Sounds & Fury
Retires(!)? RETIRES?? Outrageous. She shouldn't have been permitted to retire. That crazy, anti-Semitic old bitch should have been fired on the spot publicly — instantly! — and all her press credentials immediately revoked.
The Right Stuff
If she really believes in and practices these two judicial principles, then, assuming all her other qualifications are everything they should be (and from what we've read, they unquestionably are), our President has made the right choice in his selection of Solicitor General Elena Kagan as his nominee for the nation’s 112th justice of the Supreme Court.
"I think a judge should try to the greatest extent possible to separate constitutional interpretation from his or her own values and beliefs."And,
"I think it is a great deal better for the elected branches to take the lead in creating a more just society than for courts to do so."
Let Us Now Praise Stupidity
Were we the FBI or NYC police, we wouldn't be crowing about finding the self-confessed, would-be Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, in a mere 53 hours. This naturalized-American Pakistani Islamist terrorist was so unbelievably inept, incompetent, and just plain stupid that it's astonishing he wasn't found in 53 minutes considering the multiple, doorpost-dumb blunders he made along the way in his failed attempt to murder hundreds of unsuspecting, innocent American civilians. Had he possessed but the merest modicum of competence and intelligence, it's an all but certainty he would have escaped scot-free back to the Middle East having left hundreds of dead American civilians in his wake.
Let us now take a moment to praise stupidity.
The Cost Of Defensive Medical Practices
In an online forum in which we participate, a member wrote regarding this country's out-of-control health care costs:
The ill health of our health care [system] is not in question. I believe that abuse of malpractice lawsuits is a big part of the reason for runaway costs. It increases all insurance premiums and it forces all sorts of expensive extra testing for defensive, rather than medical, purposes.Our response follows.
The (self-)defensive medical practices engaged in both by institutions and individual practitioners as a response to current malpractice tort law is responsible for something much worse than runaway health care costs. It actually puts the patient at unnecessary risk, not to mention unnecessary discomfort. Personal example: I was started on a statin (simvastatin) about three months ago to control an off-the-chart cholesterol number (386). My cholesterol count has been high all my adult life, but not that high, and, even though I'm terrified of all drugs except aspirin, I thought it might be a good idea to take the stuff, and so I agreed to follow my primary care physician's suggestion. After about 4-5 days or so, I became a little constipated and the texture of my stool changed, and the condition persisted. This didn't concern me overly much as my research had shown that it's a common if infrequent side effect of the drug. On my next visit to my PCP about two months later to get a blood test for liver enzymes (statins work by throttling the liver's cholesterol-producing function, and liver enzymes must be checked regularly to make certain the drug is causing no problems with general liver function), I casually reported the persistent condition on being asked if I was experiencing any side effects. My PCP's first response? You need to get a colonoscopy done. Say what? Is this guy nuts? A colonoscopy? Because of a condition which is commonly experienced by legions of people mostly for relatively benign reasons, and, in my case, a documented side effect of the statin I'd recently started on? Unless there are compelling reasons indicating the need for a colonoscopic examination, a colonoscopy is the LAST diagnostic resorted to, never the first, and that only after all other diagnostics have turned up nothing to explain the complaint. It's a horrendously invasive procedure that carries not insignificant risks of its own, puts the patient through great discomfort just preparing for, and is quite expensive (about $3000 in toto even at my local butcher shop). For a man my age, it's suggested that a colonoscopic examination be done every ten years as a screening procedure, but I had a colonoscopy done some four years ago (not as a screening procedure, but for compelling reasons), and it came up clean. Now, I know why my PCP suggested that diagnostic procedure as the first thing out of his mouth. It puts him in the clear in the unlikely event that my complaint turns out to be an early warning sign of colon cancer; a complaint that just happened to show up coincidently almost immediately after I started on the statin. Needless to say, I refused to undergo the procedure. Not only did this episode really piss me off — and I let my PCP know in no uncertain terms that it did — but it lowered my confidence in him; my confidence that whatever he suggested for my medical care was suggested for my medical benefit, not his own protection. I can't imagine this sort of thing happening as recently as, say, 50 years ago. It was pretty much unheard of then except in the case of quacks or money-grubbing charlatans. Today, it's S.O.P. for medical institutions and practitioners across the board. Now, multiply this sort of case by hundreds of thousands, even millions, and you get a rough idea of its impact on patients, and on health care costs nationwide.
Elegy For The Classic English Breakfast
In our younger days, we were happily addicted to the English breakfast although it wasn't until years later we understood that it was a near-classic English breakfast: a fat pork sausage, two crisp slices of thick-cut bacon, two eggs with fully liquid yolks, hashed brown potatoes, a pot of strong coffee served with sugar and cream (NOT milk or half-and-half), and two thick-buttered slices of toast.
Today, such a breakfast is anathema, the Healthy Food Nazis having condemned it as Entartete, and therefore Verboten. But the English breakfast lives on.
Well, sort of.
Witnesseth:
The Full English is the one meal that England does well, with fat bangers, sizzling rashers and eggs oozing sunshine, strong tea and two buttered toast. This is food that makes you feel good just thinking about it, a platter that pulls on the heartstrings (as well as straining the heart). It’s an icon of Englishness, as much of a symbol as the flag of St George, but here’s the thing: who really eats it these days? Less than 1% of the population starts every day with a cooked breakfast, compared to the 1950s when it was more than half of us. I was thinking about this the other day, chewing (and chewing) my compulsory muesli while dreaming of bacon and eggs. If the full breakfast is so representative of the English, what does it say about us? And if our attitude to it has changed so much, what does “the Full English” really mean — not just in the sense of what is on the plate, but in terms of being fully English? Those questions inspired a mad, bad, salt-soaked road trip from culinary heaven to hell and back, and from one end of the country to the other. Come with me, if you want to see what the English are really like now. But prepare for some very strong and surprising tastes.RTWT here.
Fact Or Merely Wishful Thinking?
Sometime in the mid-'90s, there appeared in print an article we wrote on Sigmund Freud (we can't remember exactly when, and our only copy of the printed piece is long gone, but which piece was reprinted in full here on S&F in August 2004) wherein we recount an episode of the Charlie Rose show on which the now-famous Harvard cognitive neuroscientist Steven Pinker expressed openly and antagonistically and with no punches pulled his utter contempt for Freudian theories of mind. In response, we wrote, in part:
No wonder Dr. Pinker was so huffy. Perhaps I'd have been a bit huffy too were I a cognitive neuroscientist, and bet the whole farm, my new BMW and solid-gold Rolex on the hard science of this [then] new discipline [cognitive neuroscience], and then heard someone academically credentialed, and therefore to be paid attention to [another of the show's guests, Dr. Peter J. Gay, Emeritus Professor of History at Yale University, cultural historian, Freud biographer, a graduate of Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis, and the author of the introductory commentary for W. W. Norton & Co.'s paperback edition of The Standard Edition of Freud's complete works], give credence to the strange theories of some soft-science guy who 100 years ago worked on some of the very same problems I was now working on. As I said [i.e., above, in the original article], a good explanation [of Pinker's antagonism), but somewhat short of reasonable. But then, Dr. Pinker was himself being somewhat short of reasonable. More reasonable, it seems to me, would have been for him to have remembered the lesson of history that teaches that world-transforming discoveries about the nature of man and the cosmos were, by intuition, first adumbrated by poets, philosophers, and other thinkers of genius using the same sort of metaphorical language Freud was compelled to use in order to make his revolutionary theories comprehensible. More reasonable, also, would it have been for him to have held it no more than prudent to acknowledge that it's never wise to give short shrift to the intuitions and insights of genius, and to have taken Freud's theories as a working guide in his new research, and centered one small portion of that research on seeking out possible neurobiological analogues of such things as the unconscious, repression, Oedipal strivings, psychic determinism, libido, id, ego, superego — the whole psychoanalytic menagerie.As regular readers of S&F have probably long ago surmised, I'm an informed (as laymen go) and convinced Freudian, and believe that, in the large, Freud got most of it right first time out of the box. And it now appears that, based on their hard-science researches, even cognitive neuroscientists will be forced to begin to do a chagrined 180 on their thinking concerning Freud's insights into and metaphorical explanations of the human mind and how it functions. At least, if what Jessa Crispin (she of Book Slut fame) reports is right. Ms. Crispin, in a piece for Drexel University's The Smart Set, writes:
I think we are entering a new Freudian era. This struck me as I was recently reading some stories in The New York Times Science Section: Depressive disorders may have a beneficial mechanism behind them; dreams may be meaningful after all; and hysteria — now called conversion disorders, and by which they mean the physical expression of emotional trauma — may actually exist. [...] For decades, Freud has been slowly discredited until his name is more a punchline [sic] than a scientific reference. But the more science wades into the murky territory of the mind, the more we see that we have to look backward to move forward.By our linking the above Smart Set piece, we do not mean to even so much as imply that we consider Ms. Crispin in any way competent or qualified to pass comment on any of this. We link the piece merely, and solely, because we get the sense that the articles she refers to might be a first hint that perhaps what we suggested in the last above quoted graf of our '90s print piece may at last now be beginning to take place in the hard-science world of cognitive neuroscience. But perhaps that's just wishful thinking on our part.
The iPad: What's It For?
Although no fan of the products of Apple Computer (we, for instance, wouldn't even so much as consider switching from a Windows machine to a Mac or MacBook laptop even were they given to us gratis), we readily confess to hugely admiring the design of most of Apple's products; design so compellingly beautiful aesthetically that, for instance, even though we have no imaginable use whatsoever for Apple's iPhone, we can but barely succeed in triumphing over our thoroughly irrational impulse to go out and buy one. The iPad, however, as beautiful aesthetically as it is, is an altogether different story. New York Times technology columnist David Pogue ends his review of the iPad with the following question:
stupidity gullibility of the American public and publics beyond.
The bottom line is that the iPad has been designed and built by a bunch of perfectionists. If you like the concept, you’ll love the machine. The only question is: Do you like the concept?To which our response is: What concept? From what we can see, the iPad is nothing more or other than a monster-sized iPhone display on which one can select and run "apps" just like on the iPhone. The notion that the iPad could in any way act as a stand-in for or even replace a full-featured laptop computer is simply prima facie absurd. The iPad has, of course, all that sexy touchscreen stuff going for it, but, for us, far from being sexy, touchscreens are a huge turnoff. We hate touchscreens. They seem to us almost perverse. We, for instance, could have had the display of our new Dell laptop be a fully functioning touchscreen and didn't even consider the option, inexpensive though it is. The last thing one should do with a computer display is touch it with one's fingertips (or anything else, for that matter). The proper function of a computer display is to do one thing and one thing only: display text and images with the utmost in detail, accuracy, and clarity. Period. Full stop. For us, the thought of touching a computer display with one's fingertips is as repugnant a thought as, say, the thought of a surgeon operating on a patient without first donning sterile surgical gloves. So, what's the point of an iPad? No point at all that we can discern other than to be a slick new toy for those with too much disposable income on hand (the entry price of the bloody thing is on the order of some $500, for which money one could buy a fairly decent, full-function Windows laptop), or for those who are Apple devotees or cultists (which latter abound for reasons which elude us entirely). Will the iPad turn out to be a commercial success? If one subscribes, as we do, to Mencken's (in)famous, barbed, but spot-on dictum that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public, and broaden its reach to publics beyond America, it almost surely will. Score another victory for the aesthetic brilliance of Apple's designers, the genius of mass marketing, and the
And Speaking Of Being As Mad As Hell...
And speaking of being as mad as hell, the ferocious onslaught against the prime cultural demons du jour, tobacco and smoking, is fast reaching fever pitch, but mostly quietly so that its impact will hardly be felt except by those of us devoted to the pleasures of tobacco and smoking (and don't even think of substituting the pejorative, incendiary code word "addicted" in place of "devoted"; tobacco is NOT addictive in the only meaningful sense of the term; i.e., physically addictive as is, for instance, heroin, never mind the mountain of tendentious and massaged "scientific" studies to the contrary).
Ever since the early '90s, at long last empowered by the publication by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of a fraudulent, statistically "cooked" 1993 study that declared so-called "second-hand smoke" (Environmental Tobacco Smoke, or ETA) to be a public health hazard, the rabid anti-smoking zealots among lawmakers, local, state, and federal, have managed to do everything short of proposing a Constitutional amendment to prohibit smoking and the sale and use of tobacco products; something they would have done years ago had they not the gruesome example of the effects of the Eighteenth Amendment to dissuade them from embarking on such a rash and foolhardy enterprise. Yet they've managed to accomplish the very same ends by other, more surreptitious means, even to the extent of the passing of laws in some cities that prohibit apartment dwellers from smoking in their own homes.
And what's the lawmakers' most powerful weapon? Draconian taxation. You need money? Tax tobacco and smokers — punitively. No one other than the tobacco interests and smokers — a decided if fairly large minority — will object. In fact, people will think you're doing good and a good thing. Why, not only are you helping to protect the public from lethal second-hand smoke, you're actually helping to save the lives of smokers themselves who are simply too stupid or too trapped by their addiction to realize the dangers they're exposing themselves to, never mind the public.
And just how draconian are these punitive taxes?
As recently as ten years ago, we were paying $10.00 per 150g tin of roll-your-own cigarette tobacco (real, no-additive, 100% tobacco leaf, not the junk, adulterated tobacco scraps found in commercial cigarettes); enough to roll the equivalent of a full carton of commercial, manufactured cigarettes which was then selling for something on the order of $50.00 per carton. Today, that same 150g tin costs upwards of $25.00, and in some localities, as high as $46.00, 100% of the price increase due taxes imposed on the product and the sale. Our custom, English-blend pipe tobacco sold ten years ago for $23.00 a pound. Today, the price is $65.00, again, 100% of the increase due taxes imposed on the product and the sale.
And we smokers are helpless. There's absolutely nothing we can do to change any of this. Our best hope today is that a thriving illegal industry will emerge to significantly undersell the still legal market. Beyond that, all we can do is rant and rave in impotent rage against uninformed public opinion, public stupidity, and the rabid zealotry of the anti-smoking powers that be. Ergo, this rant.
That is all.
As you were.
Winston Churchill, whose ever-present cigar was as much an iconic part of who he was as his victory sign, has been summarily transformed into a non-smoker.
Idiots!Posted by A.C. Douglas on 16 June 2010 | Permalink