Category: Uncategorized

Actions have consequences

Although they always seem to come as a surprise to liberal Americans:

Experts warn there won’t be enough doctors to treat the millions of people newly insured under the law. At current graduation and training rates, the nation could face a shortage of as many as 150,000 doctors in the next 15 years, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

That shortfall is predicted despite a push by teaching hospitals and medical schools to boost the number of U.S. doctors, which now totals about 954,000. The greatest demand will be for primary-care physicians. These general practitioners, internists, family physicians and pediatricians will have a larger role under the new law, coordinating care for each patient.

The U.S. has 352,908 primary-care doctors now, and the college association estimates that 45,000 more will be needed by 2020. But the number of medical-school students entering family medicine fell more than a quarter between 2002 and 2007.

At least the health care you’re not getting will cost you less. So there is that, anyhow.

WND column

Understanding the Numbers

“The American economy appears to be in a cyclical recovery that is gaining strength. Firms have begun to hire and consumer spending seems to be accelerating. That is what usually happens after particularly sharp recessions, so it is surprising that many commentators, whether economists or politicians, seem to doubt that such a thing could possibly be happening. … Why is good news being received with such doubt? Why is “new normal” the currently popular economic phrase, signifying that growth will be subpar for an extended period, and that the old normal is no longer something to be expected?
– “Why So Glum? Numbers Point to a Recovery,” the New York Times, April 8, 2010

There are three kinds of statistics. First, there are objective and verifiable statistics which are extremely difficult to fake due to the ease with which they can be independently measured and confirmed. These are most typically seen in sports. It would be very difficult for the Minnesota Vikings to falsely claim that Adrian Peterson ran for 3,000 yards in 2009 due to the NFL game logs and thousands of recorded videos of the 16 games in which he played. Second, there are objective and unverifiable statistics which are more easily faked due to the difficulty involved in measuring them. A movie’s box office take, for example, is not something that a third party can reasonably confirm without sending thousands of people to all of the various movie theaters and counting how many people entered the relevant screen rooms.

UPDATE: The National Bureau of Economic Research appears to be skeptical of the recovery too, considering its refusal to declare the recession over:

The Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research met at the organization’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 8, 2010. The committee reviewed the most recent data for all indicators relevant to the determination of a possible date of the trough in economic activity marking the end of the recession that began in December 2007. The trough date would identify the end of contraction and the beginning of expansion. Although most indicators have turned up, the committee decided that the determination of the trough date on the basis of current data would be premature.

UPDATE II: Did BoA, Citi, and JP Morgan/Chase just bail out Greece? Who borrowed $428 billion last week? I tend to doubt it was the American consumer.

Social autism strikes again

Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens once more demonstrate that while it isn’t necessary to be a consummate horse’s ass in order to be an atheist, it certainly doesn’t hurt:

RICHARD DAWKINS, the atheist campaigner, is planning a legal ambush to have the Pope arrested during his state visit to Britain “for crimes against humanity”.

Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church. The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998.

The Pope was embroiled in new controversy this weekend over a letter he signed arguing that the “good of the universal church” should be considered against the defrocking of an American priest who committed sex offences against two boys. It was dated 1985, when he was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which deals with sex abuse cases.

Being a nondenominational Christian with Southern Baptist ties, I am not inclined to be a defender of popery. And being a casual student of medieval history, I am fully cognizant of the various crimes that have been committed in Rome, Ravenna, and Avignon by men who claimed St. Peter’s throne. I also see a clear distinction between Christianity and Catholicism; although many Catholics are Christians, many are not by any reasonable Bible-based definition of the latter term. While I respect the organization and the historical contributions of the institution, I do not confuse it with my religious faith. Nor do I approve of the sexual abuse of children; I would have absolutely no problem with every priest, schoolteacher, and sports coach confirmed to be guilty of preying upon the children in their care being taken out and shot, were it not for my opposition to granting the government a hunting license on its citizens.

Since, ironically enough, it is Richard Dawkins who has openly minimized the damage to children from sexual abuse, it is obviously the Pope’s Catholicism that he wishes to prosecute, not the Pope’s suboptimal human resources management 25 years ago. The fact that Dawkins is targeting the Pope, who is not even accused of committing any abuse, rather than the hundreds of English school teachers – including one of his own teachers – who have actually done so is conclusive evidence that this is nothing more than the world’s most famous atheist demonstrating the Argument from Social Autism. It’s a remarkably stupid PR stunt, even by the low standards of the Clowns of Reason

“Once, in the question time after a lecture in Dublin, I was asked what I thought about the widely publicized cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland. I replied that, as horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing up the child Catholic in the first place…”
– Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 317

The sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic church is the direct result of allowing homosexuals to enter the priesthood. Unless and until the Pope addresses that ludicrous decision of his predecessors, more predatory abuses will occur. But the Pope is no more personally responsible for those crimes than the Minister of Education is responsible for the same crimes taking place in the English schools.

“The Roman Catholic Church has borne a heavy share of such retrospective opprobrium. For all sorts of reasons I dislike the Roman Catholic Church. But I dislike unfairness even more, and I can’t help wondering whether this one institution has been unfairly demonized over the issue, especially in Ireland and America.”
– Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 316

It would appear that Mr. Dawkins isn’t quite as opposed to unfair demonization as he used to be.

Anti-republican Republicans

Keep this Kentucky Senate in mind the next time the Republican Party asks you for money to stop the growth of government. Because they don’t mean it. Not even a little. And they never have:

The prospect of a Paul victory scares some Republicans. Former Vice President Dick Cheney endorsed Mr. Grayson last month after conservatives in Washington circulated an e-mail message about what they called Dr. Paul’s “troubling” views on national security. Mr. Grayson’s supporters note that Dr. Paul once argued for closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay and that he said detainees who cannot be convicted should be sent back to Afghanistan….

Mr. Grayson argues that some of Dr. Paul’s ideas (getting rid of the Departments of Energy, Education and Commerce) are too “weird” for Kentucky. And in increasingly sharp ads, he argues that Dr. Paul is downright dangerous when it comes to foreign policy. “Here’s a guy who is outside of the Republican mainstream,” Mr. Grayson said in an interview here.

Given the disaster that mainstream Republicans proved themselves to be from 2000 to 2006, to say nothing of the Banking Bailout of 2008 that was orchestrated by mainstream Republicans, one would logically conclude that being outside of the Republican mainstream is exactly what is required for both Kentucky and the nation. And needless to say, “troubling views” means nothing more than a refusal to endorse the Imperial America approach to foreign policy.

There is nothing conservative about Imperial America or its self-styled conservative advocates. Nor is it possible to support the Iraqi and Afghanistan occupations while simultaneously claiming to support small and limited government.

Technofascism part III

You can’t say I didn’t warn you about Apple’s ideological evil. Adobe’s Flash Blogger goes off:

By now you have surely heard about the new iPhone 4.0 SDK language that appears to make creating applications in any non-Apple-approved languages a violation of terms. Obviously Adobe is looking into this wording carefully so I will not comment any further until there is an official conclusion.

[Sentence regarding Apple’s intentions redacted at request from Adobe]. This has nothing to do whatsoever with bringing the Flash player to Apple’s devices. That is a separate discussion entirely. What they are saying is that they won’t allow applications onto their marketplace solely because of what language was originally used to create them. This is a frightening move that has no rational defense other than wanting tyrannical control over developers and more importantly, wanting to use developers as pawns in their crusade against Adobe….

Speaking purely for myself, I would look to make it clear what is going through my mind at the moment. Go screw yourself Apple.

Now, I disdain Apple products anyhow, since I despise their attempt to exert control over the way their users are permitted to use their hardware. I don’t develop for them except as an afterthought since it’s neither my business nor my concern what hardware and software any of our users happen to use; that’s why we will soon have hundreds of custom modes available for download that are designed specifically for whatever bizarre purpose our users have in mind. But if I was an Apple software developer, I would have to be very inexperienced indeed not to see the writing on the wall. Apple is now a console system, not a PC, so it won’t be long before they are imitating Nintendo and charging the developer a larger share per unit for the right to sell something developed for their platform than the developer makes himself.

NB: Before you leap to the wrong conclusion, I am most certainly NOT a fan of Flash. I think it is a very effective way to ruin the utility of a useful website and have it turned off in Firefox by default. But that doesn’t excuse Apple’s actions here.

Poland’s president dead

It’s strange, isn’t it, how one nationalist-inclined European leader after another has met with fatal accidents. First Haider, now Kaczynski:

Polish president Lech Kaczynski and his wife Maria have been killed after their plane crashed on approach to Smolensk airport in western Russia.

Needless to say, David Cameron has absolutely nothing to worry about.

The limits of written law

It doesn’t matter how perfectly you attempt to tie it down, government will always find a means of expanding its power:

Minnesota’s Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty, says the new federal health care law is unconstitutional. DFL Attorney General Lori Swanson says it’s not.

If the legal question gets to the U.S. Supreme Court, it may be decided with the help of a long-gone small-time Ohio farmer who once was fined $117 for growing too much wheat.

A key question about the health care bill involves just how far the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce reaches. For nearly 70 years, one influential precedent on that issue has been the peculiar case of farmer Roscoe Filburn, whose crop was deemed to influence commerce “among the several states” — the kind of commerce the Constitution permits Congress to regulate — even though none of the excess wheat left his farm.

The dangers of journalistic knowledge

To me, the amusing thing about this eye-opening experience is that it is apparently the first time this journalist has ever experienced the phenomenon. To those who actually possess more than a modicum of knowledge about anything, it is distinctly clear on nearly every page of every newspaper every single day:

Unlike most of the journalists covering the event, I was not an expert on that particular industry. It wasn’t my normal “beat.” The reason I was there was because I’d been interviewing the company’s CEO over the previous several months for a book project. But that also meant that while I wasn’t an expert about the industry in general, I was in the odd position of knowing more about the company’s “secret” product than any other journalist in the room.

It was an eye-opening experience. A lot of major news outlets and publications were represented at the press conference following the announcement. A few very general facts about the product had been released, but the reporters had only been introduced to details about it a half hour earlier. There was still a lot about how it worked, how it differed from other emerging products, and why the company felt so confident about its evolution and economic viability, that remained to be clarified.

But the reporters’ questions weren’t geared toward getting a better understanding of those points. They were narrowly focused on one or two aspects of the story. And from the questions that were being asked, I realized–because I had so much more information on the subject–that the reporters were missing a couple of really important pieces of understanding about the product and its use. And as the event progressed, I also realized that the questions that might have uncovered those pieces weren’t being asked because the reporters already had a story angle in their heads and were focused only on getting the necessary data points to flesh out and back up what they already thought was the story.

Almost every single time a major media outlet has done a story on me, someone related to me, or something related to me, there has been at least one factual error. Sometimes it is a big one, usually it is something pretty trivial, but it’s always there. Naturally, this renders me somewhat skeptical about the factual reliability of all the other stories I read in the media. Think about the last time a travel magazine or the New York Times wrote an article about a place you know well. Did they nail it or did they write about a few well-known places that are known to every tourist and no local actually goes?