popular belief, rigorously spread by the growing lifestyle medicine movement, is that chronic diseases of aging; such as cancers, heart disease and diabetes; can be prevented and are to blame on unhealthy diets and lifestyles and failing to control health risk factors. The actual fact is that the best randomized controlled trials (the gold standards of medical evidence) continue to fail to support such premises behind lifestyle medicine, as we’ve seen time and again. The 64 percent drop in age-related deaths from heart disease over the past 50 years, for example, is largely attributed to our modern, advanced medical care and coupled with the survival advantage of a better fed, immunized and overall healthier population. Even mainstream medicine is finally realizing lifestyle medicine is more pseudoscience and ideology than sound, evidence-based science.
Fads and quackery have always abounded in Medicine. Who would expect government to be able to tell the difference?
Related, how they keep medical costs down in England
I shared a lunch table at Jimbos – great vegetarian dishes -- the other day with a young Israeli mother, living in the US now, her career being the dancing styles of India. We discussed our younger adventurous feelings of immortality when traveling to places we wouldn’t now, and how we naturally as parents protectively shelter our children from following – even knowing too much about – our younger selves. She’d served in the Israeli Defense Force, as most Israelis do, and wasn’t startled, as most American Jews are, when I told her I’d volunteered for the US Marine Corps and served in Vietnam.
At my, of course politically liberal, synagogue, to my knowledge there’s only one other former Marine, a Naval Academy grad, who served in Iraq. Otherwise, there’s a very small group who send packages to our troops serving in combat zones. There’s organizations within our faith who foster support for Jews currently serving, such as this one. But, the oldest veterans organization in America, the Jewish War Veterans, is primarily composed of ancient WWII vets. Jews who served of my generation haven’t joined the JWV, still stung by its turning against support during Vietnam, and otherwise feeling we have better things to do with our time.
Yet, this stirring site detailing of the over 1-million Jews who have served in our military, many earning the highest medals and commendations for valor (for example: General Douglas MacArthur in one of his speeches said, “I am proud to join in saluting the memory of fallen American heroes of Jewish faith.”), doesn’t mention how relatively few Jews serve today. An estimate has fewer than 15,000 Jews serving today in our 1.4-million armed services (about 1% versus our 2.1% of Americans who are Jewish), out of our US population of about 5.3-million. I think the number is an underestimate, but in order of magnitude not far off. Compare this photo of Jews in our WWI American Expeditionary Force celebrating the Passover Seder in Paris in 1919, with the size of this grouping at a Seder in Fallujah, Iraq.
Less the case here in San Diego than elsewhere, the ultra-liberal droning of most Rabbis from the Bimah (elevated platform) and anti-military/anti-war attitudes of most congregations alienates many Jews, about 25% of whom are politically conservative. Most American Jews, who once were one or two steps removed from knowing first-hand the need to fight oppressions abroad, are now risen to prominence and relative well-being and comforts. They vote overwhelmingly for candidates opposed to US efforts and sacrifices to fight the same jihadist and Iranian and Saudi funded existential enemies of the US and of Israel. They have little clue of the tough Jews who excelled, even as leading mobsters.
In Israel, where extraordinary concentrations of hard work and brilliance has created one of the world’s most advanced miracles, still our brothers and sisters serve for survival, even excelling at practicing heightened moral sensitivities in war (see this excellent review of the performance and issues by a British commander in Afghanistan speaking last month at Jerusalem’s Center for International Affairs on “Hamas, The Gaza War And Accountability Under International Law”). Yet, supposed guardians of international law practice a one-sided view when it comes to Israel, waging a “legal war” against Israel, Human Rights Watch even touting it to gain funding from Saudi Arabia. Today, in America, although a small minority among Jews, there’s well-funded Jewish “peace” groups, like J-Street, very secular but of Jewish heritage, who echo such slanderous and disastrous memes. Even Obama-endorsing Mort Zuckerman called it the “J Street Jive” and our most liberal Reform movement president Eric Yoffe, who says “I am a dove myself,” called its posture on the Gaza operations “morally deficient, profoundly out of touch with Jewish sentiment and also appallingly naïve.”
In 1967’s deepest worry during the initial reversals in the then latest seemingly overwhelming attack upon Israel, at the heavily Jewish Brooklyn College, where anti-Vietnam sentiment was as widespread as elsewhere on American campuses, there was a long line at Hillel to volunteer to fight in the IDF. We were rejected as untrained and a likely hindrance. To my knowledge, I’m the only one who upon graduation the next year volunteered and joined the USMC and served in Vietnam.
Today, even among the staunchest American Christian allies of Israel, there’s increasingly widespread dismay, even sometimes oozing into disgust, at the unwillingness of so many prominent Jews and of so many Jewish voters to stand up to the weaker-willed and hostile within Obama’s administration who jeopardize Israel as willingly as they excuse Iran’s oppressors.
So, back to my lunch the other day. In my dotage, I have two young sons, who will ultimately make their own decisions in life, including whether to serve in our armed forces. My luncheon companion’s young daughter will not have that choice, should they return to Israel, and must serve in the IDF. In either case, whether here or there, Jews cannot avoid facing up to whether we will live up to the painful lessons of our forebears, and fight for what’s not only right but the survival and triumph of our deepest roots – now too often relegated by comforts earned and won by the blood of our older members of the faith – as Rabbi Hillel famously said, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” Or, are we to be “out to lunch”?
At the very least, when next lunching at a sports bar or such, if you see a young soldier, Marine or sailor, buy him a beer and say “thanks for serving.”
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