Family Physician Can’t Give Away Solo Practice:

The share of solo practices among members of the American Academy of Family Physicians fell to 18 percent by 2008 from 44 percent in 1986. And census figures show that in 2007, just 28 percent of doctors described themselves as self-employed, compared with 58 percent in 1970. Many of the provisions of the new health care law are likely to accelerate these trends.

“There’s not going to be any of us left,” Dr. Sroka said.

Indeed, younger doctors — half of whom are now women — are refusing to take over these small practices. They want better lifestyles, shorter work days, and weekends free of the beepers, cellphones and patient emergencies that have long defined doctors’ lives. Weighed down with debt, they want regular paychecks instead of shopkeeper risks. And even if they wanted such practices, banks — attuned to the growing uncertainties — are far less likely to lend the money needed. {…}

Dr. Sroka has not taken a sick day in 32 years. After his latest partner left in September, he was unable for five months to schedule any time off until another local doctor volunteered to cover for him. His income and patients depend upon his daily presence. This resiliency is part of a tough-minded medical culture — forged in round-the-clock residency shifts, constant on-call schedules, and workplaces in which revered doctors made decisions and staff members followed orders — that is fast disappearing.

Had he left a decade ago, Dr. Sroka might have been able to persuade a doctor to pay $500,000 or more for his roster of 4,000 patients. That he cannot give his practice away results not only from the unattractiveness of its inflexible schedule but also because large group practices can negotiate higher fees from insurers, which translates into more money for doctors.

A lot of people talk about how doctors are overpaid because they limit the supply and there they are able to jack up their rates. There is some truth to this, but if only it were as simple as these basic market forces! Because if it were, my wife would be making a whole lot more than she does due to the overwhelming shortage of family practice docs - particularly those with her skillset. Instead, while she was aggressively recruited, there was really only so much they could pay due to stagnating (per-procedure) reimbursement levels unless she were to join a profiteering practice that makes it up in volume. Without being a part of a team - a hospital, a large consortium of docs - the working conditions of family practitioners (who aren’t mere clinicians, anyway) are bad and actually made worse by the shortage.

There was a job in Estacado that caught our interest before she took the job here in Callie. I was interested because it was in Estacado, which I’ve wanted to return to since the day we left. She was interested because it was the small-town-doc job she’d been training for. The only doc in the town with call nights shared with docs from the neighboring town. But having been in Callie for a year, if we leave the next job won’t be anything like that one. Even in places with limited populations, people get hurt or sick at three in the morning and when you’re in call every third or fourth night, that’s a lot of time spent hovering over patients (”hovering”, by the way, falls under the category of “required” but “not billable”). In Callie she is a hospital employee and does have something of a team, but she still can’t leave town two of every three weekends and can get called in every other night or so.

Of course, the money is good. However, I had the choice between this and her working an engineer’s hours at an engineer’s wages, I’d take the latter. I just can’t imagine going the route Dr. Sroka went for so long.

First, props to Missouri on this:

Modifications to the bill must be approved by the House before becoming law, but the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) has already begun increasing yellow signal timing with very positive results. In Arnold, the first city in the Show Me state to use automated ticketing machines, yellow timing was increased from 4.0 to 5.0 seconds at three intersections along Missouri Route 141 on February 24. Smaller changes were made on April 15, including a boost from 4.0 to 4.4 seconds at northbound 141 and US 61/67, a 4.0 to 4.5 second change at northbound US 61/67 at Rockport School, and from 4.0 to 4.7 seconds at southbound Vogel Road at Richardson Road (4.3 seconds at the northbound approach).

The impact of the longer yellow at red light camera monitored locations was felt immediately. In January, before any signal timing had been changed, American Traffic Solutions recorded 875 alleged violations in the city of Arnold. At the end of April, that figure fell 70 percent to just 266. Jefferson County Councilman Bob Boyer obtained the ATS statistics after learning that MoDOT had extended the yellow times.

“This recent bit of information goes further to prove the point that there are other safety measures that can be implemented if safety, not money, is the focus,” Boyer said.

Whenever you talk about lengthening yellow lights, there’s always somebody that says that people will simply adjust. And sometimes people will. But study after study has suggested that in the aggregate, longer yellow lights reduce lightrunning as well as accidents. They also reduce revenue, which is part of the problem. So congratulations to Missouri for getting this right.

On the other hand…

[I]n Missouri, it is common that municipal prosecutors will regularly “amend” moving traffic violations, which incur points against one’s driver’s license and potentially raise car insurance rates, to non-moving violations which do not incur said points and insurance rate hikes. Of course, the prosecutor only does so under two conditions:

1) The fine for the “amended” violation is exorbitant compared to the moving violation fine–and compared to the usual fine for the actual non-moving violation, and

2) The victim–er, ticketed person–must have hired legal representation for the prosecutor to negotiate the amended complaint. (Non-lawyers, don’t try representing yourself. Prosecutors won’t do it. I tried…once upon a time when I was younger, drove less carefully, less wise, didn’t inhale, etc.)

Now, one may counter that this behavior is not “extortion” because it is not illegal for the prosecutor to negotiate an amended charge as part of a plea bargain, nor is the prosecutor directly benefiting from the extorted fees. However, this activity is a plea bargain only in the most superficial sense, since a miniscule percentage of moving violations are ever actually contested with a not-guilty plea to begin with and individuals engaging in this ‘bargain’ have no intent to contest the moving violation. In a game theoretic, it’s almost never a credible threat so there is virtually no chance court time will be used or the alleged criminal will go unpunished. And while the prosecutor may not directly pocket the huge fines, those fines comprise a non-trivial portion of many municipalities’ revenues, which do flow back in part to the prosecutor’s budget.

This is not entirely unlike what they’re doing in Delosa, wherein you can avoid having your ticket turned over to your insurance company under certain circumstances. This makes people less likely to contest, but also helps them skirt state laws about how much revenue a town can get from tickets (they can “only” get a third of overall revenue from traffic enforcement). On the one hand, this is great because it helps you keep a clean driving record. On the other hand, it allows them to write up more tickets. In the case of Missouri, it sounds like an odd freebie for lawyers.

As I’ve mentioned before, I got out of a ticket for which I was dead guilty by hiring a lawyer once. If a lawyer knows what they’re doing, they can make it not worth their trouble. Trying to defend yourself, though, is pretty foolish.

An acoustic song in an Americana vein by James McMurtry, the son of Larry McMurtry of “Lonesome Dove” fame and one of the best singer-songwriters out there. Though the song opens with a bit of speculation about the town’s founding, it’s more about the narrator’s desire to leave.

“Flatter than a tabletop
Makes you wonder why they stopped here
Wagon must have lost a wheel or they lacked ambition
On the great migration west
Separated from the rest
Though they might have tried their best
They never caught the sun
So they sunk some roots down in the dirt
To keep from blowin’ off the earth
Built a town around here
And when the dust had all but cleared
They called it Levelland”

Update: The official music video is below the fold: (more…)

The economics of the Death Star. As someone that has recently been discussing the geopolitical ramifications of Superman’s renounced citizenship, I - of course - think that these things are neat as hell. I’m going to have to start reading Overthinking It with more regularity.

So what did we learn from Toyota’s recall crisis? Basically, it all goes to hell once the politicians get involved.

The ins and outs of getting a tattoo with a professional sports logo. I remember, years ago, a woman with a huge tattoo on her back with the logo of the local professional sports team. A friend and I wondered what she would do if they changed their logo. I suppose it could be hip and retro and all that, but she didn’t strike me as a retro-ironic sort.

A human rights worker passes on a list of things he wishes he’d known before getting involved.

GM is not sure what to do with GMC. The degree to which these decisions are made around their dealership networks is nothing less than astounding. The cars are meant to be sold to people. You need a network to do it, but it’s only part of the equation. It’s been suggested that GMC become their Jeep counterpart. Not a bad idea, actually, if they have to come up with something to tag-team with Buick. Ford ran into the same issue with Lincoln/Mercury and the end of the latter. On the other hand, our local dealer is Chevy/Buick but not GMC, so it’s not a hard rule that they have to go together, apparently.

Married women get more time for leisure than unmarried women. The difference is marginal, but acts as a counter to the complaint that men double the housework. Then again, we’re dealing with averages. A few stay-at-home wives can throw off the averages.

Why redheads are more sensitive.

A Yale student gave up any and all semblance of privacy to be a guinea pig in a class project.

Over at CNN, a raucous “discussion” ensues over what, precisely, it means to declare someone incompetent to stand trial.

This is always a tough debate. On the one side, the mentally incompetent are likened to children, the main other class which are normally protected from the legal consequences of their actions (or at very least, given reduced punishment) due to society’s opinion that they are insufficiently mature to fully understand the morality of crimes they commit.

On the other the “insanity defense” (or claim that a person is incompetent to stand trial) generally comes up for discussion in the realm of crimes that are intensely violent, whether because the person was in a “fit of rage” or because they are simply mentally unhinged in general. For part of the public, there is a standing belief that nobody could be “that insane”, and thus that any lawyer bringing up mental insanity is employing a cheap parlor trick. For part of the public, there’s the belief that someone let off the hook on an “insanity plea” is simply dumped back into the population.

Especially poignant in this is the general public’s normal “interaction with the mentally ill” that is mostly confined to people who are homeless. The “crazy guy panhandling on the corner having a loud argument with his invisible friend” is something plenty of people have experience with, and there’s a certain amount of cognitive dissonance involved in the fear people have of these people becoming irrationally violent, and the idea that “nobody could be that insane” when it comes to criminal defendants.

Two years ago, I discussed types of criminals, in context of criminal punishment/rehabilitation models and the contrasting ways to deal with rational and irrational actors. It strikes me that Loughner falls into one of the “irrational” categories. Certainly, his mind and warped worldview don’t match many other people. I’d say he falls into a sociopath category, inasmuch as his writings and ravings indicate that he lacks a connection to the normal world.

But what can be done for it? Again, there’s the real dilemma. Even if the state eventually rules him competent to stand trial, even if he skips trial and goes straight to “remorsefully pleading guilty and begging for leniency on grounds that he wasn’t sane” mode… how can you tell he’s not simply telling people what he thinks they want to hear? How can we be sure, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he is “cured” enough to reenter society? Especially if the “cure” involves antipsychotic drugs, what assurance does society have that he’ll continue taking them on schedule or that they won’t lose effectiveness as his body builds up a resistance to the dosage?

I’m not expecting much argument against the notion that Jared Lee Loughner needs to be under supervision, and possibly separation from society, for the rest of his life. There’s no question that, sane or not on some relative scale, he committed an absolutely horrific act. However, the way society views “criminals” at large is very odd. If Loughner really is completely incompetent to understand the world around him in the way a normal person does, sticking him in prison - even after “treatment” renders him “sane enough to stand trial” - would seem to be just abusive. There’s also a small minority of people who would rather have him (humanely) executed, no matter what his mental state, or especially if his mental state can’t be repaired - since, in the state he’s currently in, any caregiver assigned to him (nurses, doctors, psychiatrists) are necessarily at some degree of risk in his next rampage. I’ll not render an opinion on that, but simply state that I understand both the pro and con arguments of such a scenario. It all depends on whether you view Jared Lee Loughner as a damaged human being on a “thou shalt not kill” scale, or if he’s more like this and must be “put down” for the greater good of society, remorsefully.

I discovered a long-time acquaintance is a red diaper baby. Her parents are bona fide Communists, as were her grandparents. The sort that hoped that we would lose the Cold War. This actually explains a great deal. She’s one of the most conservative people I know, in the traditional sense of the word. And her mannerisms really strike one as a fundamentalist Christian or something. She’s been mistaken for right-wing by mutual acquaintances. It’s the lifestyle that she leads. And yet her politics were way out in left field. Why?

Well, if you’re a real traditionalist, and you were born into a family where the family tradition is Communism. You keep up the fight. You honor your family’s heritage and accept the wisdom handed down from one generation to the next. Their good guys are your good guys. Their bad guys are your bad guys. Your tribe is the USSR, defunct or not, and not the nation in which you were born and raised.

Bill Wyman wrote a worthwhile piece a few months ago about the universal availability of art:

If you were born to this it’s an unshakeable, seemingly permanent feature of the world. The rest of us marvel that a significant part of everything out there that should be digitized and made available has. And once it’s out there, getting your hands on it is a fairly simple process. The concept of “rarity” has become obsolete. A previously “rare” CD or movie, once it’s in the iTunes store or on the torrent networks, is, in theory, just as available as the biggest single in the world. (In practice, there are marginal differences, like having to do a few extra searches or wait a bit for a download, but that’s a big difference from, say, driving across town to a Tower Records to find that they don’t have a CD in stock.)

A rarity might be less popular; it might be less interesting. But it’s no longer less available the way it once was. If you have a decent Internet connection and a slight cast of amorality in your character, there’s very little out there you might want that you can’t find. Does the end of rarity change in any fundamental way, our understanding of, attraction to, or enjoyment of pop culture and high art?

The notion that “the Internet changes everything” is touted too often. But this is really an astonishing development. Many years ago, I was a Batman fan that bought a somewhat disappointing one-shot called Batman: Vengeance of Bane, which introduced an interesting but (within the story) inconsequential villain. When Bane went on to utterly defeat the Batman, the comic book that I had purchased for a couple bucks - that they didn’t even bother an embossed or triple-released cover, was suddenly worth $40. Unlike a lot of valuable comics at the time, this didn’t become valuable because it had an embossed cover or something like that. It was valuable because people wanted to read the story and they couldn’t unless they bought it (when they released a second print, the value dropped back down to $10). These days, they could have just downloaded it on the Internet, illegally for free or for a few bucks from DC Comics itself.

There’s no scarcity anymore, except that which is imposed by the producers to price certain people out. Any book released today will likely be available, in perpetuity, forevermore. Due to the virtual abolition of the public domain, it may never be free. But it’ll be available. As someone that once ached to find copies of CDs out of production or comic books that had a single run years ago, this is a pretty amazing development. Once, I purchased an entire set of 60 comics just so that I could finally get my hands on the four that I didn’t have and that were hard to get. It would, of course, be nicer if I could get it for free, but it’s pretty amazing that I will likely be able to get ahold of - one way or another - anything that came out since around 2005.

This is great for me. And in some sense it’s good for the producers to the extent that they can continue to make money off old things without firing up the printing presses again, though at the prices they will sell them at and the availability of the stuff for free online, I’m not sure how much money they’re actually going to make. Not only is it free from Bit Torrent, but you never have to worry about any DRM glitches. So there’s the argument that, if they want to sell these things, they should make them so cheap that it’s not worth taking any sort of risk on Bit Torrent, and that they should make it available. Sure, maybe a lot of people won’t pay for it, but they’ll make more money in the end than they do if they put together a package at a price and with restrictions that people won’t abide by.

From a practical standpoint, I think this is wrong for two reasons. First, people who aren’t geeks really don’t seem to care all that much about DRM. Kindle and its offspring have demonstrated that people are willing to pay what are really outrageous prices when the delivery system is sound. Even before music downloading went from AAC to MP3, Apple was sitting pretty.

Second, I am becoming increasingly convinced that people internalize price. That art, when sold cheaply, becomes cheap. Someone that pays $15 for a CD is likely to have an investment in that artist. Someone that pays a couple bucks for the three songs off the CD that they want will likely forget about the artist. They won’t have an attachment. They won’t - for lack of other things to listen to - listen and relisten to the CD until they find out that there are actually four other songs that they come to like. So while from a fan’s standpoint - to the extent that fans are willing to concede that the record labels, artists, and the like should be compensated for their trouble, which isn’t always the case - it shouldn’t matter to the record labels whether they make $1000 selling a copy to 100 people or the same amount selling to 400 since the marginal costs are so low, there’s an argument to be made that making their product cheap actually does do them harm, by making the services they provide seem less valuable. And from an artist’s standpoint, by making their music more disposable.

More on this to come.

Will’s post regarding the Hellspawn reminded me of something I haven’t thought of a lot in recent memory, save for an incident out a couple weeks ago when I was verbally savaged for using the “r-word” (for the uninitiated, there is a major movement to treat the word “retard” the same as the N-word; since the site speaks for itself, I offer a balancing opinion from the Washington post).

My precise wording: “in American classrooms, class proceeds at the pace of the slowest retard.” The person in the discussion who took offense, took great offense because she has a brother who is “developmentally challenged” and she really, really, really doesn’t like the use of that word.

In the larger scope, however, I refer back to my 3rd grade English class. In my grade school, we had a couple of “developmentally challenged” individuals. Not enough to constitute their own classroom, as Will had in his day minding the Hellspawn; instead, there was a special-ed teacher on staff for them who had them most of the day. To “innovate” around the difficulties of minding them (she couldn’t eat during normal lunch periods, instead having to mind her charges at the “special table” in the cafeteria/gym), the school decided to kill three birds with one stone. Bird #1 was that she needed a special lunch period. Bird #2 was that when she was eating, someone else had to “mind the hellspawn.” Bird #3 was that, due to state regulations, each of them had to spend “one class period with age-appropriate peers for socialization.”

In other words, the class period right after lunch was when her charges were farmed out to the other teachers of the school, dropped into their classes for “socialization” while the special ed teacher ate her lunch.

My 3rd grade year, we got “Ricky.” Ricky was one of the types who if you put his problems into a neat dossier, would doubtless generate sympathy. His parents were poor. Kenny McCormick-level poor. He was one of several (as in, “poor people who don’t get the idea of birth control or are religiously opposed to it” numerous) children, at least half of which were also “developmentally challenged.” He had physical deformities in addition to mental, deformities which if you got him to “smile for the camera” would, again, lead towards a sympathy reaction. His level of developmental problems meant that most of the day, he was barely doing preschool-level tasks instead of 3rd-grade tasks. He really, really liked the stuffed animals his parents tended to give him (rather than giving him breakable toys or anything that could be used as a weapon). It is not impossible, and indeed quite likely, that his health and development problems and those of his siblings were related to or exacerbated by the fact that his mother was a chain-smoker and alcoholic who had neither refrained from, nor limited, her usage of either during any of her pregnancies.

What the dossier would leave out is the following: he fit the definition of “hellspawn” almost perfectly. He was verbal without being understandable, communicating in a combination of grunts, groans, moans, and screams. He had severe impulse control issues, in that he had no impulse control at all. He would, when feeling balked or ignored, throw temper tantrums that involved physical violence with the strength of body that somehow seems to be a trademark of certain “developmentally challenged” individuals who never, ever, ever hold back from maximum. He had a predilection for throwing things - HARD. The stuffed animals didn’t really hurt. The hardcover books he liked to throw more, did. He was not above biting, and did in fact bite our teacher on at least two occasions hard enough to draw blood. He was such a disruption that for purposes of our English class over the course of that year, we probably got through 20% of what we were supposed to get through, and that only because after the second biting incident, the school actually did manage to remove him from the socialization aspect and found a teacher (the gym teacher, it turned out) who they could assign to watching him 1-on-1 during the time the special ed teacher was getting her lunch. His “socialization time” the remainder of the year was limited to the gym teacher keeping a 1-on-1 eye on him during recess periods, where he generally ran in circles off to one side while everyone else was on the playground equipment.

Admittedly, Ricky is an extreme case. However, when confronted with people who in the educational system insist that “mixing classes” is the “fair way” to get scores up and insist that the slower kids will “learn from the advanced kids”, I cannot help but remember the year my English class was saddled with Ricky, and the fact that even with lesser students in the class who are not such extreme cases, class must necessarily move at the “pace of the slowest retard” and one sufficiently disruptive student can ruin the school year for up to 29 other kids.

I was somewhat reluctant to password protect my WiFi. Having leeched off neighbors’ WiFi after a couple of moves until I could get my own Internet up, I felt hypocritical not extending the same courtesy to others. But ultimately, the desire for security won out. Specifically my fear that someone might use my connection for something untoward. Basically, I didn’t want to end up like this guy:

Lying on his family room floor with assault weapons trained on him, shouts of “pedophile!” and “pornographer!” stinging like his fresh cuts and bruises, the Buffalo homeowner didn’t need long to figure out the reason for the early morning wake-up call from a swarm of federal agents.

That new wireless router. He’d gotten fed up trying to set a password. Someone must have used his Internet connection, he thought.

“We know who you are! You downloaded thousands of images at 11:30 last night,” the man’s lawyer, Barry Covert, recounted the agents saying. They referred to a screen name, “Doldrum.”

“No, I didn’t,” he insisted. “Somebody else could have but I didn’t do anything like that.”

“You’re a creep … just admit it,” they said.For two hours that March morning in Buffalo, agents tapped away at the homeowner’s desktop computer, eventually taking it with them, along with his and his wife’s iPads and iPhones.

Within three days, investigators determined the homeowner had been telling the truth: If someone was downloading child pornography through his wireless signal, it wasn’t him. About a week later, agents arrested a 25-year-old neighbor and charged him with distribution of child pornography. The case is pending in federal court.

I don’t know if such SWAT teams exist in Callie. But it’s a headache no matter how you look at it. Of course, in addition to getting the wrong guy, there’s the question of whether something like this is really “SWAT team” material:

The trend towards the militarization of the police, brought to us first by the drug war, is quite disturbing. I am all for arresting people who break the law, but military approaches to law enforcement turn citizens, who are presumed innocent (lest we forget) into presumed enemies of the state. This is not an appropriate approach, especially when dealing with something as tenuous as an IP address for evidence. Even if a given cybercrime did originate in a given location, there is no way to know which person in said household committed the crime. To bust through the door, toss people to the ground and then start sorting things out is not what I want out of law enforcement agencies in a democracy.

There are two main justifications for this sort of raid. The first is that they fear retaliation and have to gain control of the situation quickly. The second is the fear of destroying evidence - in the case of drugs, flushing them down the toilet. There is very little reason to believe that either is the case here. Child pornography consumption does not exactly equate with “armed and dangerous.” And while it’s possible that they can delete the stuff, it’s getting harder and harder to delete stuff that cannot be recovered.

Further, these raids are non-trivial events. They are, in a sense, a punishment in itself. If they fear that they are being assaulted by hooligans, they can get their gun and end up dead on the floor. Or they could survive and spend the rest of their lives in prison for accidentally killing a police officer (though, if they get a police officer, they’re probably dead in any event). If they have a dog, there’s not a bad chance that the dog will be killed in the process. Even leaving aside the psychological effects, you’re putting this person at great risk.

Sometimes, it may be necessary. But it’s pretty hard to argue that - as bad as we may consider child pornography to be - accused consumers are a particularly dangerous group.

World War II was a long time ago. So long ago, in fact, that despite programs to search out “escaped” Nazis indicted for war crimes, it’s pretty much assumed that within the next 5-10 years, the search can be called off because they will all have died of old age anyways.

So it’s not surprising that there’s a lot of media attention following John Demjanjuk, a man who’s been put on trial multiple times on suspicion of… well I’m not sure, really. It’s very confusing. Allegations of tainted evidence pop up. In a rare show of competence for them, the Wikipedia entry on the man (at least at the moment I type this) is fairly balanced and informative, so I’ll link it as well.

In the larger scope, I find it troubling to watch this case. Whether Demjanjuk was a POW (as a Ukrainian citizen taken when the Nazis rolled over Europe), or whether he was a minor guard, it’s been established that the original charges - all based on mistaken identification - that he was “Ivan the Terrible”, a Nazi torturer later identified by Soviet records as being an entirely different man by the name of Ivan Marchenko. At this point, we’ve got a man who apparently lived a relatively clean and law-abiding life in the US for more than 30 years. He is 91 years old, in a wheelchair, and in such poor health that court sessions had to be limited to 90 minutes per day. A lot of the evidence is in doubt - especially certain evidence recently declassified by the FBI in the US, which the German court decided not to even consider.

I really don’t know what to make of it all. For those who are seeking some form of closure from WWII, perhaps it makes sense to go after everyone - however minor - who was involved in anything to do with the Nazis. On the other side of the argument, a lot of people went along with what was done because, well, they were scared of being shot or worse yet, being put into those conditions themselves.

Not everyone is able to stand up and say “I will not betray principles no matter what the coercion.” And absent some other intervening reason, or proof that someone didn’t just follow the orders given them at gunpoint but actively helped to organize the event, I’m not certain what good this particular prosecution really does.

“How was your day today?”

“A lot better than expected.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. A 7th grader was shot and killed last week.”

????

“Well, a lot of the kids were at his funeral today. And most of the rest of them kind of sullen. Made my day much easier.”

“That’s awful.”

“Absolutely. For the kid.”

How much do we really want to hear about someone else getting sexually assaulted? Why do we want to hear it? Does it help us? Or has “coming forward” just become, in many cases, an automatic, lurid way to get attention while bumming a lot of other people out?

Back when I wrote for newspapers*, I was at the center of a newsroom fight about this topic. The alleged victim wasn’t famous like Lara Logan; she was a single young welfare mother. Here’s what happened: She came to a young female reporter (not me) offering to tell her story about being raped. She wanted her name used. Young female reporter jumped all over it.

Young female reporter was working the Saturday shift, when there was a skeleton crew of management and thus, less scrutiny over what went in the paper. In a day, she wrote a huge story containing every graphic detail that the alleged victim told her about how an older man had said he wanted to go into business with her; developed a relationship with her; eventually got her out into a car on a supposed business trip, took her out to the mountains and proceeded to bind her and rape her for a day. Oh, and he still owed her money he’d promised to pay her for “work.” The cops arranged for her to call him on a pretext of getting money he supposedly owed her, and got him to come to her house, where they were waiting to arrest him.

How do you feel so far reading this? Good? No? Lucky you, you only have to read a few sentences about it. The newspaper’s Sunday readers were treated to a huge front-page story, complete with a photo of the alleged victim looking sad, and a sidebar about the perils of acquaintance rape. Her allegations were described over 80 or 90 column inches, as compared to about 12 to 15 for a regular news story.

All the quotes and information came from the alleged victim, except for a brief quote from a police officer calling her “brave.” Oh, and the usual no-comment from the alleged perp and/or his attorney, if he had one by then, I can’t remember. Oh, and the police report. Because that’s all there was, was a police report and an arrest. No hearing, no trial, we were nowhere close to that yet. No physical evidence, no other witnesses. Just a woman claiming that her business partner raped her, then she went home, called the police, had him arrested, and had them write down her account. That’s it.

Was it enough to protect the paper from a lawsuit? Yes. Was that enough to merit an 80-inch front-page Sunday spread glorifying her as the poster girl for date rape? I didn’t think so. I voiced my objections strongly, which led to conflicts.

The staff was divided into three camps: 1) Those who thought the alleged victim was “brave for coming forward” (mostly women).

2) Those who thought we’d been sickeningly irresponsible to print a detailed account of some publicity-seeking, random woman’s allegations about some random man based on nothing more than a police report (mostly women).

3) People who just wanted to stay the hell out of it (mostly men).

It’s one thing to seek justice for a sexual assault. It’s another thing to seek publicity. At least that was the Camp 2 view. Camp 1 seemed to think that anyone who’s been raped is doing society a heroic deed by talking about it to as many people as possible, and everyone is obligated to listen and applaud. Also, Camp 1 thought, incorrectly, that there’s no way police would arrest a man based only on a woman’s allegation, with no physical evidence. (Whether the district attorney actually prosecutes the case may be a different matter, but we weren’t there yet.) I couldn’t tell how much the two beliefs were intertwined, because members of Camp 1 didn’t talk to Camp 2 for a few days, then we just kind of tried to avoid mentioning it again.

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*Print reporters and TV reporters are natural enemies. That’s because most TV reporters are obnoxious self-promoting bimbos, like Lara Logan.

I’ve literally been called in for every day for last week and next. I think teachers have a lot of sick days to burn or something. I even have a full day at the high school, which is a first (every HS assignment I’ve gotten has been half-day).

Right now I’m in the middle of my first four-day stint. I was initially excited about the prospect. One of the frustrations of substitute teaching is that you get to know the kids a little bit and then you’re on. I get excited when I see repeats. So a four day assignment? Awesome! Then I found out it was special ed, which lessened my excitement somewhat. But it was special ed at the middle school, which I’ve done before. Different teacher’s name, but the special ed room is chalk full of teachers, so it could be the same students regardless.

It wasn’t. It was, of course, the worst set of students I have ever had. I was warned. The teacher referred to them as “little pieces of…” {ask the student who arrived early to cover his ears} “shit.” Her expectations were basically null. Take a standardized test. They get as long as they need. They should finish in two days, but they have all four. Here’s the science lesson. If you get through this lesson, meant for one day, over the course of your tenure, you did okay.

The “special ed” in this case has a few kids with some learning disabilities, and surely a few others with disabilities I can’t see (a couple of them I had in regular classes and it never occurred to me that they would be special ed material), but mostly kids that needed to be put somewhere and for some reason not to the alternative school. Most of them seem not far below average, though a couple are. One student in particular had to answer a question about his opinion on evil corporations cutting down the forest and disrupting nature so that they can make evil profits. The “correct” answer was in the question (”I think it’s bad.”) but he couldn’t answer it. So I said, “Just put down what you think.” To which, he said with great exasperation, “I DON’T THINK!” He’s one of my favored students, along with an awesome girl who is Daria Morgandorffer with Aspergers. The rest would prefer throw stuff at one another or hit each other with rulers. I do what I can, but it isn’t much. Can you send a whole class to detention? A couple kids did get detention. One for throwing something right after I told him not to (easy to single that out) and another (not one of the few with obvious retardation, though clearly a kid with issues) for dropping his pants and farting in the face of another student. That was Day One. Day Two said kids refused to do their work because “I have detention this afternoon. I’ll do it then.”

So I’m two days in and dreading tomorrow and the next day something fierce. Fortunately, I had a weekend to unwind. But I’m not looking forward to tomorrow.

Almost any time I sub and talk to one of the other department teachers, they say “Look, if you have any problems, send them over to my room.” I got no such offers this time around. Over lunch I was asked by a teacher that I knew from having subbed for her before how the day was going. I told her it was a challenge in as diplomatic terms as I could. Another teacher - who is next door to me - said, “You’re just doing fantastic. I don’t think that they’ve ever been this quiet!”

Why haven’t we heard from any of Lara Logan’s rescuers? (2/17)

Why no one wants to question Lara Logan’s fishy one-source story. (2/21)

What the Lara Logan press release should have said. (2/22)

Egyptians: Really into pinching. (2/23)

Journalist witness: Logan not sexually assaulted. (3/2)

Lara Logan: Possibly the most manipulative, dishonest person on television. Yes, that’s saying a lot. (5/19)

One thing I do like about Lightweight Lara Logan. (5/21)

“Coming forward:” How newsworthy is sexual assault, really? (5/23)

It’s pretty cool that we’ve advanced to the point where a 40-year-old woman can still make it as a bimbo. It’s great that I’m able to have this argument without being accused of being an old hag picking on some 25-year-old. Lara Logan is 40!

Society, medical care, nutrition, and makeup sure have come a long way.

It has become a widespread belief in some circles that our smaller-population states are pampered with outsized representation in the Senate (and, to a lesser extent, the Electoral College and the House of Representatives - though in actuality the best and least represented states in the House both have one rep). While this is true, without these mechanisms these states would be outright ignored. Even in the current system, the larger states arguably have undue influence. Even when a state like Montana or New Mexico is up for grabs, presidential candidates aren’t going to spend a whole lot of time there. Even though California and Texas are not up for grabs, Republicans will spend some time in the former and Republicans in the latter for fundraising reasons alone.

Of course, the complaints are not without merit. If you look at donor and beneficiary states, you see not only the red/blue distinction that many comment on, but an urban/rural distinction as well (the major exception being the rust belt). It’s a fair point. Also worth noting, however, is that in some cases it just costs more on a per-capita basis to service a large and sparse state than a primarily urban one. So if Wyoming is getting its mail, and New York is getting its mail, but on a per-tax-dollar basis the former costs a lot more than the latter, they’re not exactly getting a freebie. As Americans, they’re getting the same services as their urban counterparts because they, like their urban counterparts, are Americans and thus due the same services. The same goes for roads. It was Washington DC that drew the map for Montana. Should Washington then complain that it costs so much to service Montana’s roads in comparison to Rhode Island’s?

It also overlooks the fact that these states are often getting this money in return for a service. Surely, we wouldn’t consider a NASA engineer* to be the moral equivalent of someone getting federal food stamps, would we? But when people talk about beneficiary and donor states, they often fail to make these distinctions. Further, it’s advantageous not just to North Dakota’s economy, but also the United States government when we put nuclear silos there rather than upstate New York because it’s cheaper. The same goes for Nevada* and Utah accepting nuclear waste, because it’s safer (except for Nevada and Utah, that is). And military bases in Kansas instead of California. It wouldn’t save the government any money to put these in any of the donor states. It’s not unlike saying that my car mechanic is a “beneficiary” because I pay him for goods and services and he doesn’t pay me (directly) for any.

Of course, you can even put these aside and you’ll probably still also find a disparity. Partially due to per-capita income, but also because rural states do exploit the senate in order to get earmarks and the like. I am not wholly unsympathetic to the undemocratic nature of it.

But the big states gain from the fact that they have larger congressional delegations. And so they have natural alliances that they can then use to get outsized influence. It’s easier for eleven reps in Chicago to team up than the sole representatives from Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas to team up with the two reps in Idaho, the three in Utah and Nebraska even if they represent roughly the same population. Further, even under the current system, the big states get almost all of the presidents.

The last 13 Presidents have come from Illinois*, Texas, Arkansas, Texas, California, Georgia, Michigan, California, Texas, Massachusetts. Kansas, Missouri, New York. Clinton is exceptional and Eisenhower’s base was the mighty US Army rather than sparsely-populated Kansas. All the others come from one of the 20 most-populous states.

So too do most defeated Presidential nominees. Since FDR beat Wendell Wilkie the losers have come from: Arizona, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Kansas, Texas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Georgia, Michigan, South Dakota, Minnesota, Arizona, California, Illinois, New York.

Note the paucity of small-state nominees. Arizona wasn’t a major state when Goldwater ran while Bob Dole (Kansas), Mondale (Minnesota), McGovern (South Dakota) and Humphrey (Minnesota) were each Washington figures. If it’s tough to win the Presidency from the Senate it’s even harder to do so as a former governor of a small state.

Clinton, again, is the only ex-governor to reach the White House from one of the 30 least-populous states. Those states account for roughly 25% of the population and, obviously, 60% of governors and yet they produce very few successful candidates.

There are some good reasons for that: what works in a small state may not scale to national level and, just as importantly, the governor of a small state lacks names recognition in major media markets and, rather importantly, in major media newsrooms. Sure, you might have done a good job in your tiny, empty state thousands of miles from Washington but that means nothing on the national stage and it certainly doesn’t earn you the right to be taken seriously by sagacious pundits and handicappers.

All of this is more than compensated for by Senate representation, of course, and the electoral college benefit the senate seats give the small states (Al Gore would have won in 2000 is the EC counts had been determines solely by House representation).

Now (leaving aside for the moment the Chicago vs UT-ID-MT-WY-ND-SD-NE equation), in a perfectly democratic system, the response would be “screw the small states because they’re such a pitiful minority. If you want more representation, move!” But while we live in a democracy, we do not live under one whose primary goal is to represent the view of a majority of the people to the exclusion of everyone else. The states were designed to mean something. Maybe you consider them anachronistic, and in a sense maybe they are. But while you can argue “the founders never accounted for the kind of population differential you see between California and Wyoming”, it’s also the case that the initial compromise did intend for their to be disparities.

Of course, I am not an unbiased observer in this, seeing as how I live in a small state with outsized senate representation. But the same “move!” argument made above can be made here. If it’s that important to you, you’re more than free to join me in Arapaho. If you are disinclined to because of the lack of job opportunities or city amenities, than just consider it a bone thrown our way: We get maintained roads and mail service, too.

* - Florida (NASA), Texas (NASA), and Nevada (nuclear waste) are actually donor states. You get the point, though.

I had a dream last night that I got some random girl pregnant. When I had to confess this to my wife, I started with, “I have some good news and some bad news. The good news… it’s official: I’m fertile. We shouldn’t have any reproduction problems on my end.”

In the same way that when you have dreams about falling you always wake up before you hit the ground, I woke up before she responded to the bad news.

Please, commenters, criticism should be informed of the entire post and supporting links. I refuse to be exhausted by repetition. Comments that force me to repeat prior statements, or that are personally abusive, or that praise her without adding to the debate, will be deleted. Those are all typical tricks of the crazed (male) Logan fans who scan the Internet for criticism of her. I left the No. 2 comment up as a good example.

Finally got around to reading the transcript of Lara Logan’s CBS “60 Minutes” interview about her alleged, fishy “brutal and sustained sexual assault” in Tahrir Square. Sorry, I’ve got kids. They take up time. And I knew this would really piss me off. It’s even worse than I thought. Lara Logan is cold scheming evil, in a “To Die For”/”Wild Things” kind of way.

Before I get to the worst con she’s pulled, by the way, know who doesn’t have kids? Lara Logan. She has one child. [Edit: A kind commenter draws my attention to the fact that her Wikipedia bio is not up to date, and she apparently popped out two kids one year after the other. She must have an indulgent boss. The facts as to her adulterous, suspiciously well-timed “accidental” pregnancy, however, are correct.] So why did she keep going on how she kept thinking of her “children”during this unwitnessed (and counter-witnessed!), so-called brutal sexual attack? Well, you see, Logan has a stepdaughter. When Logan got pregnant with her one and only child, her current husband was married to another woman. That’s the woman whose husband she stole’s child, not Logan’s. That girl’s mother is still alive, you know, notwithstanding that when she got the news of Logan’s very convenient “accidental” pregnancy (yeah, sure, a childless late-30s professional having an affair with a married man gets “accidentally” pregnant with his baby she keeps) she reportedly went to the hospital with an overdose. I wonder how that poor woman feels watching this cheater claim her daughter on national TV. The underling reporter who did the interview surely knew Logan’s biographical details, so when he said “your daughter and your son,” that had to be at her instruction.

Such a well-timed interview, so well-calculated for one last big burst of public sympathy and publicity. Done just when Logan’s first fix of publicity had died down, and she’d almost been eclipsed by real, honest reporter/assault victims like Lynsey Addario. No Obama phone call for Addario, though. No poster-girl status. And … not a single person questioning or disputing Addario’s credible, unsensationalized account of her mistreatment at the hands of her Libyan captors. And conveniently done just as Logan, whose only real professional asset is her appearance, turns 40 — getting very close to the age of the superior but older female reporter who was fired for her several years ago. Suddenly, women feel we have to sympathize with Logan.

Frankly, it’s scary that CBS would let this go on. What happened to critical reporting? What happened to “If your mother says she loves, you, check it out?” It just doesn’t seem to matter that there were eyewitnesses who dispute Logan’s account — and, more importantly, three months later, still not a single witness who supports it other than Logan herself. Not one supporting witness to support her claim that there was a 20 to 30 minute attack where chunks of hair were ripped out of her scalp, she was raped with hands (as she put it), and stripped naked in public. The only witnesses to any harassment at all, ironically, were people who said it didn’t appear that much was going on, at worst she may have been groped over her clothes, and she was protected by a chain of male volunteers. There were no women around when she got to the soldiers. Even without the disputing witness acounts, Logan’s counter-story just sounds like so much melodramatic Hollywood hogwash:

Logan: And I almost fell into the lap of this woman on the ground who was head to toe in black, just her eyes, I remember just her eyes, I could see.

Pelley: Wearing a chador.

Logan: Yes. And she put her arms around me. And oh my God, I can’t tell you what that moment was like for me. I wasn’t safe yet, because the mob was still trying to get at me. But now it wasn’t just about me anymore. It was about their women and that was what saved me, I think. The women kind of closed ranks around me.

Where are these saintly female saviors? How come there weren’t any witnesses interviewed for this segment, except a brief bit from her producer, who doesn’t seem to provide any support for the story except that Logan seemed very upset, like a “rag doll”? Why don’t we get to hear from “Ray,” the former special forces security guy who should be able to support her account of being stripped naked? All we get is Logan’s interviewer commenting that “Ray” said her sleeve was torn from her coat (probably by Ray himself, because he was supposedly holding that sleeve in a death grip). And how is it no one claims to have seen those cell phone photos Logan claims people were taking? Where is anyone who witnessed or took part in this gory, protracted attack and dramatic rescue?

Why did Scott Pelley ask Logan absolutely nothing about the fact that eyewitness accounts seem to dispute her story? It would have been so easy, and it could have been done without being mean. “You’ve probably heard that there were others in the square who claim they saw you there, and that it didn’t seem to them you were being sexually attacked.” I mean, they don’t have to actually interview Mexican photojournalist Temoris Grecko (and here’s his response to her interview, as well as to her crazed fans who wanted his head on a platter for reporting what he and others saw), but at least ask Logan something that gives her a chance to respond to his account of the incident, and the accounts of other eyewitnesses he quoted. It’s irresponsible not to give someone a chance to respond to that. Unless you know they don’t have a decent response.

Logan isn’t brave. She was treated with kid gloves in this interview, just as she’s been treated with kid gloves across the media. There’s nothing brave about a press release, and there’s nothing brave about keeping quiet for three months while the people you conned wring their hands over you, then telling your story your way to someone who won’t question a damned thing. It’s the most cowardly way she could have handled it. It’s the way someone acts when they’re lying.

Yes, Logan conned me and is still conning a lot of other people, and I’m frothing mad about it. So let’s go to someone who can discuss this unemotionally: “DC Dave,” (I found him at Female Faust’s post on the subject. We women do get emotional about sexual assault.) here:

Filming and reporting had gone just fine for about an hour before the camera battery went down, we are told for the first time. This is a convenient way of dealing with my question in part 1 as to why we had not been shown any pictures of what happened subsequent to the one picture we have been shown over and over of Logan looking concerned in the crowd’s midst. [Sheila says: I disagree that she looked concerned in that photo, she had a small smile and just appeared to be looking at something.]

They may have addressed the one-photo criticism—however implausibly—but they provide no explanation for their four-day reporting delay. They also have no explanation for the last-minute redundant coverage of the Tahrir Square celebration by 60 Minutes in this era of financial hardship by the news networks. CBS already had its live coverage of the event. What was the 60 Minutes story to have been in the absence of the “sexual assault?”

They do have an explanation as to how the group of rescuing Egyptian women came upon the scene. The attacking melee was somehow “swept along” until it encountered this knot of local women in the crowd. Only then, we are told, did things begin to change for the better.

What really cries out for better explanation in this new version of events is how the six-man crew failed so utterly to protect Logan. Before, with the “got separated” story, one could imagine terrible things perhaps happening to Logan that the crew knew nothing about. The scene as now painted, though, has the menace arriving with their full knowledge, and Logan, the one person the crew was there to guard, was somehow culled out by the mob. Had I been interviewing McClellan I would not have wanted so much to hear about Logan’s wounds; I would have wanted to hear about his wounds.

It is perhaps significant that the producer of this latest 60 Minutes piece was none other than Robert Anderson. This is the same person who, in the Vince Foster case, put the following complete lie into the mouth of Mike Wallace: “The forensic evidence shows that the fatal bullet had been fired into Foster’s mouth from the gun found in Foster’s hand and that Foster’s thumb had pulled the trigger.” (See the appendix to Part 6 of “America’s Dreyfus Affair.”)

…

Notice the contrast in journalistic professionalism between this account and what we have been told by CBS and the Murdoch news organs. Grecko names his witnesses and tells you something about each, making it easier to check his story out. CBS didn’t even give us the name of the hospital in New York City where Logan was supposedly sent for several days. It certainly makes you wonder if there really was any such hospital to name.

If [Temoris] Grecko’s is the correct account, which to this observer has a much greater ring of truth, what CBS did with its four-day reporting delay was not to hatch a story out of whole cloth, but to figure out a way to put their propaganda spin on the story. The real story would have done nothing for the larger mission of the U.S. mainstream press, which these days no doubt includes addressing the growing Zionist propaganda crisis …

My favorite line is the last:

A human chain of young men protecting the mildly harassed accused Israeli agent, Lara Logan, just wouldn’t do.

But it looks like Logan and CBS will all get away with it. The story tells too many people what they want to believe.

And that’s why CBS won’t fire her, even if a big media outlet finally picks up the real story and she’s exposed. Her superiors were in on it.

I can’t believe GMA couldn’t tell it was a crock just from looking at “Kerry Campbell” (probably not her real name). Does this look like a pageant mother? Does this child look like a pageant princess? Doesn’t anyone remember the immaculately groomed and coiffed JonBenet Ramsey and her mother Patsy?

Instead it turns out that Mom is a child welfare services … consumer… desperate to get on TV. She lied.

When I first heard this story, I envisioned some crazed upper-crust striver. Everyone did. There was good reason for that mental picture: The pageant circuit costs serious money. Look at these photos — the hair, the outfits, the accessories, the glamorshots. Then look at this clearly amateur “pageant” photo in the Daily Mail of young “Britney” up against a plain white wall, wearing some clumsily applied makeup and an inexpensive party dress, with her hair done “mussy.”

Not an overweight child, but not pageant weight either. And then look at the mom — first and foremost, she’s obese. Not just mom pudge, actually obese. And yet look at the tight, cheap, light clothing she’s wearing (basically a long-sleeved T-shirt) that emphasizes her size rather than hides it — on national TV! That was the best outfit she had? And look at her skinned-back hair. That’s what I do with my hair when I haven’t had my hair done for a while — on which you’d bet I’d be dumping some major cash if I were going on national TV to promote my daughter’s pageant career.

No, Mom instead fits the profile of a child welfare target. which she is. Her daughter was removed from her care by child protective services and placed with relatives. My guess: She was removed for reasons that have nothing to do with getting Botox. Social workers interviewed the child, and perhaps mom’s relatives/friends, and found out the usual: Substance abuse, and/or mental health problems, serious neglect, physical discipline, maybe domestic violence between mom and a boyfriend. And no surprise, there’s no dad in the picture. No surprise either that mom’s apparently unemployed, and presumably on public assistance.

The stories say “while the matter is investigated,” (lol, “investigations” are usually just a few quick interviews) but let me tell you how that works legally. They can’t remove a child from her parents without filing a petition that alleges specific reasons a child is at risk of serious physical and/or emotional harm in their care. It has to be cleared by a judge. I’ve seen a lot of lightweight allegations in dependency, but never one regarding parents taking too much care of their child’s appearance. Gossip magagines love to talk about how tortured poor little Suri Cruise must be, wearing those designer shoes and going to fancy restaurants with her parents and staying up late. If only that was the “abuse” the kids I see were going through.

So much for our hyper-ambitious pageant momster. The Sun, and then Good Morning America, jumped at a story that backed the belief that mothers who put their children in beauty pageants are dangerously obsessive about their appearance. It helped people make the larger point that society puts too much emphasis on physical beauty. And when a story tells people something they already believe, it’s easy to con them with flimsy evidence.

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Jezebel reports her real name is Sheena Upton (credit to TMZ):

Did you find hard to believe that a mom would really inject her 8-year-old daughter with botox? Maybe you should’ve trusted your instincts.

And she’s down in Los Angeles County now for some reason, so her child welfare investigation must be through L.A. County DCFS (the department the Board of Supervisors just took over because they’re unhappy not enough kids are being yanked out of homes). Good luck, Sheena — you’re gonna need it.

Well now,

Last week I went to Barnes and Noble. As I approached the back of the store, I noticed a big display promoting The Nook for children. For some reason, this didn’t sit well with me. It’s not that I have anything against electronic readers. I bought one for my husband on his birthday. He often travels for work, and in the past has been at the mercy of the airport to find something to read. With the Kindle, he can download books to read for long plane rides. He can pack and carry it conveniently. The difference is he is an adult. For children, I believe actually holding a book with pages and pictures holds much more value.

IF OUR CHILDREN AREN’T READING MOBY DICK BY CANDLELIGHT WHILE CHAINED IN A BASEMENT, WE’RE NOT DOING IT RIGHT!!!!

Are we seriously so scared of everything electronic that we’re worried about our kids reading books on an electronic device? It just smells too much like a game or some crap (even if we personally enjoy the device). Truth be told, the author has a good point in asking what the appeal is of a reader that can’t show pictures*. But then again, shouldn’t we be asking ourselves, why are those pictures there? Shouldn’t these kids be reading Moby Dick? Moby Dick doesn’t have any damn pictures. We’re coddling them with something that they might actually enjoy instead of what would be enlightening (and what we can brag about to other parents).

Seriously, in what universe do we simultaneously say that pictures are good because they spark interest, but electronic devices are bad because they spark the wrong kind of interest when we’re talking about reading, either way. And suddenly, after endless complaints about how reading is better than video because it gives the imagination a work out, we’re going to argue that traditional books are better because they have (formerly imagine-crushing, but now suddenly imagination-enhancing) illustrations on them? In what sane world do we think a kid reading raw text should instead be reading a book with a ridiculously large but aesthetically amusing red dog on it?

Personally, I’m down with the big red dog. For the younger kids, anyway, it is likely to be more appealing. And if it makes reading more appealing, I’m all about give-a-little-get-a-little. But if for some reason my kid would prefer to read from an ebook, without the bright color pictures, all the better. Even if it has batteries and buttons on it. Satan’s tools.