Paul M. Jones

Just got word that several additional medications have been added to the national list of “drug shortages”. Doctors better start learning more about wilderness medicine at this rate.

via Drug Shortages | WhiteCoat's Call Room.

Obamacare was supposed to be the capstone in the arch of a new progressive era. The Dems were going to show us all that government really does work. Smart government by smart people, using modern methods and the latest up to the minute research from carefully peer reviewed articles in well regarded social science journals can solve big social problems. Obamacare was going to be such a big hit that even the bitter clingers would have to put down their guns and their Bibles long enough to thank the Democrats for this wonderful new benefaction.

But even if the Supreme Court doesn’t pull the trigger and kill the law in June, the darn thing won’t fly. The public hates it, and the longer it’s on the books the less popular it gets. This isn’t like Social Security, a program the public fell in love with early on and still cherishes today. It isn’t like Head Start, which remains dearly beloved even though there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that it helps anybody other than the people it employs. Obamacare is only marginally more popular than the Afghan War; already its estimated cost has doubled and we all know these numbers are likely to continue to increase. Obamacare so far is a political flop and shows ominous early signs of being a policy misfire as well. The benefits don’t seem to measure up to the hype, more people are going to lose their existing insurance, premiums are going up and the impact on the deficit is going to be worse.

via The Health Care Disaster and the Miseries of Blue | Via Meadia.

If a man does this, he's a monster; if a woman does it, she's empowered:

This morning’s TODAY Show featured a segment on a woman who chose to leave her husband and two young sons (ages 3 and 5 at the time) while on an extended research trip to Japan because she realized she didn’t want to be a mom anymore leaves my chest tight and my gut aching.

via Mom Doesn't Want to be a Parent Anymore and Leaves Kids - Parenting.com.

The Western World has quietly become a civilization that undervalues men and overvalues women, where the state forcibly transfers resources from men to women creating various perverse incentives for otherwise good women to conduct great evil against men and children, and where male nature is vilified but female nature is celebrated.  This is unfair to both genders, and is a recipe for a rapid civilizational decline and displacement, the costs of which will ultimately be borne by a subsequent generation of innocent women, rather than men, as soon as 2020. 

via The Futurist: The Misandry Bubble.

... "I want to learn why I am this way."  Then what?  Will learning why you made those choices be what changes your choices?  You're still eating junk food, aren't you?  You're eating it while you're learning  how bad it is. 

"But... why am I this way?"  That question is a narcissistic defense.  It doesn't want an answer, it wants you to keep asking the question.

"I'm a good person, I just am making bad choices."  Wrong.  You're not a good person until you make good choices.  Until then you are chaos.

Via The Last Psychiatrist: "My fiancee is pushing me away and I've lost hope".

Brilliance –- even genius -- is no guarantee that consequential factors have not been left out or misconceived. Intelligence minus judgment equals intellect. Wisdom is the rarest quality of all–the ability to combine intellect,  knowledge, experience, and judgment in a way to produce a coherent understanding…Wisdom requires self-discipline and an understanding of the realities of the world, including the limitations of one’s own experience and of reason itself. The opposite of high intellect is dullness or slowness, but the opposite of wisdom is foolishness, which is far more dangerous.

Emphasis mine. Via PJ Lifestyle » “Intelligence minus judgment equals intellect.”.

One source of data that people often use is median household income. It’s a good idea to use the median rather than the mean -– the mean can be very misleading. For example, the mean income of Harvard graduates who studied economics is going to be very high in the year that Jeremy Lin graduated. John Elway, another econ grad, pulled up the mean dramatically for Stanford grads that year.

But there is a problem with median household income and those who use it relentlessly to grind their policy axes never mention it. The problem is that when household structure is unstable, comparing medians over time is a very poor way of assessing the progress of the typical person.

As I have written many times, rising divorce rates in the 1970?s for example, meant that the number of households in the US grew 26.7%. Population grew only 11.5%. There was an increase in the number of households as one household became two. If both people were working, that alone would likely decrease median household income. If only one of the spouses was working, it was usually the man. The former wife found herself in the labor force unexpectedly. Her income is likely to be below the median. Both of these effects create new households with incomes below the median, dragging down the median over time.

via Inequality and Stagnation.

The entire TSA paradigm is flawed. It requires an impossibility for it to succeed. For the TSA model to work, every single possible means of causing danger to an aircraft or its passengers must be eliminated. This is an impossibility. While passengers are being frisked and digitally strip-searched a few dozen yards away, cooks and dish washers at the local concourse “Chili’s” are using and cleaning butcher knives.

via gmancasefile: TSA: Fail.

This report is one of the main reasons I have swapped down from .40 to 9mm:

Conversely the 9mm can probably be fired fastest of the common calibers and it had the most rounds fired to get an incapacitation (2.45). The .40 (2.36) and the .45 (2.08) split the difference. ... If a person takes an average of 5 seconds to stop after being hit, the defender who shoots a lighter recoiling gun can get more hits in that time period. It could be that fewer rounds would have stopped the attacker (given enough time) but the ability to fire more quickly resulted in more hits being put onto the attacker. It may not have anything to do with the stopping power of the round.

You can't shoot a fraction of a bullet; 2.45 rounds of 9mm and 2.36 rounds of .40 both round (ha!) up to 3 rounds. Might as well have 15 in the mag instead of 13, and get faster followup hits. Via An Alternate Look at Handgun Stopping Power.

One of my favourite sections of the book was Harford’s discussion of accidents. Most of the problems Harford examines in the book are complex and “loosely coupled”, which allows experimentation with failure. But what if the system is tightly coupled, meaning that failures threaten the survival of the entire system? This concept reminded me of work by Robert May, which undermined the belief that increased network complexity led to stability.

The concept of “normal accidents”, taken from a book of that title by Charles Perrow, is compelling. If a system is complex, things will go wrong. Safety measures that increase complexity can increase the potential for problems. As such, the question changes from “how do we stop accidents” to how do we mitigate their damage when they inevitably occur? This takes us to the concept of decoupling. When applied to the financial system, can financial institutions be decoupled from the broader system so that we can let them fail?

(Emphasis mine.) via Harford’s Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure.