We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
That is, excepting those who hit 100 on the dot as I probably do. The government must do something about this social injustice. For starters, they could make assortative mating illegal. It's all about Equality. All Americans must be at 100 (except our Government Masters, who are always the Smartest People in the World in the same way that the North Korean leaders are).
That came up because I did not know that household helpers make so much money these days. I do not think that a good butler, lady's maid, or estate manager would have a below-average IQ. These can be complex tasks which require juggling many topics. Who remembers the butler from Upstairs, Downstairs? He was good, the realistic adult in the family, the central role. And what about Jeeves?
OK, well perhaps a scullery maid would not need an average IQ but nobody in America has a scullery maid. In America, even the immigrant dishwashers have big ambitions, and rightly so.
People ask me, as a Physician, whether or how I would reform healthcare. (What they mean, it turns out, is not to reform medical care but to change how medical insurance works. Nobody really wants medical care in the US to change because it is the best and most caring in the world, by far, thanks to our free choices, national prosperity, brains, and freedom in general.)
It's become clear to me that people are divided into two basic camps on medical insurance: those who want to insure cheaply against major expense and those who want what amounts to pre-paid medical care. In any event, it is stunning to me that 85% of Americans were content with their medical care situation pre-Obamacare so I'm not sure that represented any crisis requiring massive Federal intervention and control.
As someone whose bias is against government getting involved further in our lives, if I were King here's what I would do about medical insurance - free it up:
1. I'd permit medical insurors to create national markets for insurance, like MLS does with real estate. They would be happy to do so were they free to do that.
2. I'd make medical insurance portable across state lines, and detach it from employment. If any employer wants to chip in, or if a union contract requires a business to chip in, fine. They could offer vouchers as a benefit, if they want to.
3. I'd demand that insurors insure everybody who wants to buy some, creating high-risk pools just as they do for auto insurance if needed.
4. I would permit the freedom to sell any kind or style of medical insurance people might want with whatever sort of coverage they want to buy. Or not to buy, if they want. It's a free country, and people are free to be foolish or to trust in the benevolence of others.
5. Regarding Medicare and Medicaid, I would fold them together somehow as means-tested charities for the poor, run by states or municipalities.
(As an off-topic aside, let me tell you the problems with many government-paid Medicaid patients and charity patients: they miss appointments, they are not appreciative and treat you like a servant, they will not make morning appointments, they resist advice, their fees do not pay the rent so docs have to limit their numbers - and they are prone to lawsuits against you. I know about this, because I do around 10-15% charity work in my office as my form of tithing, volunteer one day/week in a charity clinic, and teach for free 1/2 day/week. Just another greedy doc. )
Addendum: A reader asks about tort reform. Good question. God knows how much of medical expenses are CYA by docs and hospitals. The reality is that medical care is an art, and that any medical decision can be challenged or questioned if somebody wants to sue their doc.
Hunting Woodcock, which we usually do in conjunction with hunting Ruffed Grouse, is an interesting and challenging sport. They tend to fly in a spiral, and many of us have a moment of remorse when we take one of these lovely little tasty birds from the dog.
The dog is needed not so much to flush them or point them as to find them when shot. Their camo is perfect.
Always make a sauce for them by sauteeing all of their innards and guts in butter and shallots, and shmooshing them up with a fork with a little brandy and pepper. There's no mess in there, because they conveniently flush out their GI track when they flush.
Readers know that the best Woodcock recipe is Woodcock Ravioli in a splash of gibier sauce and shaved black truffle on top.
"The job market is so awful now, and people don't take you seriously with anything less," said Linda Ahlskog, a part-Hispanic graphic-design student in Natchitoches, La. Jordan Machado, a Hispanic from Cypress, Calif., who runs his own business, said he would "support" his daughter if she decided to join the military or learn a trade, but "especially nowadays … in order to get that middle-class money, you need to have that degree." Even Parkinson, the Ohio electrician, although skeptical of the four-year commitment, is working to complete a two-year degree. "I'm more than halfway there, I might as well get it. It never hurts to get an education or degree, but as far as going to a four-year college and taking on major debt, you might not have a job when you get done. I wouldn't do it."
I have missed meaningful paper gains in the past year by being out of equities. I must be a lousy gambler. I steer clear of casinos. Zero Hedge explains what I have been seeing this year: The worse the economic numbers are, the higher the markets go. That's because lousy real numbers make the Fed afraid of quitting QE (which they should have done more than a year ago) and want to print money like crazy.
It may seem odd to take advice from a cartoonist, but "Dilbert" is usually spot-on with its portrayal of the absurdities we run into here in the office ranks.
Scott Adams has a unique understanding of human nature. He also understands management reality, which he juxtaposes with the goal-based thoughts of standard office denizens. The result is a very humorous and informative strip.
His advice on how to manage your career is equally useful. Most of us are so far along, it may not benefit us at this stage of our careers. You're never too old to learn, though. My career improved after I made some alterations in office demeanor in my late 40's, and I continue to evolve.
I shared the linked article with my staff and my sons. It makes several points which I truly believe.
The American Psychiatric Association is confused about the PC answer to that question. It must be difficult to be both multiculturally-sensitive and yet PC in the American way, given that pedophilia seems quite accepted in Muslim areas along with recreational homosexuality, rape, etc.
We have some number of readers who think NYC is Gomorrah. It's Gotham, not Gomorrah. I'm a country boy, but I love it and find the neighborhoods endlessly fascinating.
I spent yesterday overseeing a relative who had a procedure at the Hospital for Special Surgery. It's ranked #1 in the world for Orthopedics. I have rarely seen any place run in such a friendly, cheerful, efficient, and well-organized manner. Even their security people are full of Good Morning and Welcome and How Can I Help You?, etc.
A chilly day in New York. As various things were going on, I got out to stroll around 1st and 2nd Avenues a bit, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the pleasant but not fancy part of the East Side, and I made a wonderful new 83 year-old friend in the Ambulatory Surgery waiting area too. A retired Econ. Prof from Chicago with a remarkable life story but I won't go into it. Everybody has a story, don't they? His wife was getting a shoulder repair.
Tourists never see the Upper East Side, way over near the East River. Lots of people live and/or work there, but it's a hike to the Lexington Ave. line (The Second Ave. El was torn down in 1942, and has not been replaced yet).
Marianne used to enjoy these sort of pics - just a random street photo gallery -
A "rape culture" in America? I don't think so. For starters, it's a felony and I'd guess 100% of Americans think it should be. The letter-writer is right, of course.
Just imagine federally-managed and controlled legal insurance. After all, legal access and justice is a real right. At Jacobson:
The great Obamacare reform is turning into the great thrust of tens of millions of people onto Medicaid.
The problem is, fewer and fewer doctors are willing to take Medicaid patients because the reimbursements are so low.
I have met numerous doctors who tell me they either refuse Medicaid patients or restrict them because the reimbursements do not cover their costs. They also double and triple book, because so many Medicaid patients who make appointments don’t show up. As to Medicare the payments currently are bearable, but only because private insurance payments for other patients make up the shortfall.
Increasingly, doctors are abandoning the government payment train wreck, and going all cash or some hybrid. This all was foreseeable and was foreseen.
The millions of new Medicaid patients will have insurance, just no doctors to see them. That is a feature, not a glitch, to those who want single payer. Obamacare is proceeding accordingly to plan.
Socialism requires government force.A key tactic is to break and disrupt things,and then to jump in with a forced plan to fix it.
It's interesting that, in most of the discussion of medical care, the source of the heavy costs are neglected: expensive procedures and hospital care at the end of life. An office visit to an internist or family practitioner is still inexpensive.
It's wonderful that Americans have the luxury of getting neurotic about what to buy at the supermarket and about what to eat. As I do, they advocate low-to-no-carb diets for weight control. It's Physiology 101.
An author at Slate thinks Americans should consider imitating the Dutch approach - or non-approach - to marriage. Of course, our lower classes already have, but I don't know how you run a complicated and nurturing family life that way, to imbue a family heritage and family values.
I mean, who hands out the candy while hubbie is taking the kids out trick or treating?
As a popular view, this laissez-faire approach accommodates the vicissitudes of the heart, the changing nature of love, the great variety of forms attachments take in real life. It acknowledges that things change, and to exit a relationship with kids is less violent somehow, less publicly absolute, than to exit a marriage. A bit of tolerance, of bemusement, of compassion or imagination is built into the system.
Very bemusing indeed. The "vicissitudes of the heart"? Are we in high school? Why grow up, if you don't have to? The government will raise your kids, Julia.
So some Dutch women just want to "follow their hearts." I'll assume that means plenty of romance and sex with lots of guys, like monkeys. But are Dutch men real men? Is life a serious enterprise, or just a lark before your well-deserved and government-paid euthanasia?
That is why we do multiple tough, searching interviews of job applicants. We want to know what they know, what they can do, and we want to know whether we would enjoy and be stimulated by their company around ye olde shoppe.
If you can't discuss Plato, Michelangelo, de Toqueville, and Statistics, and display some witty sense of humor and perfect manners, we lose interest fast unless it's a drudgery job.
That is from What is it like to be a man? A quote:
A conviction in physicalism, and the possibility of science fully explaining conscious experience in the future, is extraordinarily widespread among contemporary philosophers, almost to the point of constituting a professional creed (though there are some notable exceptions). Implicit in this position is the deeper conviction that for conscious experience to be truly understood – for anything to be truly understood – it must be understood scientifically, that to understand a thing in an essential way is to understand it scientifically. Such an attitude is bound up with that common belief among modern philosophers, traceable to the logical positivists, that their discipline is merely an auxiliary to the more fundamental work of the sciences, a belief adequately summarized by Jerry Fodor as “the world picture that the natural sciences have a sort of priority…to which other discourse is required to defer insofar as it purports to speak literal truth.”
A reader reminded me about the Kettle Fallacy (aka Kettle Logic) in a comment about the contradictory defenses of Obamacare. It is a so-called informal fallacy - flawed premises rather than logical errors - whose name derives from, of all people, Sigmund Freud.
It would term this fallacious effort as a sub-category of the "baffle them with bullshit" informal fallacies. Via Wiki:
Freud relates the story of a man who was accused by his neighbor of having returned a kettle in a damaged condition and the three arguments he offers.
That he had returned the kettle undamaged; That it was already damaged when he borrowed it; That he had never borrowed it in the first place.
The three arguments are inconsistent, and Freud notes that it would have been better if he had only used one.
But so are many or most of the 500,000 gay guys in New York City, of every skin color. A lot of it is about stylin' and profilin'. There is some mileage in that.
My baby Sis, on the right, sent me this pic she found of us messing around with boats many years ago. I was helping her tune her Laser's rigging. We both remain happy to mess with boats of any sort, anytime. Sail or power. We have a feel for water. In adolescence, this one particular sis of mine was a great sailboat racer (Lasers, as in photo) but always scowling. Tough competitor. Happily, she outgrew the scowl, hasn't really scowled for years, has three cool, scowling kids now, and a distinguished career.
Lightnings were my racing boat. Our threesome of young fellows even got into Sports Illustrated, with my cuz as skipper. We took strategic risks, often, to break from the pack and we studied the winds, currents, and tides. Wonderful boats for learning seamanship, and seaworthy in most weather including those nasty summer squalls which always added excitement and danger.
I consider basic seamanship to be a fundamental adult life skill, along with swimming, shooting, tennis, land navigation, quoting Shakespeare and the Bible, catching and cleaning a fish, how to start a fire, play an instrument, budgeting, fundamental principles of cooking, handling tractors on hills, riding a horse, public speaking, log splitting, using correct grammar when called for, handling tools, appropriate grooming, dressing, and manners including table manners; pleasing social conversation, making basic judgements about other people, making a Martini, and a few other things - most of which which I have not yet perfected but there is still time.
I suppose every person has his own idea about the Basic Life Skills needed to negotiate the world effectively. I know some who would even include Golf!
The youth need parents to teach these things - or to pay to have them taught. It's called parenting, and it can't be outsourced. It's a serious enterprise.
On a recent trip West to visit our elder scholar, now spending his time in Oxford, Ohio, we decided to break up the 10 hour drive with a stop at Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright's signature work. It is no surprise Smithsonian Magazinelisted it as one of the 28 places to see before you die (I'm surprised there are only 28, but glad I checked this off).
I've always felt it was a place I needed to see. I was correct. It lived up to every expectation. Pictures don't do it justice(but I'll share some anyway). The story enhances the visuals to a degree I had not prepared myself. You could visit this several times a year and get a substantially different feel each time.
Wright had something very particular in mind when he built this, and he clearly achieved what he set out to accomplish. It wasn't easy. He exceeded budget, there were disputes, and Wright was not easy to work with all the time. But the owners of the home, the Kaufmans, had bought into his vision, and the results are spectacular.
While their original budget was only $35,000, total costs eventually topped $155,000 (roughly $3mm today). While it would be nearly impossible to build this structure today due to environmental impact issues (this structure has been assessed regularly has having a negligible impact on the environment, which says something about environmental regulations, as well as Wright's ability to deliver on a vision), the costs would clearly be far higher than the inflation-adjusted figure of $3mm. In addition, you'd have to account for the costs of ego, which were significant in this project.
Tallis' "40 Part Motet" - officially Spem in alium numquam habui (c.1556) is a Renaissance motet, not a medieval motet. Thus no real rhythm, but plenty of flow.
Mrs. BD and I had to hustle down to The Cloisters after church to hear their special installation of Tallis' most famous work. One speaker per voice - 40 speakers - and you walk all around and hear each individual voice, or stand in the middle to hear the blend in the acoustically-superb old stone Spanish apse. We did it 2 1/2 times.
It is a popular event. Most people listen to it twice.
The government offers me a $40,000 check to go on electronic medical records. I won't do it. Who would open up to me if I did?
For the same reason, I keep minimal notes anyway and just enough to refresh my memory. From The
Electronic-Medical-Records Wreck-Doctors have their own Obamacare nightmare to deal with:
As I’ve mentioned previously, my own primary-care physician in Colorado Springs quit her regular practice and converted to “concierge care” because of the EMR imposition. Dr. Henry Smith, a Pennsylvania pulmonary doctor, also walked away. “Faced with the implementation costs and skyrocketing overhead in general,” he told me, “I finally threw in the towel and closed my practice.” He said, “As EMRs proliferate, and increased Medicare scrutiny looms, medical documentation is evolving from its original goal of recording what actually was going on with a patient, and what the provider was actually thinking, to sterile boilerplate documents designed to justify the highest billing codes.”
Many docs today are spending more time on computer screens than they are with patients.
A friend did the research on this topic for me, because we were both looking for something good, and we have tons of wood and hate paying our heating bills (I have oil heat and propane stoves).
My friend concluded that Harman makes the best products in that area: furnaces, fireplace inserts, free-standing, etc. I like the idea of something that works for wood, pellets, or coal. The "green" aspect has no importance to me, but I do like to have flames to look at to warm my spirit.
To warm a house and for cooking, there's still nothing better that a wood-burning cook stove to turn a house into a home. Here's a modern version that the Amish make:
Many of us think of Christianity as a “cheerful” religion, but Andrew Klavan, who is a convert to Christianity, wrote that “for me, one of Christianity’s central assets is that it’s a tragic religion — which is to say, a realistic one. The son of God prayed for release from a dreadful death and his prayer went unfulfilled. That tells you something, something you need to know in order to live with patience and wisdom.”
But I think it is not so much a tragic as one determined not flinch before tragedy; committed to patching up a bunny even though it may be eaten the next moment; or save an unknown woman in Calcutta if only for a while and to see in that no futility whatsoever, no cause for despair. And as to the terror, horror, beauty and wonder of life — why that is what God — or the universe as a synonym for God — is supposed to be like. The Old Testament warned Moses that he could not see the Face of God and live. We know the familiar lines from Exodus:
Then Moses said, “Now show me your glory.”
And the Lord said, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.”
To “see God”; to “know the truth” is asking for trouble. Are we sure we want do that?
If all of your winter firewood has not been split yet, it is Splitting Maul Season.
Log splitting is a great joy, a great work-out, and useful. And it can be done as well by a 113-pound gal as by an 180-pound fellow because, when done properly, the maul does most of the work. Heck, it's a sort of lever. You lift it, then let gravity and leverage do the rest of the work, assuming you put the right English on the blow to your log. That is a matter of practice and experimentation, and a deep source of pleasure once this basic life skill is acquired.
Axes are terrible for wood-splitting. Wedges get stuck, cause huge frustration, and get lost in the field. There are all sorts of good mauls. This photo of mauls shows the spring-loaded maul, #5, which looks like a foolish gadget but which truly works well, and will really throw the wood around if you are wise and work on the edges and don't aim for the middle of a big one. Highly recommended by the Bird Dog Consumer Reports.
I approach a large log in the classic manner: I work around the edges, then I chop the corners off the remaining square, or pentagon, or whatever it might be. I like to end up with a square piece at the end. Knots? I never fight a knot just like I never argue with a Leftist/Statist. I burn them intact.
Very satisfying work and, as Thoreau said, it warms you twice: Once when you split it and again when you burn it. That is true Yankee economy.
The good idea behind Obamacare was the idea of a national marketplace for medical insurance. Of course, an insurance consortium could have done it too, but the complication in that is that insurance is controlled and regulated state by state.
A deregulated, nationwide marketplace for every kind and flavor of medical insurance with wide competition for coverage format, would have been a good thing for everybody - and put a lot of brokers out of business. Probably most people would opt for cheap high-deductible insurance (Major Medical, aka Catastrophic) as protection against bankruptcy. Brokers have easy access to all available deals within a given state, but it's not national and not available to consumers, and now the ACA has strictly limited peoples' choices.
Instead, we have an illusory marketplace selling government-designed product at government-determined prices, and they'll fine you if you don't buy it. Doesn't sound like America to me.
Requiring marketplace insurance companies to cover the highest-risk patients is a challenge with many possible solutions. Coverage for kids to age 26 is insane and infantilizing. Adulthood is 21, at the latest. However, "adulthood" keeps creeping upwards, doesn't it?
The other useful reform would have entailed tort reform. I have read varying estimates about how many medical costs are lawsuit-avoidance, but it is substantial.
"Thomas Nagel's article "What is it Like to Be a Bat?" is undoubtedly one of the 
On a recent trip West to visit our elder scholar, now spending his time in Oxford, Ohio, we decided to break up the 10 hour drive with a stop at Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright's signature work. It is no surprise 
A friend did the research on this topic for me, because we were both looking for something good, and we have tons of wood and hate paying our heating bills (I have oil heat and propane stoves).
