Category: Uncategorized

The excellent NHS

In addition to demonstrating the superlative nature of the UK’s NHS, this tale of an intrepid immigrant surgeon should serve as a warning regarding the way in which the shortage of doctors under Obamacare will be resolved:

Dr Sulieman Al Hourani was only supposed to cut out a cyst, but removed the whole right testicle instead. … A month later it is alleged that the doctor, who qualified after studying at Jordan University of Science and Technology, stole two boxes of dihydrocodeine from a treatment room on a ward at the same hospital. An investigation was launched and the doctor was dismissed by his employer, Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, which ran the hospital.

The GMC was told of another incident in August 2006, when Dr Al Hourani had consulted a colleague and was advised to inject a patient with 10 milligrams (mg) of midazolam, a powerful sedative drug. He then gave the patient 8mg and injected himself with the other 2mg, the hearing was told.

I love the fact that he injected himself as well. Shades of Steve Martin as dentist.

Mailvox: the other side

JB looks at Changing Your Mind from the reverse perspective:

I think “Changing Your Mind: The Steps” could suggest a model of persuasion. The lessons I draw from the list for the persuader are the following:

1. Expect to be initially regarded as crazy, and defend yourself against that accusation effectively but unemotionally.
2. Continue to make the case; time will cure the “he’s crazy” phase.
2. Make points that will be objectively verifiable as valid.
3. Expose the poor behavior of the other side.
4. Highlight division within the ranks of the other side.
5. Leave room for opponents to defend you.
6. After exposure, give a person time to begin to adopt your viewpoint.
7. Don’t be so needlessly offensive you prevent the person from doing so.
8. Don’t inhibit admissions of error with gloating or demands for further change.
9. Point out the inconsistencies in the positions of the partially persuaded.
10. More people agree with you, and to a greater extent, than will say so.
11. Keep pride in check, because for every proclaimed convert, there are still 10 in the previous phases.

This is why a blog is so much more effective than a book at changing minds. A book loses the time and interactivity components of the above steps. Also, a book is usually narrower in scope, while people’s opinions are tied into their entire worldviews.

I think JB’s steps 6 and 8 are particularly important. It is difficult enough for people to change their minds, so adding to their degree of difficulty by making it personally uncomfortable for them to do so is inherently counterproductive. Now, I could quite reasonably be accused of violating step 7 on a regular basis, but it should always be kept in mind that I do not expect the vast majority of people to change their minds even when they are presented with an open-and-shut, 100 percent conclusive case.

It’s true, I could theoretically be more persuasive if I refrained from needlessly upsetting so many people. But that’s only true in theory, because if I gave a damn about what people happen to emote and rationalize in lieu of actually thinking, I would never be able to ignore the mindless protestations and spurious condemnations in pursuit of the most accurate truth I am able to comprehend.

Changing your mind

Jamsco admits to traveling at least part way down this process with regards to libertarianism:

Changing Your Mind: The Steps
(One route – in 16 parts)

1. Experience pride that you have your mind made up on the issue at hand

2. Hear the differing opinion of a person with whom you disagree (the ‘opponent’) and disregard it as crazy

3. Hear the differing opinion of the opponent – think ‘Okay, valid points, but still wrong’

I always find it interesting to watch as conservatives gradually move towards libertarianism. They say that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged; in like manner, a libertarian is a conservative who realizes that the government is the biggest mugger of all.

WND column

Too Evil to Live

While much of the world news at the end of last week was focused on the sky-borne ash that has brought international air travel to a near standstill, another volcano erupted that may have more significant ramifications for the future of the American people. At last, at long last, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced it was going to take action against one of the bankster organizations responsible for the 2008 financial crisis. In fact, it was filing a lawsuit against the political capo dei tutti capi of Wall Street, Goldman Sachs.

Hispanics in the mist

One must salute the bravery of these two intrepid amateur zoologists as they go out into the deep, dark, wilderness of Los Angeles:

Can journalists only report about the issues of their own race? That’s the question being debated about two white journalists who decided to embed themselves in a home in the MacArthur Park neighborhood with at least seven undocumented Mexicans to “learn Spanish so that we can better report our native city.”

Reporter Devin Browne and photographer Kara Mears are documenting the yearlong project on a blog called The Entryway. The name is derived from the fact that the two share a bed in the apartment’s front entryway. They both pay rent to the host family. The blog, which started in March after a two-year search for a host family, has led to fair deal of criticism, and praise, from reporters and bloggers. Some call the project voyeuristic.

The most amusing part of what should prove to be a thoroughly amusing anthropological experiment on the two white girls was the fact that it took them two years to find a place they were willing to live. My guess is that the reporter will come to her senses and quit both the project and journalism the first time a cockroach gets in her hair while the photographer will get pregnant after a series of short affairs with gangbangers and eventually be arrested for being in possession of a handgun used to murder a convenience store clerk.

I do so enjoy the NPR/SWPL approach to every subject they “investigate”. It doesn’t matter if they are ice-fishing in Minnesota, climbing mountains in Tibet or chewing qat with jihadists in Yemen, look past the details and the story always ends sounds exactly as if Dian Fossey had written it. Because no matter what the subject nominally is, the only thing NPR/SWPL ever write about is how the nominal subject makes them feel.

The whores rush to defend Goldman

William D. Cohan leaps to defend the Vampire Squid. And surprise, surprise, he also owns Goldman stock:

Goldman also was not above working with a client like Paulson to structure a security — for a fee — that Paulson could then short. Would those European banks not have bought Abacus if they had known that Paulson had helped select what went inside it? Possibly. But no one forced them to buy Abacus. And if the housing market had soared for a few more years, and Paulson and Goldman had lost billions instead of making billions, would the S.E.C. have filed a lawsuit against Abacus’s investors?

These might not be the most popular questions to be asking right now, but until we get the answers we can’t assume Goldman’s guilt.

There are no words sufficiently contemptuous to describe this insufferable little [expletive deleted] and his pathetic attempt to play defense attorney on the Vampire Squid’s behalf. How dare he try to exonerate Goldman by claiming the market could have gone against them! Because we all know very well what happened when the market DID go against them… they were bailed out by the federal government. Not only were they bailed out, but they were permitted to magically transform their legal corporate identity so that they could be bailed out!

It’s at times like these that one can understand the initial popularity of the French revolutionary excesses. One knows better than to think any good would come of it, and even so, one would almost find oneself ready to welcome La Terreur so long as the insufferable bankers with their interminable self-justifications are sent to the guillotines.

Cohan conveniently omits that no one forces little old ladies to invest in financial scams either, and yet the petty con men who scammed them are still prosecuted for fraud.

A profession of whack jobs

I would turn to retarded crack whores for wisdom and advice on how to live my life before I’d spend five seconds listening to a therapist. Dr. Helen explains why:

Kottler touches often on the narcissism of therapists in the book and has a section on the topic. He talks about his own struggle with self-worth and measures his own success by looking at all the good he has done, the people he has helped. He discusses how therapists often feel they are frauds. The author talks about his deep need to influence others, and he mentions a treatise on narcissism that describes it as such:

“A lack of feeling, the need to project an image, the desire to help others in order to exercise power, and arrogance are all familiar symptoms.”

He then states that he has long felt he holds super powers:

“After all, it seems at times (to others, if not to myself) that I can read minds, predict the future, and hear, see, feel, and sense things beyond the powers of mere mortal beings.”

In the author’s defense, he does struggle with this and acknowledge it can be a problem. I have talked to therapists who feel they are superhuman yet see it as an asset.

I’m sure it would be an asset to be superhuman… if it weren’t an obvious sign that you are insane. But there is a solution. As soon as a psychological therapist completes his training, lock him up for life in the lunatic asylum. Tell half of them they’re doctors, tell the other half they’re patients. The narcissistic whack jobs can keep each other occupied without harming anyone and the mental health of the rest of the world will improve significantly.

Dr. Helen asks a cogent question at the end: “Could it be that many liberals, like narcissistic therapists, are so insistent that others go along with them because they fear being obscure and crave feeling powerful more than they care about whether their solutions actually work?”

Yes. Absolutely. Which reminds me… I’ve been reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and found it to be little more than the travel diary of a useless, moronic narcissist and closet-case gamma who errantly believes he is poetic due to his habit of utilizing inappropriate superlatives. If Kerouac had been born in 1969 instead of dying then, he wouldn’t have written an astonishingly tedious “this one time, on a road trip” stream of semi-consciousness, he’d be a licensed therapist.

The New York Times pronounced the most damning verdict on Kerouac’s generation when it described his novel as “the most beautifully executed, the clearest and most important utterance” of that generation. Truman Capote had it right. “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” But On the Road is a remarkable achievement in one way, as I now find Rand al’Thor to be only the second most-irritating fictional protagonist in literary history.

An end to extend and pretend?

This doesn’t appear to harmonize well with the economic recovery tune:

A record number of U.S. homes were lost to foreclosure in the first three months of this year, a sign banks are starting to wade through the backlog of troubled home loans at a faster pace, according to a new report. RealtyTrac Inc. said Thursday that the number of U.S. homes taken over by banks jumped 35 percent in the first quarter from a year ago. In addition, households facing foreclosure grew 16 percent in the same period and 7 percent from the last three months of 2009. More homes were taken over by banks and scheduled for a foreclosure sale than in any quarter going back to at least January 2005, when RealtyTrac began reporting the data, the firm said.

“We’re right now on pace to see more than 1 million bank repossessions this year,” said Rick Sharga, a RealtyTrac senior vice president.

I imagine ONE MILLION repos will exert an amount of negative pressure on home prices in the near future. What most people don’t realize is the way in which being underwater tends to prevent a house from being put on the market. The recent rise in prices is the result of a temporary restriction in supply due to underwater homeowners being trapped in their worthless homes, not the rise in demand that would be a sign of recovery.

UPDATE: Forgive me if I’m skeptical that anything more than a handslap and a fine is meted out. “SEC charges Goldman Sachs with civil fraud in structuring and marketing of CDOs tied to subprime mortgages.”

The breaking of the Euro

While the Euro is still much more valuable than it was ten years ago when it was trading at .88 to the dollar, the inherent problems of both the currency and the political entity has never been more obvious. The European Union cannot survive the dissolution of the Euro. And the Euro cannot survive the intrinsic economic contradictions of the various member states. For years, Europhiles have scoffed at my prediction of a complete Eurofailure in which Britain and a few of the smaller member states would withdraw from the EU while Northern and Southern Europe break into two or more apolitical economic blocs, but I don’t see anyone scoffing at the fears of George Soros and other professional investors who follow the European economic scene.

Morgan Stanley has warned that the Greek debt crisis is setting off a chain of events that may prompt German withdrawal from the eurozone, with grim implications for investors caught off-guard. “The backstop package for Greece and the ECB’s climb-down on its collateral rules set a bad precedent for other euro area states and make it more likely that the euro area degenerates into a zone of fiscal profligacy, currency weakness, and higher inflationary pressures over time,” said Joachim Fels, head of research, in a note to clients.

As socionomics predicts, political unity is a consequence of economic growth and positive social mood. As the economy and the social mood worsens, we can expect movement away from political unity in both the USA and Europe. Since there are very strong indicators of further economic contraction, we can safely expect further trouble for the EU and the Euro.