For The Record

Via sources, Jonathan Chait handed Ms. McArdle her lunch (whatever that means). Let's see.

All of it:
Obamacare Is Now Beyond Rescue from Intelligence Squared U.S. Debates on FORA.tv

If You Can't Beat Them, Call Them Poopyheads

Shorter Ross Douthat:
Six Hours of Hot Air!

My peers have no intellectual capabilities and act like little children. My opponents are jerks for pointing this out and no one should get healthcare because of it.

In the article, he actually says that Obama is "too professional." Yeah, we need more leaders who fly headlong into decisions based on gut reactions. Screw this thinking shit. It has never worked.

Megan's website redo seems to have messed up my Google reader, as I haven't been seeing any of her posts. I'm too lazy to go to her URL, click on the read more button and then actually read her drivel, so, fuck that. This might be the end of me. Go over and read her columns yourself, imagining a smug ass guffawing and calling her stupid periodically, and you'll have an experience similar to what you get when reading me. A quick glance shows she has an article about the killer Shamu, which has got to be amusing. Apparently she's qualified to discuss marine life now. Those MBAs are fucking handy.

Well That Explains It

I have often wondered how it is that Megan can be so incompetent about so, so many things. I think this provides some insight into that:

State Department vehicle hits journalist, breaking his knee, and gets the MPD to cite him for jaywalking. Note to State Department: if you hit a pedestrian walking anywhere near a crosswalk, you were at fault. The accident is bad enough. But trying to blame it on the victim is appalling.

Now, as usual there's a lot of stupid in there. The first is that, of course, she doesn't care about the jay walking. She's pimping this 'cause (and I'm hazy on the details on account of who fucking cares) this was some right wing guy and he was hit by a member of socialists Obama's government cabal so obviously coverupscandalomg. There's the fact that she, almost certainly, has no idea what actually happened and yet is sure the pedestrian is not at fault. That's not what I'm here for though. I'm here for the part that says:

if you hit a pedestrian walking anywhere near a crosswalk, you were at fault.

Which is like, really? What the fuck? Who told her that? What part of her brain is missing that she can't realize how stupid such a law would be? Does she not notice that people don't just walk out into the intersection no matter that status of the light or the traffic, confident that they won't be hit by cars? Does she really think that avoiding pedestrians is always the responsibility of the less maneuverable, larger, faster, lower field of vision having party? Fuck, planes aren't supposed to fly over active parachuting areas, but I can assure you that we still check for traffic before we fucking exit!

She continually blows my mind with the ignorant, poorly thought out nonsense that escapes from her fingers. I don't know which is more unbelievable an explanation; that she is so partisan even her views on jay walking are bent to fit the political agendas involved, or that she is so stupid she actually thinks that the car holds sole responsibility for avoiding pedestrians.

Update: Oh, yes, the explanation part. The point is that this clearly indicates that she is not in the same world that the rest of us are in. I don't know how she switched dimensions, and I'm not sure what part of our reality bleeds into hers and what part of her reality bleeds into ours. I just hope that they have nice music wherever she is, for her sake.

I Remember My First Primary

Holy shit. I bring you the Comment of the Day:

I think that one of the biggest obstacles to reform is not one particular party ,but the simple fact that Iowa votes first in the primaries.

Next, Megan will be shocked -- SHOCKED I say -- to learn that the electoral college has it roots in slavery.

How does someone whose job it is to know things about politics find it SHOCKING NEWSWORTHY ZOMG WHYWASN'TIINFORMED to hear that Iowa gets more attention than other states?

Furthermore, there are about 65 other states in the mid-west which are pretty much giant farms and 1/4 of the food grown in America comes from California. So, what the fuck are you talking about, Walter?

Megan and Tom Cruise

Shorter Megan McArdle:

Mental Health Parity for Insurance:

All these "depressed" people need to just stop whining. They are making the deficit worse. Losers.

The Law of Averages Would Indicate You Did Something Wrong at Some Point

Shorter Megan McArdle:

My expertise in the methods of scientific researches as well as a few cherry picked quotes leads me to some very important conclusions. If only people would stop romanticizing scientists and maybe start calling them "out of touch" or "elitist" or something. The defenders of these scientists are completely biased as shown by their failure to acknowledge that the researchers that they back aren't completely perfect.

This Compass Points South

FUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!

If the favorables stay above 40%, I think we stand a very good chance of getting a bill before next March.

Let's hope she's only wrong about the March part.....

A Changing of the Stupid

Megan's right, Apple is being stupid/disingenuous by refusing to repair computers owned by smokers because of health risks. Megan still manages to show what a self-centered idiot she is by talking about it.

Allegedly, Apple is declining to repair Macs owned by smokers on the ground that secondhand smoke is dangerous. This a gross misunderstanding of the science--

Low hanging fruit. Megan is dead on but refuses to quit while she's ahead:

tobacco tar could be hazardous if applied to your skin, but you'd have to really slather it on, leave it there for an extended period, and reapply fairly frequently.

Duh, wha... ohhh...kay. Not done speaking out of her ass, she switches from medical expertise to marketing expertise

But it also seems like a gross misunderstanding of who makes up their customer base on the East Coast.

Megan knows like, SIX, Mac users and like, FOUR of them smoke, so, like Apple costumers always smoke, but only on the East Coast.

Remember when she said they "knew their demographic" because they served coffee? Gee, I wonder what East Coast Mac user smokes and drinks coffee? Megan McArdle? ALL OF THEM!

How Nobel of Her

Mark Kleiman is half right;

So when the usually intelligent Megan McArdle announces loftily that

it’s kind of ludicrous that anyone is even trying to argue that Barack Obama truly deserves this Nobel Peace Prize

she is, to put it bluntly, talking through her hat.

Megan, sensing the respect of someone slipping, goes classy:

Hmm. Well. Call me crazy, but I think that maybe to earn the Nobel prize, a million dollars, and all the associated prestige, you ought to have made efforts somewhat more heroic than chairing a meeting in which you said that you thought we ought to have fewer nuclear arms--even one in which you said that the US also thought we ought to have fewer nuclear arms.

Yeah! Snarking at someone who calls you usually intelligent! That's great!

But the real question; How disingenuous is McArdle being? The answer: She's being about her usual amount of disingenuous. Ignoring that one could argue "committing" is not "chairing a meeting", we have only to look to Kleinman's next paragraph for something "more than heroic than chairing a meeting."

That’s not to mention the importance of killing the “missile shield” that threatened a new arms race with Russia, or the work for “fraternity between nations” done by making it clear that the United States of America was no longer fighting a “crusade” against al-Islam, or putting an end to the torture regime.

Woah, call me crazy, but I think the president has to do more than end torture, reach out to enemies we've been at war with for eight years and end plans that antagonize Russia in order to be called "peaceful."

You should, I don't know, deliver a deal or something.

Yeah, like why not do something substantial such as getting the Iranians to agree to greater oversight of their nuclear program AND to deliver their enriched uranium to Russia. Do something like that, Obama, and THEN WE CAN TALK!

Not content to have wholly inadequately addressed her opponents claims, she moves on to her magical phantom claims:

As for the notion that this strengthens our hand when dealing with Iran and North Korea, I'm really skeptical that this does anything at all.

You all will be shocked to learn that not only do people hold these views, they are also expressed so frequently and fervently that McArdle doesn't even need to link to a single person who's said anything like that at all.

The leaders of Iran and North Korea do not, to put it mildly, look up to us. They don't want us to think that they're nice, moral people. They want us to think that they are terrifying military forces whose desires must be assuaged.

Wow, that doesn't sound racist at all. It's also completely 100% true because McArdle is a fucking expert in psychology of people she's never met from cultures of which she's only dimly aware and about whom is she extremely biased. Just take it from the person who was right about Saddam's love of WMD's and Putin's love of invading Georgia.

The people of North Korea and Iran don't like us either, but even if you thought that this was likely to have a big impact on their opinion, this would be purely hypothetical, because both countries have very tightly controlled media which will report whatever the leaders want them to think.

Yeah, those hating backward ignorant foreigners. How dare they both HATE US IRRATIONALLY and NOT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT US! Who do they think they are, Megan McArdle?

If the best you can come up with is that he made some impressive-sounding statements at the UN--well, I think a majority of the world's leaders are equally deserving. I don't see any actual foreign policy scholars advancing the theory that this was a landmark achievement on par with say, SALT or the Camp David accords.

If the best you can do is read only the first sentence or two of someone who calls you an idiot, well, maybe you've proven their point. I mean, that's not on par with throwing salt in your own eye, or trying to book a site at Camp David, but it's pretty fucking dumb.

Law Abiding Citizens

The ever valuable John Cole points us to an article about a mom who used to carry her gun to soccer practice. Apparently that ended with her and her husband dead in a murder suicide. It's unclear who did which part of that little pact; though there is reason to believe that the husband shot her and then himself.

Which brings us to the Megan and her predictions. Back when people were carrying AK-47s around at political rallies, Megan was unperturbed. After all;

the rate of crime associated with legal gun possession or carrying seems to be very low.[three links not included.]

Apparently statistics for the subset of legal gun owners that carry their guns around in wildly inappropriate places are different than those for the entire set of legal gun owners. It's almost as if there's a distinction between gun owners and crazy fucking gun owners.

To be fair, the legal gun carrier in this case may not be the perpetrator. However, crazy people tend to flock together. Her husband prolly wasn't crazy enough to go a killin' without presenting other craziness first. I doubt that anyone who wasn't a bit batty themselves would get involved with that. (To be clear, that is not to blame the victim. Crazy men also attract crazy women and -- I'm guessing -- men and men as well as women and women in non-heteronormative land.)

Looking Back Is So Yesterday

Hey guys, remember when Megan got outraged? Well, she did:

Well, I'm outraged. Also, not a fan of a resurgent Russian empire. I think we should do something about it, not that I think we will. But we could certainly do more than we are, which is nothing.

Oh, yeah, about that imperialist push by the Ruskies...

Tbilisi Started '08 War, but Moscow Also at Fault, EU Finds

Those Russians are so good at empire, they make their future subjugants declare war on them!

Oh, Also, Too

A Tale of Two Conspiracies

In the left corner we have:

I have no idea what to think about the accusation that an NBC producer responded to a blast email from Americans for Limited Government by writing "Bite me, jew boy!"

It's so bizarre that I simply can't believe that an NBC producer did this. But it's also so bizarre that it's not actually all that much more plausible that Americans for Limited Government made the thing up. It's not like they're playing to the common stereotype that the television world is hostile to Jews.

This is a pressing question! I hope Mrs. Super-Sleuth is on it:

The most likely explanation is that someone punk'd them. But who? And how?

Ashton Kutcher, you devious fucker! How did you know how to intercept an NBC producers email at exactly the right time to create such madness?

In the right corner:

Also in the "too bizarre to accurately categorize" is the murder of a part-time census worker in Kentucky, who was found hanged in a remote area. He had the word "fed" scrawled on his chest, which suggests anti-government loons.

Browbeaten into submission by commentorsIn the interest of bipartisanship; Our fair heroine turns her discerning eyes to the case of the "something actually happened and figuring out motive is actually worthwhile." A mere several days after his murder, McDetective cracks the file and puts on her thinking cap.

But the census is not a traditional bugbear of said loons, who don't generally regard apportionment as an unpardonable blow against liberty.

Initial investigations reveal fowl play, but the magnificent magnifying glass in the mind of McArdle sees more! Michele Bachmann is just a red herring, and not part of traditional bugbears! She's on about atraditional bugbears and hence has no bearing on the case!

It sort of defies the imagination that a resurgent militia would decide to start its reign of terror by kidnapping a schoolteacher in his fifties who happens to do census work on the side.

You see, this murder defies rational thought, making it suspicious. Most men who take lives are well reasoned, meticulous and cunning. McArdle knows this because she knows the mind of the criminal like the back of her head.

Was this man murdered and humiliated while canvassing for the census by a paranoid right-wing fanatic spurred on by hateful calls to resist a completely benign government operation, or did a drug dealer find him, kill him, strip him naked, bind his hands and feet, gag him, drag him to a cemetery and hang him from a tree in order to throw the police of his tail?

Tune in next week for the dramatic conclusion of "Willful Ignorance: The Partisan Detective!"

Pullin' a Goldberg

Shorter Megan:

Correction: Community Rating Turns Out to Be Even Worse Than I Thought:
The fact that I don't know what I'm talking about is central to my point.

A Title

Megan has a post up titled "Thining Thin" which is either the world's worst joke or the world's funniest typo. I'm going with the latter, but she's proven to be capable of both so...

Anyway, it starts off with something borrowed from Socrates (or I guess Plato). Socrates when he was drunk and/or on acid:

A typical dialogue on diet goes something like this:

Expert: We don't have any known way to make obese people thin except gastric bypass surgery, which has a 2% mortality rate by itself.

Thin person: But I am very thin!

Which is as WTF as I've seen Megan write. I'm not sure who thinks the only way to lose weight is to shrink your stomach, and why that person is telling some random thin person in a way that makes said person believe they are prescribing it to them. I think Megan is trying to make her "opponents" appear stupider than she is here. It's no wonder why the writing verges on meaningless grunting sounds. It's hard to be that dumb and stay coherent. Next, she hypotheticals:

Expert: We don't have any known way to make short people tall, except for extreme surgeries and hormone injections.

Megan: But I am 6'2"

Which is where the reader is supposed to wonder why she left the part out about falling down the rabbit hole or going through the looking glass because, seriously, WTF is she talking about. Next, we get to explore. Fun!

1. Obesity is increasing in the population, so it can't be genetic.

Well, average height is also increasing in the population. Does that mean that you could be as tall as me, if you weren't too lazy to grow?

Well, except, height increasED and is not increasING. See, back earlier in the century there was a sudden improvement in our diet and so you get this (yes, it's kind of a funny graph but it was the only one I could find quickly):A graph that, surprisingly, shows that Megan took a really fucking stupid analogy and made it that much dumber by being completely fucking wrong. I must say, she takes idiocy to new levels.

For some reason she keeps blathering about height and health, though it serves no purpose other than to show that she's easily distracted. Skipping over that:

Actually, this is rubbish: we don't know how to lose weight. Some of the things Paul Campos is saying about obesity are controversial, but this isn't. Every single study which has attempted to make overweight people get thin without very risky surgery has failed completely and utterly. Fewer than 1% of patients ever keep the weight off.

This is so obviously bullshit I can't believe it. I know anecdotes are usually worthless, but who doesn't know several people that have lost significant weight permanently? At 1%, you'd have to know hundreds of overweight people that have dieted and failed in order to know a handful of successes. That's fucking bullshit. I can think of three people off the top of my head that lost weight and kept it off from the Atkins diet alone. I know several more that have lost weight by other means. I also know at least a few people that went from thin to fat from eating junk food all day long (not saying that's the only reason to get fat, but there are plenty of people for whom that is the cause). So either I know thousands of fucking obese people, or she's full of shit.

Highly educated people who have managed to get their body weight down 5-10% from where their body naturally wants to be confuse what they are doing with what someone obese enough to cause significant medical problems would need to do, which is get their weight down 50% or more from where their body apparently wants it. They are not the same thing. The amount of weight loss that these sanctimonious slenderizers have achieved has no statistically significant health benefits. Let me repeat: losing twenty pounds will not make you healthier. If you have diabetes and high blood pressure, there is an extremely modest improvement in test results. Unfortunately, it's even harder for diabetics to lose weight than the rest of us.

I think the first part of that paragraph is actually a kind of ink blot test; essentially meaningless and meant only to gauge the psyche of the reader from what he infers. The last bit make perfect sense, in the sense that, yes, plugging the holes in the Titanic wouldn't do much at this point. No mention of how missing the iceberg altogether would've gone, though.

Fat tissue makes people want to eat--it sends out for takeout. And hunger is a signal on par with thirst or pain. You can ignore it, if you have sufficient willpower. But just as most people can't withstand torture (a minority can), most people can't ignore the constant demand from their body for food.

Wait, if being fat makes you hungry, why is it impossible to stay thin once you lose weight? Oh, right, cause she's retarded. Also, comparing eating healthy and exercising to torture.... wow. Awesome.

And you know what... it fucking goes on. For like EVER. Forget it. I thought I had the energy to do this but I don't. She is higher and for longer than ever previously recorded due to this fucking marriage thing (maybe one is on the way and so she's more keen on not getting fired.). I broke my fucking back on Saturday. I don't need to do this shit. I wish she could be pithy and stupid instead of long winded and stupid. It's too much work when her posts get so fat.

Fuck her.

Then Bill of What's?

I think Megan is trying to out liberal the liberals here, or something. I don't fucking know. She's just free associating as far as I can tell.

In a recession, the problem most people and organizations face is too little money. But clearly, that's not the case with the ACLU, which apparently has ample time and money to sue to prevent a charter school from unconstitutionally promoting Islam.

The ACLU litigating a case about religious promotion by the government. Jeez, they must be loaded to get involved with a case that relates to their core principles and widely affects lots of people. Crazy times. (Whattaredaodds that the ACLU got involved in this case before the recession. I'd say higher than "1.")

In a way, this is very good to hear, because it makes it easy to direct my giving to organizations with more urgent needs.

Uhhh, is Megan actually trying to get us to believe that she ever gave money to the ACLU? 'Cause I don't usually donate money to people that I whimsically pontificate annoying for fun.

After my much-regretted decision to vote for George W. Bush in 2004, I've kind of been sitting on the political sidelines. I'm pretty sure I'll hate whoever gets elected. Rudy might be funny just to see the ACLU get all misty and nostalgic about the current administration

That's just me, though.

On the other hand, what the hell is wrong with the leadership at the ACLU? In theory, for all I know, it unconstitutionally promotes religion.

Anyone who can tell me what "it" is wins a years tuition to the religious school of their choice. Also, in theory it's unconstitutional, but who cares about that little thing?

The establishment clause was supposed to prevent a minority from being oppressed by a majority, not to prevent a minority from oppressing itself.

Yeah, that's why it says right there in the constitution separation of church and state only the biggest religion in the country should be excluded from public education.

OK, wait, no, this one requires more time than that. I know I asked this two posts ago, but, seriously, HOW CAN SHE BE THIS FUCKING STOOPID??? "Separation of church and state" is like, the second fucking political thing we're taught after the Pledge of Allegiance. How can you be so fucking dumb as to add imaginary qualifying language like "the church that has the most influence?" How can you be so historically ignorant. She fucking blogs about politics when she's clueless about the meaning of what is commonly regarded as America's CENTRAL FUCKING TENET OF GOVERNING PHILOSOPHY. Who the fuck reads her shit and decides NOT to fire Megan? How can such a person exist? What's next, is she going to claim that right to bear arms means she can wear a fucking tank top? Where the fuck did she come from? She has to be a joke. This blog is actually the biggest sucker in the planet, falling for what is obviously an elaborate parody. She's not real. She's dumber than a random sentence generator. It would take her longer than a million monkeys at a million type writers to generate anything close to a coherent thought. WTF!!!! How is the earth that I live on?! How are there people whose DNA is essentially identical to mine and yet can barely figure out how to fucking fall down? This is like not knowing who fucking Obama is! For fuck's sake! WTF!?!?!? I can't take this shit anymore. The fuse on my head is just about up.

I admire a huge amount of the work that the ACLU does on issues like habeas corpus and wiretapping.

Oh shit.

<Head Explodes>

Why, then, do they so often seem intent on turning the organization into the highbrow edition of Stuff White People Like?

<Crickets>

I'm A Moocher, Looting The Work Of Others

As no one here got to this Mega-item (I've a vague memory of scanning it, noticing that my hair was starting to hurt, & moving along) why not enjoy it from the perspective of the sort of person who is an "adult," has written books on, if not the economy, then right-wing presentation of economic issues, & gets TNR to pay him to do this sort of thing?

So McArdle's comparison -- some countries have cut taxes and thereby raised revenues, some countries have controlled costs with universal coverage -- turns out to be true if you replace the first "some" with "zero" and the second "some" with "all." Other than that, great comparison!

There does seem to be a pattern here of McArdle trying to explain away the influence of supply-siders on the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Two years ago, in response to me, she huffed that Laffer Curve devotees amounted to no more than a tiny fringe within the GOP. ("This motley collection of names is hardly proof that the Supply Siders Have Taken Over the Building.") Shortly after, in a hilarious bout of karma, McArdle had a book review spiked by a major conservative publication because, in the course of her otherwise orthodox argument, she noted that the Laffer Curve does not depict present-day tax rates in the U.S. (I would say better evidence of McArdle being wrong was the fact that the last Republican president and every GOP primary candidate in the 2008 election asserted that tax cuts could revenues to grow.)

So then, in the course of issuing a mea culpa, McArdle asserted that the same dynamic exists on the left with regard to unwillingness to criticize teachers unions. It was quickly pointed out that criticizing teachers unions is not only common but practically de rigeur among liberal columnists, magazines, think tanks, and even elected officials. So now, in her quest to show that it's not just conservatives, everybody does it, she's reaching for an even more preposterous comparison.

--Jonathan Chait

We'll scout about; perhaps Ms. McA. responded. Well, no. Not only no response, but the very next day runs an item about that ol' Laffer & his curve that makes no mention of Mr. Chait's rebuttal or takedown or vicious blog slam or whatever.

How Could They Possibly Sell for More Than I'm Willing to Pay?

Megan tells us "Why I Think the Housing Bubble Has Not Yet Bottomed" because there are a few retards out there who, incredibly, want Megan's opinion on things.

The reason housing prices haven't bottomed, she says, is because the people selling this condo are asking more than it sold for 4 years ago. Naturally, she's not looking at the multitude of graphs showing the national housing price is still well above historical norms. Nope, she's armed with an anecdote. For those too lazy to click, the listing is in the heart of a good neighborhood in the middle of DC.

Now, for someone so convinced housing prices haven't bottomed, it's a bit odd she's looking at house listings. That's, of course, not the stupidest thing she is doing, though. The stupidest thing is here is that she doesn't know anything about housing prices save that they're down. Anyone who is a modicum of informed would know that they're down in some areas but relatively unchanged in others. Those other areas typically being in the center of major metropolitan areas; you know, like downtown DC. To wit, commenter Jim:

Are you familiar with comparable sales? Looks like the going rate for a 900-1000 sqf 2 bed 1 bath condo within a couple blocks of this one range from 485-540K over the last 6 months (6 sales). Seems to me they are already at the low end of this range. Perhaps their realtor knows the market better than you do?

An expert knowing more than Megan? NEVER!

Oh, and thanks, Jim. As soon as I read it I knew she had to be wrong along these lines. I'm glad I didn't have to do the legwork myself to prove it.

My President Spends Irresponsibly Because He Loves Me so Much!

Austan Goolsbee recently complained on television that they're only embroiled in the auto mess because the Bush administration "kicked the can down the road". Keith Hennessy, who was in the Bush administration, says that's not quite how it happened: the administration proposed a more definitive resolution process, but the Obama transition team, which wanted more control over the process, declined.

I though Bush was a manly man? What did he care for what the sissy Obama thinks? I call shenanigans!

BTW, thanks for the links, Meggles. No links for you, either!

It seems to me that the Bush administration could hardly have resolved things any more quickly than they did; restructuring a company takes time.

Hrmmmm.... ok. I guess that's why Obama took a whole 5 months to start the process. He had a lot of free time.

If only someone could have noticed a year ago that GM was in trouble, maybe Bush II could have sprung into action! All of us were fucking SHOCKED that the car companies had to ask for money in December! NO ONE COULD HAVE PREDICTED!!!

But perhaps my old professor was voicing my secret suspicion: that the Bush administration only gave the automakers loans because they wanted to leave the incoming Democrats with an ugly, expensive, mess on their hands. If Bush had had a few more years in office, he might simply have let the automakers fail.

Ohhhhhh! I see why you said something incredibly stupid, now! It's because the stupid thing you're about to say is going to look smart in comparison! It's also great how she suggests that a real expert agrees with her as long as you read between his lines! Now her argument totally carries the weight of a very important person, if you squint right.

But this way, he kept Michigan competitive(Michigan stayed competitive?!?!?! More like on a fucking lifeboat! -ed.), and forced the Democrats to spend huge, unpopular sums on a fairly naked bailout of a key labor constituent.

OMG! Is she saying that a Republican engaged in dirty politicking without regard for the good of the country? Thanks God she blew the whistle! By implication! Months later! While complaining about something else!

Of course, what really happened is that the auto-bailout was financed by the White House under Bush II who was NOT A FUCKING DEMOCRAT! Megan rolls stupid wheels within stupid wheels!

That would imply, of course, that like me, my former professor thinks GM should have been allowed to fail.

Similarly, my opposition to the Iraq war proves that I was right about universal health care! See, I was against killing people for no reason and it turned out to be a bad idea so naturally the solution was actually to send them to a doctor. QED, BITCHES!

Wait, what? I seriously don't know if anything here makes any sense. Megan is so stupid it blares at you like a neon light. Then you look at it closer and it's even stupider! Then you realize that there's another level of stupid beneath all that and before long it's twisted all around itself in some game of "Stupid Twister" and you have no idea whose stupid foot goes with whose stupid arm and you're like OMG WTF I NEED TO LAY DOWN! So, like, whatever, fuck it. I'm taking a nap.

Random Bit: I finally got around to looking up the actual "rules" for capitalizing titles. Turns out Megan was wrong in many ways, but not all of the ones I've previously noted. Whoops. I may think it looks bad to capitalize "are" but that don't make it wrong!

Is There a Dumbass in the House?

Megan picks the weirdest things to opine about. I'm not sure if she's trying to be edgy or if there is some secret personal reason for each of the topics she espouses on, but the only unifying thing I can find is that she's stupid on all of them.

Perhaps her recent foray into best medical practice is motivated by her multitude of chronic aliments. Whatever the cause, we can say for sure that Megan knows better.

She starts with a long excerpt of someone else's writing. The veterans will not need to be notified that it is quite a bit longer than her own musings, though no less well informed.

And so, NICE has decided, on the basis of "the evidence", that acupuncture and chiropractic are a good way to spend the NHS's money.
(...)
As Edzard Ernst points out, the Cochrane Institute (the other great temple of evidence-based medicine) actually found chiropractic to be more or less useless, while the evidence for acupuncture is that all of the ancient wisdom and theory of the meridians and qi doesn't actually confer any great benefit over and above that which can be gained from simply lying on a table and being poked with sticks.

I see. So one investigative body says that chiropractors and acupuncture work, and another does not. Naturally, since those two things aren't "modern medicine" this is proof that the skeptics are right. Also, the fact that both report that acupuncture works is central to his point. The real problem here is the acupuncture works even if you're doing it differently than is commonly done, proving that acupuncture doesn't work and is total bullshit.

The rest of the excerpt extols on how medicine is complex and so we can't know anything for sure. This is both insightful and proof that we know for sure that acupuncture and chiropractors are crocks.

Now we get to Megan.

This is part of a broader problem with medicine and other sciences with physics envy. Medicine, like economics, is really messy. You can't do the same kind of controlled experiments that you can do on rats or quarks, and as a result, the results are often hard to interpret.

Hmm, you can't do experiments in medicine? Wow, those MD-PhD's are gonna be pissed to find out they wasted a decade of their life pursuing the impossible. I Love the analogy to economics, too. We all know that studying individual ailments and studying the complex interactions of millions of people are roughly equivalent. That's why medicine and economics have both come out with so few concrete improvements for our day to day lives.

But this doesn't stop doctors, or policymakers, from acting as if the studies or metastudies can deliver vastly more certainty than is possible from such inherently sloppy science.

Which is why our muse calls herself an economist.

This is why, for example, I am broadly sympathetic to Paul Campos' claim that medical guidelines on obesity tell you much more about the attitudes towards fat in the upper middle class social stratum that doctors occupy, than about reliable scientific evidence on same.

Right, the fact that medicine cannot produce reliable evidence is proved by the fact that medical claims aren't backed by the available evidence. The available evidence which cannot be produced.

But policy demands certainty. And so you get obesity guidelines advising everyone to diet and excercise to shed their excess pounds, even though it's as close to a scientific certainty as anything is that most people simply regain any weight they manage to diet off. And you get absurdly precise economic forecasting, even though in many cases, the better answer would be "who knows?"

It's not that Megan is wrong all the time. It's that no one can ever possibly be right about anything. Oh, and the fact that fat people have a hard time losing weight is apparently proof that being overweight is not detrimental to your health. Also, since most people don't lose weight no one should try, ever. Or something. She has a point. She swears.

In both cases, I don't see a better alternative. But we should be more skeptical of both the institutions, and their claims.

Oh, that explains her constant cheer-leading for the implementation of the things she just attempted to disprove.

I Vaguely Implied To You So!

Megan wants to know if there's a doctor in the house. She hints (but does not link) to an NYT article (presumably this) about a shortage of doctors. She then modestly states "Gee, where have I heard this before?" Luckily, she didn't forget to link to herself.

The link is to a post "Is there a better way?" which attempts to address this comment:

You're a long way from establishing your critical point, focusing only on the downsides of unionism to productivity. What about the downsides of focusing only on the next quarter's return? Any individual corporation would be best served by a return to servitude (company towns, anyone?). The system as a whole may well be better served by having a systematic counterweight to maximizing short-term profits.

Just curious. Are you paid on a piece-work basis or do you draw a salary? Given what you do here, shouldn't you be paid on a piecework basis?

As you think about that, remember that there are other values in this world than maximizing short-term productivity, like treating people with dignity. Who knows, maybe the people who get paid a little more can actually afford to buy the products that the economy generates.

Strangely, it doesn't mention health care at all.

I think she's patting herself on the back for saying this in reply (amongst a host of other "points."):

On the fourth point, this is a silly canard. On an economy level, we cannot produce more by paying workers more, any more than you can increase the height of your house by calling the basement the first floor. The amount of stuff everyone has is determined (more or less) by the productive capacity of the economy. You can redistribute that stuff between people, and you can change the mix of stuff that gets made. But you cannot make more of it by changing the nominal price of labor. The only way to get more stuff as a society is to improve our productive capacity, mostly by research and capital investment.

Which is, of course, total fucking bullshit. If we pay people who do useless shit like being lawyers a shit-ton and our productive members nothing, then we will produce less. Also, she isn't talking about fucking health care. She's stating a simplistic Econ 101 principle that applies TO THE ENTIRE ECONOMY and not A SPECIFIC PROFESSION. Naturally, it bears only a passing relation to the real world like all simplistic Econ 101 principles.

So, this is Megan's life these days. She finds a current topic vaguely relevant to some bullshit econo-crap she has recited previously in an entirely unrelated context and we're all supposed to be like "ZOMG, how does she predict these things?!?!?!??!"

Gather round all and listen to the great Nutstradamus. When you pay CEOs a shit ton of money to account for only stock holder considerations, then they will do things that may cause great harm to non-stock holders. Next time a large corporation cuts a corner and causes significant harm to random people, be sure to check back here to see me saying "Gee, where have I heard that before?"

On to Megan's "points" about health care.

The core problem is that we don't actually have a ton more doctors and nurses. (...) But when I look at the numbers, I don't see all that much room to believe that getting rid of the AMA would let a thousand flowers bloom. In 2008, 42,000 people applied to medical school, and 18,000 enrolled.

Hm, well, I see about 24,000 people's worth of wiggle room, myself. I also see that the focus of the NYT article is a lack of primary care doctors, not total doctors. It briefly mentions a lack of specialists but only cites examples of people having trouble getting access to them in rural areas -- an entirely different story.

Another problem is that a teaching hospital is a hard thing to construct--given how much training doctors need, we won't do that overnight. Teaching hospitals are very expensive, and receive heavy government subsidies. Obviously, we could increase the number of doctors by some amount, but it wouldn't take care of the supply problem.

No! What will we do?! Not "very" expensive and "heavy" government subsidies! That sounds "really" hard! We can only increase doctors by "some" amount! That clearly won't be enough!

It's more reasonable to note that reimbursement structures are creating an undersupply of primary care physicians, compared to the number of specialists.

Right, which is why the article focuses on that. I like how she destroys a strawbaby and then takes her "opponent's" actual argument as her own.

We reimburse for procedures, not wellness, so surgeons are well paid and GPs aren't.

For someone who is an "economist" you'd think she would understand that we always reimburse for "things" rather than "intangible bullshit."

First of all, thanks to previous generations of these reimbursement policies, the AMA is dominated by specialists. It's a democratic organization, and there are more specialists than GPs, so guess who wins? They will launch an all-out war against any politician who changes the reimbursement policy, and the politician will lose, because they can't fight ads featuring sad, sick, telegenic grannies.

Don't you love how when it comes to things like health care she's so pragmatic, always addressing the political reality rather than any flaws in that reality? I love it almost as much as I love how thoroughly she ignores those same realities when talking about things like invading countries, destroying medicare/social security etc.

Second of all, it's actually really, really hard to pay GPs well, at least in the context of cutting overall costs. Note that private insurers, who are presumably not attempting to ingratiate themselves with the AMA, also reimburse procedures, not wellness.

I must be atypically smart because I can think of a million and one things that might be easy to do and involve paying GPs more money. One of them involves handing them some money. The rest are even more complicated. Also, procedures are given more money because they cost more. Specialists take as profit a certain percentage of that higher cost. Naturally they are paid more. This has fuck all to do with "wellness" or "paying for procedures" or whatever. It's a fucking consequence of everything in capitalism. There is more money to be made per capita in high cost goods. Whoops! I'm getting into advanced economics here which is over our poor woman's head.

Pay for office visits, and you will get a lot of unnecessary office visits. As David Cutler once told me, it's no coincidence that health care and education are the two fields where outcomes are hardest to monitor, and where costs are growing uncontrollably.

No, the first is only true if the doctor's are struggling to fill their schedules. If they can already fill them with legitimate office visits, they won't prescribe extraneous ones.

The second is, again, completely irrelevant to the topic at hand. GPs don't provide "more wellness" than other doctors. They just provide different services which aren't be funded as highly.

Nor can you simply slash specialty reimbursements as a way of herding people into general practice, because med school applications are already declining; they're down 3.5% since 2001. Doctors are not, by and large, altruists who dream of living on a GS-13 wage. Nor can I blame them.

But we're only enrolling 40% of applicants, and there are major opportunities for overhauls such as increasing care from less trained workers such as LPNs. As for wages, my father is a psychiatrist; one of the lowest paid branches of medicine. He probably doesn't know what the fuck GS-13 is, but I'm sure he's making more than it. He's not complaining about his pay. Frankly, I'd rather not have doctors around who are in it for the money. If you only care about money, then you will do what is profitable rather than what produces "wellness." Naturally, Megan doesn't blame them for that.