Tilting at Windmills
Tilting at windmills As a firm believer in family loyalty, I was heartened to read this letter to The Economist from Samuel Engle Burr, Jr., president general of the Aaron Burr Association:...
...The new helmet, according to a report in Defense Week, is made out of Kevelar plastic fiber and has the padding permanently fixed to the inside...
...An example is a friend of mine who has a complicated medical problem that requires the services of four specialists...
...He did the exact opposite—his administration concealed facts, such as the truth about natural gas, from the people...
...No one, apparently out of professional deference, will assume chairman of the board authority...
...The same railroads that have been preaching the virtue of free competition (as they ask Congress to deregulate them) are telling Congress that competition would be an evil if it came in the form of a coal slurry pipeline...
...In particular, we must change secondary school and college curricula so that, in reasonable part, they focus on the main problems facing the country, both in the domestic sphere and in our defense and foreign affairs...
...It is for this reason that I have written that the country needs a president who is a teacher—who will try to explain the nature of the country's long-range problems in a realistic but non-threatening way that says, here's something we've got to do something about, not immediately, but in the next few years— who will make clear that no one is going to be deprived of anything until we have thoroughly examined the facts and explored the ways out together...
...He pointed out that there were life jackets for everyone...
...The winner was Georgetown University Hospital, but the real significance of the study was that it asked the right people the right questions...
...My Ly anxieties about private planes and their pilots were not eased by news of the "go-fast button...
...It asked the nurses of the Washington area to choose the hospital they would prefer to be patients in...
...Church is being paid $61,000 a year by the United Mine Workers...
...It weighs the same as the old helmet, but, according to Dr...
...Anyone may proposition anyone else so long as force or the threat of force is not used...
...If he turns out to have a hot hand, you can retire...
...But because of the government salary ceiling, we now have 25,200 people from grades 15 through 18, all making the same amount— $50,000...
...TEA claims it isn't necessary for teachers of the deaf to be trained in sign language and told Lamar to dispense with' such obvious frivolity immediately...
...When reform does happen, it tends to come in a form that is calculated to offend no single group...
...And just a couple of weeks ago I answered my phone and heard an anxious voice identifying himself as the father of a friend of my son's...
...The man won my sympathy and admiration...
...Yet Paris is where the New York Times's number one foreign correspondent, Flora Lewis, stations herself...
...Norton Sound have been accused of lesbianism and threatened with discharge...
...Charles Peters...
...Recently Rep...
...According to the National Taxpayer's Union, the unfunded pension liability of the federal government now exceeds $5 trillion...
...He explained that his wife had an unusual kind of pneumonia and he was trying to track down other people with similar conditions and had reason to believe I might know of one...
...If similar arrangements proliferated, I don't think nearly as many people as is commonly thought would object to equal salary or equal status with the people they work with...
...What arouses envy and anger is not equality, but having to play the role of subordinate to someone of inferior ability...
...As a result, the basic problem that reform is supposed to attack usually goes unsolved...
...Since Carter is not a teaching president and Reagan does not offer the faintest possibility of becoming one, I think the rest of us are going to have to do something about filling this need...
...Every patient knows what happens to him, but he doesn't know whether his case is typical or not...
...How dull, you must be thinking...
...They remember what happened to Barry G old water when he mentioned the possibility of changing the social security system during the 1964 campaign and proceeded to be buried under one of the great electoral landslides of American history...
...It threatens no one, and will, as Thomas N. BethelFs article in this issue shows, merely exacerbate our present problems...
...foreign policy: "Even if that is what we wanted to do, which it isn't, I would have to say that the coordination of commercial and nuclear policies with overall political objectives is simply beyond the capacity of our establishment...
...Now's your chance to change all that...
...Joseph Yang, the army's deputy assistant secretary for research and development, it has "greatly improved aerodynamic properties...
...But, my colleague Joseph Nocera asks, shouldn't it occur to the agency that if Wolf, who has never been inside the CIA, can find the names of the agents, why couldn't any enterprising terrorist or foreign agent...
...If you resisted the wisdom of the Khomeini Corollary when it was first proclaimed in this space last year, now you understand why the Ayatollah couldn't make page 20 until he went to Paris, where the reporters are While I feel one should always try to avoid leaping to cynical conclusions, that's not easy when one reads that Mrs...
...Sure, he has a lot of fun swimming and hiking, but what do you get out of it...
...I can hear the prosecuting officer unctuously saying, "And tell me, my dear, just what happened next...
...If the fear underlying this policy is that the homosexuals will molest the straights, I have a solution: The Verbal Standard...
...As his flight was arriving, the captain announced that the FAA's computer wasn't working and that the landing would be delayed for an hour...
...Another part of the policy, India claimed, was preventing the delivery of nuclear fuel to India...
...And while many of them want more money, few complain about the fact that others are doing as well as they are...
...Moscow, Peking, Tokyo, Bonn, and several in the Middle East certainly rank ahead of Paris and London...
...Actually, pyramidal hierarchy is often unnecessary...
...ou had to suspect that someone at CBS was in bed with a press agent when on September 4, the day the Stealth story broke, the Evening News began and ended with long segments on Abby Hoffman's emergence from Underground, one of the great who-cares stories of the year...
...Seven women on the U.S.S...
...The CIA wants Congress to stop press revelations of the names of its agents...
...And of course you know social security payments are going up, as are the pensions of federal employees, which are increased twice each year...
...Much of American organizational life is based on the presumed necessity of hierarchy...
...And remember those tapes you've heard of cockpit conversations just before a crash...
...The old helmet was metal and had a removable lining and therefore was useful for cooking and shaving...
...In the field of health care, for example, physicians panic at the first mention of any reform that might appear to threaten their income and prerogatives...
...The Indians were upset, reported The New York Times from New Delhi, because they were sure that the recent imposition by America of import duties on Indian exports was part of a general anti-Indian policy...
...Doctors are usually defensive...
...And if we take time to educate—to explain why— maybe she won't even be mad...
...The trick is to have buck-stops-here responsibility clearly assigned to specific individuals when it is necessary, and for the other members of the team to accept a colleague's instructions in such situations...
...But it doesn't have to be— think about how the 60 Minutes episode on Marva Collins began to revolutionize many people's thinking about the public school bureaucracy...
...Such pipelines, carrying a mixture of powdered coal and water from coal fields to utilities, could cut energy costs...
...He was trying to make communication happen and he was wise not to leave it up to the medical system...
...This will give the infantryman something to be thankful for as he scrounges about the battlefield looking for something to cook and shave with: if he moves very fast he may cut a hundredth of a second or so off the time of the search...
...Tilting at windmills As a firm believer in family loyalty, I was heartened to read this letter to The Economist from Samuel Engle Burr, Jr., president general of the Aaron Burr Association: "Sir—We deeply resent certain parts of your review of the book: 'Aaron Burr: The Years from Princeton to Vice President,' by Milton Lomask (June 21st...
...I was composing an apology when I read a story in The Washington Star with this quote from Howard Seymour of the University of Delaware's College of Marine Sciences at Lewes: "The concentration of sharks in Delaware Bay is the worst I have ever seen [Delaware Bay] seems to be a nursery for some species of shark...
...With our armed services in such desperate need of capable people, it is outrageous for them to reject female or male homosexuals...
...It is dreadful, so dreadful that, in my case at least, it provided a powerful incentive to get well fast...
...Nothing, right...
...An example was Medicaid, which was made unthreatening to doctors at the price of adding to the inflationary bias of the health care system—which was and remains the basic problem of American medicine...
...Most law firms operate without it...
...Send him to the Youth Business Camp, which offers to teach children 10-18 "how to read and play the stock market...
...Sam Church drawing unemployment while Mr...
...The problem is that the recipients of the various income maintenance programs tend to panic whenever reform is mentioned because they fear the reform will result in the loss of the particular benefit they receive...
...Also in London is Leonard Downie, who is The Washington Post's highest ranking foreign correspondent...
...There is similar resistance to even the possibility of reform in other important areas of our national life...
...And in London you'll find R. W. "Johnny" Apple, who would have to rank number two in the Times's overseas hierarchy...
...did not kill his opponent in the duel—Hamilton was mortally wounded " Y^ou must have read about the Navy's sex scandal...
...Another example is the synfuels bill that Carter and Congress have given us as an answer to the energy "crisis...
...We must encourage the television networks and newspapers and magazines to forget about the Billygates and the Abby Hoffmans and to do a better—radically better— job of reporting basic national issues in a way that not only lays out the essential facts but analyzes possible solutions...
...But they would also provide competition for the railroads, who, as a matter of fact, have as one of their reasons for seeking freedom from ICC regulations, the desire to charge whatever they want for carrying coal...
...The FAA suspects that the go-fast button and the hotriding it has permitted are responsible for several recent crashes involving Learjets Of course the FAA itself is far from being free of sin...
...Did you read about Mrs...
...Church that she can't have her unemployment compensation...
...Next time you go to a paperback bookstore, notice who picks up the lesbian novels—nine times out of ten it will be a man...
...The Times story quoted an American embassy official as denying the Indian suspicion...
...But the new plane, while longer and heavier than the previous version, is so technically improved that the crew's workload is actually 40 percent less...
...Yet no politician wants to face the problem...
...The office was run efficiently by three younger lawyers, operating as they would have done in private practice...
...Once, while I was working in a government agency, the general counsel left and no successor was appointed for four months...
...And did you also read that the National Commission on Unemployment Compensation proposes that we raise benefits from the current $25 billion to $35 billion next year...
...Soon after our September issue appeared, a reader called protesting that I had been unfair to the Coast Guard and the Lewes-Cape May Ferry when I complained that the ferry—which crosses the mouth of Delaware Bay—was certified by the Coast Guard even though it provided life boats and raft space for only 200 of its 700 passengers...
...Sam Church, didn't need it, and the viewer could begin to think that if he doesn't want the national bankruptcy that our income maintenance programs promise in the next decade or so, we might just have to tell Mrs...
...The army has finally produced the new helmet it has been promising for 20 years...
...Instead of doing this on the energy problem, Carter tried to panic everyone into immediate support of his program...
...Evidently, your reviewer has been indoctrinated and brainwashed with anti-Burr falsehoods, misstatements, half truths, and innuendos...
...I suspect the prime cause of the investigation is the men who have been doing the investigating...
...For one thing, its computers are outdated and frequently malfunction...
...Robert Walker flew to San Francisco to investigate the problem...
...If he doesn't, just send him back to Camp Shawnee What are the most important capitals in the world in terms of American foreign policy...
...The main target is Lester Wolf, who names the names in the Covert Action Information Bulletin...
...And remember 60 Minutes's highly entertaining segment on unemployment compensation, focusing on some beneficiaries splashing around Florida beaches...
...And with good reason...
...Gloria Connors both manages her son, Jimmy, and runs her own business as a "tournament management consultant" who offers to get big-name players for the promoters who hire her W should congratulate Washington Consumer's Checkbook, a magazine that in trying to rate local hospitals did something that you can bet your boots the medical accrediting societies have never done...
...It seems, according to Lew Townsend of the Knight- Ridder newspapers, that some Learjet owners have been using a device that deactivates the warning horns designed to prevent potential airframe breakup or loss of pilot control...
...Everyday American medicine is not organized to provide buck-stops-here coordination of, and communication among, the doctors and nurses treating any one patient, or patients with similar problems...
...It does not have one paragraph that could panic any interest group...
...He did not educate...
...Who cares whether they are lesbians or not...
...The result is that the patient is in a fairly constant state of confusion...
...That way, no one would be harmed, the recruiting base would be broadened, and I suspect social discourse in the services would be considerably enlivened...
...The official went on to make one of the more revealing statements that I have seen about the nature of U.S...
...Colonel Burr...
...Even I don't want to believe bureaucracy can be this bad—but the Beaumont, Texas, Enterprise reports that the Texas Education Agency has instructed Lamar University to lower its standards...
...As a former patient at Georgetown, I must say that I suspect there is at least one nonmedical explanation for the hospital's record of effective care, namely the food...
...The nurse is the one person who sees the interaction of physician and patient and sees enough to be able to generalize...
...Tell the kid you'll stake him in return for a share of the profits...
...And even when the plane finally began its descent, the landing had to be aborted because another plane was preparing to take off from the same runway All this would seem to support the claim of the Air Line Pilots Association that three men, instead of the two advocated by the airlines, are needed to fly the DC-9 Super 80...
...The point was made that a lot of people were getting unemployment compensation who, just like Mrs...
...Stop wasting your money sending little Algernon to Camp Shawnee...
...This accords with my own experience...
...The chances are that one more person in the cockpit will mean one more chance for distracting conversations about women, sports, or politics...
...By the way, the nurses named lack of communication among staff as the number one complaint about all local hospitals...
Vol. 12 • October 1980 • No. 8
