A reporter rebels against the most important story of our time.
More, please.
Category Archives: ‘Culture’
Oh, Come On!
Isn’t there anything better to do with research money? I have a rejected NSF proposal that could do better.
Their paper, published yesterday in The Archives of Internal Medicine, involved 100 primary-care doctors in the Rochester area. As part of a study on patient care and outcomes, the doctors agreed to allow two people trained to act as patients come to their offices sometime over the course of a year. The test patients would surreptitiously make an audio recording of the encounter. The investigators analyzed recordings of 113 of those office visits, excluding situations when the doctors figured out that the patient was fake.
To their surprise, the researchers discovered that doctors talked about themselves in a third of the audio recordings and that there was no evidence that any of the doctors’ disclosures about themselves helped patients or established rapport.
First, anyone who has hung around doctors is not surprised that they talk about themselves all the time. I don’t think you can be a doctor without having an ego – it comes with the whole “saving people’s lives” thing.
Second . . . come the fuck on! Are Doctor unique in this? I live in Texas and practically can’t drive through a damned McDonald’s without hearing the cashier’s life story. Professional people chat with customers. That’s the way the world works.
Jesus Christ. We needed a group of researchers to figure out, after a year of study, that doctors are chatty? Stand by for new studies showing that plumbers often unveil their butt crack and waiters occasionally hit on customers (and vice-versa).
More Lies
Why is it no one points the obvious with sex surveys.
The median number of lifetime female sexual partners for men was seven; the median number of male partners for women was four.
I’m reminded of Sex in America which claimed that men had, on average, sex with three times as many women as women did with men (the numbers were six and two). That’s mathematically impossible. Someone’s lying.
Now this is a median, not an average. So it means half are below, half above. So if you had a small percentage of women who were *really* slutty, this could balance out. But:
29% of men reported having 15 or more female sexual partners in a lifetime compared with 9% of women who reported have 15 or more male sexual partners in a lifetime.
Rule of three, people. Rule of three.
Firsts’ First
As a first-born, I can tell you that the tradeoff was not worth it.
Thursday Linkorama
An analysis of just how much seniors are going to rip us off with Medicare and Social Security. Nice to know that the debate in Washington is over who can make this situation worse.
Center for New American Security has, what seems to me, a reasonable plan for getting out of Iraq. Money quote:
Some may suggest the United States should withdraw only when victory is achieved but “there will no American victory in Iraq in the terms defined by the Bush administration,” the report concluded.
I discovered this because Neal Boortz endorsed it. I think this is what the Right is looking for right now. A way to get out while still declaring victory. This report suggests phased withdrawal, timetables, etc. — everything the Right has railed against for years.
Sand may be a greater menace than sharks. Raise your hand if you’re surprised.
Scott Adams gets to the heart of environmental hypocrisy and panic-mongering.
Virginia school has a zero tolerance policy . . . on touching. Ugh.
Maya
In response to Maya Angelou’s vomit-inducing endorsement of Hillary, Reason links to David Allen Griers’ spot on imitation.
Is it racist of me to not be on board with Mayan Cult? I’ve always found her kind of pretentious and overbearing. Maybe that’s just me. Despite having written poetry myself, I can’t stand to hear poetry publicly read.
Galactica Down
Next season will be the last for Galactica.
This is good. The worst thing that could happen to the show is for it to artificially stagger around for an extra season or two and screw around instead of going where it needs to.
“This show was always meant to have a beginning, a middle and finally, an end. Over the course of the last year, the story and the characters have been moving strongly toward that end and we’ve decided to listen to those internal voices and conclude the show on our own terms,” Eick and Moore said in the statement. “And while we know our fans will be saddened to know the end is coming, they should brace themselves for a wild ride getting there –- we’re going out with a bang .”
Bravo. Sometimes the hardest words to write in a story are the lsat two.[ed – and sometimes they are even harder to spell!]
Getting Better
Boaz on how good news gets buried. In 2000, improvements in health and technology reduced the number of heart attack deaths by 341,000.
But this great news about heart disease appeared on page D4 of the Wall Street Journal and on page 13D of USA Today. As far as I can tell, it didn’t appear in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, or the Washington Post at all, nor on any NPR program. Though on the NY Times website, you can find an article the same day on the tiny increase in deaths from West Nile virus. And the heart disease story can be found on the Post website, though not in the print paper.
I just recorded a video message for my five-day old daughter telling her to always understand that she lives in the best of times. Too bad our media don’t seem to focus on that.
D-Day
Neal Boortz posts FDR’s moving call to prayer that he gave the American people on D-Day. I won’t quite it. Read the whle thing.
Now, back to gonzo politics. Notice something? No chest thumping. No boasting. No “mission accomplished” or “we’re gonna get ’em”. There’s a call to sacrifice, to give the last full measure.
Different times indeed.
But Then Boortz is Right
And after slamming Boortz, I’ll agree with his attack on more school stupidity.
But as Gailes, an honor student, crossed the stage last month to accept her diploma, the members of the audience cheered. According to school administrators, the celebratory display for Gailes and four other students warranted punishment. They withheld the students’ diplomas because family and friends violated a no-applause rule during the school’s graduation ceremony.
Apparently, some people made too much noise so they banned all noise. This is typical government school thinking. Deal with the guilty by punishing everyone. It’s the same mentality that says that if a student fights back against a bully, both are suspended. And it’s garbage. You can define acceptable and unacceptable cheering. And you can find better ways of dealing with it than a “guilt by association” punishment of the innocent student.
Reading between the lines, I suspect they were trying to avoid charges of racism as the rowdy cheering was from some of our nation’s more exuberant minorities. Ironically, they stumbled right into that nest as the punished students were . . . members of more exuberant minorities.
Boortz also links to this wonderful story about a Polish man coming out of a 19-year coma to find that Communism has fallen and Poland is vibrant and alive. I’ve often thought about how amazing it would be to take a time machine and jump every 20 years in history, familiarize yourself with the world, then leap again and see how it solves its problem. I suspect the man would happily have lived through those years. But his medical time machine gives him a perspective that no one else has.
When this man fell into a coma, I was 16 years old, a miserable loner in high school who hoped he’d one day be writer. The menace of nuclear war still hung over everything but Reagan was still President. In the last 19 years, I’ve gotten a Ph.D., moved a million times, watched my team win the World Series, witnessed the fall of the most vile system known to man (Communism, not the three-network TV oligarchy), seen the rise of the internet, continued to write in small dribbles and today had a daughter of my own.
Funny old world. Not too bad most of the time. And pretty fucking good when you smooth it out over a 20-year time-span.
Two More
Just watched two more of 2006’s best films. The Queen actually isn’t great, but Hellen Mirren’s performance was easily the best of the year.
Pan’s Labyrinth has to be in the mix with Children of Men and United 93 as my best picture of 2006. Simply beautiful. I can now see how Children of Men lost the Best Cinematography oscar (although it still should’ve taken Best Editing). I’m annoyed that Ivana Baquero did not get a Best Actress nomination. I haven’t seen the other films (apart from bits of The Devil Wears Prada, but it’s hard to imagine all four of the other performances were better than the mesmerizing turn the 11 year-old spaniard put in.
I noted last year that the critics’ favored movies of 2005 was loaded with downer movies. The best you could say about some of them was that they were “hopeful”. And before you say “critics always like downer movies”, that’s not always the case. It wasn’t in 2004 or 2003 or most years.
2006 looks like more of the same.
Moorewatch
An early review of Michael Moore’s new movie. I have not seen it, of course. But it sounds like the usual medly of liberal horseshit pooped out by the ignorami on the left from time to time. I’m sure this will lead to more calls for socialized medicine — which will cure the disease by killing the patient.
Linkorama
I’m working on two big posts on immigration. In the meantime….
In a recent study, sociologist Diane Felmee found only a third of women said looks were the first thing that attracted them to a man. Most preferred a sense of humour or financial and career success.
This has never been my experience. And I mean ever. I have known precisely one woman in my life who preferred geeky men. She was also my first girlfriend (and eventually moved on to better looking ones).
No, these are women who want to have their cake and eat it, too. When they’re young, they want to have sex with hot men. And now that they’re older, they want to settle down with the other ones. And the plain or ugly men are supposed to settle for never having a wild and crazy youth. Garbage.
To BR or not to BR?
FINALLY, Brannagh’s version of Hamlet is coming out on DVD. Christ, it’s only been like ten years. The studio that made absolutely sure we had Basic Instinct 2 on DVD at the earliest possible moment sat on this masterpiece for a decade.
Of course, since it’s in 70mm, it’s a legitimate question of whether I should wait until a) the high-def DVD wars are over and one format triumphs; b) the price of the platers comes down. I’ve been thinking more and more about declaring a moratorium on DVD buying until the high-def fight is finished (of course, I’d have to have a high-def TV first). I hate buying movies six times.
Fortunately, the quality of movies being pooped out by Hollywood these days has cut by DVD purchases on its own.