FunctionalAmbivalent

It's One of Those Right Brain. Left Brain Things, Apparently

A hospital in Rhode Island has been fined $50,000 for its third case this year of operating on the wrong side of a patient's brain.

The hospital issued a statement saying it was re-evaluating its training and policies, providing more oversight, giving nursing staff the power to ensure procedures are followed, among other steps.

Rhode Island Hospital is, interestingly, a teaching hospital.

Screwing-Up Christmas

Today in the grocery store, "O! Little Town of Bethlehem" was on the Muzak.

How To Create a Food Shortage

Russia has joined the Third World fad of putting price controls on food:

Russian food prices rose steeply in September, with vegetable oil up 13.5 per cent, butter up 9.4 per cent and milk 7.2 per cent, thanks to global agricultural price increases. Given a big low-income population and meager pensions, the price rises are among the few factors capable of deflating President Vladimir Putin’s 80 per cent-plus approval ratings.
...
Russia’s agriculture ministry said the food pricing arrangement was voluntary. But industry insiders said they had come under heavy pressure. “We were told in no uncertain terms that we have to freeze prices on certain products,” said one Russian food industry executive, who asked not to be named. “Everybody understands what the government is doing. It is part of their election campaign.”

Food prices are going up because worldwide demand is going up. Not only do farmers have to feed all the people in the world, now they have to feed cars and the biotech industry, too.

Ordinarily, rising prices on basic commodities increase supply, as farmers plant more in order to make more money.

In the counterintuitive world of farm price supports and government subsidies, however, there's no telling what might happen. Here in the United States, we pay some farmers to grow less while subsidizing others to grow more, both of which have the interesting effect of making it harder for subsistence farmers in far off places to subsist. And in the game of government agricultural meddling, the United States is far from the most egregious offender.

Russia joins a worldwide movement of governments trying to lower food costs by artificial means:

China has also agreed to food price controls; Egypt, Jordan, Bangladesh and Morocco are increasing subsidies or cutting import tariffs to lower domestic prices. Rich countries are not im­mune: Italian consumer groups organized a pasta boycott last month in a protest over prices.

Italians complaining. Who would have guessed?

Anyway, for those of you who have forgotten your basic economics, prices rise when supply, relative to demand, goes down. Lowering prices by government fiat is not a good way to increase supply.

Russia's approach to food price controls is ironic, since it attacks not the problem of food supply but the supposed perfidy of the blood-sucking merchant class. It is the commercial equivalent of killing the messenger. The Soviet -- excuse me -- Russian price controls limit the markup that can be charged on select food items -- bread, cheese, milk, eggs and vegetable oil -- by retailers and other middlemen. This is ironic because it recalls the days when Russia, then under-performing as the Soviet Union, produced lots of food even as market shelves were bare. The problem then was not food production but food distribution, a government-run system of dysfunctional railroads, trucking lines and state stores that replaced the blood-sucking merchant class of Czarist times. That government run distribution system of apathetic nine-to-five clock punchers wasn't able to ramp-up for the harvest, leaving food rotting in storage facilities and farm fields. It was actually easier to buy grain from the United States and ship it all the way around the world than it was to get native stocks a few hundred miles from the Russian breadbasket to the hungry in the capitol city of the worker's paradise.

By attacking, once again, the distribution channels, Russia could be headed back toward the good old days of bare store shelves and periodic, localized famine. At that point, Russians being Russians, I'm sure the public outcry for a permanent Putin administration will be overwhelming.

A Perfect Example of How Both Right and Left Expect Too Much of Government

Three pro-life pharmacists in Washington are suing to overturn the state's regulation mandating that pharmacies dispense the "morning after" pill.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court Wednesday, a pharmacy owner and two pharmacists say the rule that took effect Thursday violates their civil rights by forcing them into choosing between "their livelihoods and their deeply held religious and moral beliefs."

Stop me if I'm wrong, but don't lots of jobs require people to balance the needs of the employer with the employee's deeply held religious beliefs? Don't soldiers have to balance their sense of patriotic duty with "thou shalt not kill"? Don't bank loan officers have to consider Christ's admonition to give to the poor with their fiduciary duty to not give the bank's money away? And don't we, as a society just kind of expect people to make up their own minds about what's more important in their lives?

But anti-abortion pharmacists want special protection. And abortion rights proponents want government to force access to emergency contraception.

What the state ought to do is step away from the controversy entirely. This is just the kind of thing that the marketplace -- of both ideas and goods -- handles lots better than government.

If the pharmacy owner, in this case, wants to limit the drugs he dispenses based on his religious beliefs, that should be his right. The fact that he lets his religious beliefs interfere with his business will become known in the market and some people will choose to do business with him because of that and some people will choose not to.

The pharmacy employees, on the other hand, can quit if they don't like the owner's policies. If they refuse to dispense a legal drug against the policy of their employer, the employer should be free to fire them if they don't have the good sense to find another job more aligned with their beliefs. We don't need to create a protected class of workers, nor do we need to set the precedent that people can refuse, with impunity, to do their jobs based on self-decided matters of conscience. (Give people that right and watch how many religious sects spring up that require margarita communion during the Friday afternoon mini-sabbath.)

Taking this approach would have several salutary effects. It would:

1. Protect personal liberty
2. Give Washington state government more time to deal with real problems
3. Put a couple of lawyers out of work

I seriously don't see what in this controversy requires government intervention.

I Also Predicted That Dick Cheney Would Resign the Vice Presidency Before the 2004 Election

Just over two years ago I wrote a post that turned out to be about the wrongest thing I ever wrote.

But the last few days I've seen something that makes me think this might be real.  Right now, in the news from the Mideast, I sense something that's not unlike the feeling just before communism collapsed.  Things are happening that never happened before; people are doing things that used to get them killed, but no one seems to have the belly for pulling the triggers.  It seems we may be encountering a turning point in history.  It's a feeling that is fleeting, a feeling not of the inevitable, but of the tantalyzingly close.

Read and take joy in how bad my analysis of the Middle East can be. And if you want to have additional fun, follow the trackbacks to the Republican blogs that linked to it. From two years farther down the road, their gloating and condescention looks even worse than my analysis.

You've Got To Learn To Pick Your Battles

As the United Sates and Russia haggle about whether American missile defense facilities should be built in Europe, it's worth remembering that the multi-billion dollar missile defense system in question doesn't work, and has never come close to working.

Yet Another Way 9/11 Is Twisting This Country

The Department of Homeland Security is passing out grants enabling local police forces to buy armored vehicles that they will never in a million years need.

With scores of police agencies large and small, from Lexington, Ky., to Austin, Texas, buying armored vehicles at Homeland Security expense, some criminal justice experts warn that their use in fighting everyday crime could do more harm than good and represents a post-9/11, militaristic turn away from the more cooperative community-policing approach promoted in the 1990s.

You remember the '90s, of course, back when demographics, tougher sentencing and community policing teamed up and crime rates plummeted. Now, post 9/11, we're an angrier, more fearful country, and with the federal dough flowing we're turning our police forces into armies that are, if you look at crime statistics, not doing anything to make us any safer. The federal grants, of course, have nothing to do with stopping crime and everything to do with politicians showing they're serious by spending tax money and posing for pictures with big, badass vehicles. The federal grants are based on a need to respond to incidents of terrorism that, in any given jurisdiction, seldom happens.

Law enforcement agencies say the growing use of the vehicles, a practice that also has its defenders in the academic field of criminal justice, helps ensure police have the tools they need to deal with hostage situations, heavy gunfire and acts of terrorism.

I can't speak for all the jurisdictions involved, but Lexington, Kentucky, just down the road from where I live, got an armored car even though it doesn't have hostage situations, heavy gunfire or acts of terrorism. It has domestic disputes in which drunken hillbillies in their underwear express their love by waving a gun around and crying. The character of those incidents will now change from Officer Friendly talking the guy down to Captain SWAT pulling up in his armored car and rescuing the hostage by getting a few people killed.

Lexington would never have spent its own quarter-million dollars on an armored car because Lexington knows it doesn't really need an armored car. But since the money involved was federal and all they had to do was fill out a little paperwork, they went ahead and did it and now they've got a garage full of muscle. The guys on the SWAT team -- who, like guys everywhere, like big, strong, noisy things -- will load up and move out whenever they get a chance, giving bucolic Lexington just a little bit of the ambiance of South Africa during apartheid.

I've said before and I'm sure I'll say it again: We don't know yet the ways in which 9/11 traumatized us, as a nation, and we're surely doing things in response that we'll regret. That regret is already evident in the growing public revulsion at the Bush Administration's promotion of torture. At some point, I think we'll probably look at the militarization of our police forces and wonder why we thought it was a good idea.

I Think We've All Been There

From MSNBC:

British firefighters said Wednesday they came to a boy's rescue after he got a toilet seat stuck on his head.

The toddler, 2 1/2, and his mother walked into a fire station in Braintree, Essex, on Tuesday saying the boy had put his head through a small trainer seat for the toilet and could not remove it.

The Moment We All Knew Would Come Has, At Long Last, Arrived

The federal government is auctioning off surplus FEMA trailers.

A year and a half after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, FEMA is auctioning off at fire-sale prices thousands of trailers used by storm victims, raising fears among mobile-home dealers that the government will flood the market and depress prices.

After the hurricane, with dead American bodies floating in the floodwaters, making a major American City look like some kind of wire service photo from Bangladesh, public opinion polls indicated outrage at Presidential disinterest and inaction.  As his approval ratings dropped, the President started throwing tax money at his political problem.  That's not unusual, of course.  Politicians do that all the time.  What was stunning was both the amount of money being thrown around and the utter disinterest in whether it did anything to solve the actual problem.  The cynicism of the President and his smug cadre was obvious.  They scheduled a few billion-dollar photo ops, told a few lies about how unaware of the pending disaster they'd been, and went back to screwing up the war.

One the affects of those photo ops was the stream of trailers headed south.  For almost a year after the hurricane -- long after the Katrina diaspora had reached equilibrium -- the trailers streamed down toward "temporary" staging areas from whence many would never emerge, the demand for the housing having slaked long before the housing arrived. 

One of the main manufacturers of the trailers was in Indiana, and we'd see the identically boxy, unadorned trailers passing through Louisville on I-65.  I used to count the FEMA trailers as they went by, each dragged by a pick-up truck proudly bearing a FEMA sticker on its door, obliviously announcing that help is on the way.  On one two-hour trip to Indy six months after the hurricane, I counted 24 shiny new trailers headed down to farm fields outside New Orleans, to rust and wait the inevitable auction.

And now they're for sale at a fraction of their cost to taxpayers, the perfect symbol of the Bush Administration and everything that ails it.

A Glimpse Inside the Conservative Bubble

Everyone else is listing their favorite entries in Conservapedia, the new, conservative Wikipedia knockoff.  Here's mine, from the remarkably short entry on Ronald Reagan.

Considered by many to be the greatest American President, Ronald Reagan's greatest accomplishments include leading America peacefully through the Cold War, lowering taxes, promoting a free economy, and staunchly opposing socialism and communism, and ending the Cold War in victory for the United States. Reagan was strongly opposed to the concept of Big government, advocating a reduction in the size and budget of the federal government, although during his terms in office the government size and budget both increased rather than decreasing due to tax-and-spend Democrats.

Conservapedia readers believe Reagan to be the greatest president because, among other things, there is nowhere in Conservapedia where they could read about George Washington, Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt, just for example. 

The whole enterprise reads like a 10th grade social studies paper.  This concluding sentence from the Cold War entry:

President Ronald Reagan finally ended the Cold War in 1989 because he caused the Soviet Union to fall.

I'm sure it will get better.  I just wonder who's going to do the ideological enforcement to keep the dogma dogged.