THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY, SICK KIDS WOULD LOSE ACCESS TO SPECIALTY HEALTH CARE. And they were right! “Now Seattle Children’s Hospital is reporting that patients are being denied specialty treatments due to Obamacare regulations. Patients at Children’s — that means that sick kids are not allowed the medical care that their doctors feel is best for them.”
Archive for 2014
January 31, 2014
OBAMA’S ART-HISTORY REMARKS NOT PLAYING SO WELL WITH TEACHERS. “Oh, you’ll be getting emails. You’ll be getting emails and letters and all forms of expression of hurt from the art history sector of the education economy. And let me play the gender card, because if this were not a President with gender immunity — that is to say, if this were a Republican President — the coded sexism would be translated and bruited about everywhere. . . . Flashback to candidate Obama in the summer of ’07, when he got the idea of stimulating the economy with money for infrastructure jobs that would fit with the way ‘guys… define themselves as men.’ Shovel-ready jobs, restoring masculine pride. And then the women pushed back. You’d better see to our needs.”
WHO WAS THROWING THE BEER BOTTLES IN THE BLUES BROTHERS MOVIE? Willie Nelson and Sissy Spacek.
REASON TV: Why No Smart City Would Want The NFL.
IN ATLANTA SNOW JAM, it was social media to the rescue.
POINTS AND FIGURES: The Times, They Are A Changing. “One sector that is seeing a rapid investment drop is healthcare and devices. That has hurt the North Carolina VC industry harder than it hurt Boston. It’s also subject to some longer term trends. Obamacare has a medical device tax buried in it-and it has caused money to pull back from taking risk in healthcare while everything gets sorted out. The FDA is a horrible bureaucratic organization to deal with, and they have made it hard to innovate.”
RAND SIMBERG: Space casualties a necessary tragedy: Loss of life will be just as inevitable on the high frontier as it was on the old ones.
That’s the theme of his new book, which is being very well received.
CRIMINAL JUSTICE: Charges dropped against Ohio man jailed for 20 years.
EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN: A shock to the system: Electroconvulsive Therapy shows mood disorder-specific therapeutic benefits.
MORE ON THE UNC SCANDALS: A former UNC dean recalls athletes unable to do college-level work.
Madeline Levine, a highly honored professor emeritus, said that as a dean, she was made aware of instances in which the university has admitted athletes with substantial academic challenges, including one she suspected was “functionally illiterate” during her tenure.
Levine also accused the university of resisting efforts to get to the bottom of a long-running academic fraud scandal that is drawing sustained national attention since it made The New York Times’ front page on New Year’s Day. She said Dean took the wrong tack two weeks ago in publicly lambasting whistle-blower Mary Willingham, a former learning specialist in the athletes’ tutoring program.
On Facebook, Don Surber comments: “How many non-athletic students cannot do the work? Colleges rake in bucks from students who take the 100-student classes in the freshman year (and remedial math and English) and then drop out after a year.” I’ve made a similar observation.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Law Schools Plug Revenue Hole With Non-J.D. Enrollment. This actually isn’t a bad idea — lots of non-lawyers need some legal knowledge. One of my friends from law school bailed after a year, went to Stanford Business School, and now runs a private equity fund. But he says the year of law school was quite helpful, and he sometimes wears the Yale Law School tie to meetings with lawyers just to keep them from getting too full of themselves . . . .
PRO-FAMILY: Olive Garden Is Giving Parents a Date Night With Babysitting Included.
Olive Garden is teaming up with 145 My Gym locations for this strange, wonderful, and brilliant promotion they’re aptly calling Parent’s Night Out. They’re doing it specifically to promote their two-for-$25 dinner menu, but invite parents to order off the regular menu too.
Meanwhile, your little tykes won’t even miss you, since they’ll be having way too much fun playing games and doing other activities with trained and background-checked sitters in a licensed facility.
Sounds like a good promotion.
AMBULANCE DRONES ARE ALMOST HERE. “AirMule, an unmanned flying ambulance capable of vertical takeoff and landing in extremely close quarters, has been in development for a few years. When the Israeli firm Urban Aeronautics released its initial concept art in 2008, it was easy to dismiss those futuristic, colorful pods out of hand. But last month, Urban Aeronautics announced that AirMule had successfully completed a series of fully automatic test flights.”
Getting closer to the ambulance drones in Empire Of The East. Just so long as we don’t get Orcus.
ALWAYS WITH THE DRAMA: Online feminism is full of “essays by people who feel emotionally savaged by their involvement in it — not because of sexist trolls, but because of the slashing righteousness of other feminists.”
From the comments: “The louder the fish bicker, the faster the bicycle speeds away.”
PHIL BOWERMASTER: What’s Real? Does It Matter?
Related: Spike Jonze’s Her and the Big Question. “In other words, throughout most of the movie, Samantha may be faking it. And yet, if she is faking it, Theo’s experience is the same as it would have been if she were sincere.”
Plus, from the anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-meta department: “Spike Jonze is a filmmaker. Arguably, everything he does is fake. These people are all just actors pretending to have experiences. If I watch this film — or any film — and feel empathy or surprise or sadness, are these fake emotions? How can they be real if they result from something that’s not real?”
IT’S OBVIOUSLY THE BLUE HADES STIRRING: Underwater Pyramid Found Near Portugal. Probably just angling for leverage in the Benthic Treaty renegotiations.
BARACK, YOU MAGNIFICENT BASTARD, YOU READ MY BOOK! Er, or something like that:
And I just want to make a quick comment on that. A lot of parents, unfortunately, maybe when they saw a lot of manufacturing being offshored, told their kids you don’t want to go into the trades, you don’t want to go into manufacturing because you’ll lose your job. Well, the problem is that what happened — a lot of young people no longer see the trades and skilled manufacturing as a viable career. But I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree. Now, nothing wrong with an art history degree — I love art history. (Laughter.) So I don’t want to get a bunch of emails from everybody. (Laughter.) I’m just saying you can make a really good living and have a great career without getting a four-year college education as long as you get the skills and the training that you need.
True. Of course, art history can lead to a good job if you develop strong reading, writing, and analytical skills, especially as an art history major who’s serious will be proficient at at least one foreign language. But, as always, that’s assuming it’s a rigorous art history major.
As a side note, if you’re going to encourage people to go into the trades to make a good living, you probably shouldn’t also be pushing an increase in immigrants who’ll compete with them.
And, alas, Obama does recycle the dumb and debunked line that women make 77 cents for every dollar men make. Maybe he should go back for some remedial study himself.
IN THE MAIL: From Chris Gerrib, Pirates of Mars.
TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 267.
THAT’S OKAY, WE’RE HEADING INTO ANOTHER “RECOVERY SUMMER.” Amazon’s Bad Omen for the U.S. Economy.
The title of the company’s news release is cheerily optimistic: “Amazon.com Announces Fourth Quarter Sales up 20% to $25.59 Billion.” And its operating income actually beat estimates — $510 million, compared with $489.9 million. But fourth-quarter sales of $25.6 billion were considerably below estimates of $26.08 billion, and earnings per share were 51 cents instead of the 69 cents that analysts had been expecting.
That’s not just disappointing for Amazon; it’s also not great news for the U.S. economy. When retail foot traffic and sales were disappointing in December, the standard explanation was that people must be moving their purchases online. Obviously, they weren’t — at least, not nearly as much as analysts expected. Given how dominant Amazon is in e-commerce, this should cause most of us to revise our expectations of fourth-quarter retail sales, as well as growth in gross domestic product. And not in a good direction.
Pay no attention to the sales figures behind the curtain.
IF THIS WERE TO CATCH ON, IT COULD SET OFF A REVOLUTION IN JOURNALISM: CNN’s Jake Tapper: Don’t Just Trust the Government, Demand Proof.
On the Hugh Hewitt radio show last week, CNN anchor Jake Tapper was asked about Edward Snowden’s leaks and government claims that they’ve done great damage to America. Every broadcast journalist in the nation ought to read his reply. The core of it: Be skeptical, and demand evidence before believing official claims!
I’m predicting, though, that it won’t catch on before January 21, 2017, at the very earliest.