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iSteve commenter YetAnotherAnon observes:
Wolfe is pretty relevant now – from The Right Stuff [1979]:
“It was as if the press in America, for all its vaunted independence, were a great colonial animal, an animal made up of countless clustered organisms responding to a central nervous system. In the late 1950’s (as in the late 1970’s) the animal seemed determined that in all matters of national importance the proper emotion, the seemly sentiment, the fitting moral tone, should be established and should prevail; and all information that muddied the tone and weakened the feeling should simply be thrown down the memory hole… the public, the populace, the citizenry, must be provided with the correct feelings!”
The MSM is full-bore providing the correct feelings, and anything that might break the spell (what did happen to that poor dead woman in the burned out car in Minneapolis, and was she the distressed women ringing a doorbell at 3 am?) is being memory-holed – like the Mission Inn beatdown.
Steve, you are a genius. Thanks
Very true. But I’d throw this one in, too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_in_the_Ruins
https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-more-things-change-the-more-they-resemble-a-tom-wolfe-book/#comment-3953047
Has anyone here ever read Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos - The Last Self-Help Book?
It's a brilliant parody of self-help books that is actually quite trenchant.Replies: @Dieter Kief
I wonder if Trump could deflate the protests by saying something like:
” 50% of violent criminals in the US are black, but only 23% of the people killed by police are black. Therefore I want to thank the black community for selflessly destroying their own neighborhoods to bring attention to this issue mostly affecting whites. Black rioters are a lot more thoughtful than I imagined. “
Someone quoted from Wolfe’s “Mau-mauing the Flak-catchers” the other day, and also from “Bonfire of the Vanities” (that might have been here on iSteve).
Wolfe was a keen observer of the zeitgeist. Too bad more of the cognoscenti didn’t read him. They could’ve learned something useful instead of Marxism.
Tom Wolfe and Walker Percy were the two writers of the last generation whom I most wanted to meet. Alas, not in this world.
https://njmonthly.com/wp-content/uploads/cache/2016/12/gay_talese_0077/488524732.jpg
https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2016/07/01/gettyimages-511776262-28fdda760c65037c6b3c05839bea1c507018294e-s800-c85.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcIyUqoFGCk
(Note, if you can, the YouTube code, very Talesian. YouTube uses base 64, but this time it might be base 69.)Replies: @The Germ Theory of Disease
I like how engineer types can observe what’s happening with regard to race and then meekly aid and abet the destruction of our people.
They know what’s happening. Yet their hearts are either with liberals, or more often, some “Establishment moderate” crap, which gets us to the same place. No moral courage.
These institutions require intelligence to function, and you can bet there are nice, soft, White guys making it all work. They just accept the dominance of Leftists and say “ahh that’s life”. They often want praise from Uppah Class Liberals. It’s sickening.
OT but I was wondering, with all the doctors and nurses supporting the protests, how many people are killed every year by medical errors compared to police errors.
It seems to be a hard number to estimate because it is hard to determine if patients die with or of the complications due to medical errors.
I did find a reasonable estimate of 25,000 per year.
Which, assuming blacks are affected at least as much as everyone else, would mean 3000 blacks die from medical errors per year.
Would be a shame if someone sicced BLM on the medical establishment for killing black bodies with racist inferior treatment, racistly missed diagnoses, and racistly neglectful higher rate of medical errors, and with as much impunity and lack of consequences as cops. (which I am sure there must already be people claiming)
Or maybe just mention this if medical professionals are being sanctimonious on twitter.
I remember being in a small town and talking to an old woman who worked at a retail establishment. Her husband had died during open heart surgery at the local hospital, which had just opened a cardiac surgery program, and the insiders thought it was a dicey program because they just didn't have the volume to do this program right. The state capital, with four times the population, was 2 hours by road east and a major metropolitan area with several world class hospitals was 2 hours south (30 min by life flight helo either way). She ruefully admitted that the doctor seemed completely inept and when I asked her if she was going to sue, she got upset. "We don't sue". Would not hear of it.
To her, filing a malpractice lawsuit was, like joining a labor union or getting involved in any kind of protest, something "those people" did. "We weren't raised that way". And that was all she'd say.
I left that town shortly thereafter and never saw her again, but when talking to others who lived in that town, they all said one reason no one ever sued a doctor was that if you ever did none of the other doctors in town would ever accept you as a patient again and you'd have to go two hours out of town for all medical needs.
A fair proportion of the medical practitioners out there are in that category of "somewhat competent", and the system protects them to an extent. Your odds of not getting killed or maimed or suffering lifetime consequences of "not-so-great-practice" get a lot better if you research who the good doctors are and go to them. It helps to have family members in medicine or allied health care fields because even casual friends in the business are usually loath to name people in the "not terribly good" category. The flamingly dangerous ones usually kill enough people fast enough they become uninsurable, but the midwits can go through a career and retire, in most specialties.Replies: @anon, @Art Deco
Of course it all depends on how you define "error," but I don't think it even includes the additional toll from hospital/rehab facility infections. To refer once again to my favorite Onion piece, blacks may have more chance of falling down a laundry chute than being killed by a white cop
This is not a case of Plus ça change. They won’t put this genie back in the bottle. The authorities have declared war on their own law enforcement officers. High-quality people will not join the police now. The only recruits they will find will be from the underclass itself and this kind of incident will become more common.
He needs a job and does not feel like this is anything like an opportunity of a lifetime. Everybody I knew in school who joined the Air Force or the Navy or the NSA or the CIA thought it was an opportunity of a lifetime and they were going to do it for 30 years.
Only a couple of them ended up making a career out of it. I knew a guy who was psyched as hell to join the Marine Corps and he did not get through basic training.Replies: @Lugash
Racism being fought is a good thing. How is this even up for debate?
In the future we will police against white supremacy with the full force of the law.
Statues are being taken down, army bases are being renamed, people are being fired, hate speech laws are inching toward reality, police will be revamped, progressiveism is growing, every corporation supports Black Lives Matter, protests are growing, democrats are leading.
Dang it feels good to be a progressive!Replies: @orionyx
In the old days that's where cops usually came from. A case of either wear a badge or wear shackles.
It's over 20 years since Robert Jordan sued after being rejected for pig duties because he tested too high on the entry examination (based on Wonderlic - popular with HR charlatans).
It's now a matter of settled Federal law (Jordan v New London 2000 U.S. App. Lexis 22195) that piggeries do, and are permitted to, select for dummies... so nobody has any excuse not to know this.
The fact that Jordan wanted to be a pig (and that he went on to become a prison guard) tells you everything you need to know about the claim that a Wonderlic score of 33 (Jordan's score) is "roughly an IQ of 125"; nothing about Jordan comes remotely close to supporting that claim... he was 46 by the time he applied to be a pig, and had a bachelor's degree in literature from a correspondence 'college'.
Pigs are - on average - as stupid as soldiers, but more cowardly and keener to wield power over 'civilians'. There was never a prelapsarian age where they were all, or mostly, 'high quality' human beings, because being 'high quality' doesn't fit well with being a Kapo.Replies: @Art Deco
BTW, better download a copy before such articles get disappeared like a mafiosi turncoat about to give state’s evidence. Wolfe used the word negro…
Democrats only groom the police department and its recruits for votes. Quality is always relative to the partisan agenda.
OT: USS Liberty, attacked June 8, 1967 off the coast of Egypt.
It’s been a while since I’ve read the Right Stuff, but I remember Tom Wolfe observing how all of the astronauts were clean-cut WASPs from Middle America. That would drive today’s media insane.
I just gave a reference for a neighbor of mine who needed some for his application to join the police force about a month ago. It was the longest conversation I ever had with him.
He needs a job and does not feel like this is anything like an opportunity of a lifetime. Everybody I knew in school who joined the Air Force or the Navy or the NSA or the CIA thought it was an opportunity of a lifetime and they were going to do it for 30 years.
Only a couple of them ended up making a career out of it. I knew a guy who was psyched as hell to join the Marine Corps and he did not get through basic training.
Things will improve.
Racism being fought is a good thing. How is this even up for debate?
In the future we will police against white supremacy with the full force of the law.
Statues are being taken down, army bases are being renamed, people are being fired, hate speech laws are inching toward reality, police will be revamped, progressiveism is growing, every corporation supports Black Lives Matter, protests are growing, democrats are leading.
Dang it feels good to be a progressive!
read gore vidals non fiction from the 1990’s until he died. he is the single most accurate observer of american culture and its demise. way beyond wolfe
I don’t know how Chicago is not really, really screwed moving forward.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/6/8/21281998/chicago-violence-murder-history-homicide-police-crime
They had the worst day of murders they have had in 60 years a week ago. 18 people murdered and they seem to be blaming systemic racism, etc.
It is very sad and depressing.
Gay Talese is still with us, and keeping alive an important part of Wolfe’s legacy:
(Note, if you can, the YouTube code, very Talesian. YouTube uses base 64, but this time it might be base 69.)
Wolfe was a keen observer of the zeitgeist. Too bad more of the cognoscenti didn't read him. They could've learned something useful instead of Marxism.Replies: @Kronos
It’s good they didn’t read him. They would’ve purged him early on.
It seems to be a hard number to estimate because it is hard to determine if patients die with or of the complications due to medical errors.
I did find a reasonable estimate of 25,000 per year.
Which, assuming blacks are affected at least as much as everyone else, would mean 3000 blacks die from medical errors per year.
Would be a shame if someone sicced BLM on the medical establishment for killing black bodies with racist inferior treatment, racistly missed diagnoses, and racistly neglectful higher rate of medical errors, and with as much impunity and lack of consequences as cops. (which I am sure there must already be people claiming)
Or maybe just mention this if medical professionals are being sanctimonious on twitter.Replies: @Anonymous, @Known Fact
I was told by a local and famous MD/JD lawyer who advertises his medical malpractice plaintiff side services widely that 80 percent of people who come to him to sue a doctor have no legit case, but that 80+ percent of people who DO have a legitimate case do not sue and indeed become upset if someone suggests that they do. If these latter people all started litigating both the medical and legal systems would implode, he said.
I remember being in a small town and talking to an old woman who worked at a retail establishment. Her husband had died during open heart surgery at the local hospital, which had just opened a cardiac surgery program, and the insiders thought it was a dicey program because they just didn’t have the volume to do this program right. The state capital, with four times the population, was 2 hours by road east and a major metropolitan area with several world class hospitals was 2 hours south (30 min by life flight helo either way). She ruefully admitted that the doctor seemed completely inept and when I asked her if she was going to sue, she got upset. “We don’t sue”. Would not hear of it.
To her, filing a malpractice lawsuit was, like joining a labor union or getting involved in any kind of protest, something “those people” did. “We weren’t raised that way”. And that was all she’d say.
I left that town shortly thereafter and never saw her again, but when talking to others who lived in that town, they all said one reason no one ever sued a doctor was that if you ever did none of the other doctors in town would ever accept you as a patient again and you’d have to go two hours out of town for all medical needs.
A fair proportion of the medical practitioners out there are in that category of “somewhat competent”, and the system protects them to an extent. Your odds of not getting killed or maimed or suffering lifetime consequences of “not-so-great-practice” get a lot better if you research who the good doctors are and go to them. It helps to have family members in medicine or allied health care fields because even casual friends in the business are usually loath to name people in the “not terribly good” category. The flamingly dangerous ones usually kill enough people fast enough they become uninsurable, but the midwits can go through a career and retire, in most specialties.
Medical training in this country is competitive and demanding. There aren't many incompetent doctors and until people are frankly old the talents of their doctors aren't an important vector in influencing their lifespans.Replies: @Anonymous
https://njmonthly.com/wp-content/uploads/cache/2016/12/gay_talese_0077/488524732.jpg
https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2016/07/01/gettyimages-511776262-28fdda760c65037c6b3c05839bea1c507018294e-s800-c85.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcIyUqoFGCk
(Note, if you can, the YouTube code, very Talesian. YouTube uses base 64, but this time it might be base 69.)Replies: @The Germ Theory of Disease
Those are just terrible photos, he is very badly dressed, and very poorly photographed. Everything is wrong in that top photo, the photographer should be keel-hauled. He has allowed his subject to look like a circus clown, he has lit him and posed him and framed him terribly, the “fall” of the clothing’s drapery is beyond retarded, and what is with those pillows? And that carpet? And those shoes?!? And worst of all, he’s got a sort of smug look on his face, like he believes he’s stylin’ and nobody had the heart to break it to him. H.T. Murgatroyd.
Mr. Talese should sue for defamation.
The lab records only go back to 1961, this was the worst day for murders in the entire history of Chicago. The 1950s and early 1960s had low crime levels like the rest of the US.
“Modern” history? There was virtually no one living there until the Civil War.
McCormick reaper around 1840 meant the black gold of Illinois grew enough wheat and corn to feed the nation east of the Mississippi Missouri
It was harvested shipped to Chicago by rail and then all over the country. Central location river Great Lakes and railroad transportation made it an important city before the civil warReplies: @MBlanc46
Don’t know if it is intentional or not but BLM has been smart not to have identifiable leaders. When you know who the leadership is the bloom comes off the rose fast. Having an Eldridge Cleaver or Huey Newton over for dinner got old fast as they were just uncouth hoodrats who had mastered a few multisyllabic words that weren’t motherf*cker.
And like Al Q and ISIS, BLM and Antifa are terrorist organizations. But...don't tell anybody I said so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_in_the_RuinsReplies: @Steve Sailer, @Prester John, @Percy Gryce, @Anonymous
I just reread Walker Percy’s “Love in the Ruins” about a month ago.
I recall Caldwell’s book “The Age of Entitlement.”
He argued that the deficits sustained by Reagan was meant to keep the “peace.” That all factions involved in the 1960s and 1970s were sedated by federal deficit spending. There were scuffles over the decades but nothing too serious, mainly saber-rattling and symbolic victories and defeats. However, the money “ran out” after the Great Recession and frozen tensions are thawing out. So your back to massive black riots as if Watts 1965 was just yesterday.
Don't look now, but ... there's no more money left, not now, not for the foreseeable future.
Things are about to get massively 'interesting', all over the world.Replies: @Prester John
Steve remains too terrified or ignorant to offer a clear explanation that is as well documented as anything in world history: its the Jews. It was then and it is now.
Steve refuses to say it.
“And yet, it moves.”
Kinda silly in parts, but prescient. Couldn’t publish that sucker in 2020, couldya?
Have you never heard of the 1968 affirmative action law and the 1973 Griggs orders that police departments must hire only the unfit and incompetent?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_in_the_RuinsReplies: @Steve Sailer, @Prester John, @Percy Gryce, @Anonymous
Very good novel. One of Percy’s best.
Racism being fought is a good thing. How is this even up for debate?
In the future we will police against white supremacy with the full force of the law.
Statues are being taken down, army bases are being renamed, people are being fired, hate speech laws are inching toward reality, police will be revamped, progressiveism is growing, every corporation supports Black Lives Matter, protests are growing, democrats are leading.
Dang it feels good to be a progressive!Replies: @orionyx
When the pendulum swings the other way, you’d better make like your nick, real quick.
Tiny French trading post 18th century Officially founded around 1830. Major east west north south railroad hub by 1845, big enough to be site sof republican presidential nomination convention summer 1864
McCormick reaper around 1840 meant the black gold of Illinois grew enough wheat and corn to feed the nation east of the Mississippi Missouri
It was harvested shipped to Chicago by rail and then all over the country. Central location river Great Lakes and railroad transportation made it an important city before the civil war
https://spectator.us/andrew-sullivan-new-york-column-riots/
New York magazine has come a long way. In a bad way.
" 50% of violent criminals in the US are black, but only 23% of the people killed by police are black. Therefore I want to thank the black community for selflessly destroying their own neighborhoods to bring attention to this issue mostly affecting whites. Black rioters are a lot more thoughtful than I imagined. "Replies: @Mr McKenna
At the rate he’s going, he may reach the point where he’ll have nothing to lose by dropping some truth bombs like that. But does he have the sense to do it effectively? He (and we) will have to deal with the Lügenpresse turning it right around with megadoses of misinformation, as is their wont. It’s a war, not a skirmish, and you have to be persistent as well as prepared.
“The only recruits they will find will be from the underclass itself ”
In the old days that’s where cops usually came from. A case of either wear a badge or wear shackles.
That’s not crazy talk. Wolfe is entertaining with a tendency toward the clever and cute. Vidal is incisive with sardonic wit, and more substantial if less amusing. Even his fiction often displays an underlying political agenda.
Just don’t make the mistake of reading a single word he has to say about himself. His inner homo–seldom far from the surface–makes itself known with tiresome insecurity and worse, annoying and completely inappropriate bragging.
He’s not the first great writer I’ve known to evince genius in his work and a complete lack of insight or self-awareness in his personal life.
In that respect it is similar to Antifa. Both can “melt” into the background when necessary and in that respect they resemble Al Qaeda and ISIS.
And like Al Q and ISIS, BLM and Antifa are terrorist organizations. But…don’t tell anybody I said so.
I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. But I love The Moviegoer.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/6/8/21281998/chicago-violence-murder-history-homicide-police-crime
They had the worst day of murders they have had in 60 years a week ago. 18 people murdered and they seem to be blaming systemic racism, etc.
It is very sad and depressing.Replies: @The Last Real Calvinist
I read that article just a hour or so ago.
It’s remarkable: it describes at least half a dozen murders in detail, and manages never, ever, to mention a perpetrator in more specific terms than ‘someone’:
Otherwise, all the killing is the result of ‘violence’ or ‘gun violence’ or, of course, racism. The article prominently quotes heretic priest Michael Pfleger:
Perhaps the most telling sequence in the article is this series of quotations from a black girl who was wounded that day. It’s obviously included to make sure the Chicago police are also blamed, because they were all too busy trying to quell the rioting and looting that were going on that day to prevent her from being shot:
So on that day the police were expected to stand as willing and deserving recipients of the rioters’ wrath — but they also should have been on scene to deal with the poor misguided rioters who were being allowed to steal and loot. They should have ‘cared’ for the very people trying to kill them.
This is utterly pathological. It’s a perfect manisfestation of Substitute Savior Syndrome from the perspective of the ‘saved’.
That is, from this black girl’s point of view, the police are expected to be full-spectrum saviors. The police should take upon themselves the sins of the community, and be scourged for their integral role in the ‘systemic racism’ that causes ‘violence’ — but they should also be omnipresent tender shepherds who guide their morally befuddled flock into the paths of righteousness.
This is about Power.
BLM had grassroots leaders. They died bizarre and under-reported deaths, suicide by multiple gunshots to the back of the head stuff. BLM has a for-profit corporation with papers in Delaware (incorporated ten days after the election) as well as several other companies using the name. BLM has a raft of things which would be investigated and exposed if our institutions functioned properly.
22pp22 is in New Zealand. He’s probably not totally up to speed on American legal history.
McCormick reaper around 1840 meant the black gold of Illinois grew enough wheat and corn to feed the nation east of the Mississippi Missouri
It was harvested shipped to Chicago by rail and then all over the country. Central location river Great Lakes and railroad transportation made it an important city before the civil warReplies: @MBlanc46
Nominating convention of 1860, certainly, in the Wigwam. But 1864?
Wolfe’s “Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers” do indeed show us how little has changed except for Whites are in far more trouble now as a people than they were in the early 1970s. Sure, you had the Watts Riots and race riots in places like Detroit, Baltimore, and other cities during the mid and late 1960s but nothing like what is going on now. But you still have the same old (((Manhattan cocktail parties attended by the same old usual suspects))) with a token darkie here and there for props, still inciting nonwhites against evil White racism & “White Privilege,” blah, blah, blah. Anyone with two brain cells knows who really has (((privilege))) in America and it taint Whitey.
It’s this.
Have a college buddy, Romney Republican-type, who lives in the Swamp. Works for some non-profit (yeah I know). His wife is a leftie.
He supported Hillary over Trump in 2016 cuz, ya know, Trump just wasn’t Presidential. Yeah, one of those.
I gave him heat last year that he posts way more criticism, and way harsher criticism, of Republicans than he does of Democrats. Honestly his posts are virtually indistinguishable from lefties.
“When did you become a Democrat? Congratulations!” I poasted.
He protested and howled. One hilarious thing he said was “My [inside the Beltway] liberal friends say I’m a rock-ribbed Republican!”
There’s more, but you get the idea.
My conclusion from the exchange was, like a dog eager to please, he enjoys getting patted on the head by his liberal friends (probably all his friends are libs) as one of those “good Republicans” at Beltway parties.
Honestly, men like him are worse than the enemy.
Logic got nuttin’ to do with it.
This is about Power.
It seems to be a hard number to estimate because it is hard to determine if patients die with or of the complications due to medical errors.
I did find a reasonable estimate of 25,000 per year.
Which, assuming blacks are affected at least as much as everyone else, would mean 3000 blacks die from medical errors per year.
Would be a shame if someone sicced BLM on the medical establishment for killing black bodies with racist inferior treatment, racistly missed diagnoses, and racistly neglectful higher rate of medical errors, and with as much impunity and lack of consequences as cops. (which I am sure there must already be people claiming)
Or maybe just mention this if medical professionals are being sanctimonious on twitter.Replies: @Anonymous, @Known Fact
The death toll from medical errors could be even higher than you mention.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_suggests_medical_errors_now_third_leading_cause_of_death_in_the_us
Of course it all depends on how you define “error,” but I don’t think it even includes the additional toll from hospital/rehab facility infections.
To refer once again to my favorite Onion piece, blacks may have more chance of falling down a laundry chute than being killed by a white cop
“I like how engineer types can observe what’s happening with regard to race and then meekly aid and abet the destruction of our people.”
Nonsense. Only STEM matters. Who cares about ethics or politics or history or any of that low IQ liberal arts bullshit. If it’s not an equation, there’s no definite T/F answer anyway, so who cares? Of course, the super-IQ Jews seem to enjoy controlling it, can’t imagine why.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_in_the_RuinsReplies: @Steve Sailer, @Prester John, @Percy Gryce, @Anonymous
Huh, I didn’t see this when I left this comment:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-more-things-change-the-more-they-resemble-a-tom-wolfe-book/#comment-3953047
I remember being in a small town and talking to an old woman who worked at a retail establishment. Her husband had died during open heart surgery at the local hospital, which had just opened a cardiac surgery program, and the insiders thought it was a dicey program because they just didn't have the volume to do this program right. The state capital, with four times the population, was 2 hours by road east and a major metropolitan area with several world class hospitals was 2 hours south (30 min by life flight helo either way). She ruefully admitted that the doctor seemed completely inept and when I asked her if she was going to sue, she got upset. "We don't sue". Would not hear of it.
To her, filing a malpractice lawsuit was, like joining a labor union or getting involved in any kind of protest, something "those people" did. "We weren't raised that way". And that was all she'd say.
I left that town shortly thereafter and never saw her again, but when talking to others who lived in that town, they all said one reason no one ever sued a doctor was that if you ever did none of the other doctors in town would ever accept you as a patient again and you'd have to go two hours out of town for all medical needs.
A fair proportion of the medical practitioners out there are in that category of "somewhat competent", and the system protects them to an extent. Your odds of not getting killed or maimed or suffering lifetime consequences of "not-so-great-practice" get a lot better if you research who the good doctors are and go to them. It helps to have family members in medicine or allied health care fields because even casual friends in the business are usually loath to name people in the "not terribly good" category. The flamingly dangerous ones usually kill enough people fast enough they become uninsurable, but the midwits can go through a career and retire, in most specialties.Replies: @anon, @Art Deco
In fairness, open heart surgery is very difficult and risky and no one has a right to expect they will come out alive. The surgeon should have had the integrity to explain this and dissuade the patient from surgery in that facility.
Actually, chest crack bypass is now a very safe operation by historical standards. This was apparently an elective procedure because they made the appointment almost a month in advance.
The chances of dying from an elective CABG procedure in 2020 is probably lower than that of dying from any operation involving general anesthesia in, say, the 1940s or 1950s.
Probably, the surgery itself was successful but the standard of care wasn't optimum since he died four or five days in. Had they done the procedure in a better institution with a lot of experience there is no guarantee, of course, that he would have lived but from what I was able to get out of the widow, she had been told by several relatively knowledgeable people that it was very likely substandard postoperative care. My point was that although she herself felt that substandard care had likely killed her husband, she was absolutely unwilling to talk to an attorney as she felt that was "something we don't do", as if suing an obviously liable person was akin to taking welfare or doing something else she considered beneath her dignity or stature.
I am sure that there are a great many people who just won't sue no matter what, and conversely some dirtbags looking to get a payout at any chance, and the latter constitute a good proportion of the people who go to attorneys. Since malpractice insurance means insurors and not doctors decide to settle or go to trial, some doctors believing themselves in no way at fault and who would prefer a trial wind up settling. Everyone's premiums go up some, his go up a little more, and if it becomes a pattern eventually they decide to not write coverage for him anymore. This means doctors decline to operate on high risk cases in some cases and they have a shorter life or one with poorer quality of life.
Whether they had solicited advice on the wisdom of undergoing a procedure in a small hospital in a ~50K population town vs. going two hours south or west to a more experienced and higher volume facility is unknown to me. This was in the mid to late 1990s and she had to be pushing seventy then, so most likely she has passed on herself some time ago.
He needs a job and does not feel like this is anything like an opportunity of a lifetime. Everybody I knew in school who joined the Air Force or the Navy or the NSA or the CIA thought it was an opportunity of a lifetime and they were going to do it for 30 years.
Only a couple of them ended up making a career out of it. I knew a guy who was psyched as hell to join the Marine Corps and he did not get through basic training.Replies: @Lugash
I’ve noticed a lot more young men who aren’t gung-ho or part of a military family signing up. They’re college grads who either can’t find jobs or are bored senseless by corporate work and political correctness.
According to the few ex-servicemen I have had the privilege of speaking with in recent years, the American military has become, in essence, a babysitting service for adults. Judging by their tones of exasperation at some of the pointless activities required of them (e.g. "sexual assault and prevention training"), it seems the PC nonsense found in civilian life is present there as well, only more so.
I cannot verify what they told me this firsthand, but I can attest that relief expressed by these chaps at being out of the military was positively palpable.
Oh exactly. It’s the Good Doggie syndrome.
Yes. The “respectable republican” does far more damage than any Leftist could do. He gives the liberals moral cover.
The surgeon was fresh out of residency / fellowship and itching to have his own cardiac bypass operation (so to speak). This guy was probably in the first ten CABG patients in this program. These programs make a lot of money for hospitals.
Actually, chest crack bypass is now a very safe operation by historical standards. This was apparently an elective procedure because they made the appointment almost a month in advance.
The chances of dying from an elective CABG procedure in 2020 is probably lower than that of dying from any operation involving general anesthesia in, say, the 1940s or 1950s.
Probably, the surgery itself was successful but the standard of care wasn’t optimum since he died four or five days in. Had they done the procedure in a better institution with a lot of experience there is no guarantee, of course, that he would have lived but from what I was able to get out of the widow, she had been told by several relatively knowledgeable people that it was very likely substandard postoperative care. My point was that although she herself felt that substandard care had likely killed her husband, she was absolutely unwilling to talk to an attorney as she felt that was “something we don’t do”, as if suing an obviously liable person was akin to taking welfare or doing something else she considered beneath her dignity or stature.
I am sure that there are a great many people who just won’t sue no matter what, and conversely some dirtbags looking to get a payout at any chance, and the latter constitute a good proportion of the people who go to attorneys. Since malpractice insurance means insurors and not doctors decide to settle or go to trial, some doctors believing themselves in no way at fault and who would prefer a trial wind up settling. Everyone’s premiums go up some, his go up a little more, and if it becomes a pattern eventually they decide to not write coverage for him anymore. This means doctors decline to operate on high risk cases in some cases and they have a shorter life or one with poorer quality of life.
Whether they had solicited advice on the wisdom of undergoing a procedure in a small hospital in a ~50K population town vs. going two hours south or west to a more experienced and higher volume facility is unknown to me. This was in the mid to late 1990s and she had to be pushing seventy then, so most likely she has passed on herself some time ago.
I thought they were southern boys,and often hell raisers?
Welcome to the army, LOL!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_in_the_RuinsReplies: @Steve Sailer, @Prester John, @Percy Gryce, @Anonymous
It’s funny you should mention that, because The Thanatos Syndrome (the sequel to Ruins) has been glaring at me from my bookshelf, unread, for an embarrassingly long time.
Has anyone here ever read Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos – The Last Self-Help Book?
It’s a brilliant parody of self-help books that is actually quite trenchant.
Ed King by David Guterson - another favorite of mine - has a lot of insights into the self-help scene (and silicone valley) too. I am curious about Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos.
https://www.amazon.com/Age-Entitlement-America-Since-Sixties/dp/1501106899
He argued that the deficits sustained by Reagan was meant to keep the “peace.” That all factions involved in the 1960s and 1970s were sedated by federal deficit spending. There were scuffles over the decades but nothing too serious, mainly saber-rattling and symbolic victories and defeats. However, the money “ran out” after the Great Recession and frozen tensions are thawing out. So your back to massive black riots as if Watts 1965 was just yesterday.
https://youtu.be/qIWf9Vju5h8Replies: @Stebbing Heuer
I think that’s correct.
Don’t look now, but … there’s no more money left, not now, not for the foreseeable future.
Things are about to get massively ‘interesting’, all over the world.
If they are easily bored and averse to political correctness, I should think the American military would be the last place they will want to go.
According to the few ex-servicemen I have had the privilege of speaking with in recent years, the American military has become, in essence, a babysitting service for adults. Judging by their tones of exasperation at some of the pointless activities required of them (e.g. “sexual assault and prevention training”), it seems the PC nonsense found in civilian life is present there as well, only more so.
I cannot verify what they told me this firsthand, but I can attest that relief expressed by these chaps at being out of the military was positively palpable.
Who are the three women on the cover of New York? I assume one is Felicia Bernstein? I love Wolfe’s discussion of the issue of the servants for the Panther party. Their usual staff, who were black, just wouldn’t do- bad optics, as we say today.
On a related note- doesn’t Jacob Frey remind one of those guys who lived to be considered cool by the black guys- listening to the Four Tops when the brothers had moved on to Curtis Mayfield…
Well, at least one of ’em was (well, sort of) : Gordo Cooper (Shawnee. OK)
This is too narrow a take. Both STEM and the humanities create tools for shaping our environment. STEM creates the tools that lead to, for example, Twitter. The humanities create the tools that lead to the censorship on Twitter.
STEM folks, for the most part, are "little picture" people (i.e. they are concerned with building a particular tool or completing a particular project). Humanities people, for the most part, take a much larger view of things (i.e. the effect a particular tool or project has/will have on mankind as a whole). It's how people like Peter Thiel (a philosophy major at Stanford) become billionaires: by understanding how it all fits together.
When you think about it, being interested in both makes sense: you can build tools more effectively if you have a "big picture" view of how people work, and how they are likely to interact with your creation. Unfortunately, being able to take a "big picture" view also means you are able to exploit people more effectively because, well, you understand how people work rather than only being able to understand how to code in C++.
All this is in aid of saying: it isn't necessarily an either/or proposition.
Don't look now, but ... there's no more money left, not now, not for the foreseeable future.
Things are about to get massively 'interesting', all over the world.Replies: @Prester John
Maybe. It didn’t prevent the Rodney King Riots in ’91 (which may have helped to sink old man Bush the following year). These riots may also have a generational component. Beginning with the early 1940s with the Detroit race riots, this phenomenon seems to recur every 25 years or so. Whether there is in fact a one-to-one relationship is best left to people more qualified than I. Nevertheless, money talks. And when there isn’t anything left in the till, that ain’t gonna help things.
Wolfe was fortunate to shuffle off this mortal coil when he did. His criticism of Darwinism right before his death would have led to his being unpersoned. NPR and the Washington Post had already started bashing him, lumping him in with ignorant religious creationists. In one of his last interviews he said he was planning to write a book on— surprise, surprise— political correctness.
WRT Tiny Duck, what is your considered judgement? Is he really serious, or is he just pretending to be a nutcase, in order to entertain himself?
You may be surprised to learn that a pretty fair number of Silicon Valley types are both STEM and humanities majors (well, I was surprised to learn it, anyway).
STEM folks, for the most part, are “little picture” people (i.e. they are concerned with building a particular tool or completing a particular project). Humanities people, for the most part, take a much larger view of things (i.e. the effect a particular tool or project has/will have on mankind as a whole). It’s how people like Peter Thiel (a philosophy major at Stanford) become billionaires: by understanding how it all fits together.
When you think about it, being interested in both makes sense: you can build tools more effectively if you have a “big picture” view of how people work, and how they are likely to interact with your creation. Unfortunately, being able to take a “big picture” view also means you are able to exploit people more effectively because, well, you understand how people work rather than only being able to understand how to code in C++.
All this is in aid of saying: it isn’t necessarily an either/or proposition.
from Citizen Kane. More on that later.
I’ve been saying it for sometime now. The media creates and directs the narrative with enough force and enfluence to move the populace in any direction their masters choose. Take the Ncov19 show and the death of the convicted home invader good boi George Floyd with subsequent riots. Without the media’s very slanted reporting there would be no pandemic and no riots. It would be impossible. We are under an illusion that there is a free press, but there isn’t. The MMSM operates in lockstep, sharing headlines worldwide, they lead the public by the nose from one irrational illogical moment to the next. Wake up America and turn your TV off, or you’re all through.
Citizen Kane is sometimes called the best movie ever made. It’s a 1941 movie directed by actor Orsen Welles, who also played the leading charactor Charles Foster Kane, a news paper magnate. In one scene the head of a small peaceful but ficitonal country calls Kane by telephone to complain about the day’s headlines which was something like; War In (fictional country). The leader of the country says to Kane: ‘There is no war in my country”. Kane’s response was something like: “Of course there is, it’s in all the news papers”.
So, you see what I mean. To the elites it’s all a game,and the prize is: power and money and more power and more money.
Has anyone here ever read Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos - The Last Self-Help Book?
It's a brilliant parody of self-help books that is actually quite trenchant.Replies: @Dieter Kief
Love Walker Percyc’s The Moviegoer.
Ed King by David Guterson – another favorite of mine – has a lot of insights into the self-help scene (and silicone valley) too. I am curious about Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos.
Was Tom Wolfe the last honest notable literary figure? I can’t think of anyone more recent.
Wolfe and Roth died at the same time.
Many major American novelists were born in the early to mid 1930s. Not many since then.
Actually, he was a malicious political crank who knew very little but knew how to speak as if he knew much. And by the time he died he’d been an alcoholic dement for nearly a decade.
I remember being in a small town and talking to an old woman who worked at a retail establishment. Her husband had died during open heart surgery at the local hospital, which had just opened a cardiac surgery program, and the insiders thought it was a dicey program because they just didn't have the volume to do this program right. The state capital, with four times the population, was 2 hours by road east and a major metropolitan area with several world class hospitals was 2 hours south (30 min by life flight helo either way). She ruefully admitted that the doctor seemed completely inept and when I asked her if she was going to sue, she got upset. "We don't sue". Would not hear of it.
To her, filing a malpractice lawsuit was, like joining a labor union or getting involved in any kind of protest, something "those people" did. "We weren't raised that way". And that was all she'd say.
I left that town shortly thereafter and never saw her again, but when talking to others who lived in that town, they all said one reason no one ever sued a doctor was that if you ever did none of the other doctors in town would ever accept you as a patient again and you'd have to go two hours out of town for all medical needs.
A fair proportion of the medical practitioners out there are in that category of "somewhat competent", and the system protects them to an extent. Your odds of not getting killed or maimed or suffering lifetime consequences of "not-so-great-practice" get a lot better if you research who the good doctors are and go to them. It helps to have family members in medicine or allied health care fields because even casual friends in the business are usually loath to name people in the "not terribly good" category. The flamingly dangerous ones usually kill enough people fast enough they become uninsurable, but the midwits can go through a career and retire, in most specialties.Replies: @anon, @Art Deco
My old landlord sued the local optometrist and won a settlement. He had no trouble getting medical care in town. The town had a population of about 4,000.
Medical training in this country is competitive and demanding. There aren’t many incompetent doctors and until people are frankly old the talents of their doctors aren’t an important vector in influencing their lifespans.
The fact is that our system of training and selecting physicians is poor, based as it is on the “the seat is precious” mentality caused by the restriction of practitioner numbers. You have to ensure a certain number of people who get past the med school gantlet wash out of medical practice at and then shortly after residency. Navy SEAL training washes out people left and right and costs a lot more than med school.
The only way you know who will excel and who will be marginally functional is to have them do it. So you have to accept that you will have training cost losses. In the long run it’s way cheaper to end their clinical practice careers early and have them do something different.Replies: @Art Deco
The Rodney King riots (and the potential OJ Simpson riots) were exceptions. Any sane government would’ve induced a media blackout on those two events early on and avoid any rioting. Or at least manage the coverage via a various assortment of means.
I don’t think Tom Wolfe would ever have claimed to be a “notable literary figure.” He was, perhaps, the Émile Zola of his time.
I knew a prominent woman editor who’d spent a lot of time with Vidal. She told me (slightly amused, slightly scandalized) that his biggest turn-on was buggering hitherto-heterosexual men.
Oh please. Police forces select for dim authoritarians, and they do so deliberately and always have. The TV trope of the good-natured local cop (e.g., the Andy Griffith Show) was never representative (and particularly when it comes to metropolitan law enforcement).
It’s over 20 years since Robert Jordan sued after being rejected for pig duties because he tested too high on the entry examination (based on Wonderlic – popular with HR charlatans).
It’s now a matter of settled Federal law (Jordan v New London 2000 U.S. App. Lexis 22195) that piggeries do, and are permitted to, select for dummies… so nobody has any excuse not to know this.
The fact that Jordan wanted to be a pig (and that he went on to become a prison guard) tells you everything you need to know about the claim that a Wonderlic score of 33 (Jordan’s score) is “roughly an IQ of 125“; nothing about Jordan comes remotely close to supporting that claim… he was 46 by the time he applied to be a pig, and had a bachelor’s degree in literature from a correspondence ‘college’.
Pigs are – on average – as stupid as soldiers, but more cowardly and keener to wield power over ‘civilians’. There was never a prelapsarian age where they were all, or mostly, ‘high quality’ human beings, because being ‘high quality’ doesn’t fit well with being a Kapo.
They don't. And you don't merit their services.
Medical training in this country is competitive and demanding. There aren't many incompetent doctors and until people are frankly old the talents of their doctors aren't an important vector in influencing their lifespans.Replies: @Anonymous
The truly incompetent are rare and usually are AA admits or smart but mentally ill people. The midwits- the kind who are okay for routine cases mostly but are the choke artists in the extreme situations- are a minority but a significant one in some areas, some specialties, some type of practices.
The fact is that our system of training and selecting physicians is poor, based as it is on the “the seat is precious” mentality caused by the restriction of practitioner numbers. You have to ensure a certain number of people who get past the med school gantlet wash out of medical practice at and then shortly after residency. Navy SEAL training washes out people left and right and costs a lot more than med school.
The only way you know who will excel and who will be marginally functional is to have them do it. So you have to accept that you will have training cost losses. In the long run it’s way cheaper to end their clinical practice careers early and have them do something different.
But it will be much improved if everyone listens to you.
See, Rabbi Meir Kahane pushed back against the cognitive dissonance of radical chic. It seems as though middle class Jews were not “down” with the black panthers, political violence, or having their bodegas extorted. You dig, man?
Things have changed. 50 years ago The New York Times and white deplorables in Columbus ohio were able to get Mr. Bern-STEIN to backtrack from his radical chic cognitive dissonance.
This would be unfathomable in the current year. Radical chic marches forward unfettered. NY Times opinion editor James Bennet was forced out after publishing a letter from a United States senator.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2020/06/07/ny-times-editorial-page-editor-resigns-after-tom-cotton-op-ed-fiasco/amp/
See, the grunts at The NY Times are totally cool with burning down the whole system, man. Like, as long as the mob doesn’t come for them personally. So, radical chic is in vogue. Middle class Jews and white deplorables be damned.
No, she told you that’s what he talked about. Has anyone ever fact-checked his biographical blather? There must be some surviving nonagenarians who attended St. Alban’s with him. I’m wagering his friendship with Jimmy Trimble was a fantasy and that Trimble hardly gave him the time of day. The man wrote fiction for a living, and made good coin doing it.
The fact is that our system of training and selecting physicians is poor, based as it is on the “the seat is precious” mentality caused by the restriction of practitioner numbers. You have to ensure a certain number of people who get past the med school gantlet wash out of medical practice at and then shortly after residency. Navy SEAL training washes out people left and right and costs a lot more than med school.
The only way you know who will excel and who will be marginally functional is to have them do it. So you have to accept that you will have training cost losses. In the long run it’s way cheaper to end their clinical practice careers early and have them do something different.Replies: @Art Deco
The fact is that our system of training and selecting physicians is poor,
But it will be much improved if everyone listens to you.
It's over 20 years since Robert Jordan sued after being rejected for pig duties because he tested too high on the entry examination (based on Wonderlic - popular with HR charlatans).
It's now a matter of settled Federal law (Jordan v New London 2000 U.S. App. Lexis 22195) that piggeries do, and are permitted to, select for dummies... so nobody has any excuse not to know this.
The fact that Jordan wanted to be a pig (and that he went on to become a prison guard) tells you everything you need to know about the claim that a Wonderlic score of 33 (Jordan's score) is "roughly an IQ of 125"; nothing about Jordan comes remotely close to supporting that claim... he was 46 by the time he applied to be a pig, and had a bachelor's degree in literature from a correspondence 'college'.
Pigs are - on average - as stupid as soldiers, but more cowardly and keener to wield power over 'civilians'. There was never a prelapsarian age where they were all, or mostly, 'high quality' human beings, because being 'high quality' doesn't fit well with being a Kapo.Replies: @Art Deco
Oh please. Police forces select for dim authoritarians, and they do so deliberately and always have.
They don’t. And you don’t merit their services.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=187zED75ZRA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1_iyirtCc0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSYjTmV1G3UReplies: @HappyBlueBreakfasts
Two of these videos lost sound. Really makes you think.
Exactly. What she was repeating was one of Gore’s many little fantasies about himself. Forever the fabulous fabulist. Still, much of his political critique was trenchant.
His political statements reminded one of Thos. Sowell's remark that intelligence and articulateness are not the same thing.
Actually, I think Vidal acknowledged that his love of Trimble was never “consummated” in any way. If I remember correctly, he also claimed that their bond was based on the fact that they were entirely different personality types with almost nothing in common.
Yes, I think what he waxed so romantic about was more of a crush than anything else. But we all need something to believe in.
Yes, most STEM types probably just want to work on their tasks and avoid inciting the liberal management mob and risk losing their job. Can’t really blame them. Who wants to go to work to solve engineering problems but instead spend all day arguing politics?
Still, much of his political critique was trenchant.
His political statements reminded one of Thos. Sowell’s remark that intelligence and articulateness are not the same thing.