Dark Brightness

Interesting day. Found this via No Minister. My comment is that it is moral to reward individuals who risk: it is immoral to steal. The most moral tax is atithe (which goes to the poor) or a  head tax (interestingly, the Torah has a head tax to start the covenant, but tithes to keep welfare going.)

It wrong to subsume one’s God-given moral thoughts and freedom to a collective. It is moral to oppose the Borg.

Advocates of free enterprise must learn from the growing grass-roots protests, and make the moral case for freedom and entrepreneurship. They have to declare that it is a moral issue to confiscate more income from the minority simply because the government can. It’s also a moral issue to lower the rewards for entrepreneurial success, and to spend what we don’t have without regard for our children’s future.

Enterprise defenders also have to define “fairness” as protecting merit and freedom. This is more intuitively appealing to Americans than anything involving forced redistribution. Take public attitudes toward the estate tax, which only a few (who leave estates in the millions of dollars) will ever pay, but which two-thirds of Americans believe is “not fair at all,” according to a 2009 Harris poll. Millions of ordinary citizens believe it is unfair for the government to be predatory — even if the prey are wealthy.

via The Real Culture War Is Over Capitalism – WSJ.com.

H1N1 Swine Flu – Google Maps.

But it is not getting through becaus it is not the approved view, y’know.

Garrett, by the way, was a talented musician and a political idiot. He is now just a political idiot.

Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head Ian Allison said sea ice losses in west Antarctica over the past 30 years had been more than offset by increases in the Ross Sea region, just one sector of east Antarctica.

“Sea ice conditions have remained stable in Antarctica generally,” Dr Allison said.

The melting of sea ice — fast ice and pack ice — does not cause sea levels to rise because the ice is in the water. Sea levels may rise with losses from freshwater ice sheets on the polar caps. In Antarctica, these losses are in the form of icebergs calved from ice shelves formed by glacial movements on the mainland.

Last week, federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett said experts predicted sea level rises of up to 6m from Antarctic melting by 2100, but the worst case scenario foreshadowed by the SCAR report was a 1.25m rise.

Mr Garrett insisted global warming was causing ice losses throughout Antarctica. “I don’t think there’s any doubt it is contributing to what we’ve seen both on the Wilkins shelf and more generally in Antarctica,” he said.

Dr Allison said there was not any evidence of significant change in the mass of ice shelves in east Antarctica nor any indication that its ice cap was melting. “The only significant calvings in Antarctica have been in the west,” he said. And he cautioned that calvings of the magnitude seen recently in west Antarctica might not be unusual.

“Ice shelves in general have episodic carvings and there can be large icebergs breaking off — I’m talking 100km or 200km long — every 10 or 20 or 50 years.”

via Revealed: Antarctic ice growing, not shrinking | The Australian.

The good macdoctor has discussed the Psychwatch site. Quoting my comment:

Local patient advocate showed me a printout of the site today.

Some issues.

1. All doctors make some mistakes every year, and we all pray that no one gets hurt. But they happen. We have systems (peer review, audit, double checking of important information) to minimise them.

2. In psychiatry we are often trying to make a decision where there is little data to guide us… and where the research is changing rapidly.

3. Most doctors who have had complaints against them take them seriously. Complaints generally make docs less confident, more scared or defensive (which is generally a bad thing) and much more mistrustful of patients (which is a very bad thing).

4. A number of patients make repeated complaints to authorities. Psychiatry and GP collect these kind of patients.

5. There is a duty on all doctors to protect the public, which can include asking colleagues, ones employer, and at times the medical council for backup in getting that doctor back to competence.

6. If one still believes that these sites are worthwhile, I suggest you look at NHS Blog doctor and the hell many GPs there have gone through due to anonymous complaints from patients.

The Health and Disability Commissioner has done, in my view, managed to hold the balance between identifying issues that need correction and avoiding “naming and shaming”.

A return to that state would lead, again, to all health professionals being silent about poor practice out of fear of the inquisitors: which is what Mr Taylor will get if this type of site remains, whether he wants it or not.

The author of Psychwatch argued back that he is doing a public service.

I do not the arrogance leaking from this comment… but Psychwatch is wrong…

1.  These things (complaints) can literally drive doctors to suicide. (Dr Rant is talking about the UK General Medical Council, and one hopes that the kiwi medical council is more merciful.) However, bullying and patient intiated aggression, including vexatious complaints, exist in New Zealand. I will add that the findings around patient complaints have been found repetatively, most recently in (untrained) caregivers for NGOs: (presenting a poster on this recently at TMHS in Auckland, I was buttonholed by a consumrer who said it was all the caregivers fault).

The great Dr Crippen was campaigning earlier this year about a similar site in the UK. He notes:

My greatest worry about this website is the effect that it might have on a doctor suffering from depression. Do not get me wrong. If you think your doctor is mentally ill, or performing dangerously, not only is it your right to make a complaint, it is your duty so to do. You must take immediate action. But not by making anonymous remarks on the internet. Talk to one of the other doctors in the practice or to the chief executive of the hospital. But do not put some anonymous, wounding criticisms on an internet website. Supposing you are the person who made the above comment. Supposing this doctor is depressed and therefore not performing well. Supposing your anonymous comment tips him over the edge. You read in the paper next week that he has committed suicide. How would you feel then? Do you remember this:

TRURO An out-of-hours GP killed himself because of fears that he might be dismissed after turning up in the wrong town for an emergency call. (full story here)

Who is Dr Neil Bacon to set himself up in judgement over the medical profession? He has no legal training. He has not completed his higher medical training. Whatever he may say, it is hard to believe that his motives are altruistic. This website is a disgrace.

2.  Naming and blaming implies that the doctor is disposable. Doctors, nurses and other workers do not hang around when they are unwanted. At the moment New Zealand is benefiting from this: the NHS has made many junior doctors feel unwelcome. We can do the same thing: and if that happens people can leave, will leave and are leaving. It is disheartening, after encouraging a junior doctor into training, coaching them through the examinations, and celebrating their being qualified, to find tha the management do not have a job for them, or that Townsville or similar has given them an offer that is much better than what is available locally. All specailist qualifications in NZ are binational & I get a letter a month from Australia offering me salary packages about half as much as what I make in NZ>

3.  In the end, the science around talking therapies has been established. Firstly, for most anxiety disorders, behavioural or cogntive talking therapies are the treatment of choice. (The correct links to look at are Best Treatments, or the underlying data in Clinical Evidence or the Cochrane Database)  For mood disorders, medication, interpersonal therapy (a short form of psychodynamic therapy) or cognitve therapies are the best available treatments. For the psychoses, medication with family therapy or cognitive therapy for psychosis seem to have best evidence…

I find people who criticise doctors for “not acknowledging science” odd. All treatments need to be shown to be safe and effective — we should nof offer unsafe and useless treatment options! Much of the research we quote on talking therapies comes from trials of treatments developed by psychologists, nurses and psychotherapists. Psychwatch has set up a straw man.