The KHIT Blog: One Scaramucci to go,

Friday, October 25, 2024

One Scaramucci to go,

and counting down...

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Cheryl and I have already voted. She will serve as an election judge on November 5th.

If you watched any of Donald Trump’s recent rally in Butler, Pa., you probably noticed Elon Musk beside him — jumping, jiving, arms raised, belly bared — and wondered what in the name of Tesla the chronically overstimulated gazillionaire was doing. Impromptu aerobics? A cheerleading audition? Charades?

If only. Musk, I fear, was previewing a second Trump administration — in which Trump would embrace and embolden a crew of self-impressed eccentrics and ideological outliers who are happy, even eager, to make confounding and fawning spectacles of themselves. Consider Musk their spirit animal. Multiply him by about two dozen and you have the Trump cabinet of tomorrow — or an only slightly exaggerated cartoon of it.

Much of the fallout of a Trump victory is unknowable. But this much is certain: Returned to the White House, Trump would get input from — and award key positions to — a bestiary of nihilists, destructionists and even criminals unlike any collection of advisers that any other president assembled. They’d be unscrupulous in all fashions but one: unswerving loyalty to Trump. He fumed about what he saw as a lack of that among his previous cadre of helpmates. The coming coterie would affirm Trump’s worst impulses, nurture his nuttiest ideas and gleefully carry out his orders... [NY Times]

Tick, tick, tick...

TRUMP JUST PRATTLES ON

Yeah, sure.

Nonetheless w/respect to the aggregate picture,

After two impeachments, several damning judgments in civil suits, federal indictments and a guilty verdict on all 34 counts in a Manhattan criminal case, he seems to have a 50-50 shot at an inauguration in January. Why wouldn’t he junk any nettlesome procedures? What’s to stop him from putting a neutered figurehead in a job that senators monitor and giving more power to far-right flatterers in the shadows?

What’s to stop those flatterers from plundering and degrading the richest and most powerful country on earth? Certainly not Trump. He’d be too busy admiring their initiative and accepting their compliments. —Frank Bruni

Scaramucci fractions now ensue. 10/11, 9/11, 8/11, 7/11, 6/11, 5/11, 4/11, 3/11, 2/11, 1/11. Election Day.

SUNDAY UPDATE

From The Washington Post:

A deep dive into President Trump’s doublespeak and other rhetorical tricks

The question of how Donald Trump ever got elected president has stumped some of the nation’s deeper thinkers. Jennifer Mercieca has a compelling answer in Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.

Spoiler alert: Trump is not, in fact, a genius. He’s a sophisticated con man who used the tools of rhetoric to pick the pockets of the American body politic. He double-talked his way to power. He buried his opponents with an avalanche of gibberish. He convinced more than 60 million Americans that the barnyard odor of his bombast was actually the pungent aroma of pure truth.

How did that happen? This book shows us by dissecting his demagogic language with a particularly precise scalpel. In doing so, it deserves a place alongside George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language and Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Bullshit. It’s a brilliant dissertation on Trump’s patented brand of balderdash. That makes it one of the most important political books of this perilous summer…

Yeah. Read Dr. Merciece's book when it first came out. She rocks. Very nice WaPo atricle here.

Highly recommended.

Ugh.

Below: From back in June. on ...

UPDATE

Trump is holding a rally at Madison Square Garden. We can be certain he quadruple down oncw more on the rhetorical venom.

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CODA

_________

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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, October 25, 2024

One Scaramucci to go,

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