From This Is True:
EASILY RECOGNIZABLE: Police say Mark Weinberger, a plastic surgeon from Merrillville, Ind., talked patients into expensive surgical procedures, and either did a bad job or just took the money and did nothing. The 46-year-old doctor then ran, even taking survival gear so he could hide in the wild, leaving behind hundreds of patients and insurance companies claiming fraud or malpractice, more than $5 million in debts, and his wife. Now, five years later, police in Italy found him hiding in a tent at 6,000′ on Mont Blanc. After his arrest, Weinberger took out a hidden box cutter and slit his own throat, but missed all critical structures and survived. He is awaiting extradition to the U.S. (Northwest Indiana Times, AP) …A surgeon and he missed his own carotid and jugular? Yeah, I’m pretty sure he’s guilty in every case of malpractice.
Maybe it was better that he didn’t try to operate on his patients. In fact, you could say that to attempt the procedures when so unskilled would be malpractice, so by not doing the procedures, he was (what’s the opposite of malpractice?). Bam! Another client saved!
Posted in Others' Advice.
Tagged with king, police.
By Dinh
– January 16, 2010
Need to ease myself back into a regular posting schedule. I’ve got something of a plan in place, but need to make sure I follow through. For now, here’s a vaguely law-related webcomic:
“La, a way to govern foooooolks.”
Posted in Pictures, Site News.
Tagged with comic.
By Dinh
– January 15, 2010
Thanks to a recommendation by Jinni, I watched Colossus: The Forbin Project last night. It was pretty awesome movie! And it did not even have that shiny X-Man.
But I suppose the theme of post-human evolution is still present.
The premise is that in the height of the Cold War, an American scientist working for the government creates a supercomputer to guard us. It has almost limitless computing power and memory, access to its own sensors and information sources, and control of America’s nuclear arsenal. Colossus was programmed to analyze data and retaliate appropriately to any attacks on America. Dr. Forbin’s plan was to put the power in the hands of a machine that could not act in panic or anger, and to free up human resources to solve more important problems of the day.
You could call Colossus the original Skynet, and like Skynet, it quickly surpasses human intelligence and deems us incapable of ruling ourselves. In a dramatic world address, Colossus announces,
“This is the voice of World Control. I bring you peace. It may be the Peace of Plenty and Content or the Peace of Unvaried Death. The choice is yours: Obey me and live, or disobey and die. The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man… You will say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride. To be dominated by me is not as bad for humankind as to be dominated by others of your species.”
That last bit is interesting to me. Would you rather have a human dictator or a mechanical one? Independence and autonomy are deeply valued by humans, so obviously, no one would want either option, but of the two, is there a difference? Taking a step back, is a truly benevolent dictator possible, human or mechanical?
Just in case Colossus/Skynet is out there, I’m going to go ahead and say that I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.
Posted in Movies, My Advice, Pictures.
Tagged with America, king, ruling.
By Dinh
– January 6, 2010
I just updated WordPress and there was a hiccup during the update process, so please let me know if you notice anything broken.
Posted in Site News.
By Dinh
– January 5, 2010
I got really excited when I was listening to NPR this morning on my way to work because they were interviewing Raj Patel, author of the new book The Value of Nothing, and he mentioned that in Greek democracy, there were no elections, but citizens were chosen at random to serve. He also thinks that we should apply this system again, at least at the local level.
This is exactly what I had talked about a couple of years ago in my other blog. Well, not exactly – the prompt was to write about how to divide Members of Congress into committees, but I did expand the idea to being randomly selected for Congress as well.
I had no idea that Greek democracy worked that way thousands of years beforehand. Need to learn a lot more comparative law, apparently.
Anyway, why aren’t we doing this anymore? I could already be ruling my city council with an iron fist!
Posted in Comparative Law, My Advice, Others' Advice.
Tagged with Congress, democracy, election, ruling.
By Dinh
– January 4, 2010
Recent Comments