Pool stammered and said he disagreed with the implication that Jews control the media.
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[Alex Jones] … seemed uncharacteristically rattled as Ye began talking favorably about Hitler.
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Physicians are starting to see a subvariant of aphasia which they are calling afascia: The sudden inability to articulate your fascism, typically occurring when publicly confronted by a more vehement fascist speaker.
In two recent cases, recounted here, fascist adherents “stammered,” and were “rattled,” in the face of a fellow fascist who failed to disguise – as both of the adherents have learned to do – his murderous antisemitism.
Afascia robs its victims of the capacity to speak their fascism only in the specific circumstance of overpowering homicidal verbal challenge; so the good news is that it is highly treatable by the simple expedient of avoiding the most blatant and articulate fascists. Researchers are also looking into identifying fascists of this sort and subjecting them to The Soros Method: a short course of treatment during which they learn to reference the name George Soros whenever they want to say We need to bring back Hitler to kill all the Jews.
Well, no one better than University of North Carolina Professor Anita Louise Jackson to do that. She herself, in contemplating unique funding opportunities within the United States Medicare system, has earned many millions in personal compensation.
It was easy: She simply performed hundreds of unnecessary procedures on hundreds of hapless patients … some of whom must really have wondered why she felt the urge to stick balloons, repeatedly, up their perfectly healthy nasal passages.
But one has to pay through the nose for a megaMcMansion on a country club golf course… uh, I mean we the taxpayers have to pay through the nose for Anita Louise Jackson to live in a megaMcMansion on a country club golf course; and if it weren’t for those pesky lawyers at the Justice Department wondering why a dinky rural practitioner is “the nation’s top-paid provider of a special sinus-relief procedure,” all would be well: Our hard-earned tax dollars would go to maintain Jackson’s lifestyle, and the farmers of northeast central Carolina would continue to boast the clearest nasal passages in the world.
Dude seems, among other things, to have taken a bunch of way, way old people and convinced them they should have demanding, elaborate surgery because you know they have so many more quality years of life ahead!
Dude is accused of having
regularlyperformed as many as three complex surgical procedures at the same time, failed to participate in all of the “key and critical” portions of his surgeries, and forced his patients to endure hours of medically unnecessary anesthesia time as he moved between operating rooms and attended to other patients or hospital matters.
Or golf game or whatever. What the hell did they care? Most of them had dementia anyway.
The point was to “increase surgical volume, maximize UPMC and UPP’s revenue, and/or appease [the dude].” Appease cuz he’s apparently one hell of a greedy egomaniac/control freak who, it says here, “endangered patients and cost the government millions in false billings.”
But look. If you could immobilize hundreds of people for hours and now and then hack away at them while at the same time fielding calls from patients also interested in having their last days destroyed through unnecessary surgery, wouldn’t you do it?
PIttsburgh loves him cuz he brings in SOOO much money. Like Lady Bracknell, it has for years ‘decided entirely to overlook’ his sick and vile behavior.
In January 2015, when Dr. Luketich [that’s the dude] had left the OR while a patient was under anesthesia and couldn’t be found for more than an hour, [the head of surgical oversight] emailed him and said such behavior was “irresponsible,” the [federal] suit said.
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SHORT-HANDED
On one particular day in 2015,
‘Dr. Luketich was scheduled to perform five surgeries in five operating rooms. In OR 26 and 27, he was listed as the primary surgeon. In ORs 12, 16 and 25, he was listed as the assistant. In OR 27, the patient was undergoing a “substernal gastric pullup” that should have taken six to eight hours. Instead, the patient was on the operating table for 12-and-a-half hours. Residents performed critical parts of the surgery and then waited, with the patient under anesthesia, for Dr. Luketich, as he required them to do.
“The patient was left with unsupervised surgical trainees while Luketich was involved with four other procedures in four different operating rooms and not immediately available,” Dr. D’Cunha’s suit said.
As a result, according to the complaint, the patient suffered complications, including an inflammatory response that led to the loss of her hand.
“Luketich explained to the patient’s family (as he did with many families) that this was an unfortunate but possible risk from surgery,” Dr. D’Cunha’s lawsuit said. “However, it is not a risk when the surgery is completed within the expected time and when a surgeon is attentive to a patient and does not unnecessarily prolong the procedure.”‘
Onaccounta they’re real anti-vax there and that’s so fucking stupid.
Montana: Land o’ Guns (highest rate of ownership in the country), Suicide (second only to Alaska), Alcoholism (highest rate of alcohol-rated traffic fatalities in the country), Covid, and All Other Conceivable Forms of Early Death .
I’m not good at remembering very old days, but I do recall a picnic lunch at the country house of Brigid Balfour, a scientific colleague of my father’s in London and, yes, related to the Balfour of the Declaration. She was also related to Gladstone! It was a sunny day, and we ate out on the grass, on a very big blanket.
Beset by accusations of research fraud, Duke professor and public intellectual Dan Ariely has held his ground, admitting a bit of sloppiness but nothing like making up data. Yet an analysis of details in a 2012 paper he wrote about honesty (!) suggests that he may well be responsible for bogus numbers in one of his influential psychological experiments.
And this is not the first time questions have been raised about Ariely’s research in particular. In a famous 2008 study, he claimed that prompting people to recall the Ten Commandments before a test cuts down on cheating, but an outside team later failed to replicate the effect. An editor’s note was added to a 2004 study of his last month when other researchers raised concerns about statistical discrepancies, and Ariely did not have the original data to cross-check against. And in 2010, Ariely told NPR that dentists often disagree on whether X-rays show a cavity, citing Delta Dental insurance as his source. He later walked back that claim when the company said it could not have shared that information with him because it did not collect it.
Ariely is also up against his field’s now-notorious “replication crisis” — a nice way of saying that SCADS of psychological experimental results sure look a whole lot like bullshit. Go here for details.
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A photograph in this article features Ariely hanging with Jonah Lehrer at a 2008 science festival. Much like Ariely, Lehrer was a much-celebrated brainiac with frenetic entrepreneurial energy until he went pffff.
Jonah Lehrer’s 2012 book Imagine: How Creativity Workswas pulled from shelves after it was demonstrated to contain fabricated quotes purportedly from Bob Dylan and WH Auden. He subsequently admitted to plagiarising the work of others in his blogposts, while critics noted apparent plagiarism and disregard for facts throughout his published work.
UD’s got nothing against operators. America is Land O’ Operators. He’s an operator/He’s a real player, as Fountains of Wayne puts it, and we got ’em growing on trees around here. But don’t believe anything they tell you.
Particles must decay, Large, large, hadroon. Beauty quarks fade away, Large, large, hadroon. ‘Lectrons are sacked in war, muons are scattered far, Truth is a fixed star, large, large hadroon.
… is going to collide more and more dramatically with this administration. The people who run the country are getting desperate, while their scientific advisors – like Tony Fauci – stubbornly do the only thing they can do: hang tough on behalf of empirical method. Utterly random figures like trade advisers can throw all of the enthusiastic hydroxychloroquine newspaper articles they want at Fauci; Fauci will never do anything other than point out the way science works and hope this will get through to most of the people in the room.
Trials of BCG, which UD‘s father championed in the 1970’s to treat early stage bladder cancer (‘BCG remains the gold standard treatment for patients with intermediate- and high-risk [non-muscle invasive bladder cancer.]’), are now ongoing in several countries.
… for family reasons. Her father, Herbert Rapp, spent most of his career (Branch Chief, Immunology, NIH) working with BCG as a possible treatment for some cancers; now, AAAS,Science Magazine, and Foreign Policy announce that clinical trials of BCG’s effectiveness against coronavirus will soon begin. (Here’s a 1972 New York Times article on cancer immunology and my father’s work. You need a subscription to read it.) Researchers will investigate whether it “can rev up the human immune system in a broad way, allowing it to better fight the virus that causes coronavirus disease and, perhaps, prevent infection with it altogether.”
It would be very gratifying to UD if her father’s decades-long faith in the significant immunogenic properties of BCG were confirmed in this globally powerful way. (“This was the heyday of immune therapy with bacteria called BCG Bacillus Calmette–Guérin,” recalls one of his colleagues. “Herbert J. Rapp deserves the credit for leading our laboratory’s efforts that led to successful immunotherapy in people with early stages of bladder cancer.”) But she’s her father’s daughter – she figures the chances of this are slim.
People are always learning the importance of skepticism the hard way, as in the current case of medical fraud Gregory Rigano, who has already seduced Fox News and the huckster in chief. Keep calm, and listen to Fauci.
Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam. New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days. The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading. Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life. AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics. truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption. Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings. Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho... The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo. Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile. Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure. Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan... Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant... Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here... Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip... Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it. Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ... Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic... Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ... The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard. Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know. Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter. More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot. Notes of a Neophyte
