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November 30, 2015
Not unlike American lawyers, have U.S. physicians become a profound embarrassment and disappointment?
Have American physicians become a gene pool-diluted embarrassment and disappointment?
Not unlike lawyers, medical doctors (MDs) are (1) very important--and probably more so than lawyers--in the overall scheme of things but (2) certainly no longer among the brightest bulbs our higher education system produces. In recent years, doctors not only let themselves be bullied by insurers but worst of all let patient care and patient service wane. Care and service is now a cruel, comical heartless ruse.
Anyone agree that American doctors have lost their way?
Hippocrates Refusing the Gifts of Artaxerxes, 1816, engraving Jean-Baptiste Raphael Urbain Massard (1775-1843) after painting by Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, 1792
Posted by JD Hull at 08:27 PM | Comments (0)
November 26, 2015
Aka Dr. Ruth: Karola Ruth Siegel is a major piece of work.
There is no one on earth quite like my friend Dr. Ruth. Holocaust survivor, soldier, sniper, grandmother, sex therapist, the subject of a play, New Yorker, mensch. Read the Washington Post feature about her in June around the time of her 87th birthday.
Posted by JD Hull at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)
November 21, 2015
American Pantheon: Anatasia Lin
Chinese-Canadian Anatasia Lin, 25, actress, model, Miss World Canada 2015 and China human rights advocate who testified before U.S. Congress in July of 2015.
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Posted by JD Hull at 10:35 PM | Comments (0)
November 20, 2015
Princeton, don't go there. WTF.
Thomas. Woodrow. Wilson (1856-1924)? Polymath, academic, progressive and internationalist? See, e.g., at NBC News Princeton University Agrees to Weigh Erasing Woodrow Wilson's Name
Opening game 1916
Posted by JD Hull at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)
November 19, 2015
Just because.
"Now let that guitar part in."
NOTE: Something is seriously wrong with at least 2 of the dancers.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:14 AM | Comments (2)
November 18, 2015
Examiner: U.S. House members huddle on their Obama ISIS-Syria problem.
In this morning's edition of the Washington Examiner, one of the few sane and evenhanded American conservative publications out there, reporter Charles Hoskinson writes House pushes Obama to get tough on ISIS. It begins:
House leaders are working to see what they can do to prod President Obama to take tougher action against the Islamic State in the wake of deadly terrorist attacks in Paris blamed on the extremist group.
Lawmakers may insert provisions into a fiscal 2016 omnibus spending bill being drafted calling for a comprehensive strategy backed by a more aggressive U.S. posture, and also are considering whether to add money to a war funding account, House Armed Services Chairman Mac Thornberry said Tuesday.
The Texas Republican is one of several committee chairmen on a task force created by House leaders to look at a number of concerns that have come up since the Paris attacks, which killed 129 and injured more than 350, and recommend new approaches.
The urgent matter on the agenda is an effort to seek a pause in the administration's plan to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees next year until a vetting process can be designed to ensure terrorists don't slip into the country with them. But Thornberry also noted that concerns have been raised about the Islamic State's continuing success in recruiting foreign fighters to join its forces in Syria and the group's ability to spread its ideas via social media, sometimes even inspiring "lone wolf" attacks.
Posted by JD Hull at 10:04 AM | Comments (0)
November 17, 2015
Beirut and Paris: 2 questions for Americans.
Okay, really 4 questions.
I'm curious:
1. Have last week's attacks in Beirut and central Paris changed or bolstered your views in any respect on American immigration policy? (They are beginning to change mine.) If so, how?
2. Do the attacks change who you might support for U.S. president? If so, how?
Posted by JD Hull at 09:12 AM | Comments (2)
November 14, 2015
On all Humanity: Pluralist Paris, November 13, 2015.
Our best thoughts tonight with all those who live/work/play in Planet Earth's hands-down best city. One hundred and forty nine dead when I last looked up at the news at 2:30 am Paris time. Look, President Obama is not my favorite president. As an internationalist American president, however, he has had no peer, is not likely to ever have one and broke new ground as a transformational global seer. He was right tonight. Modern Paris is a kind of uber-human zoo and living library of old verities and new truths. It picked up and stood sentry over everything fine and good to be salvaged from the spirit-shattering middle ages; it keeps adding more. An attack on Paris, the West's best face, and where the entire world reposes mankind's best thoughts, hopes, work and art, is indeed an attack on all humanity. Pierre Rousselin Haywood Wise Richard Nahem Philip Jenkinson. Lucy Andre. Joseph Andre. Hope you guys are okay.
Posted by JD Hull at 08:50 PM | Comments (0)
Helmut Heinrich Waldemar Schmidt (1918-2015)
Helmut Schmidt, German father figure and Chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982, died on November 10. He was 96. Schmidt was a brilliant, rude, savvy far-out mother. RIP, old man. See in this week's The Economist his obituary in Smoke and fire, as only TE can do one. Excerpts:
Helmut Schmidt did not just find fools tiresome. He obliterated them. The facts were clear and the logic impeccable. So disagreement was a sign of idiocy.
He was impatient, too, with his own party, which failed to realise the constraints and dilemmas of power. It wanted him to spend money West Germany did not have, and to compromise with terrorists who belonged in jail. He was impatient with the anti-nuclear left, who failed to realise that nuclear-power stations were safe, and that the Soviet empire thrived on allies’ weakness. And he was impatient with post-Watergate America, which seemed to have lost its will to lead.
In good causes and in bad he was imperious. His addiction to nicotine trumped convention and courtesy. He smoked whenever and wherever he felt like it, even in non-smoking compartments of railway carriages. “Can you ask Mr Schmidt to put his cigarette out?” a passenger asked the conductor. “Would you mind telling him yourself?” came the timid reply.
Yet his brains, eloquence and willpower were unmatched in German politics. They brought him through the Nazi period, thrown out of the Hitler Youth for disloyalty but with an Iron Cross for bravery. He was one-quarter Jewish, which he concealed when he married his wife Loki and needed to prove his Aryan background.
In post-war West Germany he flourished, making a successful career in Hamburg’s city government. By commandeering army units to deal with the floods of 1962 he broke a taboo, and the law, but gaining a deserved reputation as a doer.
Posted by JD Hull at 12:25 AM | Comments (0)
November 13, 2015
November 1993
The Internet now even reaches back and records things like "no comment" I dutifully said to Los Angeles Times reporters 22 years ago covering a U.S. Department of Justice Public Integrity Section investigation of a client the same age as my own father. See "Grand Jury Targets Wife of Former Congressman; Lee M. Anderson is named in court documents revealed during a hearing for an aide to her husband, Glenn M. Anderson".
We represented the congressman's Washington, D.C. Administrative Assistant, Lynn, Massachusetts native Jeremiah Bresnahan. For reasons I never quite understood, Bresnahan, a much-admired, much-loved educator and former Long Beach schools superintendant, agreed to work for Rep. Glenn Anderson in Washington, D.C. for a few years. At the time of the investigation, Rep. Anderson was suffering from dementia and was not of any help to me, the FBI and DOJ lawyers.
Bresnahan died in Martha's Vineyard in October of 2002. An ex-Marine who fought in the Inchon and Chosen Reservoir campaigns of the Korean War, Jeremiah was one of most courageous, unselfish, charismatic, funny, poised and witty humans I've known. While this was a 'good result' for him, I and others hated watching him go through it. I was very fond of him and still miss him. See the LA Times article and read between the lines. A (Yankee) fish out of water. Wrong DC job at the wrong time for the wrong family of California pols.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:01 PM | Comments (0)
November 09, 2015
395 years
On November 9, 1620, 102 mainly English puritans first caught sight of the shoreline of what is now Cape Cod, Massachusetts, eventually anchoring in the fishhook of Plymouth (later Provincetown) Harbor. The boat called the Mayflower was about 110 feet long and 25 feet across at its widest point. About 25 crew accompanied them. Called Pilgrims, the 102 settlers were from one of the many sects of alienated Protestant "separatists" in England and Europe at the time. However, the Pilgrims were unique in one important respect. They would brook no union of church and state.
Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor by William Halsall (1882)
Posted by JD Hull at 11:01 PM | Comments (0)
November 08, 2015
GOP/Dem nightmare as SNL humanizes Donald Trump and Dr. Carson unmasked as ditzed-out old lying turd.
The 2016 presidential election game has changed. Trump might win this thing. With an assist from Larry David mockingly calling Trump a racist on SNL last night, Donald Trump just humanized himself. Nicely done. Not that funny? Not the point, Campers. Plus Dr. Ben Carson's West Point and "growing up angry" revelations paint Carson at best as a kindly, talented and lying ditzed-out old turd. Watch for a huge Trump bump. Is this a great election cycle or what?
Posted by JD Hull at 09:18 AM | Comments (0)
November 07, 2015
Charon QC: Cricket and the Law.
See yesterday's Charon QC post Cricket and the Law, featuring Miller v. Jackson, a famous Court of Appeal of England and Wales decision on the torts of negligence and nuisance. When cricket balls are hit over the fence and onto the adjoining homeowners' property, what result? And in 2008, our West End man, now in Perth, Scotland, chatted up up Gordon Brown.
Soon after the case was decided, the plaintiffs moved their house.
Posted by JD Hull at 05:15 PM | Comments (0)
But aren't there ways we can get GenYs to quit even quicker?
See this thoughtful and valiant piece by Olivia Barrow, a reporter for the Milwaukee Business Journal, on "How to keep millennials around for more than two years." You're a tribute to the human spirit, Ms. Barrow.
Posted by JD Hull at 09:39 AM | Comments (0)
November 05, 2015
This is what lawyers are good for.
In the movies, at long last, there's a portrait of a lawyer I would claim as one of my own: James B. Donovan (1916-1970). Unfortunately, the exception, not the rule. See Steven Spielberg's new film Bridge of Spies.
DreamWorks
Posted by JD Hull at 10:43 PM | Comments (0)