Friday, January 5, 2024

Threats From Within?

"Donald Trump on Veterans' Day, 2023"

I clipped that out of an NPR mp3 audio segment. Screen-grabbed the waveforms of those 10 seconds of Your Favorite President while I had it up in Adobe Audition.

Majorly apropos of Barb McQuade's forthcoming book (uh, see prior post).

People will differentially ask "who poses the threat?" "Where will the attack(s) originate?"

It's not like we lack clues. e.g., PBS Frontline “American Insurrection.”

Click image
Also, see below for your viewing pleasure..

Trump Shares Messianic Video About God Sending Him To Save World

V/O transcript: "And on June 14th, 1946, God looked down on his plan Paradise, and said, I need a caretaker. So God gave us Trump.

God said, I need somebody willing to get up before dawn. Fix this country. Work all day. Fight the Marxists. Eat supper. Then go to the Oval Office and stay past midnight. And a meeting of the heads of state. So God made Trump.

I need somebody with arms strong enough to wrestle the deep state, and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild. Somebody to ruffle the feathers. Tame the cantankerous World Economic Forum. Come home hungry. Have to wait until the First Lady is done with lunch with friends. Then tell the ladies to be sure and come back real soon and mean it. So God gave us Trump.

I need somebody who can shape an ax but wield a sword. Who had the courage to step foot in North Korea? Who can make money from the tar of the sand turned liquid to gold? Who understands the difference between tariffs and inflation? We’ll finish this 40 hour week by Tuesday noon, but then put in another 72 hours. So God made Trump.

God had to have somebody willing to go into the den of vipers. Call out the fake news for their tongues as sharp as serpents. The poison of vipers is on their lips. And yet. Stop. So God made Trump.

God said, I need somebody who will be strong and courageous, who will not be afraid or terrified of the wolves when they attack a man who cares for the flock. A shepherd to mankind who will never leave nor forsake them. I need the most diligent worker to follow the path and remain strong in faith and know the belief of God and country. Somebody who is willing to drill, bring back manufacturing and American jobs. Farm the lands. Secure our borders. Build our military. Fight the system all day and finish a hard weeks. Work by attending church on Sunday. And then his oldest son turns and says, God, let’s make America great again, dad. Let’s build back a country to be the envy of the world again. So God made Trump."

I have a nagging feeling of spoofery. Suck everyone in.

Is it too early to start drinking?

LATE FRIDAY UPDATE

The U.S. Supreme Court has "granted cert" (agreed to hear) Donald Trump's appeal of the Colorado ruling declaring him ineligible for placement on their presidential primary campaign ballot under the contentious 14th Amendment Section 3 specifications.

AND, OF COURSE, YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT ON FRIDAY

JANUARY 6TH 2024 UPDATE

1,095 days since the Trump Insurrection. 304 days until the 2024 national elections.

MARCY WHEELER’S LATEST

“STAND BACK AND STAND BY:”JACK SMITH’S HIDDEN CARDS

GENUINE "PATRIOT," ANYONE?

READ DAMMIT:

I have been alive long enough to see presidents shot dead in the street; civil rights leaders gunned down in their hotel rooms; horrible, horrible wars started on the wretched basis of disgusting lies ... but of all the things I have seen in my long life nothing compares to January 6, 2021.

On that day ... a terrible, singular day that will live in our broken hearts forever, an evil, broken sociopath who had been voted out of power by the citizens of the United States of America did everything he could to hold onto that power and set the match that led to a gruesome attack on his own country.

And when that attack was at full boil, he watched and did nothing to stop it for three hours except hope that it would prevail.

Even his ghastly family was begging him to call off his rabid dogs, while brave, overmatched police officers were stomped into the pavement and beaten with flags -- FLAGS!

Members of Congress -- Republicans and Democrats -- ran for their lives.

Finally, when somebody or something was able to penetrate the sociopath's thick, fat skull, he grudgingly called a halt to the attack, but not before telling his army of pathetic, anti-America losers that he loved them.

He f*cking told him that HE LOVED THEM!!!

I am seething as I type this. Raging ...

Why ... WHY is this man still free? Why hasn't he been jailed forever? WHY must WE continue to deal with this monster, who most certainly will try this again?

My God, LOCK-HIM-UP already.

Elon's TwitterX is increasingly a cesspool of raw rhetorical sewage. But, not (yet) totally.

OFF-TOPIC ERRATA

Cheryl and I went to the Baltimore Museum of Art on Friday to see an exhibition of "Women artists in Europe, 1400-1800 Ad."

Click to enlarge to read. It was fascinating. Photographing the art pieces was prohibited (though people were doing so anyway; I abstained). Below, pic from the BMA website.

__________

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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
___

"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
___

"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
___

"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
___

"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
___

"'Solutions' exist only in mathematics."

- Karen Martin
___

"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
___

"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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Friday, January 5, 2024

Threats From Within?

Trump Shares Messianic Video About God Sending Him To Save World

“STAND BACK AND STAND BY:”JACK SMITH’S HIDDEN CARDS

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