May, 2010 archive
More Making Stuff Up 0
From Fact Check dot org:
They never stop.
We Need Single Payer 0
The alternative seems to be no payer.
The report linked below focuses on a man whose artificial leg was approved in advance, but whose insurance company is stalling payment of about a third of the bill. The whole thing is about three webpages long and is worth the five minutes it takes to read; it’s a wonderful tale of buck passing, blame shifting, and delay.
If UNC has not invented the Carolina Four-Corner, the health insurance companies would have.
A nugget (emphasis added):
(snip)
Dan Emmer of Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey said the outstanding fee in Fine’s case was due to internal processing errors — although the company’s customer service representatives told Fine that the delay was due to the charge being a “high dollar amount.”
“We apologize to Mr. Fine for this delay and, as our records indicate, that he had to contact us 10 times about this matter and it has still not been resolved,” the company said in a statement. “It will be resolved as soon as possible.”
The Internet Is a Public Place 0
We are all Philip Marlowe now:
“These sites are so spread out that a lot of users volunteering all these separate bits of information don’t think about all of it together in totality,” he says. “People think this social-networking stuff is so cool, but they don’t think about what’s going on behind the scenes.”
Read the story and be guided accordingly.
The End of the World Is Nigh 0
Scientific Blogging considers whose prediction of the end of the world is more likely correct: that of the Mayans or of the Norsemen.
The Norse were a lot more serious. They blew up stuff when Ages ended.
Read the whole thing, if only for the cool graphics of the constellations.
ODU Professors Protest Government Intimidation (Updated) 0
From the Richmond Times Dispatch:
In a letter, the professors accused Cuccinelli of “exploiting the powers of his office to engage in personal attacks on climate scientists” at U.Va. and elsewhere.
“These actions also threaten the political, economic and cultural well-being of our other state universities and the commonwealth of Virginia by discouraging top students and scholars from associating with our academic institutions,” states the letter, signed by 19 faculty members of Old Dominion.
I’ve tried to find a copy of the professors’ letter on line but so far have been unsuccessful.
Next: Cuccinelli demands expense reports from Gallileo.
Kook-kook-a-choo.
Afterthought: Check out the comments to the news story at the link.
Addendum:
Stephen D deconstructs Cuccinelli at the Booman Tribune.
Nailed 0
Don’t dry and drive in Chicago.
“It is not the same as biting a sandwich … it’s a voluntary disablement,” he said. “She might as well have been in the back seat making a sandwich.”
A Lake County jury of eight women and four men apparently agreed. After deliberating 3 1/2 hours Thursday, they found that Hunt, 49, of Morris was criminally reckless in the crash near Lake Zurich that killed 56-year-old Anita Zaffke on May 2, 2009.
No Ex-Governor Left Behind 0
Mike Hucksterbee needs to go back to fourth grade and study percentages. What he says just doesn’t add up.
Afterthought:
If Republicans stood for something other than making the rich richer and the poor poorer, they wouldn’t have to keep making stuff up.
QOTD 0
George Jean Nathan:
Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.
Voting is not a right. It is a duty.
“Yes, We’ve Got a Ways To Go, but We’ve Also Come a Very Long Way” 0
From the website:
From the transcript:
Settling In 0
My house in Delaware finally settled, three weeks later than originally scheduled.
Many thanks to my real estate agents, who truly earned their commission in moving things towards settlement with another agency which seems to have been settlement-paperwork-challenged.
If you are looking for agents with integrity in upper Delaware, email me. I can recommend some.
Now I can can stop looking over my shoulder.
Dustbiters 0
This week’s digit counters are starting to fall:
Late night additions:
Afterthought:
My father was, in his second career, a banker. He was throughout his career a man of integrity.
He would be mortified and embarrassed to know that the question every Friday is not, “Will a bank fail?” but “How many banks will fail?”
The Quest for Ratings 0
Senator Al Franken proposes an amendment to the Financial Reform bill to change how the investment ratings system works.
Remember that the ratings companies, who are paid by the outfits that issue the stuff that they rate, looked at junk and rated it AAA–“good as gold”–time and again.
Without that AAA rating, the junk would not have sold. The issuers, Goldman Sachs and the like, would shop around and play the ratings agencies off against each other.
The ratings outfits were crucial enablers of the junk derivatives market, and it was Wall Street’s desire to have derivatives to package into bonds that fed the housing bubble:
more sales–>more commissions–>more bonuses.
The Franken amendment looks like a good start.
The proposed bipartisan amendment is picking up broad support, including the endorsement of the Consumers Union consumer advocate group, Franken’s office said.
The amendment would set up a Credit Rating Agency Board that would choose which rating agency would rate an issuer’s debt. If such a board selected agencies arbitrarily, that could make ratings more impartial, some analysts say, even though the issuer would still pay the agency.
Church and State, State Is Wrong Dept. 0
The four-college district will pay $90,000 in legal fees to students Kandy Kyriacou and Ojoma Omaga, who were threatened with suspension after they prayed in class and after Kyriacou prayed with a sick instructor in the teacher’s office. The district also agreed to rescind its written warnings to the students, sent in late 2007 and early 2008.
My two or three regular readers know that I have strong beliefs about the separation of church and state. The first amendment not only prohibits the government from favoring or promoting religion, it also protects the free exercise of it. The religion clause of the first amendment cuts both ways.
The Constitution says,
According to the report excerpted above, the letter of discipline sent to the students said, in part, that the students
“may not engage in behavior that is disruptive to the teaching and learning process during class lecture and lab or in the offices of the faculty.”
The story does not say that the praying in class was in any way disruptive to the class; the fact of the settlement leads me to think that it was not. Had it been, it would be the disruption that was actionable, not the praying itself. I cannot see how voluntarily praying in a private office could be disruptive, unless accompanied by other behavior, such as shouting, screaming, or wall-pounding. If that were the case, it would be the shouting, screaming, or wall-pounding that was disruptive.
Furthermore, the settlement agreement contains this telling paragraph:
Click the picture for a larger image. Click here to see the full agreement.
The community college district is a public agency. For a public agency to act as if the mere act of praying, absent any other intrusive or inappropriate behavior, is disruptive in and of itself seems to me to be clearly “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion.
The college probably did well to cut and run.
Let’s Just Strip Search Everyone 0
Assurances of privacy be damned:
Months of joking culminated on Tuesday night, when Negrin attacked co-worker Hugo Osorno in an employee parking lot, according to an arrest report.
Diet of Worms . . . 0
. . . would be better than this. Emily Hill at the Guardian theorizes that weird celebrity behavior can be traced to weird celebrity diets:
I’ve just been reading Janusz Bardach’s Man is Wolf to Man, and am considering becoming a diet guru myself – proposing the gulag diet (1 x head of salted herring, 12 x hours of sawing down trees. No water. 500g of bread at the end of it = red-carpet-ready bone visibility guaranteed within one week).
Mythbusted: The Boston Tea Party and Taxes 0
The myth, taken from a wire story about John McCain at Raw Story (emphasis added):
The bust, from US History dot com (emphasis added): The taxes had actually been lowered.
The issue was not the tax. It was the retail price of legal tea. Lost in the mythmaking is that many of the leaders of the tea party, particularly John Hancock, were involved or associated with those involved in smuggling tea.