February 2012
21 posts
“I asked one of the doctors, Howard Donner, why they volunteered to spend their summers toiling [on the flanks of Denali]. “Well,” he explained as he stood shivering in a blizzard, reeling from nausea and a blinding headache while attempting to repair a broken radio antenna, “it’s sort of like having fun, only different.”
—Jon Krakauer, Eiger Dreams—Club Denali
“Over a lifetime, a medical student who specializes can expect to earn $3.5 million more than a medical student who chooses primary care.”
—The health reform law’s biggest threat: 30,000 too few doctors
The best waffle recipe ever
1 3/4” Cup Sifted Flour
2 Tsp Baking Powder
1/2 Tsp Baking Soda
1/2 Tsp Salt
2 Beaten Egg Yolks
2 Cups Buttermilk
1/2 Cup Cooking Oil or melted shortening
2 Stiffly beaten Egg Whites
(Optional): Chocolate chips
Sift together dry ingredients, combine yolks, buttermilk and oil
Stir into dry ingredients
Fold in the whites, leaving some fluffs
Pour batter into iron
“There is a culture of policy-making where the politician’s job is to come up with a solution and it will work. Whether it really works or not is irrelevant. It will be shown to have worked in some way or another.”
—Burden Of Proof: Should Evidence Determine Policy? | Richard Wilson | New Humanist | 09 January 2012
“Only the sequence of the words must remain inviolate. We can change everything about a text but the words themselves and the order they appear in. The literary experience does not lie in any one moment of perception, or any physical contact with a material object (even less in the “possession” of handsome masterpieces lined up on our bookshelves), but in the movement of the mind through a sequence of words from beginning to end.”
—E-books Can’t Burn | Tim Parks | NYRB | 15 February 2012
“The rhetoric from Rick Santorum—now leading in the Republican polls nationwide—has been almost casually ugly. Not content to merely demand that all abortions be criminalized, including in cases of rape and incest, he also smothers his prohibitionist ideology in smug condescension. A woman who has been impregnated by rape, in Santorum’s description, is someone who should “make the best of a bad situation.”
—The Increasingly Disturbing War Against Women’s Rights | The Editors | New Republic | 17 February 2012
“Then the “natural law” was fallen back on, saying that the natural purpose of sex is procreation, and any use of it for other purposes is “unnatural.” But a primary natural purpose does not of necessity exclude ancillary advantages. The purpose of eating is to sustain life, but that does not make all eating that is not necessary to subsistence “unnatural.” One can eat, beyond the bare minimum to exist, to express fellowship, as one can have sex, beyond the begetting of a child with each act, to express love.”
—Contraception’s Con Men | Gary Wills | NYRB | 15 February 2012
“Support for Republican candidates, who generally promise to cut government spending, has increased since 1980 in states where the federal government spends more than it collects. The greater the dependence, the greater the support for Republican candidates.”
—Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It | Binyamin Appelbaum & Robert Gebeloff | NYT | 12 February 2012
“We may have tried to normalise cancer with fun runs and awareness weeks – yet still we “battle” against it in a war without end.”
—The Trouble With My Blood | Will Self | Guardian | 21 October 2011
“Even if statistics weren’t for individuals, this represented a powerful index of the fact that shit happens. We were middle-aged, apoptosis was well under way – get over it.”
—The Trouble With My Blood | Will Self | Guardian | 21 October 2011
“One would be hard pressed to find a two-year-old who is not sometimes irritable, a boy in fifth grade who is not sometimes inattentive, or a girl in middle school who is not anxious. (Imagine what taking a drug that causes obesity would do to such a girl.) Whether such children are labeled as having a mental disorder and treated with prescription drugs depends a lot on who they are and the pressures their parents face. As low-income families experience growing economic hardship, many are finding that applying for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments on the basis of mental disability is the only way to survive. It is more generous than welfare, and it virtually ensures that the family will also qualify for Medicaid. According to MIT economics professor David Autor, “This has become the new welfare.” Hospitals and state welfare agencies also have incentives to encourage uninsured families to apply for SSI payments, since hospitals will get paid and states will save money by shifting welfare costs to the federal government.”
—The Illusions Of Psychiatry | Marcia Angell | NYRB | 19 June 2011
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No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:
” —The Caging Of America | Adam Gopnik | New Yorker | 23 January 2012Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities… The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.
“Statistics are notoriously slippery, but the figures that suggest that violence has been disappearing in the United States contain a blind spot so large that to cite them uncritically, as the major papers do, is to collude in an epic con. Uncounted in the official tallies are the hundreds of thousands of crimes that take place in the country’s prison system, a vast and growing residential network whose forsaken tenants increasingly bear the brunt of America’s propensity for anger and violence.”
—Raise The Crime Rate | Christopher Glazek | n+1 | 26 January 2012
