RUTHFULLY YOURS

Abraham M. Nussbaum When Doctors Stop ‘Seeing’ Patients

Dr. Nussbaum, the chief education officer at Denver Health, is the author of “The Finest Traditions of My Calling” (Yale University Press, 2016).
Physicians aptly speak of “seeing” patients. After all, medical training is a series of vision lessons. Students look closely at a nameless cadaver and disassemble it until it resembles the pictures in an anatomy text. They watch lectures in which interrelated organ systems are displayed as simple machines.

Often, however, doctors’ vision narrows too far. We begin to see the body as a collection of parts and lose sight of the person before us. Early in my medical training, this way of seeing began intruding on the rest of my life. During movies I imagined the best surgical approach for the actress. I saw friends’ physical imperfections as signs of syndromes.

So I took a leave of absence from med school to study history, literature and theology. The humanities taught me that the questions I was wrestling with are foundational to the history of medicine. In Platonic medicine, a physician sought to diagnose disease as a concrete fact. Hippocrates, who lived around 400 B.C., reoriented doctors toward seeking to understand the beneficial and deleterious forces in a patient’s life and then helping rebalance them in favor of health.

For the past two centuries, physicians have been counseled to pursue something akin to Platonic medicine, to act like scientists. Remarkable technologies—antibiotics, anesthesia, antisepsis—resulted. But physicians also shifted away from the Hippocratic pursuit of understanding patients. Today’s clinics are often alienating, as when a physician spends a checkup gazing into a computer screen. Half of doctors report feeling burned out, and a majority would advise against a medical career. CONCINUE AT SITE

Progressives want to politicize everything, even chicken sandwiches. Witness New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s campaign to get his fellow citizens to boycott the Chick-fil-A restaurants that are opening around the Big Apple.

The fast-food chain opened its first New York restaurant last year, and the line at lunch time at the restaurant near our office stretches around the block. This is no small feat in midtown Manhattan, where you can’t walk 20 yards without hitting a deli, a food truck or some other fast-food joint.

This meeting of popular supply and demand is too much for Mr. de Blasio, who last week urged New Yorkers not to eat the spicy chicken fare because the chain’s owners are known for opposing same-sex marriage.

“Chick-fil-A is anti-LGBT,” said the mayor, who fancies himself a spokesman for all progressive causes. “I’m certainly not going to patronize them and I wouldn’t urge any other New Yorker to patronize them. But they do have a legal right.” Good to know he isn’t trying to ban the business, though give him time.

A Chick-fil-A spokesman responded that, “The Chick-fil-A culture and service tradition in our restaurants is to treat every person with honor, dignity and respect—regardless of their beliefs, race, creed, sexual orientation or gender.” There are also laws that ban discrimination. CONTINUE AT SITE

Understandable. We wouldn’t want to stigmatize murderers, drug dealers, rapists and robbers. Their victims might disagree, but they’re just Crimeaphobic.

Assistant Attorney General Karol Mason, who has headed the Office of Justice Programs since 2013, announces in a guest post that her agency will no longer use words such as “felon” or “convict” to refer to released prisoners.

“Many of the formerly incarcerated men, women, and young people I talk with say that no punishment is harsher than being permanently branded a “felon” or “offender,” Mason writes. “This new policy statement replaces unnecessarily disparaging labels with terms like “person who committed a crime” and “individual who was incarcerated,”

Should go over as well as “man caused disasters” for terrorism. But the side benefits of living inside a Groucho Marx movie set in an Orwellian dystopia is that we get plenty of laughs.

“The labels we affix to those who have served time can drain their sense of self-worth”.

I suppose we could discuss the self-worth of their victims, but that would not be politically correct.

Friday’s jobs report from the Labor Department brought the latest reminder that the U.S. economy isn’t creating opportunities like it used to. A separate report released this week goes a long way toward explaining why.

On Wednesday Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute rolled out his annual report card on federal regulation, “Ten Thousand Commandments.” Beltway rules are now imposing $1.9 trillion of annual costs on the U.S. economy. That’s the same level as last year, but when combined with on-the-books federal spending, which is $3.9 trillion, the feds are taking a record-setting bite out of private commerce and wealth.

The regulatory burden is staggering for the economy and for all who live and work within it. The annual tab for complying with directives from Washington is now larger than the entire economy of Russia. The cost of federal red tape amounts to nearly $15,000 per U.S. household each year.

And the bureaucratic onslaught will continue, even as we enter the final months of the last year of President Obama’s second term. Mr. Crews reports that regulators spanning 60 federal departments, agencies and commissions have nearly 3,300 regulations still in the pipeline and waiting to be imposed on an unsuspecting public.

Is it any wonder that the government reported modest job growth in April and a shrinking labor force? Or that the U.S. economy wheezed its way to 0.5% growth in the first quarter?

Mr. Crews’s data also show that the regulatory burden falls particularly hard on small firms, which suffer higher compliance costs per employee than larger competitors. This may explain why readings of small-business hiring look even worse than for the economy as a whole.

The Obama Administration was the first in American history to generate more than 80,000 pages of new and proposed rules in the Federal Register in a single year. CONTINUE AT SITE

Obama’s plan to accelerate vetting of Syrian “refugees” for U.S. entry.

President Obama is willing to gamble with the lives of American citizens. He is intent on emptying Guantanamo of as many of the detainees as possible, even as some of the released jihadists have returned to the battlefield to fight against our soldiers. Now the Obama administration is reportedly planning to accelerate the screening process for Syrians claiming refugee status, so that they can be rapidly resettled in communities across the United States.

The Washington Free Beacon has reported that, according to its sources, “The Obama administration has committed to bring at least 10,000 Syrian refugees onto American soil in fiscal year 2016 by accelerating security screening procedures from 18-24 months to around three months.”

The current resettlement vetting process for self-proclaimed refugees begins with an initial screening by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The applications of some who make it through this preliminary UN screen are referred to United States authorities for further consideration and possible resettlement. UNCHR’s role in the front end of the vetting process should be reason enough for alarm.

The United Nations has called for more open borders to accommodate the millions of “refugees” and other migrants whom have left the Middle East and North Africa. To this end, UNCHR is said to be looking for alternative avenues to admit Syrian refugees that are faster than the current refugee “resettlement” vetting process. UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi suggested a number of such alternatives last March, at a high-level meeting held in Geneva to discuss “global responsibility sharing through pathways for admission of Syrian refugees.”

Among the alternative “pathways” listed by the UNCHR High Commissioner for Refugees were “labour mobility schemes, student visa and scholarships, as well as visa for medical reasons.” He added, “Resettlement needs vastly outstrip the places that have been made available so far… But humanitarian and student visa, job permits and family reunification would represent safe avenues of admission for many other refugees as well.”

Mickey Fearn, the National Park Service Deputy Director for Communications and Community Assistance, made headlines when he claimed that black people don’t visit national parks because they associate them with slaves being lynched by their masters.

Yellowstone, the first national park, was created in 1872 in Wyoming. Slavery was over by then and no one had ever been lynching slaves around Old Faithful anyway. But false claims of racism die very hard.

Now Alcee Hastings, an impeached judge, and a coalition of minority groups is demanding increased “inclusiveness” at national parks. High on their list is the claim that, “African-Americans have felt unwelcome and even fearful in federal parklands during our nation’s history because of the horrors of lynching.” What do national parks have to do with lynchings? Many national parks have trees. People were hung from trees. It’s racial guilt by arboreal association. Trees are racist down to their roots.

The origin of the bizarre racist lynching theory of national parks appears to be Carolyn Finney. Finney was an actress noted for, apparently, little more than an appearance in The Nutt House. Then she became a cause célèbre for race activists when she was denied tenure by Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management because her work didn’t meet academic standards.

Her supporters blamed racism, rather than her academic shortcomings, and protested vocally.

These days she’s a diversity advisor to the U.S. National Parks Advisory Board. What wasn’t good enough for UC Berkeley is good enough for national parks. She is also the author of Black Faces, White Spaces. In it she claims that “oppression and violence against black people in forests and other green spaces can translate into contemporary understandings that constrain African-American environmental understandings.”

Finney cites the work of Joy DeGruy Leary who invented a Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome that she claims black people suffer from. Affected by PTSS, black people experience “fear and mistrust of forests and other green spaces.” According to Finney, the tree is a racist symbol to black people.

“Black people also wanted to go out in the woods and eat apples from the trees,” Finney explains.” But black people were lynched on the trees. The tree became a big symbol.” Black people are triggered by trees and suffer Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome flashbacks. You can’t expect them to go to on a hike.

What shall we do about the racist trees? Finney is front and center at the new “inclusion” initiative, “You’re sitting here making up a rule and assuming that everybody is going to feel comfortable to come to the woods and go on a hike,” she whined. “Maybe they’re not interested in doing that, that’s not how they like to come to the woods.”

A few weeks ago, the bloviator-in-chief moved his lips in another deathless lumbada of badda — another nugget of Obamaesque [un]truthiness.

His words: “An attack on islam is an attack on all faiths.” Outside a Baltimore mosque, he added, “When any religious group is targeted, we all have a responsibility to speak up.”

That goes double for you, too, Mr. President. And you have the means, and the daily morning update briefings, to be hyperaware of the true extent of threats against “religious groups.” And those under threat are far and away not Muslims.

But equal faiths is simply not so, Mr. O.

Few religions chattelize all women, sanction the taking of all and any female child or adult as fit booty after unprovoked aggressions aimed at wresting land and money and valuables from innocent civilians doing no one any harm. No Protestant sect advises the mutilation of female genitalia, the forced donning of impenetrable, crippling body bags to ensure that men cannot gaze on a workaday female going about her daily rounds. Judaism has no brief with forced conversions under pain of death or the payment of vast sums of Jizzya to ‘apologize’ for not converting. Judaism frowns on conversions altogether, as those wishing to convert for a variety of reasons soon learn.

The Hindu does not rampage ceaselessly over lands they ‘once inhabited’ — as in Andalusia, the Muslim coinage for Spain, 700 years ago. Baha’I have no brief with enforcing a specialized hell on earth called “sharia” that essentially nullifies the Constitution or any national democratic document that asserts primacy over a nation’s laws and people.

In an extensive, groundbreaking study of hundreds of stateside mosques undertaken in the ‘90s by leading anti-terror national security expert Steven Emerson, executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, the vast majority of U.S. mosques feature violent and unmitigated anti-infidel literature, problematic clerics advocating unholy screeds and actions, and in the past and to this day harbor often-scabrous terrorists in training or worse.

During the first days in May, I attended a three-day conference held in the Roosevelt Hotel in NYC, sponsored by CitizenGo!, that dedicated a full day to hourly panels and discussion of ISIS and related Islamist groups’ torture, beheading, ravaging of property, abduction of women, selling captured Christian, Yazidi, and minority women into actual slavery, and of course, personal witness of their men being beheaded, shot or otherwise tortured to death.

Conference days on which there were no Christian survivor panels showed unwatchable full-length documentaries and trailers gotten through hidden cameras inside ISIS tents as they jubilantly discussed trading slaves and practicing sexual abuse on Yazidi women and children. These films show the ravages of Shia, Sunni, or Syrian Alewite massacres of mostly Christians, or other Muslims. Witness after witness spoke of being raped, even tiny girls. Men who had escaped, including priests and prelates of various Christian denominations, called on the world, and in particular President Obama, to come to their aid. Though there are some four thousand Jews in Iran, ostensibly a “protected minority” useful for the Shia regime of the mullahcracy, there are no longer any Jewish populations of any numbers in any Middle Eastern — that is, Muslim — state.

“If you really want to protect Americans from ISIS, you secure the southern border. It’s that simple.” — Rep. Duncan Hunter.

The Department of Homeland Security denied Hunter’s claims, called them “categorically false” and added that “no credible intelligence to suggest terrorist organizations are actively plotting to cross the southwest border.” Days later, however, it was confirmed that “4 ISIS Terrorists” were arrested crossing the border into Texas.

Under Obama’s presidency alone, 2.5 million illegals have crossed the border. And those are just the ones we know about. How many of these are ISIS operatives, sympathizers or facilitators?

Securing the U.S.-Mexico border — with an electronic fence, which has worked so effectively in Israel — is more urgent than we think.

Of all the reasons a majority of Americans support the plan of businessman and U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump to “build a wall” along the U.S.-Mexico border, perhaps the most critical is to avoid letting terrorists into the country. Drugs enter, the victims of traffickers enter, but the most imminent danger comes from operatives of the Islamic State (ISIS) and like-minded groups that are trying to use this porous border as a way to smuggle weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) into the United States and launch terror attacks that could make 9/11 seem like a morning in May.

Just last week, “One of the American men accused in Minnesota of trying to join the Islamic State group wanted to open up routes from Syria to the U.S. through Mexico… Guled Ali Omar told the ISIS members about the route so that it could be used to send members to America to carry out terrorist attacks, prosecutors alleged in a document.”

While I am an admirer of his work, Ross Douthat’s New York Times post-mortem on the candidacy of Ted Cruz is a caricature of “True Conservatism,” the demise of which he undertakes to explain.

Devoid of any context except reaction to the futilities of George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” Ross builds his straw man:

Thus True Conservatism’s determination to avoid both anything that savored of big government and anything that smacked of compromise. Where Bush had been softhearted, True Conservatism would be sternly Ayn Randian; where Bush had been free-spending, True Conservatism would be austere; where Bush had taken working-class Americans off the tax rolls, True Conservatism would put them back on — for their own good. And above all, where Bush had sometimes reached for the center, True Conservatism would stand on principle, fight hard, and win.

This is warped because it fails to tell even half the story.

President Bush’s conservative heresies had not merely “reached for the center” or, as Ross elsewhere puts it, “led the Republican Party into a ditch.” They had paved the way for President Obama and the radical Left to lead the country into a bottomless pit. The national debt that Bush and the Republican Congress would double to $10 trillion, Obama would double again, to $20 trillion. The unsustainable entitlements that Bush added to, Obama would double-down on — including with Obamacare, which (unlike Bush’s well-meaning prescription entitlement) is about government control, not government compassion. The Bush bailouts became Obama mega-bailouts cum stimulus. The push for “comprehensive immigration reform” became the systematic non-enforcement of the immigration laws, the breakdown of border security, and a Justice Department crackdown on states that tried to affirm the rule of law. The conflation of national security with Muslim outreach, oxymoronic sharia-democracy building, and the pie-in-the-sky notion that Iran could be a helpful force for regional stability became willful blindness on steroids, Muslim Brotherhood promotion, and an Iran deal that combines nuclear proliferation with the provision of material support to the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.

In the interim, Republicans pleading to be returned to power repeatedly promised to use all constitutional means at their disposal, particularly the power of the purse, to thwart Obama’s steamrolling agenda. Typical was Mitch McConnell, GOP leader in the Senate, who thundered that Obama “needs to be challenged” and vowed “to do that through the funding process.” Here is McConnell, for example, in the run-up to the 2014 midterms:

In the spending bill, we will be pushing back against this bureaucracy by doing what’s called placing riders in the bill. No money can be spent to do this or to do that. We’re going to go after them on health care, on financial services, on the Environmental Protection Agency, across the board. All across the federal government, we’re going to go after it.

Yet, as soon as conservative voters put them in control, Republicans promptly dropped the combative rhetoric and forfeited the power of the purse. With Obama applauding, they funded the administration’s priorities while leaving themselves no leverage to fight the excesses that were sure to come and are sure to continue through the next eight months.

‘Jump the shark” is an American pop-culture expression that derives from a 1977 Happy Days sitcom episode; it describes a moment of decline. At a certain point, a TV show becomes so predictable, empty of ideas, and gimmicky that in desperation its writers will try anything — like the character “The Fonz” jumping over a shark on water skis — just to keep on the air.

Contemporary protestors have reached that moment, when demonstrations exist for demonstrations’ sake, without any consistent or coherent agenda of dissent.

At a recent forum on political correctness at the University of Massachusetts, three invited guest speakers were shouted down by protestors in the audience. A video of one shouter went viral. In the manner of a two-year-old, she threw a loud temper tantrum, interrupting the speakers, screaming obscenities, and repeatedly yelling, “Keep your hate speech off this campus!”

How does one stop “hate speech” by bellowing out four-letter obscenities to disrupt free expression at a university? The childish protestor then proved that she had jumped the shark when she finished by screaming, “Stop treating us like children!”

At an earlier protest at Yale, one particularly emotional student jumped the shark by cursing at a faculty member whose crime was advising students not to overreact to the childish Halloween costumes that other students would be wearing.

Protestors have a right to object to Donald Trump’s various crudities, as long as they do so peacefully and respect the right of free speech. But recently, disrupters at a Trump rally in California likewise jumped the shark when some waved the flag of Mexico or bore placards with slogans such as “Make America Mexico Again.” If the protest was directed against Trump’s pledges to deport undocumented immigrants to Mexico, then it made little sense to celebrate the country to which protestors did not wish immigrants to return, or to suggest that immigrants’ new home should become identical to the old home that they had chosen to leave.

At the University of Missouri last year, protestors demanded concessions from the university. In a public area, assistant communications professor Melissa Click called for “some muscle” to manhandle a student journalist who was trying to photograph a public demonstration. Click might as well have put on water skis and jumped a plastic shark. A right-wing cartoonist could not have dreamed up a sillier scenario, with a faculty member from a university’s communications department trying to have a student reporter physically blocked from covering a news story in a free-speech zone.