Police department posts warning of Zika in meth

A police department is turning to tongue-in-cheek tactics to fight a serious drug epidemic.

The Bath Police Department in Michigan posted on its Facebook page with a big “breaking news” graphic warning that read “meth possibly containing the Zika virus.”

The post goes on to say, “If you recently bought some meth, you can bring it into the Bath Township Police Department and we can test it for you.”

I’ll bet their lab is top-notch.

I haven’t thought about that particular question before, but I’ve thought a lot about the growth in presidential power and Congress’s inability to rein it in. My answer is, at the margin, yes, but how effective would depend on the structure of that unicameral legislature.

The Framers envisioned Congress as one institution set up against another institution, the two of which could check each other effectively. What they did not seem to realize is that Congress is not one institution, not in any functionally coherent sense. Even more, it’s not simply two institutions, as we might think because it is bicameral.

In 1885, when Congress generally dominated the president, Woodrow Wilson wrote his doctoral thesis on how Congress did not provide good leadership because each member being responsible to a regionally limited set of voters, it could not focus on the national interest, only on a competing set of regional interests.

So what has changed to make presidents more powerful? Not the structure of Congress, but the system of selecting presidential nominees. Congress could dominate presidents back then because party leaders selected presidential nominees. Today the general public selects them, so party leaders, including Congressmembers, have lost that power over presidential hopefuls.

Source: Could a Unicameral Congress Better Rein in Presidential Power? | The Bawdy House Provisions

Hillary Clinton Raises More Than Donald Trump From Oil Industry (Wall Street Journal)

Taken together, oil and gas donors have contributed roughly twice as much to support Mrs. Clinton’s campaign as Mr. Trump’s. Election rules bar corporations from giving directly to candidates, but donations from an industry’s employees can provide a reflection of where it stands.

At Exxon Mobil Corp., the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, employees have made 175 donations to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, totaling roughly $18,000, while Mr. Trump’s campaign has received just one donation from an Exxon employee. At the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s Washington lobbying group, no one has contributed to Mr. Trump. (These figures include donations of $200 or more.)

Like, actually every single thing you can think of, crammed into a single two-and-a-half-minute magnum opus.

Source: This Is an Incredible Ad for Instant Ramen

If I am to pick one low-cost way for ruralia and other places with physician shortages, it would involve waiving residency requirements:

Dr. Faris Alomran, a British-educated vascular surgeon working in France, says, “My first choice after medical school was to practice in the U.S. In fact, for most [English-speaking] people, in terms of language options, they are somewhat limited to Australia, Canada, and the U.S.”

But he didn’t end up crossing the Atlantic. “In the U.S. I would have had to do five years of general surgery and a two-year fellowship in vascular surgery to be a vascular surgeon. Seven years total. I got an offer in Paris to do a five-year vascular surgery program. They also reduced my training by one year since I had done two years in the U.K.”

Juliana, a physician originally trained in Brazil and currently in an American residency program, agrees that migrating to the U.S. could have been easier, especially if redundant training were removed. “Repeating the residency is not an easy thing, and many times it’s very frustrating. I do not think the internship [that I’m in] will add much to my future career. Having trained in America for the last four months has helped me understand cultural differences [between the U.S. and Brazil], but it has also made me wish I were allowed to skip some steps.”

This article seems to focus on attracting the best and the brightest, though that’s less my primary concern. (It’s a heck of a secondary concern, though!)

There is a perception that doctors aren’t going to come here to work in Idaho, and that may be true for the best and brightest. But there are a lot of doctors who would be willing to come here for a paycheck (which, by international standards, are just fine in Idaho). A lot of them wouldn’t stay there, but some would even after released from a 5-10 year requirement. (Yes, even some non-European ones would.)

I’m not optimistic on this happening, though, because while many argue the requirements are self-enriching gatekeeping, in my experience even those places where the doctors are suffering from the shortage (by having to work insane hours, for instance), they are pretty resistant. It’s a matter of professional pride. If another country (besides Canada) aligned their medical training with ours, it would be possible. But… other countries aren’t anxious to bend over backwards to make it easier for their doctors to leave.

That said, people make the AMA the bogeyman for all things gatekeeping-related, but they’re actually open to it. As it happens, and as I will keep saying from now until the end of the time, they don’t weird very much power. The power belongs to the states, and the medical board within the states. The AMA may have some influence with them, but they are extraordinarily conservative and inflexible institutions as far as such things go. They recognize the problem, but don’t see it as their problem.

And from a more cynical standpoint, the looser the restrictions the less important they are. There is a reason that one particular state ran my wife through the ringer over (her own person) medical records that were destroyed in a hurricane, let the process drag on for over a year, and then demanded another application fee (of $1000) because the original one had lapsed. In a state where her skills and professional interests aligned perfectly with a state, and a shortage precisely where she would have gone.

Across the board, the credentialism is just crazy. My wife has delivered over 1,000 babies, and performed more than 300 c-sections, and she could still never be given privileges in county hospitals covering some 70% of the US population. Doctors just out of obstetrical residency, who have delivered far fewer babies, would have no problem at those same hospitals. It’s a long story as to why this is the case, but the long and short of it is that if she wanted privileges at these hospitals, she’d have to go back to residency for three years. All of her experience would only let her skip a single year.

One of the few football coaches I follow on Twitter is Mark Mangino, the former head coach of Kansas who was sacked after a moderate scandal but mostly because he was fat and unpleasant. He’s lost a lot of the weight, but as far as being unpleasant goes, well… he takes to mocking the schools that have fired him on Twitter. That’s… something coaches almost never do. He’s been going after Kansas for a while, though last year he was fired by Iowa State (as a coordinator) mid-season. Iowa State lost to FCS Northern Iowa, and he retweeted a potshot. Actually, it might not have been so bad if not for last year.

I suspect he’s not going to be on the radar for any good jobs any time soon. Which is a shame, because he’s a pretty great coach. (And his bitterness is not unjustified, particularly at Kansas, which has won an average of two games a season since he was tossed.)

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A few seasons back, Southern Tech had a tremendously bad season opener. Deltona Poly is one of those schools we should never, ever lose to. We had a mostly new coaching staff and a new quarterback. But not only did we lose, we lost badly. It wasn’t even close. While head coach Harvey Fulbright was not a brilliant coach, he was brilliant in doing one thing: before he took over, he purchased FireHarveyFulbright.com. The next day, there was a picture of him and the team with the words “Relax. It’s just one game.”

Fulbright did, however, fire his new offensive coordinator. After one game. Offensive coordinator John Breuk spent the rest of the season on a paid vacation, and then the next season got a job at a Division II school as a coordinator. As it happened, a scandal pre-dating his tenure erupted there, and suddenly he was a head coach. He went 11-3 and made the tournament final. The offense did very well.

Flash forward a couple of years and Fulbright needs another offensive coordinator. It became a common joke that there is this Division II coach who is really pretty good and maybe we should hire him! Just one problem…

When Fulbright got canned, we were in the market for a head coach. One coach that was mentioned pretty regularly was the head coach at Cal State. He seemed rather particular about what head coach job he would be willing to take, but he played football as a Southern Tech Packer. So maybe he would reconsider? Oh, yeah, he played for Southern Tech because his father was the head coach, and he was fired in a pretty messy situation. We were invited to a bowl game and he refused to coach it. His tenure at our school had kind of ruined Dad’s head coaching career. So nobody was surprised when he declined to interview.

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I thought of these stories this weekend as there were a couple of instances of coaches who were fired getting the last laugh.

The first is Southern Miss offensive coordinator Shannon Dawson, who was something of a fall guy at Kentucky when the Wildcats had a bad season last year. This year, Southern Miss opened up against Kentucky:

Dawson’s new team Southern Miss just happened to open at Kentucky, and the Wildcats jumped out to a 35-10 second quarter lead.

But Dawson’s Eagles offense moved 84 yards in three plays just before the half to pull within 35-17. Then they marched 84 yards to open the second half, and now the score was 35-24. And then Southern Miss moved 66 yards in eight plays to pull within 35-31.

On its next possession, Southern Miss again found the end zone, marking four straight touchdowns to turn a 35-10 lead into a 38-35 advantage.

Kentucky finally slowed down the Flying Shannon Dawsons on their final two possessions — sort of. Both traveled more than 50 yards, and both ended in field goals.

Overall, Southern Miss moved 409 yards over 55 plays and six possessions, producing 34 points over that span.

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A more high-profile example was Lane Kiffin, who was infamously fired on a tarmac at LAX coming home from a game. He’s the offensive coordinator at Alabama, who just handed USC their worst loss in a very long time:

You might think Alabama’s play on the field Saturday night would do all the talking its offensive coordinator Lane Kiffin needed to say.

Fifty-two points, 223 passing yards (most of which came on the arm of true freshman Jalen Hurts), 242 rushing yards and 7.4 yards per play tend to say a lot.

So does your Twitter account, especially when you have 136,000 followers.

So on Sunday, after handing his former employer its worst opening day loss since the 19th century, Kiffin took a direct shot at USC with a hashtag that has surely never been used before, nor will ever be used again.

Kiffen never holstered his gun and ran up the score as much as he could. Which I, of course, have no problem so long as you let your backups play. And as the article mentioned, after the game he got another shot in:

Post game w the game ball!!! #3:14AM-LAX pic.twitter.com/cxQkJ89254

— Lane Kiffin (@Lane_Kiffin) September 4, 2016

This post is not about Donald Trump, but as you know he recently met with the President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico. What’s been interesting to watch is how the President is named by various people.

His full name is Enrique Peña Nieto.

You can shorten it to Peña Nieto.

You can further shorten it to Peña.

A lot of people, however, are defaulting to Nieto. Which makes sense, since Nieto is the last of the three names presented. Even before she dropped the Rodham, nobody referred to Hillary Rodham Clinton by that name. It was the middle name.

Where it gets tricky is that in Mexico, the last name isn’t always the surname. It is typically the mother’s maiden name. It is part of the full name, and appears last, but not the “last name” as we think of it. And often it’s skipped entirely. Former President Vincente Fox is actually Vicente Fox Quesada. He just never uses the last last name. In between the two was President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa. Usually referred to as Calderón.

In the same way that Hillary Clinton incorporated Rodham into her formal name, Peña has incorporated “Nieto” into his formal name, and so it appears a lot more often than did Quesada or Hinojosa. So frequently you hear Peña Nieto. But when there’s only one, it’ll be Peña. As indicated by the English-language Mexican newspaper linked to at the beginning of this piece.

Despite knowing this, I nonetheless feel the urge to go with “Nieto” for a separate reason. Specifically, the “n” with the tilde (~) is not easily accessible on this keyboard. It can be typed, but it’s actually easier to go to the Wikipedia page and copy and paste (which is what I did here). Historically, it has been regular to drop the tilde and go with “Pena” but this tends to irk a lot of Spanish-speakers because it’s actually a different letter with a different sound.

If it were accepted, I’d simply adjust the spelling to meet the sound, by calling him (in this instance) Enrique Penia Nieto. This is not unheard of with names from other languages, such as Former German president Gerhard Schröder, or as we sometimes liked to call him, Gerhard Schroeder. (To further complicate things in that case, pronunciation of his name varies here from Shrohder, Shrewder, and Shrayder.)

Long story short, in addition to recognizing the importance of the middle (surname) name in Mexico, we do need new keyboards. Maybe another shift-style key or something that adds tildes, accents, and umlauts without resorting to ASCII jujitsu or copy-and-paste.