The KHIT Blog: Is THIS what we've come to?

Monday, January 11, 2021

Is THIS what we've come to?

Are we heading toward widespread violent anarchy?

Click the image.

Not what I want to be posting about. But, we now have the most exigent of circumstances. If we fail to abate and reverse this growing sociopolitical psychosis, not much else will matter.

Buckle up, America.

apropos, see my Feb 2020 post "For Sama." Anyone who thinks civil war would be fun is crazy.

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Meanwhile the Covid19 pandemic continues to surge.

2.4 million new US cases across the first 10 days of January. 3-4,000 US deaths per day, hospitals running out of space. Total US Covid deaths now approaching 400k. Vaccine distribution and inoculations still way behind the curve.

Click the image.

Again, click the image.

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UPDATE: ALAN ZUNDEL, PhD

A reflection on our debacle posted on Facebook the other day.

WHAT BROUGHT US TO THIS POINT? There were 5 principal conditions that led to the events of January 6th in the U.S. Capitol.

1. RACIAL POLITICS. When the Democrats under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson allied with the civil rights movement, southern Democrats began leaving the party. Republican Richard Nixon then deliberately used race as a wedge issue to split the Democrats and appeal to white working people. The Republican Party has continued to exploit racial politics since then.

2. ECONOMIC CHANGE. The short period in the 1950s-60s in which the U.S. working class was doing well economically was an aberration in the history of capitalism. Shared economic prosperity in the U.S. was a result of World War II: economic spinoffs from massive government investment for the war and the war’s destruction of economic competition from Europe and Japan. These conditions changed by the 1970s as Europe and Japan began to recover and compete again. To maintain profits, the investing class instituted a program of neo-liberalism: reducing the power of unions; cutting taxes, regulations and social welfare programs; and advancing a global financial system. The economic conditions of working people in the U.S. began a decades-long decline. First the Republican Party under Reagan and then the Democratic Party under Clinton adopted the neo-liberal program.

3. WHITE SUPREMACIST MILITIAS. Racial resentments and the economic decline of white working people fueled the growth of the white supremacy movement. It attracted military veterans from the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. These veterans felt betrayed and abandoned by the government for sending them to wars that did not succeed; they also had military training and the capability for violence.

4. FLAWS IN THE ELECTORAL SYSTEM. U.S. election laws support a two-party system in which voters have nowhere to go if the two dominant parties don’t seem to be responding to their needs. The economic frustrations of working people opened the opportunity for a political outsider to seek their votes. In the 1990s Ross Perot tapped this pool of voters in an unsuccessful independent run for the Presidency. Plurality elections in the Republican Presidential primary of 2016 (the candidate with the most votes, not necessarily a majority of the votes, wins) allowed Trump to attract enough of these voters to emerge as a front-runner when the other candidates split the majority of Republican votes between them. This opened the floodgates for more of these voters to support him.

5. EMERGENCE OF A DEMAGOGUE. President Trump has followed a classic fascist playbook of weakening democratic norms, encouraging extra-government militias, and using “big lies” to divide and confuse the public. These tactics all came together in his attempt to incite a mob of his supporters, likely led by white supremacist militias, to invade the U.S. Congress in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

Alan is a friend. I invariably call him my favorite graduate school professor (UNLV Institute for Ethics and Policy Studies, 1994-1998). A standout among a standout faculty. He and his family now live in Oregon. I asked his permission to re-post his remarks.

A FACEBOOK POST OF MINE THE OTHER DAY, AND A TWEET

I am the offspring of a World War II Gold Star family. My late dad left a leg behind in Italy fighting nazis and fascists. He and all four of his brothers served for the duration. Only Pop and my uncle Warren survived the war years.

My late parents went on to be patriotic conservative Goldwater Republicans. I have subsequently been a ticket-splitting centrist independent, voting Republican as often as Democrat across my 74 years. When I retired and moved back to California in 2013, I registered as a Democrat, to be able to vote Democratic primaries.

Because I am now a “registered Democrat,“ I am told I am actually a “Communist.“

Because I am a middle-class white guy now living in Baltimore with a “Black Lives Matter” poster on my front door I am told that I should be killed.

Kiss my NY Irish ass.

Yes, this IS what we've come to.

I've been to our nation's capital many times. A couple of months ago most recently. Cheryl and I loaded up the dogs to do a quick get-outa-the-house day trip from Baltimore to DC, just to cruise around and maybe park and walk a bit.

I found it creepy this time. Concrete barriers everywhere, idling police cruisers with red and blue lights flashing, dump trucks blocking off streets... Mere portents.

Creepy.

January 15th, concertina wire Capitol.

apropos,

The Boogaloo Bois Prepare for Civil war
Among the Insurrectionists

Important, if dispiriting reading.

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Brave New Health

Commonwell Health Alliance

Another important read (pdf)

I love this kind of stuff. It sustains and humbles me. "As politicians, advertisers, salesmen, and propagandists for various political, economic, moral, religious, psychic, environmental, dietary, and artistic doctrinaire positions know only too well, fallible human minds are easily tricked, by clever verbiage... Common language—or at least, the English language—has an almost universal tendency to disguise epistemological statements by putting them into a grammatical form which suggests to the unwary an ontological statement. A major source of error in current probability theory arises from an unthinking failure to perceive this."

Quotes

"An economist is a person who sees something that works in practice and tries to figure out whether it will work in theory."

- J.D. Kleinke, medical economist
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"The only person who enjoys change is a baby with a wet diaper."

"Every misspent dollar in our health care system is part of somebody's paycheck.

- Brent James, M.D., M.Stat

“We could do healthcare, at markedly higher quality, for everyone in this country, without rationing or denying anybody the care that they need, without having the government dictate how doctors practice or whether hospitals could expand, at half the cost we do it now.”

- Health Care Futurist Joe Flower

Most of the sciences, unlike parts of medical science, are not concerned with the impossible. There is not complementary and alternative physics, or chemistry, or biochemistry, or engineering. These disciplines compare their ideas against reality, and, if the ideas are found wanting, abandoned."

- Mark A. Crislip, MD

"Q: How much alcohol is too much?
A: More than your doctor drinks."

- a physician I once heard speak during a CME presentation

“Just because science doesn’t know everything, doesn’t mean you get to fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.”

- Dara O’Briain

'[I]t is one small step from using the computer for "helping" doctors to monitoring them, judging them, dictating to them what to do, and withdrawing payment for computer non-compliance. The use of computer data is a multi-edged sword. It can be used for the "good," facilitating diagnosis and treatment and making it more accurate and up-to-date, and for “evil,” invading privacy, inviting security breechs, and making decisions based on the opinions of remote authorities rather than those present at the patient-doctor encounter.'

- Richard Reece, MD

“[T]here ARE statistics which are non-political. Just because The Washington Post/Fox News reports the temperature is 75 degrees doesn’t mean it’s really snowing and sunscreen is a liberal/conservative plot. Even if you earn a living being ideological.”

- Michael L. Millenson

"It is a generally a fairly convincing argument that people shouldn’t have to be subsidized to undertake a change which is in their best interest.

The reconciliation seems to be that EHR is not supposed to make a doctor’s practice more efficient and higher quality. It is supposed to make the system of care more efficient and higher quality, which is not the same thing. Those of you who took calc recall that maximizing the total of variables is not achieved by maximizing any one variable and this is a perfect example of that.

Those of you have served in combat certainly noticed that too — if everyone works as a team the unit takes fewer casualties. If you try to save your own hide, you might, but at the expense of more casualties overall."

- Al Lewis

"There are two ideas to keep in mind about Bayesian reasoning and how we tend to mess it up. The first is that base rates matter, even in the presence of evidence about the case at hand. This is often not intuitively obvious. The second is that intuitive impressions of the diagnosticity of evidence are often exaggerated."

- Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow"

"Physicians apply advanced scientific knowledge, but they must do so without the favorable conditions that experimental scientists create for themselves. Multitasking is forced on physicians, often in chaotic environments and under severe time and resource constraints."

- Lawrence and Lincoln Weed, "Medicine in Denial"

"It’s time to stop the whining about Obama care and acknowledge we already have universal health care. We just pay for it in the stupidest way possible that ensures problems are that much more disastrous and complicated when they’re finally treated."

- Mark Hoofnagle, MD, PhD

"Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily."

- Thomas Szasz, MD
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"Of course, one reason that process metrics* are so popular is that processes are much easier to define and measure than outcomes."

- The Skeptical Scalpel
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"There is an “illusion of validity” for any random data point, a seductive sense that is colored by what we hope will be true. Mountains of pharmaceutical claims are often made from mere molehills of data."

- Danielle Ofri, MD
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"Joy empowers people. It is a source of energy that enables people to hope and plan and change their lives for the better. Spend some time around someone who is relentlessly negative and how do you feel–drained, right? More and more research shows that joy is not something that just happens to you, like a bolt of lightening out of the blue. Joy is, instead, a habit to cultivate. Negative thinking and despair are the crabgrass of our souls–weeds that take root and spread, sometimes to all areas of life. Joy, in contrast, is a soul’s rose–hardy when cared for, able to put down roots over time and withstand disease and extremes. Like a rose, however, your joy can become blighted from neglect or harsh conditions. We all need to tend to our joy–to prune away the badness, and to know that, even though it may look like a prickly bare root, if you invest time in a joyous outlook, gorgeous things will bloom, even in the harshest conditions."

- Dr. Jan Gurley
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"'Solutions' exist only in mathematics."

- Karen Martin
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"The issue of how to regulate clinical software is, in the long run, indistinguishable from the issue of how to regulate medicine. The only difference is that medicine is practiced in the open, without secrecy, subject to peer review, and under a merit-based state license."

- Adrian Gropper, MD
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"Economist, rope, tree: some assembly required."

- Source unknown

DISCLAIMER:

I write this blog wholly on my own time and my own dime. The views proffered are expressly my own as a concerned and active citizen/taxpayer (in addition to being the result of my substantive experience in the various IT fields), and in no way reflect any policy views of my former employer, notwithstanding that some of the thinking has indeed obviously been spurred by the implications of the work with which I have been doing for them.

FAIR USE POLICY
I cite a ton of news and web sources spanning the breadth of relevant technical and policy domains, sometimes at substantial length. I believe I remain well within the bounds of "Fair Use," as [1] I am not doing any of this for profit, [2] I always provide attribution and links -- which, [3] far from negatively impacting any copyright holders' commercial interests, might actually increase traffic to and interest in their offerings.

Nonetheless, should I post anything of yours regarding which you have any objection, just let me know and I will remove it forthwith.

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Monday, January 11, 2021

Is THIS what we've come to?

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