Monthly Archives: January 2013

If You Outlaw Bazookas, Only Outlaws Will Have Bazookas

I am perfectly fine with individuals owning handguns.  I am perfectly fine with individuals owning shotguns.  I am perfectly fine with individuals owning simple rifles.  I am not fine with people using stupid arguments for owning guns.

You will often hear proponents of guns say, “If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.”  This is a stupid argument.

First off, the Federal Government has not ever tried to outlaw all guns.  I believe the Federal Government will not ever try to outlaw all guns.  The only thing that the Federal Government has ever tried to do is outlaw individual ownership of things which might as well be considered weapons of mass destruction.  I don’t think there are many gun rights people out there that think individuals have the right to own a bazooka or a tank or anthrax or ICBMs.  There are creations of man that just should not be owned by individuals.  So too, the AR-15.  So too, 30 round ammunition clips.  Don’t get me wrong, weapons like the AR-15 have their place.  It’s just that that place is not in the hands of a Michigan “militia” member.  Individuals should have the ability to wield heavy weaponry.  They should just be doing it in the form of enlisting in the Army or the National Guard.

Second, the phrase is completely inane.   Last I checked, police will still have guns.  The National Guard will still have guns.  The Army will still have guns.  ATF.  Secret Service.  The list goes on and on.  So, you’re wrong, plenty of other people will have guns if they did outlaw guns, it just won’t be you.

Get a better argument, folks.  Of course, there really isn’t a better argument.  And that’s why “if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns” is so popular.  It’s simple.  It superficially makes sense.  And most people never bother digging down beneath the superficiality of an argument.

Lance Armstrong Is The Worst Person In The World

You’ve probably heard by now that Lance Armstrong has finally admitted to the world (via Oprah, no less) that he has been doping for years.  Shocking.  I wish there was a way to easily express droll non-surprise in words.

I could’t care less about Armstrong’s taking of drugs to give himself the edge in a pointless sport where everyone is also using the same drugs.  I also couldn’t care less about lying about it for years.  Lying is what humans do and no one is immune to it.  What makes Lance Armstrong the worst person in the world is the vicious campaign of smears and intimidation that he initiated to protect his lies.  What kind of sick person does that?

And please don’t try to whitewash how horrible Armstrong is by pointing to all the great things he did for cancer through his cancer foundation.  First, his foundation is mostly about raising money and little actually goes to cancer research.  Second, he used his cancer status and his foundation as a shield and a weapon against anyone who would dare do a simple thing like speak the truth against him.  Third, the amount of good you do does not justify the evil you cause while doing it.  Drug dealers build playgrounds.  Financial swindlers donate to charity. Koch brothers fund science research.

Sadly, what Armstrong does is all too common.  He just takes a page from an everyday political playbook.  Want to protect your financial interests?  Attack climate scientists with misinformation and lies.  Want to promote your religion?  Attack those who teach and promote evolution.  The more I see, the more I pay attention, the more I believe that any person in any seat of power is a complete sociopath.

A 20 Year Old Trapped In A 5 Year Old’s Body

We all know an adult who absolutely refuses to grow up, who doesn’t take responsibility for their actions, or who relies on others for basic necessities.  We normally say that they are trapped in a younger person’s body.  Well, here’s the story of a woman (girl?) who is 20 years old but has not grown at all since age 5.  She had all the normal functionality of a 5 year old.  Not the mutant power I would want to have.

Her name is Brooke Greenberg and she hasn’t had a terribly good life.  She’s had strokes, tumors, and been in a coma, but she’s survived this long.  Scientists are now studying her genome to see if they can figure out what is causing this mysterious lack of maturation.  They have already ruled out any hormonal problems.

This leads to some fascinating questions.  Can a perpetual 5 year old die of old age?  Will Brooke live forever?  Is what is wrong with her the answer to immortality for everybody?  Will we soon be able to choose an age to stop aging?  What would the implications of such technology?  Would we allow parents to keep a perpetual 5 year old?  What age would you have to be to make a decision like that?  18?  21? 40?  Would we become a world of perpetual 21 year olds?

It is not often that you can point to someone and say they are unique.  Brooke certainly qualifies.  If scientists can crack her mystery, she may go down as the most important person who ever lived.

The Face Of Health Care Is Changing

I have been saying to whoever will listen to me (which is nobody) for years now that the way we treat health care a decade from now will be vastly different than the way we treat health care now.  One of the points that I rant about often is the upcoming “doctor shortage”.  Now I have a study to point to that shows that what I have been saying is true; there is no doctor shortage.

The main problem with studies claiming that there is a doctor shortage is that they take the current health care system as a baseline and extrapolate it to the future.  This is almost assuredly a false model.  The baseline, in this case, being one doctor, one practice.  That has been changing rapidly, though.

Even now, we’re approaching three doctors, one practice.  Instead of having one doctor that always sees you, you end up with one of the three doctors whichever happens to be available.  There are great logistical savings with this model.  The amount of patients that can be seen rises dramatically.  The amount of time sitting in a paper gown waiting for a doctor to show up decreases dramatically too.

But that’s not the only advance that is around the corner.  We are also becoming more dependent on nurses for everyday health care needs.  If we assume that, in the future, 20% of our needs will be met by nurses, the doctor shortage completely disappears.  I like this number because it’s conservative.  I could easily see 40% or even 50% of our health care needs being provided by nurses in the future.

As pointed out in the article by someone who has a vested interest in declaring a doctor shortage, there is still the issue of specialists.  I don’t know enough about this to give an educated answer.  I’m guessing, though, that specializations like neurosurgery will be quickly taken over by robots.  Advances in remote surgery are already ready for prime time so replacing the doctor completely seems the next logical step.  I, for one, would feel much safer with a precision robot rooting around in my brain than a human that may be a little jittery because they had too much caffeine.

Health Care Savings That Have Failed To Materialize

One of the more promising paths to health care savings pushed by Obamacare was the migration from paper based records to electronic records.  Unfortunately, it looks like health care providers are not moving to electronic systems nearly as fast as predicted.

Such a shame.  Electronic records will eventually be the future.  It’s just going to take much longer than anticipated to get there.  There are many reasons for this.

Primary among them, in my opinion, is a lack of standardization.  The whole idea of savings related to electronic records is the simple exchange of information from one doctor’s office to the next and to the hospital and to the pharmacist and to the specialist.  So instead of many different offices having many different records, you have one set of electronic records that is shared among them.  The problem we are seeing is that doctor’s office A implements one system and doctor’s office B implements another system and system A can’t talk to system B.  So we end up spending millions of dollars to implement these systems and they end up being no better than the paper system.

This is where governmental standardization would be ideal.  Let the private market create as many electronic record keeping systems as they want, but mandate that the data will be stored exactly the same way regardless of the system.  Insurance information will be stored like X.  CAT scans will be stored like Y.  Blood tests will be stored like Z.

Think of the health care system like infrastructure.  Health records are like roads.  The government controls how they are built.  All of the health care providers are connected to the roads.  The roads can take you anywhere you need to go.

Of course, I recognize that this is pie-in-the-sky thinking.  The guvmint can’t be trusted to do anything including govern.  Or so they say.  Really, though, this is the path we need to take for the promised savings.  It’s a shame we’ll never take it.

Sit Up Straight, Elbows Off The Table

In order for polite society to remain polite society, we have developed a set of rules that make no sense whatsoever.  We call these rules etiquette.  Why the heck are there two forks for my place setting?  I suspect that the cutlery industry had a hand in starting that etiquette rule.  Either that or it harkens back to the time when having two forks instead of one was the only thing separating life and death.

And just when we think we’ve made sense of all of these stupid rules, we do something even more idiotic like go to another country.  That country’s etiquette rules are likely drastically different than yours.  So if you try to insult someone in Italy by giving them the middle finger, you are actually wishing them a full and prosperous life (results may vary).

I am pleased to say that the good people at Swisotel (purely out of the kindness of their black multinational conglomerate hearts, I’m sure) have a handy online guide to etiquette from around the world.  It’s a little simplistic, but it does cover the bare minimum nicely.  How to greet people, tipping, basic dining tips, and various dos and don’ts.

Despite the fact that etiquette rules almost universally don’t make sense, these things are important when travelling.  Don’t be that rude American who can’t do even basic research before travelling to another country (or State for that matter!).

I remember when I was travelling in Italy and this obviously well-to-do couple from the U.S. joined us in our train car.  They were doing one of those all around the Mediterranean cruises and were either just finishing or had a few days in Italy to kill between hops so they were heading to Lake Como.  The entire train ride there, they were expressing their shock that there were all these people that didn’t speak English.  It wasn’t in a way where they were travelling for the first time and were coming to terms with the variety of humanity either.  It was more indignation.  How dare the rest of the world not speak English!  I assume that they kept previous vacations to safe tour group sojourns.  Don’t be those people.  Please.

Anything Too Stupid To Be Said Is Posted On The Internet

There is the old quote by Voltaire, “Anything too stupid to be said is sung.”  That needs to be updated to modern times.  I propose, “Anything too stupid to be said is posted on the Internet.”  As supporting evidence to such claim, I offer the following:

Did you know that the Sandy Hook massacre never happened?  That one of the supposedly dead girls was found alive and with President Obama?  That the parents from Sandy Hook look oddly similar to the Aurora shooting victims?  That the principal of the school was interviewed after she supposedly died in the shooting?  Well you are obviously not a Sandy Hook truther!

Holy crap, I feel dirty just reading that article.  I’d probably have to take a scalding hot shower if I decided to follow any of the links to the conspiracy sites themselves.  Who ARE these people?  And how do they function well enough to be able to make it onto the Internet?

Men Are Trained To Hate Women

You wouldn’t think of Cracked.com as a source for good social issues reporting, but they often do a heck of a better job than most news sites.  Add 5 Ways Modern Men Are Trained to Hate Women to the mix.

Obviously, it’s a little generalized, but I think this summary is well within the bell curve of an average man’s relationship to women:

So where you see a world in which males dominate the boards of the Fortune 500, and own Congress, and sit at the head of all but a handful of the world’s nations, men see themselves as utterly helpless. Because all of those powerful people only became powerful because they heard that women like power.

This is really the heart of it, right here. This is why no amount of male domination will ever be enough, why no level of control or privilege or female submission will ever satisfy us. We can put you under a burqa, we can force you out of the workplace — it won’t matter. You’re still all we think about, and that gives you power over us. And we resent you for it.

Top Ten Weather Stories of 2012

Jeff Master’s WunderBlog has a list of the top weather stories of 2012.  The weather was a mess throughout the world in 2012.

Only including billion dollar or higher disasters, close to 400 people died from weather related injuries in the U.S., over 500 in China, over 400 in Pakistan died in a flood, and 1900 died in the Philippines from Super Typhoon Bopha.  Europe had one of it’s worst cold snaps ever, killing over 800 people.  Santa Claus is going to have to move or invest in floatation devices since ice at the North Pole continues it’s drastic decline.  I would suggest he move to Greenland, but it’s also melting so fast it might actually be green soon.  The Northern Hemisphere experienced record summer heat and is still in a major drought.

Year after year of increasing extreme weather and we continue to do nothing.  It’s not like we can stop polluting today and this stuff will stop tomorrow.  The damage we’re doing today will be felt for a decade or more.  Denialist continue to win the day, though.  I would say evidence for global warming is mounting, but it’s been a mountain of evidence for years.  We’re just adding grains of sand at this point.

Top Ten Racist Stories Of 2012

The Chicago Defender has a list of the most jaw droppingly racist stories of 2012.

These aren’t blatant racist stories.  These are the ones that you have to scratch your head and wonder what the people were thinking.  My favorite is the man from Wisconsin who claims to be an Obama supporter and yet posts a sign with a gallows on it that says, “Hang in there Obama”.  “Hang” and “Obama”, though, are in large print and “in there” is much smaller.  So to anyone driving by, it says, “Hang Obama”.  I also somehow missed Gabby Douglas winning of the gold quickly followed by an NBC Olympics commercial of a monkey winning gold.

Don’t you just love a good top ten list?  Ugh.