The End of Health Care As We Know It

It had to happen. Writer gets funny lump in his jaw. Writer gets brush-off from doctor. Writer checks up on Google and self-operates to remove stone from salivary duct.

Are you sweating yet, you priests and pharisees from the health priesthood? Have you paid off the mortgage on the McMansion and the starter castle yet? Better get a move on!

It’s a delightful story, told by Sean Thomas in the Daily Telegraph. It all started when

I suddenly developed a weird swelling under my jaw. And I mean suddenly. In a matter of hours, I went from looking perfectly normal to having the appearance of a mating canetoad, with a mammoth bulging on the lower right side of my face.

But then it went away. But pretty soon, it was back, and not just once, but regularly at meal times.

Disturbed, I started Googling. Within a few hours, I had self-diagnosed. What I had, it turned out, was a salivary calculus, or sialolith, a stone in the salivary duct running from the submandibular gland (under my jaw) to my mouth.

Now you would think that the British National Health Service, the health provider of choice for our young sufferer, would leap into action. But no. First he went to the ER, and they sent him to his provider. Yes, it turned out, he had diagnosed correctly, but the physician wouldn’t remove it. He’d get referred to a maxillofacial, and get an appointment in a month or two.

Well! By this time our eager medical student had discovered by more dedicated Googling how to remove the offending stone. Two months? To heck with that.

Five days ago, I summoned up the courage and attacked my stone with two matchsticks and a plastic fork from Pret à Manger. Slowly, I squeezed the blob along the duct. At 4pm, it finally popped out in a squidge of blood and lots of spittle: 2mm wide, it was. All that misery for a 2mm wide stone.

Piece of cake, eh? And why not? Now, how long do you think it ought to be till you can just go down to your local self-serve medical clinic, sign a simple release form, and do it yourself?

I know. Dream on, pal.

Global Warming Stuck on Pause

Just when it looked like we were all going to fry in the oven of global warming comes a scientist to say that global temperatures have stopped climbing.

Since 1998 global temperatures have actually dropped a tad, according to climate scientist Bob Carter in the Daily Telegraph. What of that, you say? Temperatures increased in the 28 years previous to 1998.

That’s very true. But then there was global cooling from 1940 to 1965.

The problem, Carter asserts, is that there is not much independent climate science being reported.

Governments generally choose not to receive policy advice on climate from independent scientists. Rather, they seek guidance from their own self-interested science bureaucracies and senior advisers, or from the IPCC itself. No matter how accurate it may be, cautious and politically non-correct science advice is not welcomed in Westminster, and nor is it widely reported.

And many climate skeptics feel too intimidated to speak out.

The essence of the issue is this. Climate changes naturally all the time, partly in predictable cycles, and partly in unpredictable shorter rhythms and rapid episodic shifts, some of the causes of which remain unknown. We are fortunate that our modern societies have developed during the last 10,000 years of benignly warm, interglacial climate. But for more than 90 per cent of the last two million years, the climate has been colder, and generally much colder, than today. The reality of the climate record is that a sudden natural cooling is far more to be feared, and will do infinitely more social and economic damage, than the late 20th century phase of gentle warming.

The problem is that, as Daniel B. Botkin writes in Discordant Harmonies, contrary to the idea of a harmonious steady-state environment, “Nature changes over essentially all time scales.” And we don’t know why.

We do know that over the last few million years the world has usually been a lot colder than it is right now.

And you can take that to the bank.

Da Vinci Code Unbroken

What a relief. A high court judge in Britain has determined that Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code did not infringe the copyright of the 1982 book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. So now the legal cloud is lifted from the movie.

But do we know the real truth behind the Da Vinci Mystery? For instance, isn’t it odd that both books were published by Random House? Isn’t it strange that the mysterious expert in DVC, Sir Leigh
Teabing, is an anagram of Baigent and Leigh? Isn’t it a little too hard to accept Dan Brown’s claim that he only consulted HBHG in the later stages of writing DVC, considering that so many of the ideas developed in HBHG turned up in DVC?

According to the London Daily Telegraph

HBHG, published in 1982, deals with a theory that Jesus and Mary Magdalene married, had a child and that the bloodline continues to this day, with a secret society protecting their heirs against wicked conspiracies enacted by the Church.

Sounds pretty much what DVC is all about. But the judge said that, even with the similarities, Dan Brown’s book did not “breach the copyright of Baigent and Leigh’s book.”

Do you think that Dan Brown, “the highest-paid writer in history,” sold the movie rights for a fixed sum, or do you think that he also figured on a percent of the gross? Wikipedia says the rights fee was $6,000,0000. But will we ever know the truth?

Blacks Voting for School Choice With Their Feet

Year by year the education establishment gets bigger and bigger. Year by year the kids seem to learn less and less. And everyone seems to shrug their shoulders as though nothing can be done.

At least people are writing books. Henry T. Edmondson III has written an attack on John Dewey and progressive education in John Dewey & the Decline of
American Education: How the
Patron Saint of Schools Has
Corrupted Teaching and Learning, which seems fair enough. M. D. Aeschliman writes in National Review that

Dewey promoted a futuristic, socialistic idea of “the Great Community,” whose “seer” for him was the polymorphous, promiscuous, egalitarian egotist-aesthete Walt Whitman, who sang both of himself and of future “democratic vistas.” Democracy, Dewey wrote, “is a name for a life of free and enriching communion,” and this mystical-pantheistic idea had its institutional vehicle in the “child-centered” school.

The trouble is that the child-centered school may be a dandy idea for the children of upper middle-class progressives, preparing them to a life of creativity and peace studies. But it also denies poor children an education in literacy and numeracy.

And now the poor, particularly the black poor, are starting to vote against Dewey-inspired education with their feet. Writes Michael Strong in TCSDaily, “While pundits and academics argue away, the quiet sucking sound you don't yet hear are African-American families leaving our public schools when allowed to do so.”

In Minneapolis, public school officials now admit that black flight is a serious problem; the district enrollment is projected to be down to 33,000, from 48,000 in 2000, a 30% decrease, largely due to black students escaping to charter schools. The Washington D.C. school district has lost 10,000 students in five years; 25% of D.C. students are now enrolled in charter schools. A Rand Corporation study of charter schools in Texas and California discovered that in both states black students are significantly more likely to move to charter schools than are white students.

This is profoundly encouraging news. It means that the movement begun by Polly Williams of Milwaukee is gathering momentum. It was back in 1990 that she began her campaign to bring school choice to Milwaukee’s black community, and she was opposed every step of the way by white liberals. When they saw, finally, that they couldn’t stop some sort of school choice plan they countered Williams’ plan with a fake one.

This fake choice plan was the product of a white, do-good liberal legislator named Barbara Nostein. Liberals backed her; they weren't for my bill. We finally won when we got 200 parents to testify for three hours in favor of my bill. In good conscience, my colleagues could not vote against those parents.

The common-sense interpretation of the data on school choice is that parents, especially minority parents, want it. In a democracy, the people rule, right? So why are progressives standing in the school house door preventing people of color from getting the kind of education they want for their children?

The answer is simple. The progressives want their “child-centered” education not because they are advocates for the poor but because they are advocates for themselves. They want progressive education to make the United States into a progressive society, just like Dewey did a century ago.

What the people want has nothing to do with it.

How Do They Treat the Help?

One of the important tests of character is: How does he treat the help? When Scoop Jackson, longtime senator from Washington, died, we suddenly learned how all the staff in the Senate dining room adored him. We had no idea.

The Clintons, we learned, were not liked by the White House staff. And the report on Katie Couric is that people dive for their offices when they hear her heels clicking down the hall.

Why bother to treat the help with respect? As usual, Agatha Christie has the reason. When a friend of young Agatha dissed a servant she was told off in no uncertain terms. The servant was a professional, and worked hard. And above all, because of their position, servants could not talk back.

In the US armed forces, it turns out, mistreating the help can send you out the door. Victor Davis Hanson tells of one career-ending incident. It was quite simple. Vice-Admiral Richard J. Naughton tried to enter the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis without the proper ID.

Naturally expecting that the young Marine sentry on duty would recognize his all-important superintendent, Naughton boldly tried to pass. But instead, the Marine asked him to produce identification. Angry words and some sort of altercation ensued between the admiral and the enlisted man.



Later, Naughton claimed he couldn't "remember" whether he had "touched" the guard, but he did concede he "might" have done so.

Some skeptics thought that Naughton would skate, but he didn’t. There was a lengthy investigation and Naughton ended up resigning his position as superintendent of the academy and his commission.

In other words, the boss of Annapolis had to obey the rules or he was out.

That brings us, as you knew it would, to Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. She thought the rules didn’t apply to her, either.

But she has even less class than the admiral. After an incident in which she is alleged to have struck a police officer who restrained her for bypassing a metal detector, she didn’t apologize. Instead she played the race card, the gender card, and the sexual harassment card in a naked attempt to blame the servant, in this case the Capitol Hill police officer, rather than admit that she was a “Do You Know Who I Am” narcissist and abuser of power and privilege.

Tom Delay had a telling point about the McKinney incident. He said that he would be filing ethics charges against her if nobody else did, and that he had a personal interest in the case. A few years ago, a Capitol Hill police officer died in Delay’s office, shot to death doing his job defending the congressman against an intruder who had jumped around a metal detector.

So there you have it. The superintendent of the United States Naval Academy had to resign for pushing a Marine sentry. What will happen to a congresswoman who does the same thing?

Before you judge anyone, check to see how they treat the help.

The Angry Left Asks Bush If He's Ashamed

It’s good that lefty Harry Taylor got a chance to ask President Bush about the NSA surveillance program. Lefties ought to get a chance to question the president. Often. According to the Associated Press he got to

tell Bush that he's never felt more ashamed of the leadership of his country. He said Bush has asserted his right to tap phone calls without a warrant, to arrest people and hold them without charges and to revoke a woman's right to an abortion, among other things.

His question gave Bush a chance to tell his side of the story: That he had been criticized for not connecting the dots, and had asked his people what else the government could do, and they told him that they needed to monitor the conversations between Al Qaeda and contacts in the United States, and that they told him it was legal.

Harry Taylor’s question gave Bush a chance to play the good guy. The audience booed Taylor but Bush “urged the audience to let Taylor finish.”

You wonder. What would Bill Clinton have done? And what would the MSM have done with a right-wing questioner attacking the president back in the 1990s?

A Radical Architect, Classical

Philosopher Roger Scruton used to be Britain’s one and only conservative. Until he gave up and came to live in the United States. But he is not so Americanized that he does not know the protectors of the permanent things in England. Like architect Quinlan Terry.

Terry is a radical architect. That is, he rejects the modernist terrorism and the postmodernist irony and designs in the classic tradition. Thus the book about his work, Radical Classicism, reviewed by Roger Scruton (reg. reqd.) in the London Spectator.

For three millennia Western builders looked back to their predecessors, respecting the temple architecture of the ancients, refining its language, and adapting it to the European landscape in ways that are subtly varied, entirely memorable and above all humane. Then Le Corbusier burst on the scene. His plan was to demolish Paris north of the Seine and to put all the people into glass boxes.

When Quinlan Terry was studying architecture he had to educate himself, traveling to see great monuments, country churches, and ordinary streets in defiance of his tutors.

Needless to say, Terry’s projects, submitted as his thesis, were failed by the examiners. In satirical spirit he submitted hubristic modernist designs instead, and was allowed to pass.

What are we talking about here? We are talking about architecture as a near erotic experience, as the cover of the book tells us.

See what I mean? Why on earth did we throw all that away?

Well, Quinlan Terry didn’t, and now he’s built buildings all over the place.

Terry’s break came in 1984, when Haslemere Estates commissioned his designs for Richmond Riverside, which was to become one of London’s most popular tourist attractions. This harmonious collection of classical buildings, rising on a knoll above the Thames and enclosing offices, restaurants and private dwellings, illustrates Terry’s principles: to fit into the landscape and townscape; to use an architectural language that puts a building into relation with its neighbours and with the passer-by; to use natural materials and load-bearing walls so that the building will last and weather; to respect the realities of climate and the human need for light and air; to create forms and spaces that will lend themselves to the changing purposes of their residents and which will not die, as modernist buildings usually die, with their initial function.

Popular tourist attraction, eh?