Obamacare narrow networks in California: as predicted

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve written quite exhaustively about the Obamacare narrow network problem, which I know is especially serious in California, because I spent a goodly portion of my spare time last winter researching Obamacare in California for a relative. It was tooth-grindingly, mind-numbingly frustrating and time-consuming to try to get any reliable information at all, but the gist of what I gleaned was bad, if a person wants to have the ability to choose or keep (quaint idea—wherever have we hard it?) his/her doctor.

The LA Times now tells us that the situation will be no better in 2015. In fact, it seems that it will be even worse, if possible, in most areas of California.

This was completely and totally predictable, like much of Obamacare’s bad news.

But did you know that Americans don’t really care about choosing their doctors? To say that, one must ignore evidence to the contrary, which says that Americans do care despite the efforts of health care insurance pundits to tell them they shouldn’t care because it doesn’t matter and all doctors are somehow the same:

Yet survey after survey has found that patients in HMOs (like Kaiser) are perfectly satisfied with their health care, and the doctors they have access to. We have a magical tendency to believe, if a doctor has done something good for us, that he or she was the only medical provider in the world who could have done that good. It’s not true.

First of all—and that’s just first of all—many people in Kaiser (at least in the past) were/are there because they chose Kaiser, which is an HMO where your choices of doctors are limited to those employed by Kaiser. Therefore these consumers are not a random sample of people; they are people who might be expected to be among those who care least about doctor choice.

Second of all, other polls indicate that many people—in fact, a majority—do care about choice for the most part.

I am most definitely one of those other people who care. My guess is that those like me, who have had a number of somewhat obscure health problems, value choice even more than most people do, because we’ve learned the value of it from personal experience.

My injuries were such that, if I had not had the capacity, through my health insurance (which for many decades I selected and paid more for in order to retain that choice), to go anywhere in the country for treatment for the nerve injuries in my arms, I would almost certainly have remained so overwhelmed, consumed, and distracted by chronic pain that I would hardly be functioning at all, if indeed I’d managed to survive (I’ve told the story here).

And I’ve seen this happen to many other people, too. Once you’ve had the experience you don’t forget it.

My guess is that many of the people who don’t care about doctor choice are young and healthy, and fortunate enough not to have needed much care, so for them any doctor will do. In fact, they probably almost never even go to a doctor. But someday they will. And most people who are older and/or sicker understand the enormous value of a doctor you like, trust, and have chosen.

Of course, choice costs money. That’s the problem. But one of Obamacare’s greatest flaws is that it not only restricts choice for those with subsidized health insurance, it standardizes all individual policies and restricts choice even for those who pay their own way (socialism is fair because it makes all people equally miserable).

All of this is why a number of states have passed or are considering what are known as “any willing provider” laws:

If approved, South Dakota would be added to the list of states with a so-called “any willing provider” laws that requires broader inclusion in health insurance networks. The health insurance industry opposes these laws, arguing that the laws hurt their ability to negotiate with physicians and hospitals and to drive efficient care ”” which, the industry says, translates to higher costs for patients…

Twenty-seven states in all have some form of any willing provider law but they vary significantly, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Many of these states have had these laws on the books since the 1980s, and the laws can be broad, covering most of a state’s doctors and hospitals, while others much narrower in scope apply to just pharmacies or certain provider types.

These laws reflects people’s dissatisfaction with narrow networks, a dissatisfaction Obamacare advocates are busy denying. How bad is the narrow network problem? This bad:

About 70 percent of health plans sold on the ACA’s health insurance marketplaces this past year had narrow or ultra-narrow networks, according to McKinsey and Co., which defined “narrow” as excluding at least 30 percent of an area’s largest hospitals. Narrow networks were increasingly being used before the ACA, but they’ve become more prevalent under the law…

Yes, this was already a trend. But there were a lot more choices available before Obamacare. After the passage of the Act, narrow networks made a Great Leap Forward:

networks

It’s not a pretty picture.

Predicting the 2014 Senate race: New Hampshire

The New Neo Posted on by

Those of you who follow this blog know that I don’t ordinarily make too many predictions about who will win an election. I didn’t do it in 2012 either, although unlike many other pundits I felt very pessimistic about Romney’s chances (maybe that’s why I didn’t make a prediction; it was too depressing).

So I’m not going to predict who will take the Senate in 2014. It’s just too close, anyway, or at least it seems that way. In general I believe the polls are fairly predictive, but they are moving around an awful lot lately. However, the general picture remains tight.

One of the states that was once thought to be an important tossup but where the Democrat now seems comfortably ahead is New England’s New Hampshire. Scott Brown is the Republican and Jeanne Shaheen the Democrat. Both have good name recognition, but Brown (despite having older New Hamphsire roots than Shaheen) is seen as a newcomer and a Massachusetts guy. And of course, he’s a man in a state that seems lately to have strongly favored the election of women.

Shaheen is a puzzlement to me as a politician. She was worse than a mediocrity as NH Governor, and has been an undistinguished and loyal Democratic party operative in her tenure as senator. And yet she is comfortably ahead in the polls in a state widely perceived as still being purple, but which I suspect has become almost (although not quite) as blue as its other New England cousins. New Hampshire was a semi-conservative and somewhat libertarian New England anomaly for quite some time after its brethen had turned liberal/left, a single throwback to an older rock-ribbed New England sensibility that now is confined to the northern and more rural (and less populated by people from “away”) areas of all the New England states.

So the following statement isn’t a prediction; it’s a wish: I hope the polls are wrong, and/or that the race will tighten up before election day. I think that’s at least possible, because the polls have been very very wrong in New Hampshire before, although in general I think polls—especially over time, and if averaged—are quite accurate.

Obama: still the blame duck

The New Neo Posted on by

One of Obama’s biggest failings as president has been the rise of ISIS under his watch. He can blame it on George Bush, as is his wont, and some will swallow it. But it’s a little more difficult to do than in many other circumstances because Obama and his administration are on record as saying that, when they engineered the withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, the country was in good shape. That makes it hard for many voters—even some who generally support Obama—to avoid drawing the conclusion that he missed the boat on this one, and that his own actions (and/or inactions) have largely contributed to ISIS’ ability to gain power and territory.

But never fear. Obama has many arrows of blame in his quiver. This time it’s the intelligence community that failed him:

…[I]n an interview that aired Sunday evening, the president told 60 Minutes that the rise of the group now proclaiming itself a caliphate in territory between Syria and Iraq caught the U.S. intelligence community off guard. Obama specifically blamed James Clapper, the current director of national intelligence: “Our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that, I think, they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” he said.

It’s an interesting ploy on the part of Obama. In order to counter it, the listener would have to have a fair amount of specific information about what our intelligence knew and when, and what the president was actually told.

And it has that superficial grain of truth that makes it plausible if you don’t dig too deeply. After all, Clapper did say that “he [had] underestimated the will of the ISIS fighters in Iraq and overestimated the ability of Iraq’s security forces in northern Iraq to counter ISIS.” But “he also said his analysts warned about the ‘prowess and capability’ of the group.” They warned over and over, for months—some of it in hearings that occurred in January and February, and are a matter of public record—and still Obama did nothing. He also did nothing after the threat and its scope was obvious and required no warning; even the casual observer could see the danger after the group took over Fallujah, for example.

So Obama was warned before it became obvious, and even after it became obvious he dawdled and pondered until the threat was overwhelming and would be far, far more difficult to counter. But Obama is both constitutionally unable and generally unwilling to take the blame for anything, ever, and so he must find someone else to blame.

The fact that we’ve gotten very used to this trait of Obama’s tends to obscure how very uncommon it was in presidents prior to Obama. It’s not just that Truman made the opposite behavior famous with his “The buck stops here” desk sign, it’s that taking responsibility used to be required of presidents by the public, and all this blaming would have been considered weak and—that overused word—“unpresidential.”

No more, as I pointed out in 2010:

…[Obama has a] repetitive need to pass the buck and make excuses.

It was one of the very first things I noticed about Obama, and it later moved me to coin the descriptive name for him that appears in the title of this post: the blame duck.

It’s not just the blaming and the excuse-making itself, it’s the fact that such behavior is unprecedented in a president in my lifetime. What’s more, it’s that nearly half of the American public isn’t yet turned off by this sort of thing in a POTUS. Back when I was growing up, such an approach by a president would be unthinkable and even (yes, I know this isn’t PC) unmanly. It just wasn’t done; it was weak and unseemly and showed lack of leadership.

The fact that it now seems acceptable is probably a result of the decades-long abdication of the idea of personal responsibility, beginning in the school system with the self-esteem movement. Obama may be the first president who not only is a product of that system, but more importantly, was elected by people raised in that system. He knows his audience well.

So Obama is to blame for his blaming. But the American public is to blame for rewarding him for it.

Obama and the global jihad

The New Neo Posted on by

Andrew McCarthy says the Khorosan Group is not a separate entity at all. It’s just a useful construction, invented by the Obama administration for its own purposes:

…[T]here is a purpose behind this dizzying proliferation of names assigned [by the Obama administration] to what, in reality, is a global network with multiple tentacles and occasional internecine rivalries.

As these columns have long contended, Obama has not quelled our enemies; he has miniaturized them. The jihad and the sharia supremacism that fuels it form the glue that unites the parts into a whole ”” a worldwide, ideologically connected movement rooted in Islamic scripture that can project power on the scale of a nation-state and that seeks to conquer the West. The president does not want us to see the threat this way…

For a product of the radical Left like Obama, terrorism is a regrettable but understandable consequence of American arrogance. That it happens to involve Muslims is just the coincidental fallout of Western imperialism in the Middle East, not the doctrinal command of a belief system that perceives itself as engaged in an inter-civilizational conflict…

The global terror network must be atomized into discrete, disconnected cells moved to violence by parochial political or territorial disputes, with no overarching unity or hegemonic ambition. That way, they can be limned as a manageable law-enforcement problem fit for the courts to address, not a national-security challenge requiring the armed forces.

I think it’s that last bit that’s especially important to Obama. The very last thing he wants to do is to have to engage in a serious, broad, committed, lengthy, military campaign, especially one against Islamist forces, especially one requiring ground troops. It is maximally un-PC to declare any connection of Islam to terrorism, which puts him in an especially awkward position, but one he’s not going to abandon.

McCarthy goes on to describe how the Arab states who are allied with us for the moment against ISIS are only behind a very limited aspect of this war. One can’t help but think that Obama, also, is only behind a very limited aspect of this war. To acknowledge more would be to do a host of things Obama cannot and will not do: admit Bush didn’t do so badly after all, fess up to having failed to evaluate the situation properly at the outset and prevent it from growing, see Islam as part of the problem, become a wartime Commander-in-Chief, and defy much of his party.

What’s been going on with the spam lately

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “T” asks whether I’ve turned off my spam filter, because more spam than usual appears to be getting through in the last few days.

I’d never do that, I can assure you. Spam comes into a blog like this at a pretty fast clip, and if I turned off the spam filter, spam would quickly overwhelm the comments. For example, as I write this it’s around 11 AM, and just this morning about 125 spam comments have already been blocked. And sometimes there are runs of spam that are a lot faster than that, close to that many in just a couple of minutes.

Spam continually seeks to find a way around the defenses ranged against it. Some small amount always gets through the filter, although the great majority is effectively blocked. When I’m at my computer, I periodically check the comments section and delete the spam that has gotten through. You don’t usually see the spam I delete, because most has been placed on threads that are no longer active. But lately, although the amount of spam is the same, it’s been deposited more often on active threads instead of old threads. So it’s been a bit more noticeable lately for that reason.

Since—contrary to what it might seem sometimes—I don’t spend my entire life at the computer, when I’m away from it this rogue spam piles up just a little bit more. That’s why you’re seeing a slightly increased amount of it lately. Most likely it will get better in a couple of days, if past experience is any guide. I’d rather not add extra hurdles to posting, such as Captcha (which I detest) or further registration, so I’m going to see if other approaches will effectively control it. I think they will.

Autism and belief: Part II

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Part I is here.]

It turns out that the case of autistic 13-year-old author Naoki Higashida is more complex than that of Rom Houben. When I Googled his book (The Reason I Jump) online, I was expecting (hoping, anyway) to find at least a couple of scientifically sophisticated discussions of Higashida’s method of communicating, but I didn’t find much except for a few naysayers in the Amazon comments section for the book.

From the articles about it that I did find, it appears that Higashida first started communicating by having his hand guided in the usual facilitated communication manner, but now he does a lot of his typing himself—but always with a helper around to cue him somewhat and clean up and transcribe his copy. So it has been difficult—in fact, impossible—for me to sort out the contribution of the boy versus the contribution of his helpers.

I struck pay dirt, however, when I found the following video of the boy at work. I believe it’s from a few years ago, and my best guess after watching it is that Higashida does have some rudimentary language and even spelling and typing skills, but that the bulk of his book is the product of his helpers and his translators, whether they know it or not.

You can watch the video for yourself (the video, by the way, was made and presented by the group at Syracuse that was previously implicated in the most misleading and bogus cases of facilitated communication with autistic patients). It cannot be embedded, so you’ll have to go to the website to watch it; scroll down about three-quarters of the way to the video entitled, “I Write, So I Am Alive.”

In the video, Higashida is seen writing by way of pointing to a letter board in a form of syllabic Japanese, as well as typing on a computer keyboard in the method of Japanese spelling that’s based on Chinese characters. Of course, as a non-Japanese-speaker, I can’t evaluate what he’s actually pointing to or typing, and how it relates to the words the video is quoting him as writing, but he definitely is using his own hand to point and to type (one-handed, by the way). What’s more, as he points to the syllabic characters, he sometimes says them. So there’s no question he knows something about what they stand for in terms of sound.

From my viewing of the video, my conclusion is that he can even express fairly simple thoughts in this form of writing. But I noticed that, even though he seems to be moving his own hand, it’s curious that his mother is always close by, and often repeats what he spells or cues him by saying something before he even spells it, or cues him by saying a few words and having him “finish” the thought or answer the question. She’s there, too, when he’s typing on the keyboard.

My distinct impression is Higashida is autistic but moderately high-functioning, with some simple language skills and ability to convey some thoughts on his own through this medium. The rest of it is a combination of people cuing him, most likely unconsciously, and interpreting and refining his thoughts, filling in the blanks with what they would like to hear. I don’t know whether their intent is to deceive; it may be that, or it may be merely to offer hope and encouragement both to themselves and to him.

Higashida is clearly loved. But his communications suffer from exactly and precisely the same flaws as Houben’s did in terms of content: they are exactly and precisely what most parents and helpers would wish such a child would tell them if he/she could only speak. The following excerpt will give you a flavor of the sort of thing I’m talking about; the form of the book is a question and answer sequence:

Q: What are your thoughts on autism itself?
A: I think that people with autism are born outside the regime of civilization. Sure, this is just my own made-up theory, but I think that, as a result of all the killings in the world and the selfish planet-wrecking that humanity has committed, a deep sense of crisis exists. Autism has somehow arisen out of this. Although people with autism look like other people physically, we are in fact very different in many ways. We are more like travelers from the distant, distant past. And if, by our being here, we could help the people of the world remember what truly matters for the Earth, that would give us a quiet pleasure.”

Watch the video, and see if you buy it. I don’t. The concepts are political as well as too PC (“selfish planet-wrecking”; “what truly matters for the Earth”) and too abstract (“distant, distant past”). They would certainly be possible for many and possibly most people who have Asperger’s syndrome, but that’s not Higashida’s state.

Here’s another quote from the book, supposedly the 13-year-old’s answer to the question “Why do you get lost so often?”:

…people with autism never, ever feel at ease, wherever we are. ”¦ I don’t think we’ll ever be able to reach our Shangri-La…

Shangri-La? Are we to think this boy has been reading that old chestnut, Lost Horizon? And knows to use as a figure of speech the name of the fictional land it describes? It seems highly unlikely.

Most poignant of all are these sorts of statements, which fit in so well with the hopes and dashed dreams of parents:

The truth is, we’d love to be with other people. But because things never, ever go right, we end up getting used to being alone.

If someone has submitted Hikashida to the sort of experiment which Houben was finally subjected to, I certainly haven’t been able to find a single report of such a test. And yet it is warranted, I’m afraid, although it’s possible that with Hikashida’s relatively high-level skills he would be able to pass a test that wasn’t too rigorous. For example, has he ever typed messages without his mother being present, and how complex are they (although of course, some people would conveniently explain any such failure to his emotional agitation at her absence)? Are his messages always interpreted, translated, and cleaned up by one of his usual helpers? Has any skeptic or scientist ever taken a look at what Hikashida is writing on his own—his raw copy, that is?

If that’s been done and he’s passed the test, fine. I have no problem with it. But till then, I’m a doubter, and I believe rightly so.

[NOTE: There’s a lot more general information about facilitated communication here. Let me add that facilitated communication is much more likely to be valid when the subject suffers from a motor problem that does not affect the mind, such as for example cerebral palsy. But autism is qualitatively different.

Watch the videos there and ask: why is the facilitator always touching the subject, even slightly? If it’s so slight a touch, why is it necessary to maintain the contact? Think of the Ouija board and how small a touch will suffice for cuing. Also, do you wonder why the facilitators’ eyes are so often more riveted to the keyboard than the subject’s? Or what would happen if the facilitator could touch the subject’s shoulder to steady him/her but was blocked from seeing the keyboard? And do you wonder why such experiments aren’t being performed?

Here’s an ad for facilitated communication. Note the unctuous tone and the attitude toward skeptics:

The world of facilitated communication is ripe for more research, but not especially receptive to it.]

This is what I want for Christmas

The New Neo Posted on by

exercisedesk

Not the guy—the wheel.

Because of my back and arm conditions, I stand to work, with my computer raised to somewhat higher than counter height. I also walk about three miles a day. I’d love to combine the two.

That human hamster wheel is somewhat of a joke, but there are a bunch of treadmills designed to be used with a desk. They’re not cheap, of course. And I can’t quite imagine I’d be able to work effectively that way, although I’d like to find a model one on display somewhere and try it out.

[Hat tip: Ace]

Obama’s poll numbers decline in blue states

The New Neo Posted on by

Lately, Democrats have become much less happy with Obama.

But don’t get too excited. They appear to be turning on him because he’s not liberal enough and/or competent enough in carrying out the liberal agenda.

As the article so delicately put it [emphasis mine]:

“Young people, unmarried women and Hispanics are difficult to turn out in a midterm, and he’s struggling there,” said Jillson. “But that doesn’t mean they’re available to Republicans. It just means Obama is going to have to ultimately satisfy their policy demands through initiatives after the election.”

Well, I wouldn’t say he has to do anything after the election. But he probably will choose to satisfy at least some of their demands, because they coincide with his own wishes and policy inclinations.

Un-PC murder in Oklahoma: bringing a gun to a knifefight

The New Neo Posted on by

The horrific murder in Moore, Oklahoma, has about as many un-PC factors as possible. Some of them are prominently mentioned in the news coverage, some have to be teased out.

Although it appears to be a case of workplace violence immediately following a firing, there are overtones of terrorism because the perpetrator, Alton Nolen, is a Muslim convert, and the victim was killed by a stabbing/beheading. There is no question that the method of death was at the very least a copycat crime inspired by recent ISIS videos, which were meant to inspire terrorism against Westerners.

Nolen is black, a fact which (at least in the couple of articles I’ve read) is never mentioned in print and only can be gleaned from looking at photos, which are not all that prominently displayed. His conversion was probably accomplished in prison, a very fertile ground for conversions to Islam of Americans, especially American blacks, although it has not yet been confirmed that this was the case with Nolen.

I have not been able to determine the race of his victims, both the person who was killed and the one who was wounded; haven’t seen a photo of either and, as I said, race is not mentioned in the article. But both were women. Although they are said to have been chosen at random, it has also been reported that Nolen’s firing occurred after an argument in which he advocated stoning women. If true, that would indicate that his victims were chosen because they were women.

Nolen was killed by the company’s head Mark Vaughn, who is also an Oklahoma County reserve deputy sheriff. Called to the scene by another worker, he brought his rifle and wounded the marauder, who had been continuing his violence. This ended the rampage.

So we have a Muslim perpetrator who is also black, targeting women, demonstrating that a gun is not the least bit necessary in order to inflict mayhem—stopped by a man with a gun. Not exactly the gun-wielding Tea Party perpetrator the left keeps looking for, is it?

In addition, Nolen had a record of three felonies, two drug-related and one attack on an officer. Why was he employed in the first place? Well, ex-felons have got to eat, too, I suppose. But John Hinderaker notes that Eric Holder’s DOJ may be part of the picture:

Paul has written about the fact that the Obama/Holder Department of Justice has brought discrimination lawsuits against employers who use criminal history to screen prospective employees.

Let’s fervently hope there aren’t any copycats of the copycat.

Autism and belief: Part I

The New Neo Posted on by

Back in 2009 I wrote a post called “Wanting to believe in miracles.” It was about the case of Rom Houben, a severely brain-damaged patient in Belgium who was said to be communicating complex thoughts through a method known as facilitated communication, in which a brain-damaged or autistic patient (often a child or teenager, in the case of autism) is helped to “write” through a facilitator guiding his/her hand to spell on a computer or letter board.

Houben’s was a wonderful story, and many people were deeply touched and inspired by it. But I was extremely skeptical, having seen an excellent documentary on Frontline called “Prisoners of Silence” that debunked the vast majority of cases of facilitated communication which, like Houben’s, use another person to guide the subject’s hand. And so I wrote:

What’s really going on with Rom Houben? Evidence indicates that he does have more ability to communicate and think than originally believed: for example, he can tap his foot yes and no in answer to some simple questions, and his brain scans indicate some sort of activity. So he has probably retained the ability to communicate in a basic way, but the articulate sentences he supposedly generates through the facilitated computer are extremely suspect, and are probably generated by the hopeful mind of the facilitator, whether she knows it or not. This could be tested rather easily, by asking him a question to which he would be expected to know the answer but about which the facilitator would be expected to know nothing.

Read the whole post if you want a more thorough background about the who, what, and why, of the case, and also a rather extensive debate from commenters as to whether I was being too skeptical or not.

But somehow I missed the announcement, just a few months later, that the chief doctor on Houben’s case—the person who had attested to his remarkable abilities and was convinced they were real—had announced that he’d been mistaken:

Houben’s neurologist, Dr. Steven Laureys, says a scientific test has shown that his patient cannot answer even simple questions…

Since [making his initial reports], he has tested Houben and some other patients more rigorously.

A few days ago, Laureys and his research team presented the results of those tests at a scientific meeting in the United Kingdom.

Laureys says they showed the patients an object, or spoke a word. Unlike earlier interactions with Laureys, the facilitator was out of the room for that part of the test. Afterward, the facilitator was brought back in to help the patient answer questions.

“We presented three cases after traumatic brain injury. Two failed the test. And that was including Rom,” says Laureys.

In the test, the man who was supposed to be writing a novel failed to identify an apple through facilitated communication.

It’s sad. Sad that so many people can be fooled—including scientists, despite the fact that it’s been known for many years that facilitated communication has only a tiny percentage of true successes. As I wrote in my earlier posts, I think the majority of believers are sincere and not con artists, although I suppose that some are knowing dissemblers. Some of the honest believers are parents and educators who want desperately to believe that their children or patients really have a great deal more promise and abilities than they seem to possess, and that some wonderful day the wall between them can be broken down and the parents/workers will have finally have access to their thoughts. Then the fruits of the parents’ and teachers’ hard and loving labors will finally be harvested.

But most of the time it is not to be.

In the case of Houben’s doctors, it is curious that they originally claimed to have performed the proper tests:

Initially, Dr. Laureys said that he had verified that the facilitated communication was genuine, by showing Houben objects when the facilitator was not present in the room, and later asking Houben to recall those objects.

But after a few tests, when Dr. Laureys wanted to perform more rigorously-controlled experiments, the facilitator balked. Interesting, no? And then:

Using a different facilitator, subsequent testing under properly controlled conditions in which fifteen objects which were shown to Houben over a period of weeks was performed, Houben was unable to communicate knowledge of any of the objects which had been shown to him during the facilitator’s absence.

I have little doubt that there are people who still believe in Houben’s amazing abilities, but his doctors and others who work with him are no longer among them.

I’m writing this not just to say “I told you so”, although I do feel that my position has been vindicated. I am writing it because I continue to be astounded at how many people fail to exercise even a moderate degree of skepticism when a story is one they really want to believe.

If you watch the video from Frontline that I linked to above (there is also a transcript of it here), you will see that not only is belief in this sort of thing a sad example of hopeful self-delusion, but it can actually lead to helpers making false accusations of child abuse through their “facilitation” of the thoughts of autistic children.

What brought this all to the fore—and led me to read the update on Houben for the first time—was when a member of my book group suggested we might read The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism, by Naoki Higashida (English translation; the text was originally published in Japanese in 2006) for our next meeting. The book was published in late August of 2013 and has received a lot of press since, including a bunch of glowing reviews and a huge endorsement by Jon Stewart of The Daily Show that propelled the book to a number-nine spot on the Times best seller list.

The minute my book group friend mentioned the subject matter of the book, my alarms went off. I asked her whether she knew how the book had been written—had the boy used facilitated communication?

[To be continued in Part II…]

And this is news why?

The New Neo Posted on by

On the one hand, the fact that almost none of the tens of thousands of illegal arrivals during the last few months showed up for their scheduled immigration hearings is not news at all. It was so predictable as to be virtually inevitable, a foregone conclusion.

On the other hand it’s big news, or should be. It means that our immigration laws are not just broken, they are a joke. What’s more, everyone knows it, including and perhaps especially the illegal immigrants entering our country, who plan at the outset to take full advantage of the situation.

This is an outrage. But there doesn’t seem to be any intent to remedy it.

And that’s where we stand.

A more pristine Sistine

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve never seen the Sistine Chapel in person. The one time I was in Rome, long ago, the Chapel was closed for something or other and no visitors were allowed. Anyway, that was before the controversial restoration that brightened Michaelangelo’s frescoes and removed the patina of age that had given them a depth and resonance—and murkiness—which some had deplored and some had admired.

Now any lingering murkiness is further demurkified by new LED lighting that purports to illuminate the images while doing the fragile artwork no harm.

Here’s the photo:

sistene

What do you think?