“We had some individuals who made undesired behaviors last week, but we stand ready with new organizational controls you know hats off to operations and the IT department for helping us with this process,” said Hillsborough Schools Superintendent Addison Davis.

Want to know what undesired behaviors the individuals made? Read here.

If this makes sense for a divorced doctor, it must make sense for all doctors. Take their kids away! Idiotic judges abound.

A divorced emergency room physician temporarily lost custody of her daughter because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Dr. Theresa Greene, a doctor in South Florida, previously shared custody of her 4-year-old daughter with her ex-husband, Eric Greene, but a judge granted an emergency order granting him sole custody until the ordeal is over, according to NBC Miami.

In the court's decision, Circuit Judge Bernard Shapiro wrote, “In order to protect the best interests of the minor child, including but not limited to the minor child’s safety and welfare, this Court temporarily suspends the Former Wife’s timesharing until further Order of Court. The suspension is solely related to the outbreak of COVID-19.”

The judge also made it known that his ruling was made to protect the health and well-being of the child.

Theresa Greene responded to the judge's ruling by saying that "the family court system now is stressing me almost more than the virus."

“I was just shocked that the judge would take this stance without talking to medical experts and knowing the facts and take it so lightly, take my child from me, and not think of the effect on her, her mental and psychological well-being,” she added.

The doctor noted that the custody battle will not stop her from following the "oath" she took to help people.

We can solve many of our problems with rapid, innovative changes to our usual practices, significant reorganization, and implementation of commonplace technology. For example, the use of telehealth within hospitals can decrease both health-care-worker risk and PPE use. All entry into the patient’s room can be coordinated and consolidated. We estimate that for a “Covid rule-out” patient, using a combination of video intercom and changes to processes, we can decrease the number of N95 respirators used from nine to one, or even zero. Implementing these changes for inpatients can yield similar results.

Regulatory barriers to implementation have slowed these and other common-sense efforts. In addition to a lack of resources to purchase devices and get them working, hospitals and IT departments have been fearful of violating HIPAA patient privacy provisions with technology that has not been fully vetted. Billers worry that they will be prosecuted for Medicare fraud for violating technical definitions of telehealth. Physicians worry about violating EMTALA, a federal law regarding the stabilization of any patient entering an emergency room and incurring personal fines of more than $100,000 per violation.

Salvator Rosa's “The Frailty of Human Life” (1656), was painted soon after the death of his son, Rosalvo.

In the painting, Death (the skeleton) is directing the child to write on a scroll. The scroll reads “Conceptio Culpa, Nasci Pena, Labor Vita, Necesse Mori”, which means “Conception is a sin, Birth is pain, Life is toil, Death a necessity.” Niall Ferguson used the Latin as a microphone test on Jonah Goldberg's podcast.

Having your accordion while your leg is amputated is imperative.

From  a link in the always interesting Marginal Revolution

Abstract

We test for discrimination against minority borrowers in the prices charged by mortgage lenders. We construct a unique dataset of federally-guaranteed loans where we observe all three dimensions of a mortgage’s price: the interest rate, discount points, and fees. While we find statistically significant gaps by race and ethnicity in interest rates, these gaps are exactly offset by differences in discount points. We trace out point-rate price schedules and show that minorities and whites face identical schedules, but sort to different locations on the schedule. Such sorting likely reflects differences in liquidity or preferences, rather than lender steering. Indeed, we also provide evidence that lenders generate the same expected revenue from minorities and whites. Finally, we find no differences in total fees by race or ethnicity.

Neil Bhutta

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Aurel Hizmo

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Date Written: March 14, 2019

This opened my ears for me.

Oscar Peterson on the Dick Cavett Show

In 1880, Robert Louis Stevenson published in Cornhill Magazine  "Henry David Thoreau: His Character And Opinions," a scathing and hilarious attack. He begins this way

 

 THOREAU'S thin, penetrating, big-nosed face, even in a bad woodcut, conveys some hint of the limitations of his mind and character.  With his almost acid sharpness of insight, with his almost animal dexterity in act, there went none of that large, unconscious geniality of the world's heroes.  He was not easy, not ample, not urbane, not even kind; his enjoyment was hardly smiling, or the smile was not broad enough to be convincing; he had no waste lands nor kitchen-midden in his nature, but was all improved and sharpened to a point.  

Stevenson's view of Thoreau as a sort of ascetic kill-joy is shared, I think, by many inmates in schools, where Thoreau is "forced" upon them. "Who is this guy to tell me...?" is a natural enough reaction, especially among those pursuing the American Dream or even the Great American Dollar. But this view of Thoreau is terribly incomplete. For one thing, Thoreau is a very funny guy, in the Great American Wisecracker tradition. For another, for all his irony he was not really a faker. He is sometimes charged with not living up to claims he never made, or would ever dream of making. 

Stevenson himself came to alter his view of HDT quite dramatically, and in so doing gave an example of fair mindedness one would seek far and wide in Journlandia without ever encountering. In Familiar Studies of Men & Books [1882], he recanted his earlier view by narrating his correspondence with a Dr. Jaap, who had written in reply to the Cornhill essay. Dr. Japp, who knew Thoreau, gave evidence from actually witnessed events, not from interpretation of text. Stevenson opens by attacking his earlier approach as a "perversion" (of Justice?) because interpretation should not be based on limited evidence reinforced by personal values:

Here [in the Cornhill essay] is an admirable instance of the "point of view" forced throughout, and of too earnest reflection on imperfect facts.  Upon me this pure, narrow, sunnily-ascetic Thoreau had exercised a great charm.  I have scarce written ten sentences since I was introduced to him, but his influence might be somewhere detected by a close observer. Still it was as a writer that I had made his acquaintance; I took him on his own explicit terms; and when I learned details of his life, they were, by the nature of the case and my own PARTI-PRIS, read even with a certain violence in terms of his writings.  There could scarce be a perversion more justifiable than that; yet it was still a perversion. 

And in the end, Stevenson thought, much about Thoreau remains enigmatic. 

 Thoreau's theory, in short, was one thing and himself another: of the first, the reader will find what I believe to be a pretty faithful statement and a fairly just criticism in the study [i.e. the Cornhill essay]; of the second he will find but a contorted shadow. So much of the man as fitted nicely with his doctrines, in the photographer's phrase, came out.  But that large part which lay outside and beyond, for which he had found or sought no formula, on which perhaps his philosophy even looked askance, is wanting in my study, as it was wanting in the guide I followed.  In some ways a less serious writer, in all ways a nobler man, the true Thoreau still remains to be depicted.

It would be a shame if someone missed out on the pleasures of reading Thoreau because of hasty judgment. 

Selections from Stevenson

Cornhill essay here:  

Most dangerous in this regard is the endless call for good jobs for all American workers, which from the progressive left could translate guaranteed employment, high minimum wages, compulsory unionization, early retirement, and much more. Such calls from any quarter are always misconceived. The ideal social objective should never be to create jobs as such. It should be to let businesses create jobs that produce more in social value than the cost of the labor that goes into the job. As the old adage in the garment industry had it, “you don’t make up in volume what you lose on each piece.” Putting government subsidies into the political hopper reduces the likelihood of achieving that objective. Make-work and featherbedding are dangerous first steps down the wrong path. But if one president is allowed to disrupt markets in the international sphere, why can’t the next president do so domestically as well? Sadly, the harmful effects of subsidies and restraints on trade only compound one other. To keep the economy humming, remember that these are the twin evils in labor markets, no matter which president is at the helm.

© 2018 by the Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University

--Richard Epstein

Catholics in England in the time of Titus Oates were much worse off than are Muslims in England today. One big difference is that the courts were useless.  Judicial murders slaughtered in large numbers. Wild accusations were enough to hang someone.

Iraq and so many countries minted in the twentieth century can attest to the wisdom of Sidney Smith in 1803. Why is this so hard to get?

SUDDEN FREEDOM.
A NATION grown free in a single day is a child born
with the limbs and the vigour of a man, who would
take a drawn sword for his rattle, and set the house in a
blaze, that he might chuckle over the splendour.—[1803.]

Nicola Chiaromonte's paraphrase of a talk Albert Camus gave at Columbia a half century ago and more ends this way:

Now that Hitler has gone, we know a certain number of things. The first is that the poison which impregnated Hitlerism has not been eliminated; it is present in each of us. Whoever today speaks of human existence in terms of power, efficiency and "historical tasks" spreads it. He is an actual or potential assassin. For if the problem of man is reduced to any kind of "historical task," he is nothing but the raw material of history, and one can do anything one pleases with him. Another thing we have learned is that we cannot accept any optimistic conception of existence, any happy ending whatsoever. But if we believe that optimism is silly, we also know that pessimism about the action of man among his fellows is cowardly.

We opposed terror because it forces us to choose between murdering and being murdered; and it makes communication impossible. This is why we reject any ideology that claims control over all of human life.

From Henry David Thoreau

By Joseph Wood Krutch

Methuen, [1948]

Incredibly, literary critics could write this clearly and intelligently once upon a time. 

From Eric Hoffer, longshoreman and observer:

In all contemporary mass movements schoolmasters played a vital and often leading role. I am willing to bet that more than half of the leaders in Africa are ex-schoolmasters. In the Nazi movement grammar-school teachers played a prominent and fateful role. Now and then I am inclined to think that the passion to teach, which is far more powerful and primitive than the passion to learn, is a factor in the rise of mass movements. For what do we see in the Communist world? Half of the globe has been turned into a vast schoolroom with a thousand million pupils at the mercy of a band of maniacal schoolmasters.

Hoffer, Eric. Working and Thinking on the Waterfront, 1968 

These women are amazing. I cannot even imagine how they got to this point.

From an English Departmental email

Next up is a poetry course. If you or someone you know on campus has an M.F.A. in poetry and is a practicing poet, please contact me, as we need your help designing and teaching this class.

Frank Butler's Arranging Music for the English Concertina with An Introduction to Harmony.

 This booklet was produced by Frank Butler as a supplement to his second tutor for the instrument, English Concertina Two.  A wonderful example of an early self-published book, and still useful for any musician.

“The 25-year-old man accused of mowing down pedestrians in Toronto with a van, killing 10 people and injuring 15 more, reportedly warned of an “Incel Rebellion” on Facebook before the attack, says Fox News. What is “incel” you ask? It stands for “involuntary celibates” and refers to low beta males or maybe gamma males who can’t get the women they want and are angry. Apparently, the group claims that since women will have nothing to do with them, the government should supply them with prostitutes.

I learned of all this in the last hour from a friend. After my initial shock and surprise, I realized that these losers are being perfectly consistent with Obama’s Jula ad and the trend of our beloved Welfare State. If safety is a right, if food is a right, if housing is a right, if education is a right, if healthcare is a right, if gender euphoria is a right, then why is sex not a right?

Of course, if these turn out to be a bunch of libertarian free market types or paleo cons, then they are crazy hypocritical whining narcissists. But if they are sjw types, or Democrats in general, then they are simply being consistent.

Just what IS the endpoint of the Welfare State? And how can we distinguish it from the Safety Net for those inclined to look to Big Brother, Sister Government to solve all problems.

I think this explains why the parents' wishes for their baby matter not one jot in freedom loving England.

https://ricochet.com/513542/why-alfie-cannot-leave/

Residents of a Dutch town say they've endured "psychological torture" due to a "singing" road, prompting officials to close it after only one official day in use.

The road, equipped with special strips on the asphalt, plays the tune to the anthem of the province of Friesland when cars drive over them at 60 mph. 

Although created as a novelty, but also to improve road safety, residents of a nearby village said the constant noise was irritating and keeping them up at all hours of the night.

"I'm going nuts. You can't sit outside and you can't sleep at night," said Sijtze Jansma. 

The BBC reports a spokesman for Friesland province said the strips were installed Friday as an experiment on how to "influence the behavior of our drivers," but added, "I was there myself and if you're living there it was unpleasant."

Since Porter wrote the song at a cocktail party with his Yale chums to parody a cowboy lament that was playing on the radio, this version seems appropriate. (Still, no one tops Ella Fitzgerald--ever.)