Constituent Service, Scott Brown version

Newly elected Senator Scott Brown sent me nice thank-you letter, for my modest (very modest) campaign contribution last month. I'm suitably impressed. Clearly a man who understands ordinary politeness and makes sure it happens. I wish him well.

Cost Cutting, Health Care version

Doctors buy malpractice insurance to protect themselves against lawyers. The insurance can run as much as $100,000 a year. That's a helova lot of money. If the doctor works 50 weeks a year, 40 hours a week that's 2000 hours. $100,000 / 2000 hours equals $50/hr. The doctor has to charge $50 an hour for his time just to pay his malpractice insurance.
That's one of the reasons that medical care is so expensive. We could cut this down a lot.
1. Cap on awards. Surely $300,000 dollars is enough compensation for pain and suffering. In fact it's generous for individuals. But it's too low to feed a lawyer. Malpractice lawyers work on contingency fees, they take the lion's share of any court awards in lieu of fees. A couple of million dollar jackpots covers the expenses of the suits they loose. Lower the awards and a lot of lawyers will find more profitable lines of work.
2. Demand expert witnesses be real practicing doctors, not hired mouths. An expert witness should be required to show that he personally treated a round dozen cases like the case before the court. Right now any joker with a medical degree is an expert witness. Most of them do no medicine, they just testify in court, for pay. Real practicing doctors have real experience, and are reluctant to point fingers at colleagues. The hired mouths will say anything they are paid to say.
3. Adopt a "loser pays" rule. Losing side pays all the court costs. That will drive off the weaker suits.
4. Forbid lawyers to advertise for plaintiffs. Used to be it was unethical for lawyers to advertise at all. Now Fox TV runs hourly ads from lawyers looking for plaintiffs to give them some standing to sue.
5. Proscribing FDA approved drugs and medical equipment is NEVER malpractice. Even if the FDA later changes its mind and pulls the drug off the market. The FDA is so conservative in granting approval for the sale of drugs, that any reasonable person is justified in believing approved drugs are safe. Doctors, hospitals and drug companies should not get sued for proscribing, administering and manufacturing FDA approved drugs.

Snooping by laptop

You must have heard about the school district that issued laptops to the students and then remotely turned on the built in video cameras and sneaked photographs of the students at home?
Takeaways:
1. That school district had more money than brains to issue student laptops. No way would my district be so profligate. Students learn by studying, not by computering. Plus the students all have computers already. Why spend public money to give 'em a backup computer?
2. If a computer illiterate public school can turn a laptop into a video snoop camera, so can anyone else. A piece of duct tape over the camera lens (and perhaps another piece over the built in microphone) is your only guarantee of privacy. Good thing my antique 3 Gigahz desktop lacks cameras and microphones.
3. That school board has to be stuck on stupid. They can look forward to getting voted out of office next election time.

America is ungovernable?

I hear the Democrats whining this whine now that Obamacare seems to be dead. Probably true. I don't like being governed (bossed around) any more than the next American. America doesn't need or want governance. We like leadership instead. We don't like Obamacare, and we were able to resist the Democratic attempt to stuff it down our throats. I like that kind of ungovernable.
By the way, Obamacare is kinda like a snake. You can't depend upon a snake being dead until it's cut up into six inch lengths. I don't see Obamacare as being that kind of dead, yet. It's lying on the floor and not moving much, but it might come back to life and bite.

Why the Love Gene in cats?

Cats, at least modern house cats, love their humans. Nothing else explains why cats demand petting, sleep on favored human's beds, sit in laps, and purr when picked up and stroked. They get terribly lonely when left alone. But what is the evolutionary origin of this gene? Cats are solitary hunters, not pack animals. Before hooking up with humans back in Egyptian times, what good would a gene to love humans do for a cat? I have read of small African wild cats that cannot be tamed even today. Presumably that breed of cat lacks the love gene.
After hooking up with humans, the love gene is obviously a good thing. Compare well fed and sleek house cats with skinny, dirty, and miserable looking alley cats. It interacts successfully with the love animals gene in humans.
Perhaps the cat love gene is a mutation or only occurs in small numbers of cats in the wild. The love animals gene in humans prompts them to adopt kittens. Perhaps the adoptions proceeded unsuccessfully until some human got lucky and adopted a kitten carrying the love gene. Once settled in with humans the cats with the love gene would flourish and the cats that lacked it would go back to the wild.
Does this account for a origin of the species of affectionate cats?

Words of the Weasel Part XIV

"The aircraft was on final approach to Heathrow from Beijing when an uncommanded power reduction occurred in both engines."
We used to call that engine failure.
The aircraft augered in 984 feet short of the runway. Gotta watch them uncommanded power reductions.

Blame Shifting

On the radio (NHPR) this morning. The terrible Belgian train accident is blamed on lack of new technology automatic train brakes.
Wow!
Brakes won't save you in a head on collision. Something went wrong and put two trains on the the same track going opposite directions. A signal failed, an engineer ran a red signal, a dispatcher gave the wrong orders, or a turnout was thrown the wrong way. Once that happens you have two trains barreling right at each other. It takes a mile or more to stop a train, automatic brakes or no automatic brakes. The engineers cannot see that far ahead ahead. Blam.
The radio story went on to quote various Europeans pointing fingers at each other. The Belgians blamed the EU for failure to standardize automatic brake requirements. The EU blamed the Belgians for not installing automatic brakes anyhow. Money was mentioned, like 200,000 Euros per train and 25,000 Euros per mile of track.
This story is a smoke screen behind which the true culprits are escaping.