More on Nancy MacLean
I realize that I am a bit late to this party and that many of Nancy MacLean ’s strangeclaims and factualerrors have already been exposed and debunked by people much more familiar with her work, the intellectual history of libertarianism and the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan, than I am. However, there is one aspect of MacLean ’s conspiracy theorizing inDemocracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right ’s Stealth Plan for America (i.e., “the attempt by the billionaire-backed radical right to undo democratic governance” in America) that, I think, needs further comment.Specifically, it would a...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - July 31, 2017 Category: American Health Authors: Marian L. Tupy Source Type: blogs
Funtabulously Frivolous Friday Five 196
LITFL • Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog
LITFL • Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog - Emergency medicine and critical care medical education blog
Just when you thought your brain could unwind on a Friday, you realise that it would rather be challenged with some good old fashioned medical trivia FFFF…introducing Funtabulously Frivolous Friday Five 196.
Question 1
What happens if you swallow chewing gum?
http://roalddahl.wikia.com/wiki/Violet_Beauregarde
+ Reveal the Funtabulous Answer
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Not a lot, most people p...
Source: Life in the Fast Lane - July 6, 2017 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Neil Long Tags: Frivolous Friday Five catatumbo chewing gum children Constipation drowning growth lightning pancreatitis Schaltenbrand syndrome scorpion bite spontaneous cerebrospinal fluid leak Source Type: blogs
Voting for the 2017 #HIT100 Starts Now!
It’s the fourth of July and that has traditionally been the start of the #HIT100 nominations. The first #HIT100 was started by Michael Planchart, the person behind the Twitter handle formerly known as @theEHRGuy (he sold the Twitter account to someone else and Michael seems to have gone anonymous for some reason), as a great way to celebrate the Fourth of July holiday and turned out to be a fun way to get to know many of the various healthcare social media influencers throughout the summer. Even with Michael now off social media, we hope we can carry on the tradition that Michael started by continuing to encourage pe...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - July 4, 2017 Category: Information Technology Authors: John Lynn Tags: Healthcare Healthcare Communication HealthCare IT Healthcare Social Media #hcldr #HIT100 #HIT99 #HITSM HCSM HealthIT Source Type: blogs
Socialist Catastrophe in Venezuela
Journalists are now reporting regularly on the crisis in Venezuela, with shortages of everything from toilet paper tofood and now daily street protests. What the news reports too often miss is, Why? Why is a formerly middle-class, oil-rich country now so desperately poor?The Weekly Standardnotes a New York Timesarticle, “How Venezuela Stumbled to the Brink of Collapse,” that spends 1800 words on the country’s “collapse into authoritarianism.” The Standard summarizes:The strongman Hugo Ch ávez “ran for president in 1998. His populist message of returning power to the people won him victory.” Chávez polariz...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - May 30, 2017 Category: American Health Authors: David Boaz Source Type: blogs
Hunger Is in Retreat, But Not in Socialist Venezuela
A shocking statistic has come to light: Venezuelans lost 19 pounds on average over the past year because of food shortages. There was a time when hunger was a near-universal experience. As Kevin D. Williamson put it, “Not long ago, the great dream and aspiration of most of the people walking this Earth was to have enough to eat, for themselves and for their children, and to be liberated from worrying about whether they would eat again tomorrow or the next day.”Then, something changed. Exchange and specialization helped bring down food prices. A burst of innovations called the Green Revolution led to higher a...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - February 23, 2017 Category: American Health Authors: Chelsea Follett Source Type: blogs
Will More Countries Be Added to Trump ’s Migration Ban?
President Trump ’s executive order is facing numerous court challenges, including atemporary restraining order. My colleague David Bier has made a convincingstatutoryargument that Trump ’s temporarily ban on issuing visas to the nationals of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Libya, and Yemen is unlawful. The genesis of Trump’s executive order was his campaign promise of aMuslim ban which, although unpopular, is built on a sturdier legal foundation than a 21st-century national origins quota. If the court challenges fail and Trump’s ban is legal then there is a high probability that the bans will be ext...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - February 7, 2017 Category: American Health Authors: Alex Nowrasteh Source Type: blogs
Biologically Modified Justice
Long time readers no doubt already know that I'm not much in favor of social justice as it is practiced and advocated these days. Just like Marxist communism or other forms of idealized socialism, the concepts sound great when presented in the philosophical abstract, detached from the process of actually running an implementation through the messy reality of human nature and human society. Unfortunately, in practice you wind up with things like the millions of deaths in the old Soviet Union, the sad state of Venezuela today, and in the wealthier and more successful parts of world, a substantial fraction of society who woul...
Source: Fight Aging! - February 4, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Healthy Life Extension Community Source Type: blogs
One week in
I ' ve commented before that politics is increasingly like sport - more and more we ' re just rooting for our side. Ultimately it means policy and ideas don ' t matter; only winning does. One side has already made this an explicit part of their strategy; they ' re playing to win, not respecting " norms, " and using every tool at their disposal to keep winning.Aquote from The Economist, on the occasion of President Trump ' s inauguration:All populists are at heart conspiracy theorists, who pretend that easy solutions exist to society ’s woes and have only not been tried to date because elites are wicked and deaf to the st...
Source: Blogborygmi - January 27, 2017 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Nick Genes Source Type: blogs
China Shuts Down Website of Mao Yushi, Friedman Prize Winner
In its ongoing crackdown on advocates of free speech, human rights and other liberties, China ’s communist party hasshut down the website of Milton Friedman Prize winnerMao Yushi’s think tank. Mao has spent a lifetime promoting the values and principles of a free society for which he has often paid a high price, including severe persecution. The Unirule Institute of Economics that he cofounded has educated new and old generations of Chinese on the importance of private pr operty, the rule of law, freedom of choice, voluntary exchange, and other aspects of the market economy, and on how to transition away from central p...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - January 24, 2017 Category: American Health Authors: Ian V ásquez Source Type: blogs
The Technological Future of Surgery
The future of surgery offers an amazing cooperation between humans and technology, which could elevate the level of precision and efficiency of surgeries so high we have never seen before.
Will we have Matrix-like small surgical robots? Will they pull in and out organs from patients’ bodies?
The scene is not impossible. It looks like we have come a long way from ancient Egypt, where doctors performed invasive surgeries as far back as 3,500 years ago. Only two years ago, Nasa teamed up with American medical company Virtual Incision to develop a robot that can be placed inside a patient’s body and then controlled rem...
Source: The Medical Futurist - January 17, 2017 Category: Information Technology Authors: nora Tags: Future of Medicine Medical Augmented Reality Medical Robotics Virtual Reality in Medicine 3d printing AI artificial intelligence diagnostics gc4 Surgery surgical robot technology Source Type: blogs
The World ’s Most – And Least – Miserable Countries in 2016
In what follows, I update my annual Misery Index calculations. A Misery Index was first constructed by economist Art Okun as a way to provide President Lyndon Johnson with a snapshot of the economy. The original Misery Index was just a simple sum of a nation ’s annual inflation rate and its unemployment rate. The Misery Index has been modified several times, first by Robert Barro of Harvard and then by myself. My modified Misery Index is the sum of the unemployment, inflation, and bank lending rates, minus the percentage change in real GDP per capita. A higher Misery Index score reflects higher levels of “misery,” ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - January 17, 2017 Category: American Health Authors: Steve H. Hanke Source Type: blogs
The Results Are In: The IMF ’s Venezuela Inflation Guesstimate Was Way Off
In October, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) committed a blunder when it issued a forecast for Venezuela ’s end-of-year annual inflation rate. An inflation forecast in a country that is toying with hyperinflation is a mug’s game.The IMF ’s October 2016 World Economic Outlook (WEO) forecast for Venezuela’s 2016 year-end annual inflation rate was 720 percent. The IMF’s figure gave the appearance that it was based on a finger-in-the-wind estimate. Indeed, the last serious connection between Venezuela and the IMF was back in September of 2004, when an Article IV Execu tive Board Consultation occurred.However, ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - January 9, 2017 Category: American Health Authors: Steve H. Hanke Source Type: blogs
Venezuela ’s Bolivar Redenomination Will Fail
Venezuela – ravaged by socialist policies, corruption, and incompetence – is currently embroiled in the world ’s 57th episode of hyperinflation. Since the beginning of November, the bolivar has lost 55.2 percent of its value on the black market (read: free market), worsening the situation in a country in which wheelbarrows have already replaced wallets. So, on November 30th, Venezuelan officials announced a misguided and foolhardy plan to issue larger bills in an attempt to mitigate the damaging effects of its hyperinflation.But why is the Banco Central de Venezuela (BCV) redenominating? Because if it doesn ’t, th...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - December 14, 2016 Category: American Health Authors: Steve H. Hanke Source Type: blogs
Venezuela Enters the Record Book, Officially Hyperinflates
Venezuela ’s inflation has officially become the 57th official, verified episode of hyperinflation and been added to the Hanke-Krus World Hyperinflation Table, which is printed in the authoritative Routledge Handbook of Major Events in Economic History (2013). An episode of hyperinflation occurs when the monthly inflation rate exceeds 50 percent for 30 consecutive days. Venezuela’s monthly inflation rate first exceeded 50 percent on November 3rd and continues to do so, sitting at 131 percent as of December 11, 2016. The peak monthly inflation rate thus far was 221 percent, which is relatively low in the context of ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - December 12, 2016 Category: American Health Authors: Steve H. Hanke Source Type: blogs
Venezuela: On the Simple Arithmetic of Inflation
As the Venezuelan bolivar collapses, the hype about Venezuela ’s alleged hyperinflation becomes more intense. Most of the commentary is literally fantastic, suggesting that the authors are unfamiliar with the subject of hyperinflation and the arithmetic of inflation.For example, DolarToday.com – which publishes reliable black-market exchange rate data, as well as the Johns Hopkins-Cato Institute annual inflation estimates – claims that the bolivar has depreciated by over 100 percent this month. This is wrong because DolarToday’s arithmetic is wrong. DolarToday’s mistake represents a common error. It fails...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - December 2, 2016 Category: American Health Authors: Steve H. Hanke Source Type: blogs
