Wartime Writing: “One day I will find the courage to rewrite it. I will speak as a witness.”

One day I will find the courage to rewrite it. I will speak as a witness. To how scary it is when air-raid sirens wail in the early morning on an ordinary Thursday. How I kept smiling while packing frantically, trying to signal to my son that I was not worried. The link is here: […]

Mudlarks United

I watched the American Bar Association’s recommendation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court. It all made sense. She’s highly qualified. We can all celebrate that she served as a public defender, tried civil rights cases, and served as a trial judge before being elevated. These are qualities that are historically underrepresented […]

Hospital Medication Errors Can Be Fatal (And Concealed)

The patient was supposed to get Versed, a sedative intended to calm her before being scanned in a large, MRI-like machine. But Vaught accidentally grabbed vecuronium, a powerful paralyzer, which stopped the patient’s breathing and left her brain-dead before the error was discovered. That was in a prestigious Tennessee hospital. The link is here. I had […]

In Defense of Jury Trials

The Jury consequently invests the people … with the direction of society.             Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America Yesterday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) used a lot of his time during the Ketanji Brown Jackson nomination hearing to champion the Constitutionally protected 7th Amendment right to a jury trial. He argued that SCOTUS, the Chamber of […]

On Top Of Locking Many Brain Damaged Children Out Of Court, Florida Begins Gaslighting Them

In the late 1980s, the Florida legislature set up a regulatory scheme to immunize doctors and hospitals by locking Florida courthouse doors to the families of some children who suffer severe brain damage during birth. All government programs get an acronym and the acronym for this burden-shifting agency is NICA (The Florida Birth-Related Neurological Injury […]

Orchestra Tune-Up

During a hospital stay, there are many ways for things to go sideways. For a timely and successful discharge, every health care provider and every department has to be working as one – each fulfilling their part toward the end goal of stabilizing the patient and putting them on the road to recovery. The nursing […]

What To Expect When You Come Between The Fortune 500 and Their Bottom Line

Marketing can cover a lot of warts. Meanwhile, in the real world, people behave in line with our experience and the incentives put in front of them, even where it conflicts with what we know to be right and wrong. From the NYT, Mr. Williams said a State Farm claims adjuster told him that she […]

The Ambassador Club (For St. Patrick’s Day)

The year was 1951. According to Myrtis Smith, they were running numbers and gambling down at Ambassador Billiards on Avery Street. Bob Null, the Justice of the Peace, dutifully took the complaint, carefully transcribing Myrtis’ words: “something that happened in her family in relation to the losing of some money” by her husband, Emerson. Null […]