Archive for the ‘education’ Category

“Acting White.”

Thursday, September 16th, 2021

Back in the days before “Black Lives Matter” there was a phenomenon called “acting white” that applied to black kids who tried to study and do well in school. Quite a few succeeded in spite of it. It has been succeeded by a new theme of “White Supremacy” that attributes certain behavior to “Whiteness.” An example is “Whiteness as a problem.” This is actually a college course.

A class to be taught next semester at the University of Wisconsin Madison called “The Problem of Whiteness” aims to “understand how whiteness is socially constructed and experienced in order to help dismantle white supremacy,” the course description states.

“Whites rarely or never questioned what it is to be white,” Assistant Professor Damon Sajnani, who will teach the course, told The College Fix in a telephone interview last week. “So you go through life taking it for granted without ever questioning or critically interrogating it.”

For Sajnani, one way to solve this is to offer “The Problem of Whiteness,” an analysis of what it means to be white and how to deal with it as a “problem.”

Now, what is the problem of “Whiteness?”

(more…)

Protest or Insurrection ?

Monday, June 8th, 2020

The protests that quickly morphed into rioting and mass looting began with an arrest of a career felon for trying to pass a counterfeit bill. He had been convicted of felony home invasion and robbery in Texas and served 5 years in prison. According to several unreliable sites, he was”turning his life around” and was involved with a church. That argument is somewhat diminished by the fact that he had Methamphetamine and Fentanyl in toxic levels at autopsy. The reaction in Minneapolis was extreme and horrific.

Some of the destruction can be seen here the next day.

It got worse, much worse.

The spineless leftist Mayor is now seeking $55 million form somebody to repair damage he might have prevented.

Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey will seek state and federal aid to rebuild city structures following over a week of looting and rioting, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported Friday.

Some 220 buildings have been damaged and require at least $55 million in repairs, the city’s Community Planning & Economic Development department said earlier this week, noting that the city was “not yet ready to produce a credible estimate.” City Council members warned that the costs will likely be far higher, while Mayor Frey said damages could reach into the “hundreds of millions.”

Typically, he tried to seek approval from black rioters and was expelled from the meeting.

He was elected on a platform of fighting “global warming.”

A pretty good explanation of what is behind all this.

For white liberals, a black identity shaped by rage is not only to be condoned, but celebrated. All politics is identity politics to liberals, because the whole object of their existence is to invent one’s identity according to therapeutic needs. That is why the progressive movement took up the cause of transgender rights with such passion: To change one’s gender is the ultimate expression of self-invention in defiance of nature and tradition.

The possessors of these newly-invented pseudo-selves know that they are imposters, and that everyone is laughing at them behind their backs. As Mephisto told Faust, “Wear a wig with a million hairs, and stand in heels as long as your elbow, and you still remain what you are.”

The motivation behind these riots is becoming clear. Antifa is an international, communist based, terror organization.

Antifa is not a single organization: it is a movement or coalition of leftist groups, each of which claims to combat “fascism,” a political ideology whose definition academics have been arguing about for decades. The word Antifa itself is a truncation of anti-fascist.

Despite the name, the movement embraces fascistic tactics.

Antifa has gained new prominence in the post-Obama era. They trace their roots back to Nazi Germany. Although they opposed the Sturmabteilung (SA), or Nazi storm troopers, like the SA they also used violence to intimidate political opponents and break up their meetings and rallies. It could be argued that the ideological distance between Antifa and the now-defunct National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, abbreviated as NSDAP) or Nazi Party, is so slight it can be measured in millimeters.

How is it funded ?

[T]he left-wing billionaire George Soros has ties to Antifa through a group called the Alliance for Global Justice (AfGJ). Soros’s philanthropy, known at the time as the Open Society Institute, gave $100,000 to AfGJ ($50,000 in 2004 and $50,000 in 2006).

Acting as a fiscal sponsor, AfGJ gave $50,000 to Refuse Fascism, an unincorporated Antifa group. Fiscal sponsors are recognized tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofits that take in donations on behalf of unincorporated or small groups so that donors can deduct the donations from their taxes, charging the group receiving the donation a processing fee.

Refuse Fascism was created in the weeks after Donald Trump’s unexpected victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. The group’s goal was summed up in a slogan on its website: “It’s Fascism: Drive Out the Trump/Pence Regime!”

Some of the members are employed, usually by universities or school boards. The man arrested for striking a demonstrator with a bike lock was shown to be a non-teaching employee of UC Berkeley. However, his charge for felony assault, resulted in 3 year probation. Thus local juries and judges tend to favor the offenders.

Eric Clanton had been linked by police to violent assaults with a metal bike lock during a “free speech” rally in Berkeley on April 15, 2017. Before his arrest, Clanton had been “outed” online, on the website 4chan, as someone who used a bike lock to strike a man in the head. The assault was captured in a video clip (below) that drew widespread attention and anger after it was posted on YouTube.

Wednesday, Clanton was supposed to have had his preliminary hearing, where a judge decides whether there’s enough evidence in a case for it to move ahead to trial. Instead, there was no hearing, and information about Clanton’s plea deal became available online.

According to Alameda County Superior Court records, Clanton entered a “no contest” plea Wednesday to one misdemeanor battery charge. The felony charges against him were dismissed, and an allegation that he had caused serious bodily injury was stricken. A misdemeanor charge that Clanton wore a mask during the commission of the crime also was dropped.

The local leader of a group called “By Any Means Necessary,” an affiliate of Antifa, was similarly, given a token sentence.

Under a plea agreement, the Sacramento District Attorney is set to dismiss a case against Berkeley teacher Yvette Felarca and two co-defendants related to a neo-Nazi rally and counter-protest more than three years ago.

Felarca and two other activists were scheduled to go to trial Thursday over felony assault charges and misdemeanor rioting charges, but left the morning court hearing, in front of Judge Richard Sueyoshi, with only a community service requirement and stay-away order.

“This is a victory,” said Felarca, a King Middle School teacher and controversial activist with By Any Means Necessary, in a phone interview Thursday afternoon. “Of course I’m relieved, it’s just been a long process and a struggle. I’m really so happy for all three of us. To me it’s a real affirmation of standing by your convictions.”

Needless to say, the “White Supremacist” rally was a fiction. Does anyone think they will “stay away?”

Relatives of Democrat politicians are also members of this group

The son of VP candidate Tim Kaine was arrested at an Antifa riot. The son of Minnesota AG Keith Ellison (former black Muslim ) has announced he is an Antifa supporter and made the motion to disband the Minneapolis police.

More evidence of the insanity of academia, which has spread to the population.

An example of focusing on “underrepresented minorities” can be seen in the recently established “Power Hour” at Gordon Research Conferences. While this effort is commendable in order to increase the participation of women in science it diminishes the contributions by men (or any other group). Universities have established various centers for “Equity, Diversity and Inclusion”, complete with mandatory seminars and training. These issues have influenced hiring practices to the point where the candidate’s inclusion in one of the preferred social groups may override his or her qualifications.

The paper has now been withdrawn.

George Harrington MD

Saturday, May 16th, 2020

I was thinking about Psychiatry today and the problems of deinstitutionalization. The best source for the latter is “My brother Ron,” by Clayton Cramer.

My book review of this book is here.

I was a medical student in 1962 when I got a summer job working in a VA psychiatric hospital doing routine physicals on the inmates. They were all men and some had been there for years. They were all “chronic hospital cases,” as described in this excellent history. Mr. Cramer gives a very thorough history of psychiatry leading up to the introduction of psychiatric drugs that actually worked and the social upheavals of the 60s that led to the emptying of the state mental hospitals. At the time I had my personal experience with the chronic schizophrenic, the deinstitutionalization movement was just getting started. My own days with these patients were similar in many respects to Mr Cramer’s experiences with his brother, Ron. Fortunately, none were my relatives and I could go home every night and leave their troubles behind. Still, the experience of talking to them all day was exhausting. My job was to do annual physicals since the psychiatry residents did not want to do so.

This was the height of the psychoanalysis influence on psychiatry. Fortunately, the chief of the service where I was working was a former analyst who realized that Freud had nothing to offer the psychotic patient. He taught me to talk to the sane part of the patient and ignore the “crazy” part. The early drugs, like chlorpromazine (Thorazine), allowed much better interaction with these chronic schizophrenics. Some of them explained what it was like to be “crazy,” their preferred term. I witnessed Electroconvulsive treatment (ECT) and saw the “lucid interval” that often followed the session. The patients usually lapsed into psychosis again after a few hours but the desire was to try to prolong the effect and this led to repeat sessions.

The author does a great job with the history and goes into far more detail on the legal aspects than I did in the chapter on psychiatry in my own book, A Brief History of Disease, Science and Medicine. He writes about “The fever treatment” that won a Nobel Prize for Wagner-Jauregg, the advocate, in the 1920s. This was a result of success with syphilis using fever when the drugs were inadequate and toxic. The legal history is important as the legal maneuvers of anti-psychiatry forces were the proximate cause of the disaster that followed. The homeless problem appeared in the 70s as the mental hospitals emptied and the former patients found nothing to replace them. The Community Mental Health Centers, as the author so well describes, were intended to take the place of the state hospitals but were never adequate, especially in the era of “talk therapy,” where a single psychiatrist could only see eight to ten patients a day.

I teach medical students and take them to the homeless shelters in Los Angeles every year so they can see where their County Hospital patients come from, and return to after hospitalization. They are able to see the futility of prescribing medicines when the patient has no clock or refrigerator to time the dose or preserve the drug between doses. The author relates the incidence of mental illness among the street population. The managers of the shelters tell me and my students that 60% of the homeless are psychotic and 60% are drug and alcohol addicts. Half of each group is both. For the first few years, we had an amazing guide, a former homeless man now working for the city. He would regale us with stories of his ten years on the street addicted to crack cocaine. He took us to shelters and to homeless hideouts where he warned us not to go there without him.

This book is a source for anyone who wants to know how things got so bad and why the families of psychotic patients are so frustrated with the “advocates” who block treatment or commitment of those unable to care for themselves. One of my students’ patients was a man with a severe leg infection that threatened amputation. He lived on the sidewalk in front of a Pasadena church. He refused parishioners’ offers of housing, telling them he was waiting for the perfect apartment. He barely kept his leg with intense treatment. After treatment, he returned to the street. This is a national tragedy and the reasons are well explained in this book. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

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My experience described above was with George Harrington MD, the most impressive man I have ever met in Medicine. His obituary:
Born in Independence, Missouri, Dr. Harrington attended the University of Kansas, where he received his medical degree in 1941. He also played football for the university. He then interned in Chicago, and during World War II served in the Pacific theater as a Navy flight surgeon. He was the recipient of a Personal Citation, Distinguished Flying Cross, and four Air Medals as a result of his service. In 1946, Dr. Harrington began his residency training in psychiatry at the Menninger Foundation of Psychiatry, and became a faculty member at the Menninger School of Psychiatry. He also served as chief of professional services at the Winter VA Hospital in Topeka, Kansas and was a member of the American Psychiatric Association. In 1955, he moved with his family to Pacific Palisades, where he began private practice. He was also a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA and head of psychiatric services at Brentwood VA Hospital until 1965.
After he served as staff psychiatrist in charge of a research project on chronic mental illness at the Brentwood VA Hospital, his work culminated in the 1965 book, “Reality Therapy,” written by William Glasser. The book, offering a new approach to psychiatric treatment, was dedicated to Dr. Harrington. He counted many noted writers and entertainers among his patients, many of whom dedicated works to him. The playwright George Furth dedicated his Broadway play, “Company,” to Dr. Harrington, who was an avid sailor and continued this activity until his death.

Harrington was a big rugged looking guy who walked with a limp from a femur fracture incurred in an auto accident soon after he finished his residency at Menninger Clinic. He told me his father had been a minister who became a lay psychoanalyst and spent time in Vienna with Sigmund Freud. In fact, he told me that he had sat on Freud’s knee as a child. From the time he was 17 he wanted to be an analyst. His father was at Menninger hence his MD from U of Kansas. After the war, he began his residency at Menninger and found that analysis had little or nothing to offer psychotic patients. He told me that every summer, the staff psychiatrists would leave the state hospital on vacation, leaving the medical students to take over. It didn’t take long for him to realize that he was getting nowhere with psychotics using analysis. He was a funny guy with a great sense of humor and an ability to mimic.

He became a clinical professor of Psychiatry at UCLA and took over a ward at the Sawtelle VA hospital sometime before 1962 when I met him. He told me that staff at the VA were very skeptical of his new ideas on therapy so, early in his tenure, they lined up a “hard case” for him to demonstrate this new “talk therapy. ” The new drugs had made things much easier to deal with schizophrenics and he wanted to go beyond with some sort of behavioral therapy. He said the patient was a typical schizophrenic little guy. Harrington asked him how things were and the patient responded with a long stream of typical crazy talk. Harrington listened to all this, then responded that something very similar had happened to him. He then repeated almost verbatim the same stream of crazy talk the patient had related. Half way through, the patient he said began to laugh. He was no longer psychotic, if he had ever been so. He liked having a bed and three square meals a day. He had memorized enough crazy talk to keep everyone convinced that he belonged there. Harrington cautioned me that anybody who wanted to live in a nut house was not normal. Still, the guy was just not that psychotic. He convinced the ward staff that there was something to his ideas. After that, everybody on the staff was part of the treatment team. Even the guy who ran the floor polisher was invited to the Wednesday staff meeting.

What Harrington did was to set up a program of rules that taught these psychotic patients that we knew they were crazy and we were not about to throw them out into a world that scared them so badly. We also, me especially, talked to them and focused on the part that was not crazy. It could be exhausting to do so but patients would respond. One of them told me as I was leaving at at the end of the summer to go back to school that talking to me allowed more of his mind to come out of the psychosis. Of course, he didn’t put it that way but that is what it sounded like to me. It was an intense summer and George Harrington was someone I will never forget.

Most of my job was to do annual physicals on these man, many of whom had not been examined in years. It was an interesting experience to do prostate exams on these psychotic men. It turned out to be no big deal as they all appreciated someone looking after them. I even found a prostate cancer that summer. Psychiatry was still in the grip of analysis then and the residents from UCLA did not want to touch patients.

After returning to medical school, I met some academic psychiatrists and lost interest in the specialty. Harrington was almost unique although Glasser’s book, which explains much of Harrington’s methods, had a wide popularity and is still in print.

A Year in New Hampshire

Thursday, December 13th, 2018

In 1994, after my back surgery and the prolonged recovery, I had to decide what to do with the rest of my life. The young man who I had taken in as a partner before my surgery, did not want me to continue in the surgery practice as a non-operating member. I had offered to see patients in the office and to help keep the referring doctors sending patients. I still had a fair sized breast practice which includes quite a bit of office work. He was not interested. That was a bad decision on his part but I had sold him the practice before my surgery and he was free to do as he chose.

I had been interested in the area of peer review in Medicine for some years and had served on the Board of Directors of California Medical Review, Inc. This was an outgrowth of a new federal policy called “Professional Standards Review Organizations. or PSRO. It was supposed to be about quality but it was always about cost. CMRI was founded in about 1986 and is now defunct. It was useful in trying to figure out how to measure quality but go into trouble later for exaggerating their case load.

Anyway, I was interested and knew that Dartmouth Medical School had a program called “Evaluative Clinical Sciences. The Director was a well known epidemiologist named Jack Wennberg who had become famous for his study of variation in medical treatment. His original study had been of tonsillectomy in Vermont where he was state health officer. He found that the incidence of tonsillectomy varied by town but not by medical indications. IT was a function of local medical “culture.” Eventually, his work resulted in The Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care.

I talked to him and then applied for the Fall Semester. In September, I leased my house and moved to New Hampshire for a year. I leased a house in the Hanover area and moved in.

New Hampshire - 3 of 9

New Hampshire - 9 of 9

The house was pretty and situated on 5 acres of land. It had a barn that served as a garage and I had my car winterized as New Hampshire is cold in Winter. It was 26 below zero Thanksgiving morning.

The house was about 6 miles north of the medical school, up this highway.

New Hampshire - 4 of 9

I had my dog and a cat that some neighbor children had brought over the first day I was moving in.

SunnyBillFood

The cat and the dog got on very well and even ate from the same dish, although Sunny, the dog, ate faster and I eventually had to put Bill’s food in the basement to keep Sunny from eating it all.

Winter came quickly and the first snow was less than a month after I moved in.The house was comfortable although expensive to heat.

The land had a small stream running through it and there was a pond in front of the house.

New Hampshire - 6 of 9

That its a small bridge over the stream and the stream itself was frozen a good part of the winter.

New Hampshire - 5 of 9

The interior was nice. Here is the living room with Christmas decorations for the kids as they came to spend the holiday with me.

New Hampshire - 1 of 9

Being California kids, they had fun playing in the snow.

New Hampshire - 4 of 4

That was across the road from the junction of Grant Road and Lyme Road from the medical school.

Spring eventually came after “mud season,” which is the fifth season of New England. Graduation was fun as the older kids were there and Bill Clinton handed me my diploma.

My research project was on dialysis access surgery and I had thoughts of further study but we never got the grant I applied for. I returned to California and spent several years trying to use the same methods to analyze care of the elderly and of care of the poor, but I got no cooperation from the necessary authorities and eventually gave up on research on medical quality.

Here is the house I leased in 1994-95.

15 grant road,.

Obviously the photo was taken in summer.

My next door neighbor was a guy named Baxter Prescott and he had at least as large a property with lots of maple trees. Next to Baxter’s was his son, Tom’s, who had a home business making musical instruments, specifically recorders. He had an Apple computer connected top a milling machine and built the instruments, many using precious woods. I got to know Tom and his family while I was there. Baxter was a very interesting guy. He and his wife, Emily I think, had a nice home which was heated by a wood stove at the lowest level. The wood stove also heated their hot water, which circulated in copper tubing behind it. They had a Nigerian exchange student, enrolled at Dartmouth, living with them. He was a nice kid and worked nights in the 24 hour Dining Hall for extra money and at night so he could study.

In the Spring I helped (mostly watched) Baxter make maple syrup from his trees. He also had a pond, which in summer was a swimming hole and in winter a skating pond. He had a little gazebo for summer, which had removable walls to enclose it as a warming hut in winter. My kids were there in winter and got quite a bit of use with it. Baxter had a sort of Zamboni machine which would smooth out the ice.

They were very pleasant neighbors and I enjoyed knowing them.

The Trump-Russia conspiracy becomes clear.

Thursday, October 25th, 2018

The election of Donald Trump as president in 2016 was a catastrophic event for a segment of the US government. It had been assumed by the entire “Ruling Class” that Hillary Clinton would, at last, be elected president. Books have been written about her reaction to the loss. One was titled, “Shattered” and recounted her reaction. A pretty good analysis in this Amazon book review.

To be fair to the authors, they lay the blame for her loss squarely on her. They sort of feel bad about it but their close access makes it obvious to them and they are objective enough to report it. The other main person held responsible is campaign manager Robby Mooks, who is so enamored with ‘analytics’ that he can’t see the forest for the trees. The canary in the coal mine is Bill Clinton, who senses that his wife and her campaign are not connecting with the white working class, but is ignored by the team who consider him washed-up and out of date.

What happened after she lost ? The Russia Collusion story was concocted.

Here is an analysis of How it began and why.

It turned out, however, that the dossier was a Clinton-campaign opposition-research project, the main allegations of which were based on third-hand hearsay from anonymous Russian sources. Worse, though the allegations could not be verified, the Obama Justice Department and the FBI used them to obtain surveillance warrants against Page, in violation of their own guidelines against presenting unverified information to the FISA court. Worse still, the Obama Justice Department withheld from the FISA court the facts that the Clinton campaign was behind the dossier and that Steele had been booted from the investigation for lying to the FBI.

Now, more analysis is coming from Sheryl Atkinson.

Taken together in context, the evidence points to two important findings. First, U.S. government insiders, colluding with numerous foreign citizens and governments, conspired to interfere in the 2016 election. Second, after the election, these figures conspired to undermine, oust, and perhaps even frame Trump and some of his associates.

The methods used, according to factual accounts and witnesses, include collusion with reporters and politicians, leaks to the press, and paid political-opposition research. Officials in the intelligence community were involved in the effort, which included the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), domestic and foreign informants or spies, and electronic surveillance.

Both articles are worth reading in full. The fact that other diversions are appearing, like the hoax bomb story, suggests that the Democrats know the Mueller “investigation” is going to be ended soon with a dud.

We are still dealing with reaction from Angelo Codevilla’s “Ruling Class.”

When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term “political class” came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public’s understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the “ruling class.” And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.

This is how we got Trump and why there is a well funded effort to get rid of him him any way possible.

Joel Kotkin has a good analysis.

Over the past few decades, the U.S. has developed essentially two economies. On the one side is the widely celebrated “post-industrial” economy: software, entertainment, media, and financial and business services. These sectors flourished as the stock market soared in the ultra-low interest-rate environment fostered by the Obama administration, whose recovery strategy was built around bailing out major banks, all headquartered in deep-blue cities. The winners under Obama included urban real estate, financial-service firms, and the tech oligarchs. These elements now constitute the Democratic Party’s burgeoning financial base, allowing it consistently to spend more than the GOP in key congressional races, while the GOP still gains support in energy and other less heralded “legacy” industries.

The whole thing is well worth reading and explains a lot about why the big money is backing Democrats.

Where is health care going ?

Saturday, August 25th, 2018

UPDATE: A new analysis of Obamacare’s role in the conversion of American Medicine to an industry with corporate ethics.

The health system is now like a cocaine junkie hooked on federal payments.

This addiction explains why the insurance companies are lobbying furiously for these funds alongside their new found friends at left-wing interest groups like Center for American Progress. The irony of this alliance is that the left-wing allies the insurers have united with hate insurance companies and want to abolish them. The insurance lobby is selling rope to their hangman.

Hospital groups, the American Medical Association, the AARP and groups like them are on board too. They are joined by the Catholic Bishops and groups like the American Heart Association and the American Lung Association. (If you are donating money to any of these groups you might want to think again.) This multi-billion dollar health industrial complex has only one solution to every Obamacare crack-up: more regulation and more tax dollars.I practiced during what is more and more seen as a golden age of medical care. Certainly the poor had problems with access. Still, most got adequate care, either through Medicaid after 1965, or from public hospitals, many of which were wrecked by Medicaid rules and by the flood of illegal aliens the past 40 years.

Obamacare destroyed, probably on purpose, the healthcare system we had. It had been referred to by Teddy Kennedy, the saint of the Democrats Party as “a cottage industry.” As far as primary care was concerned, he was correct. What we have now is industrial type medicine for primary care and many primary care doctors are quitting.

So why is there waning interest in being a physician? A recent report from the Association of American Medical Colleges projected a shortage of 42,600 to 121,300 physicians by 2030, up from its 2017 projected shortage of 40,800 to 104,900 doctors.

There appear to be two main factors driving this anticipated doctor drought: First, young people are becoming less interested in pursuing medical careers with the rise of STEM jobs, a shift that Craig Fowler, regional VP of The Medicus Firm, a national physician search and consulting agency based in Dallas, has noticed.

“There are definitely fewer people going to [med school] and more going into careers like engineering,” Fowler told NBC News.

There are several reasons, I think. I have talked to younger physicians and have yet to find one that enjoys his or her practice if they are in primary care. That applies to both men and women. Women are now 60% of medical students. This has contributed to the doctor shortage as they tend to work fewer hours than male physicians.

A long analysis of physician incomes shows that 22% of females report part time work vs 12% of males.

Physicians are the most highly regulated profession on earth. The Electronic Health Record has been made mandatory for those treating Medicare patients and it has contributed a lot to the dissatisfaction of physicians.

THE MOUNTING BUREAUCRACY
This “bottleneck effect” doesn’t usually sour grads on staying the course, Fowler finds, but he does see plenty of doctors in the later stages of their careers hang up their stethoscopes earlier than expected. Some cite electronic health records (EHRs) as part of the reason — especially old school doctors who don’t pride themselves on their computer skills. New research by Stanford Medicine, conducted by The Harris Poll, found that 59 percent think EHRs “need a complete overhaul;” while 40 percent see “more challenges with EHRs than benefits.”

If I remember my arithmetic, that adds up to 99% unhappy with the EHR.

Most primary care physicians I know are on salary, employed by a hospital or a corporate firm. They are require to crank out the office visits and are held to a tight schedule that does not allow much personal relationships with patients. The job satisfaction that was once a big part of a medical career is gone.

What is happening with higher education ?

Thursday, November 30th, 2017

It is a very long time since I graduated from college. I have been teaching medical students for 15 years until I finally retired two years ago.

My five children have all attended college and all but one have graduated. Three have advanced degrees.

The most recent graduate, my youngest daughter, was taught some untruths at the University of Arizona a few years ago.

For example, she was taught, in her “US History Since 1877” course that “The Silent Majority” consisted of white people who refused to accept the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That was in her final exam review study guide. There was no mention of Nixon or the Vietnam War.

My theory is that university faculties when I attended were mostly World War II veterans or older and I could never sense the political affiliation of any of them. During the Vietnam War, colleges became refuges for anti-war students who stayed in grad school to avoid the draft. Since they were mostly strongly leftist in sympathy, they have perpetuated the leftist bias in faculty by recruiting similar students and by rejecting those who hold more conservative views.

As evidence I offer Steve Hayward’s report on hiring practices today.

Here is the announcement.

Evidence of ability for excellence in teaching and research grounded in political theory and focusing on topics central to the discipline at large: e.g., ancient, modern, and contemporary theories; democratic theory; critical race theory; immigration; the carceral state; postcolonial theory; identity; hybridity; intersectionality; queer theory; deconstruction’s focus on alterity; globalization, and neoliberalism.

What the hell is “the carceral state?” I suppose that refers to BLM theories that black males are unfairly incarcerated.

What about the high school level ? They are graduating illiterates who are going to college.

An internal email obtained by WAMU and NPR from April shows two months before graduation, only 57 students were on track to graduate, with dozens of students missing graduation or community service requirements or failing classes needed to graduate. In June, 164 students received diplomas.

According to a teacher at Ballou, this feat was accomplished by “smoke and mirrors.”

Teachers felt pressure from administration to pass chronically absent students, and students knew the school administration would do as much as possible to get them to graduation.

And Teachers we spoke with say if they questioned administration, they were painted as “haters” who don’t care about students.

The results have been what you would expect:

Last year, 9 percent of students there passed the English standardized test. No one passed the math test. The average SAT score last year among Ballou test takers was 782 out of 1600.

Achievement must be earned. It cannot be mandated by the authorities. Now all of these kids are in college, presumably subsisting on financial aid provided by taxpayers. Their illiteracy and habit of blowing off classes must leave them plenty of time for Black Lives Matter protests. When they are not made Chairman of the Board immediately upon graduation, they will blame it on racism, and for the most part the media will concur.

This is why I think education is in an existential crisis. These kids will never repay student loans. Eventually, the level of delinquency will overwhelm the system.

The Data.

Balances of student loans have eclipsed both auto loans and credit cards, making student loan debt the largest form of consumer debt outside of mortgages. These interactive charts show how student loan borrowing and delinquency rates vary among age groups and over time.

It will never be repaid. The next question is what happens to these illiterates when they graduate from college, as they certainly will. Many will drop out but there will be some illiterate graduates.

More evidence of the left slant that is getting close to vertical.

What is going on with professional sports ?

Saturday, September 23rd, 2017

d day

That image is from Zero Hedge but it was so good I had to use it.

We see every day new protestations by professional athletes about political matters. Almost all are left wing politics.

ESPN, a sports network has become another source of left wing politics.

ESPN became a cable-television giant by offering wall-to-wall sports, so naturally the channel has increasingly chosen to offer political commentary. In a remarkable coincidence, its viewership has been declining. ESPN’s shrinking audience triggered layoffs of about 100 employees this week. While this column wishes that Fox Butterfield could help make sense of all this, sports fans nationwide are hoping that perhaps the cable network will once again consider offering the coverage that made them watch in the first place.

It seems to be a mystery to the management.

Like many cable networks, ESPN has been hit hard by consumers canceling expensive monthly pay-TV packages in favor of smaller packages or streaming services. Over the past five years, ESPN has gone from 99 million subscribers to 87.44 million, according to Nielsen data. At the same time, the cost for sports content continues to rise, putting pressure on the sports giant’s bottom line.

Well, they fired Rush Limbaugh and Curt Schilling for comments they disliked. Who could have predicted this ?

The network may be losing subscriber revenue not just because of cord-cutting, Cohn allowed, but because viewers are increasingly turned off by ESPN inserting politics into its sports coverage.
“That is definitely a percentage of it,” Cohn said Thursday on 77 WABC’s “Bernie and Sid” show when asked whether certain social or political stances contributed to the stupor that resulted in roughly 100 employees getting the ax this week. “I don’t know how big a percentage, but if anyone wants to ignore that fact, they’re blind.”

Then there is the epidemic of protesting during the National Anthem.

It began with Colin Kaepernick, a biracial child adopted and raised by white parents who have been rewarded by his outrageous behavior which is celebrated on the left as seen in the NY Times.

His name was Colin Kaepernick, and what he was looking for, Ogundimu and others discovered, was a deeper connection to his own roots and a broader understanding of the lives of others.

Seven years later, now 29, Kaepernick is the most polarizing figure in American sports. Outside of politics, there may be nobody in popular culture at this complex moment so divisive and so galvanizing, so scorned and so appreciated.

Contrary to the Times, it may have begun with his Black Muslim girlfriend who thinks the owner of the Baltimore team who pays his black players millions is a “slave owner.”

Kaepernick’s antics are now being imitated by 8 year old children who are members of a “football team.”

These players all seem to have a characteristic in common.

They are all black. A few white players have adopted this pose in sympathy but it seems this is one more example of the yearning for segregation.

The millionaire players may not be doing their poorer imitators in inner city ghettos any good.

The Future of Science

Thursday, August 17th, 2017

We are now entering a crazy period of our history. Europe is sinking beneath a wave of Muslim immigration by young military age men.

America is now seeing riots like Charlottesville. These are being organized by people who have sketchy associations like Jason Kessler who seems to be an “activist” on both sides.

Rumors abound on white nationalist forums that Kessler’s ideological pedigree before 2016 was less than pure and seem to point to involvement in the Occupy movement and past support for President Obama.

So the “white Nationalist” is an Obama supporter ?

Now, we have to turn to the future of science. We had the Larry Summers episode at Harvard.


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Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers has triggered criticism by telling an economics conference Friday that the under-representation of female scientists at elite universities may stem in part from “innate” differences between men and women, although two Harvard professors who heard the speech said the remarks have been taken out of context in an ensuing national media frenzy.
MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins ’64 said she felt physically ill as a result of listening to Summers’ speech at a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) luncheon, and she left the conference room half-way through the president’s remarks.

This was one of the first reports of snowflakes requiring fainting couches when faced with opposing opinions.

Summers was subsequently forced to resign in spite of an obsequious apology.

More recently, we have had the defenestration of a Google engineer with 100% evaluations fired after expressing sentiments simialr to those Summers had stated.

The memo he wrote is not like the description in the other link.

For example, on the scales measured by the Big Five personality traits women consistently report higher Neuroticism, agreeableness, warmth (an extraversion facet[68]) and openness to feelings, and men often report higher assertiveness (a facet of extraversion [68]) and openness to ideas as assessed by the NEO-PI-R.[69] Gender differences in personality traits are largest in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities that are equal to those of men. Differences in the magnitude of sex differences between more or less developed world regions were due to differences between men, not women, in these respective regions. That is, men in highly developed world regions were less neurotic, extroverted, conscientious and agreeable compared to men in less developed world regions. Women, on the other hand tended not to differ in personality traits across regions.

He was demonized for such comments.

OK, Now what have we to face ?

Male dominated Science is to be rejected.

Prescod-Weinstein asserts that, rather than placing value in the contents of peer-reviewed scientific articles, we should recognize that “science has often made its living from encoding and justifying bias” and is “conducted primarily by white men.”

Here’s hoping that airplanes continue to fly with “feminist science” determining design of wings.

This seems related to “Feminist Mathematics.”

There is, now, an extensive critical literature on gender and the nature of science three aspects of which, philosophy, pedagogy and epistemology, seem to be pertinent to a discussion of gender and mathematics.

Who knew that Mathematics had gender ?

We now have a Dean of Engineering at Purdue who is interested in “Feminist Engineering.”

The goal of the FREE research group is to do research, teaching and outreach that helps people (students, the public, engineering colleagues, and other engineering education researchers) develop a more inclusive, engaged, and socially just vision of engineering education.

OK. Maybe it is just the approach to Engineering Education but what is Socially Just Engineering ?

The riot at Middlebury College over Charles Murray.

Saturday, April 1st, 2017

Recently, Charles Murray, author of the book, “The Bell Curve,” a study of intelligence in the population, was invited to speak at Middlebury college, a liberal arts college in Vermont. His attempt to speak was interrupted by a riot which injured a professor at the college.

Inside Higher Ed’s story on the event explains that college officials admonished the students prior to the talk that they could protest but not disrupt Murray’s talk, which was to be about the way white America is coming apart—the title of his latest book—along class lines. Unfortunately, that admonition did no good. “As soon as Murray took the stage,” we read, “students stood up, turned their backs to him and started various chants that were loud enough and in unison such that he could not talk over them.

The confrontation continued after he had left the stage and attempted to move to another location.

And then matters turned worse. Fearing that there might be a raucous, disruptive mob instead of an audience of students willing to listen and consider Murray’s arguments, school administrators had set up a contingency plan. Once it became clear that the mob had killed the lecture, they moved to another location where Murray would give his talk, which would be live-streamed to students.

Sadly, that location was soon beset by the mob, with banging on windows and pulling of fire alarms. Murray and Professor Allison Stanger, who was the moderator for the talk, tried their best to continue a rational discussion.

Finally, Murray, Professor Stanger, and a few others tried to leave campus.

Mayhem resulted when Professor Stanger, who had been willing to state her agreement that Murray should not have been invited, was injured.

Why did this happen ? Tribalism ?

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