Nation Indivisible

Scare "tactics"

2010-05-05T15:50:00.002-04:00

Hi Folks.

Been a while.

Let's jump right back in:

The movie-of-the-week is clearly getting ahead of the facts on the Times Square Bombing story. And that's because the movie version is clearly an order of magnitude more interesting than the reality, which, as I see it, boils down to this:

1. Some guy gets it into his head, somehow, to blow up Times Square.

2. He acquires a vehicle, and does much less to disguise its origins than your average high school car thief.

3. He buys some firecrackers, a couple of jugs of gasoline, and the propane tanks from a BBQ. Then, for good measure, he puts some dirt in the back of the car.

4. Unsurprisingly, this doesn't prove effective.

5. The entire US government mobilizes, to a degree you'd never see with even the worst case of non-"terrorist" mass murder, and catches the guy quite fast. Whereupon he confesses.

Instead, we get:

1. Muslim terrorist sleeper agent gets activated by the Taliban

2. He uses his months of training in terrorist camps in Pakistan to assemble a deadly WMD.

3. Only thanks to the eagle eye of one (two? three?) simple yet patriotic sidewalk vendors is America saved from cataclysm.

4. Obama tries to pin it all on a white man, while the Evil Terrorist plots his escape.

5. Massive fumbles almost allow Bin Laden Jr. to escape, and then, horror of horrors, he's allowed due process.

Taken together with the Christmas Day event in which the nation panicked when a man set his groin on fire, I don't know whether to be thrilled that this is the best our enemies can do, or to mourn the fact that this seems to be all they have to do to utterly destabilize the national discourse.

We demand that Iraq and Afghanistan, nations where real bombs actually detonate on a scale that's almost unimaginable, adopt a perfect democracy. But at the same time, we allow a couple of non-functional explosives wielded by borderline incompetents to derail our own democracy. When The Terrorists get us this excited with an M-80, they've won.

JEK
Calvinist outlook makes every day left unexploded into something of great wonder.

Cute little nothings

2009-12-19T10:08:00.001-05:00

JEK
Wishes color choice was his only obstacle

The Senator from CT

2009-12-18T22:50:00.002-05:00

Yup.

JEK
Unlike Joe Lieberman, looks more like himself than a sock puppet

Decision Tree (h/t L. Blair)

2009-12-18T19:21:00.002-05:00

Re-linked

2009-12-18T12:46:00.003-05:00

Hi Kids,

Facebook has been...not deactivated or disabled, exactly, but gravely injured by the IT department at my place of employment. The benefit to Science may be marginal, though, because the result is not a sudden uptick in pipetting, but a return to this blog as a repository of ripostes.

And thus, a backlog:

This is an essential piece of reading from the NYT re: the mathematics of preventive care and screening. Bear with the arithmetic...it's worth it for the comprehensive understanding of how Positive Predictive Values can change your life.

And this is a nice little shout-out to the cutting edge of modern surgery. Pointless? Probably. But fascinating all the same.

How 'bout that Lieberman?

-JEK
Say it ain't so, Joe

Spider Bites

2009-09-07T23:36:00.002-04:00

This was sent my way by GD, a fellow surgery resident from Seattle. She and I both have spent many long nights tending to the epidemic of "spider bites" among a certain ungroomed set in that fair city. Those things are bad news. They cause horrible abscesses that drain terrible, terrible things onto the resident's shoes. On the upside, they inject heroin directly into your bloodstream.

These are its cousins:

JEK
Arachnophobe

Eric's Blog

2009-09-02T23:41:00.003-04:00

My old friend Eric has moved to Berkeley for a Ph.D., but he's taking good advantage of his extracurricular time by growing an organic garden in his back yard. And blogging all about it. He's a regular Michael Pollan.

JEK
Irregular Michael Pollan (but just had some killer grass fed beef)

UBG Part 2

2009-09-02T22:09:00.001-04:00

The saga continues...

JEK
Gotta learn to play an instrument (but not the tuba)

Sublimation 101

2009-07-08T16:37:00.001-04:00

Attaboy.

JEK
Should learn to play the guitar

Lucky

2009-06-19T22:38:00.000-04:00

JEK
Not Lucky

TJ

2009-05-21T12:42:00.002-04:00

Back in my Chicago days, POHS and I used to take improv classes. POHS did a better job of it than I, and for much longer at multiple places. But when we first started out together, we went to ImprovOlympic and had the masterful TJ Jagodowski as our teacher. He's the guy on the left.

And now he's the well-deserving subject of a movie all his own!

JEK
Makes stuff up, but poorly by comparison

A little dash of hope for us all.

2009-04-15T19:08:00.001-04:00

JEK
Glad to see that even as an older, single, cat owner, he may still have potential

Millin' with Trillin

2009-04-12T06:47:00.001-04:00

Yup.

JEK
Uncultured Oaf

Back.

2009-04-09T13:56:00.002-04:00

And without ceremony, we return from a break.

This is Charles Isherwood's new review for the 2009 Humana Festival, which, owing to assorted opportunities and complications, we didn't make it to this year.

All things considered, to read this review it would seem we didn't miss much.

JEK
Unmissed?

Proof of principal

2009-02-01T20:10:00.003-05:00

Tom Daschle seems like a nice guy.

I felt bad when he got beat as the minority leader, though I also thought it said something about his minority leadership that he was hardly the only one to lose that year.

His new glasses suit him.

And this tax business doesn't, on its face, worry me about his ability to formulate a workable health care plan.

But how much of an asset is he to the future of American health care? Is he truly irreplacable? Because if he's not, I think it's time for the Obama administration to put some teeth in their promises to be the best vetted administration in history, and send him packing. Showing a willingness to stand on principal here would undo the image that seems to be setting in in the wake of their pushing for Geitner (whose omissions seem worse to me) and waiving their own lobbying rules for two appointees and counting. They need to show that they're not all talk. Daschle didn't disclose his issue. A loss here seems to me that it would be a win in the long term.

JEK
Available, drives his own car

Late Update: Nailed it.

Illegal Gal

2009-01-27T21:15:00.003-05:00

OK so I stumbled upon this http://www.humblelibertarian.com/2009/01/barack-obamas-hillary-clinton.html. Not truly as boring as a babbling article about institutional something, not making past mid page, but this article on 'I will step aside and support you because you are going to give me a really powerful job Hillary,' held my attention long enough to make me nervous. Seems the Constitution doesn't mean much... Now what says you?

ps, did BO ever find his US birth certificate? ;-p

Institutionalize the Institutionists

2009-01-27T19:28:00.002-05:00

In my more reductionist moments, this is how I think about the difference between Democrats/liberals/progressives and Republicans/conservatives/libertarians:

Democrats: fundamentally believe that the world was once bad, but can be made better because people are fundamentally good.

Republicans: fundamentally beleive that the world was once perfect, and we must continually fight against its inevitable dissolution because people (except themselves and their friends) are fundamentally bad.

But Brooks is out with another, maddening argument: that it's individualists (meaning, in this context, people who look out for themselves and believe they are better than the system) vs. institutionists (those who take their proper position in society and like it). I really hate being preached to by the penny loafer set, but think this merits some discussion.

JEK
Not a cog, to the benefit of himself and his apparatus

Shout out to the Wingers!

2009-01-18T18:23:00.003-05:00

No, not the right wingers, the Matt Wingers. I remain hopeful there's a difference...

;->

These are my cousins in Ohio. Matt is a much more regular blogger than I, so if you're looking for more internet-based information from someone with many of my same genes, he's the place to go. And he's kindly linked my blog from his. Right back atcha, boss.

JEK

Back from the break

2009-01-18T18:01:00.004-05:00

In five, four, three fingers, two fingers, one finger...

And we're back. If you're just joining us, this is Nation Indivisible, a loose affiliation of three or so people who, when the moment moves them, post what's on their minds. Not all of it, because otherwise our coverage of the stimulus might have been improved. Short version: I'm with 538, not TPM.

I'm coming to you now, with the first, belated post of 2009, from Washington, DC, where I will be, both by turns and often simultaneously:

- Cold yet warmed by patriotic zeal

- Well fed on food, with an extra helping of Hope

- Attending the Southern Presidential Inaugural Ball, where I will join my fellow citizens in celebrating the election of Barack Obama while being alone among Dixiecrats in trumpeting their loss in the War of Northern Aggression.

- Leaving on Wednesday morning, possibly tarred and/or feathered.

Pictures and reflections to follow.

JEK

Periodic Table of Awesomeness

2008-12-19T11:14:00.002-05:00

Truly, we live in an age of wonders. Some of the shared valencies here make sense, like William Shatner and Bacon (both hydrogenic). But it takes a deep thinker to elucidate the chemical kinship between Boobs and Lightning, or Cheetah and Mullet.

DMW

Mendelevite

So much for surveys...

2008-12-18T18:03:00.002-05:00

Turns out that more women, the world over, want to marry doctors than any other professional.

JEK, M.D.
Outlier

Flight of the Conchords, Season 2

2008-12-17T18:24:00.002-05:00

The noble and high purpose of this blog is certainly not to promote film and television programs of other people's making. But it is, on some level, to be an arbiter of genius. And given the quality of Season 1, it seems reasonable to promote Season 2 aggressively:

Season 2 Online Premiere - Flight of the Conchords (US Only) - watch more funny videos

JEK
Long-held fascination with New Zealand

Telling cute animals what's what...

2008-12-15T16:11:00.003-05:00

At this quite delightful blog (also linked on the right).

h/t Alex Cochran.

JEK
Is often told what's what by cute animals.

Old Friend Made Good

2008-12-14T18:43:00.003-05:00

Scout Tufankjian, an old friend mine (and of all of us here at Nation Indivisible), recently ended a run as the Person With The Best Job Ever. Which job, of course, was being the lead freelance photographer of the Obama campaign, from the fist days in New Hampshire to Election Day. Needless to say, this is completely, mind-bendingly amazing. And while I can't really imagine what it must have been like to live the campaign that was completely mesmerizing just to watch from a distance, Scout has been kind enough to provide a few ways to try.

The most important one is her new annotated book of photographs.

Which she also described recently on CNN:

JEK
Bought 10

ManipulatioRN

2008-12-03T18:08:00.005-05:00

One of the founding precepts of Nation Indivisible -- if you can the loose association of cat herding principles that constitute our founding document "precepts" -- it's that all writing is biased and should be trumpeted as such.

So let me say that when it comes to articles written about bitter, unhelpful surgery residents, I'm really biased. Because I know that situation really well, and I always perceive a certain amount of bias on the part of the reporter, who presumably hasn't been paid minimum wage to stay up for 30 hours straight, working 80 hours a week trying to keep a bunch of people alive while also trying to keep both nurses and attendings happy. Which task is seldom fun and frequently impossible.

This article in the NYT is a classic example of a growing literature on this subject. Let's look at one section in particular, from among many of a similar theme:

It was the middle of the night, and Laura Silverthorn, a nurse at a hospital in Washington, knew her patient was in danger.

The boy had a shunt in his brain to drain fluid, but he was vomiting and had an extreme headache, two signs that the shunt was blocked and fluid was building up. When she paged the on-call resident, who was asleep in the hospital, he told her not to worry.

After a second page, Ms. Silverthorn said, “he became arrogant and said, ‘You don’t know what to look for — you’re not a doctor.’ ”

He ignored her third page, and after another harrowing hour she called the attending physician at home. The child was rushed into surgery.

“He could have died or had serious brain injury,” Ms. Silverthorn said, “but I was treated like a pest for calling in the middle of the night.”

Her experience is borne out by surveys of hospital staff members, who blame badly behaved doctors for low morale, stress and high turnover. (Ms. Silverthorn said she had been brought to tears so many times that she was trying to start her own business and leave nursing.)

Sounds bad, I know. I know. But I promise you this is a question of denominators. I would love to talk to the resident in question here and ask him how many other pages he'd gotten that night, and how many of them were from Ms. Siverthorn about matters that were not pressing in the slightest. I'd bet that this lady has a reputation for calling residents with medical pronoucements, telling them that she knows the condition better than them, and generally making a pest of herself with no appreciation for the complexity of the resident's job. And I have to wonder whether the conversation was really this cut and dried.

Ms. Silverthorn is clearly a biased source -- one of the many people, both nurse and physician, who seem to love to create territorial battles between what should be mutually supportive professions. That's made all the clearer by the closing quote, also given to her:

Professionals like Ms. Silverthorn, the nurse in Washington, said the change was overdue.

“We go to school, we have a very important job, but there’s no respect,” she said.

She recalled a particularly humiliating moment on Dec. 25, 2006. Working in the pediatric emergency room, she called a drug by its generic name rather than its brand name.

“I was quickly shouted out of the trauma room and humiliated in front of everyone,” she said. But while “everyone knew the doctor was actually the one who didn’t know what he was doing,” she continued, no one said a word.

Boo hoo.

This lady is clearly a whiner. But the bigger fault lies with the reporter, who gave someone with a clearly self-serving agenda the open and the close of her article, filling the middle with a variety of one-off horror stories and weak statistical pablums. There's no analysis of the systemic issues that they alternately illustrate and obscure the real issues. Instead, we get a bunch of relatively meaningless anecdotes that seem carefully designed to swing favor towards nurses and away from doctors in a PR battle that shouldn't be happening at all, much less in the most-emailed article in the NYT.

JEK
Neither pawn nor pawner.