Regulations and guidance

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology webpage describes how a centralized bureaucracy will control your medical treatment in near-real time based on your electronic medical records, the doctor's diagnosis and the government's needs. They also offer Regulations and Guidance. I suspect there's something in the phrase "Regulations and Guidance" that makes a liberal sigh with contentment like a toddler with a warm blankie and a dry diaper.

Take your camera

I may as well toss this out into the aether before next Tuesday: take your camera with you when you vote. If anything looks suspicious, take pictures & videos and post them. The party that controls your local election infrastructure has plenty of motivation to cheat this year.

Poetry Wednesday

The first part of Sidney's Psalm 139 (read it aloud to feel it in your mouth - somehow these words direct an elegant dance):

O Lord, O Lord, in me there lieth nought
    But to thy search revealed lies,
            For when I sit
            Thou markest it;
    No less thou notest when I rise;
Yea, closest closet of my thought
    Hath open windows to thine eyes.

A lot left to run

Here is John Derbyshire's delightful introduction to 1910 at the beginning of a recent speech:

Let me do a little scene-setting here. It is March of 1910 — just 100 years and change ago. William Howard Taft is in the White House; Edward the Seventh, very nearly Taft's equal in girth, was on the British throne. China's last Emperor was in the Forbidden City, and the Russian Empress was under the spell of Rasputin.

Mark Twain and Leo Tolstoy were still alive. The population of the U.S.A. was 92 million, including 450,000 veterans of the Civil War (North and South) and 162 households recorded in the census of that year as "living in polygamy." Thirteen percent of us were foreign born. Total government spending was eight percent of GDP.

The automobile was settling in, airplanes were still a novelty, Picasso was painting, Mahler was composing, Nijinsky was dancing, Caruso was singing, H.G. Wells was writing, and Mary Pickford had just started in the movies. The year's hit pop song was "Let Me Call You Sweetheart."

Adolf Hitler was living in a homeless shelter in Vienna, Lenin was writing angry pamphlets in cheap rooming houses, Stalin was on the run from the Tsar's secret police, FDR was a lawyer on Wall Street, Churchill was Trade Secretary in H.H. Asquith's cabinet, Gandhi was agitating for civil rights in South Africa, and Mao Tse-Tung was in high school. Barry Goldwater was in diapers and Ronald Reagan was a twinkle in his Dad's eye.

There was a lot of 20th century still to run.

Men versus the Man is available in its entirety at blessed Google Books.

Someone needs to get out more

Maybe walk to the liberry and read a few books. "Thanks to a song in the 1940s, Money is the Root of All Evil has become a common phrase." -- Adam Dachis at lifehacker.com

With a little help from his friends

I see here that the emperor of the world plans to visit Bombay next month. It seems he can't travel anywhere without the entire imperial retinue of janissaries, sycophants and jesters. Why not just stay home and do the whole thing via videoconference?