Bookworm Room

Tweet George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of the best and most important books ever written. This is not hyperbole. It’s as close as one can ever get to an objective statement about a novel.  In addition to Orwell’s lean, elegant prose, it is impossible to imagine a more insightful or prescient book about the [...]

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Tweet My mother is a testament to the wonders of modern medicine.  But for the drugs, surgery, and implanted equipment upon which she relies, she would have been dead a long time ago.  Perhaps even more importantly, to the extent that she’s not dead, she has a fairly good quality of life.  Thanks to cataract [...]

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Tweet When we met the Blues, one of the people we met was the team’s flight surgeon, who struck me as a lovely young woman:  warm, dedicated and intelligent.  I’m sure Neptunus Lex wasn’t talking about her when he wrote this hysterically funny post a few years ago.  (And no, I didn’t go hunting that [...]

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Tweet Okay, it’s actually called the Kennedy bill, but it’s the realization of Obama’s insistence on the federal government forcing and funding mandatory health insurance.  Keith Hennessey, in addition to giving links for you to read the bill yourself, explains the substantive parts of the bill, as well as the probable practical and economic effects [...]

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Tweet Today’s news stories help to clarify Obama’s and the Democrats’ priorities: Money for parties?  Check. Assistance for politically friendly papers that the American public refuses to read?  Check. Money for soldiers wounded in the service of their country?  What!  Are you kidding, dude?  No way! The leader of the nation’s largest veterans organization says [...]

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Tweet For reasons too complicated to explain, I have more than a passing knowledge about medical informatics — or, in simple terms, the trend to put all patient records in computerized systems.  That’s why, at a soccer game, a young woman who is clearly an Obama supporter asked me what I thought of the move [...]

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Tweet From Genesis 3:16 (after the expulsion from Eden): To the woman He [God] said, “I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. I’m feeling Biblical after having read a story about another one of the “miracles” of universal healthcare, as in effect in Britain: Hundreds of [...]

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Tweet If you stop at the first paragraph of this AP article, you might think that Teddy Kennedy is the only person on earth who has ever faced a cancer surgery as daunting as the one he underwent (emphasis mine): Bravery in the face of cancer? Sen. Edward M. Kennedy has given it new meaning. [...]

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Tweet Many years ago, I was talking to a friend of mine who was a medical student on his neurology rotation.  He related what was, to me, an amazing story.  The patient he saw that day was a fairly young man who had suffered a major stroke, resulting in an almost complete loss of speech [...]

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