What the good doctor did was to suggest that medical students and their professors should wash and disinfect their hands after dissecting corpses in the hospital morgue before going to the bedside of a patient in labor. Since Louis Pasteur had not yet promulgated the “germ theory” of disease, there was no theoretical explanation of why washing and disinfecting a caregiver’s hands to remove cadaverous tissue should lead to a decline in puerperal fever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur

Dr. Semmelweiss’s discovery was rejected by most of the leaders of Obstetrics of his time. After his live saving discovery was published, his career was troubled, to say the least. Less than two decades later he died in a mental asylum, having been sent there because of deep depression, alcoholism and other psychiatric disorders. Did his professional rejection cause his decline? Possibly. But what is clear was that his profession was slow to accept his findings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

It is sad to think of how many lives were lost because the leaders of Medicine rejected his findings out of hand.

It is also very easy to think that in our modern day and age, such a rejection would not have occurred. However, would the findings of Dr. Semmelweiss be accepted today? I have my doubts.

According to great economists, Dr. McCloskey and Dr. Ziliak, in their seminal work, The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Errors Costs Us Jobs, Justice and Lives, the result of a research project is not able to be published in most scientific journals unless the findings are statistically significant. Dr. Semmelweiss’s research was only based upon his findings which compared the results in one hospital in Vienna. His data was probably too small to yield a statistically significant result. If Dr. Semmelweiss had tried to publish his findings today, they would have been rejected for a lack of statistical significance.

What we have here is a modern version of the old bane of mankind–narrow mindedness–clothed in the wrappings of applied mathematics. The more things change, the more things stay the same. Sad.

The court wishes to thank Ms. Kathi Perkins of the court’s staff for organizing each and everyone of them. She has done a fine job. It is hoped that she will continue to do so for many years in the future.

The court’s thanks is hereby extended to our three speakers today–Kevin Keating of the Harris County District Attorney’s Office; Ms. Cindy Cameron and Phil Stiles. Thank you one and all.

As part of my research, I read Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel’s 1998 book, “The Ends of Human Life: Medical Ethics in a Liberal Polity.”  Dr. Emanuel is both an oncologist and a bioethicist. He is a graduate of Amherst, holds a master’s degree in Biochemistry, and has both an MD and a PhD from Harvard. Interestingly, his PhD is in Political Philosophy. According to his biography, he is inter alia, an advisor to President Obama. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezekiel_J._Emanuel

Dr. Emanuel is a bright fellow and would be a most entertaining dinner companion. However, his book is uneven. The parts of it that delineate the problems facing physicians in dealing with the issues surrounding end of life are lucid, accurate and well written. However, when he stops writing as a physician and slips into philosopher mode, his writing becomes opaque. It is an interesting read, but not terribly useful, since it assumes lots of things not in evidence to use a legal phrasing.

It is also full of impractical advice, such as telling us that decisions on where to build hospitals should be based on principles of distributive justice.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributive_justice   Having gone to a Catholic university back when Catholic colleges and universities were still Catholic, I understand the concept.  However, having been required to take fifteen semester hours of Philosophy and several more courses in Political Philosophy, I recognize that philosophical questions rarely have cut and dried answers.  My reaction to Dr. Emanuel’s assertion was that hospital construction would cease, if boards of directors were forced to factor into their decision abstract questions of distributive justice along with the more mundane questions of location, costs and similar less weighty matters. I say this because in most cases, the board members could debate the issue of whether location “A” or location “B” offered a more just location until the cows came home and not reach a conclusion.

Perhaps greater wisdom is to be found in the writings of Marx–not Karl, but Groucho.  Groucho, writing about Prohibition in “Groucho and Me,” observed that the world is full of people who think that they can manipulate the lives of others by getting a law passed. He pointed out that Prohibition failed to deter drinking, but it did expose many people to illness and death due to a lack of quality control over bootleg hootch and managed to make quite a few criminals very wealthy.

As usual, Groucho’s skepticism was right on target.

By earning the award, President Obama joins an illustrious group of past recipients which includes former Veep Al Gore; Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Agency, who managed to persuade the Iranians not to go nuclear; Jimmy Carter; Yasser Arafat; and Linus Pauling. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/

Congratulations once again!

Not wanting to miss my deadline, I -emailed my editor and went back to writing.  What would writers do without editors?

On a much more serious note, it appears more and more likely that there will be an attack on Iran, since they are close to having both a nuclear weapons capability and a reliable delivery system.  Since the Iranians have shown no desire to bargain seriously, the talks that were announced last week are nothing more than a stall by Iran to give them more time to process uranium.

A friend of mine sent me this link. http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20091005_two_leaks_and_deepening_iran_crisis?utm_source=GWeeklyS&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=091005&utm_content=readmore  From what I have learned from other sources, the author’s data seems to be quite accurate and his assessment of what will happen eerily prescient. If Iran continues developing nuclear weapons, the only real question is whether the Israelis will have U.S. support when they act.

Some day historians will wonder why we Americans were wasting our time worrying about “health care reform” when a global war was brewing in Iran.  Sadly, there is nothing knew in our failure to confront reality squarely. When the German invasion of Poland was coming into place in the summer of 1939, the League of Nations was dealing with the international drug trade, which was a problem–but several orders of magnitude less than the coming of another world war. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Nations

The western powers could have stopped Herr Hitler over remilitarizing the Rhineland, unification with Austria, his seizing the Sudetenland,  or his seizure of the rest of Czechoslovakia. Instead England and France slept.  Will we ever learn to solve problems before they become too big to handle?

If you have ever watched the show, you know that Jack McCoy is the fictional District Attorney in the Borough of Manhattan. How could he prosecute a federal official for an official action?  They played with the plot so that the memorandum of law was written in Manhattan to provide a fig leaf’s worth of jurisdictional facts. This is a stretch in and of itself.

McCoy had Cutter prosecute the author of the memorandum, who conveniently was teaching law in Manhattan.  The issues were never resolved, since the federal courts stepped in and ended the prosecution before the jury verdict was received by the court.  Since a jury had been empaneled, jeopardy had attached and the alleged miscreant was home free.

I find the plot disturbing for two reasons. From what I have read, NYU law students and professors are used as consultants to the script writers to make sure that the language in the scripts and the plots themselves are reasonably connected to the law as it really is.  The show’s consultants ought to refresh themselves with the case of  In re Neagle, 135 U.S. 1 (1890).

If you are not familiar with that case, here is a brief summary of the facts of the case.  In Neagle, ”[T]he U.S. Supreme Court asserted federal supremacy over state law. President Benjamin Harrison had directed David Neagle, a deputy U.S. marshal, to protect Justice Stephen J. Field of the Supreme Court against a death threat. Neagle shot and killed would-be assassin David S. Terry as Terry made a murderous assault on Field in  California.  Arrested by state authorities and charged with murder, Neagle was brought before the federal circuit court on a writ of habeas corpus and released on the ground that he was being held in custody for ‘an act done in pursuance of a law of the United States.’ His release was upheld by the Supreme Court.” http://www.novelguide.com/a/discover/dah_04/dah_04_02004.html  http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0135_0001_ZS.html

I studied that case both as an undergraduate and as a law student. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the holding in Neagle is still good law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_Clause  It is also preeminently sensible. I am saddened that the usually reasonably legally accurate scripts of Law and Order departed from their high standards to pursue a left-wing fantasy and/or high ratings.  They can do better.

The other disappointing aspect of the plot was the anarchical vision that is implicit in McCoy’s decision to prosecute a federal official for his official actions. If local prosecutors begin to prosecute federal officials for actions which might tangentially have violated state law, we might has well dust off our copies of the Articles of Confederation because that is where we will be headed.

I am not advocating that errant federal officials get a free pass if they break the law. Rather, they should be prosecuted for official misconduct under federal law.

As a long time viewer of the series, I have come to expect that McCoy’s actions will reflect the character’s left wing view of the world. That I can live with. But suggesting that it is appropriate to prosecute federal officials acting within the scope of their authority in state court is overdoing the propagandizing.  They can do better. I hope that they do.

Picture the scene. The local sheriff is sitting on the front porch of his office when he sees a couple of strangers, all bad looking hombres, riding into town. He stops them at the hitching post by the local saloon and asks them to show to produce their identity papers. Obviously the author of the novel did not understand that the concept of identity papers is totally alien to the American mindset. To a European, such a request would be commonplace.

This vignette illustrates a major difference between Americans and our cousins across the pond.  We don’t like bureaucracy and only tolerate it in a small doses.

Reading Gov. Palin’s piece on The Wall Street Journal’s web site entitled “Obama and the Bureaucratization of Health Care” brought the vignette from the French novel to mind. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574400581157986024.html

I believe that the increased bureaucratization of American life that the Obama health care plan will require is alien to the American way of thinking.  That is why the plan is so unpopular and has caused President Obama’s approval numbers to sink like a stone. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090909/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_ap_poll_health_care

Stated simply, Obama’s plan is asking Americans to tolerate a degree of government involvement in our lives that is alien to our cultural traditions.  Such a loss of freedom might not bother someone from a European country. However, such a loss of personal liberty is not going to set will with many Americans.

If it were to pass, it would create a backlash of epic proportions. Most Americans do not think like Europeans and have no desire to live like them, no matter what the desires of our cosmopolitan elites may be!

The last session of the Texas Legislature passed HB 1233 http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/BillLookup/Text.aspx?LegSess=81R&Bill=HB1233  which granted to the probate courts the authority to hear medication petitions filed with respect to certain classes of inmates in the county jail.

Thanks to much hard work on the part of my staff–as well as employees of various other parts of Harris County government–we are now ready to begin to hear those cases.  It took a lot of hard work on the part of Kathi Perkins, manager of my office out at HCPC;  James Conrad, my staff attorney who deals with mental health issues; and my courtroom deputy, Jerry Suntych, to put the necessary procedures in place to allow us to function under this new statutory environment.

Thank you for your efforts which were way beyond the call of duty.  You did yourselves proud. It is truly an honor to work with you.

ARNOLD EXPLORES WHITE HOUSE BID!!!

(Los Angeles)  Hollywood and Washington are both paying close attention to the swirling rumors—unconfirmed as of Saturday morning—that Arnold Schwarzenegger has a certificate of live birth from Napoleon, North Dakota, dated July 30, 1947.  Governor Schwarzenegger has confirmed that he  cannot release his official birth certificate since the courthouse burned down in 1948, long before computerized record-keeping. According to the certificate, Governor Schwarzenegger was born at a private residence, attended by long-deceased cousins and a midwife, Mrs. Kitzel Schmidt.

According to local lore, Schwarzenegger’s mother, Aurelia, was visiting relatives in the central North Dakota Germanic community (where the Schwarzenegger name is well known) when Arnold was born at the home of a relative, Frederich Dopplebanger. Under nationalization rules at that time, a child born in the USA automatically was a U.S. citizen despite the nationality of his parents.

The California governor has quietly formed a Terminator for U.S. President committee and is awaiting court rulings on whether President Barack Hussein Obama’s certificate of live birth is sufficient to satisfy the natural-born citizen requirement of the U.S. Constitution.

Contacted at the Hotzenplatz’s Cafe on Main Street, Franz Schmidt, a long-time resident, responded that his mother was present when Schwarzenegger entered the world on his cousin’s kitchen table in 1947.  Schmidt added,

“Before she died in 1992, Mother Schmidt used to tell us the story every time a new Schwarzenegger movie came out. She was very proud. I remember her saying in her North Dakota brogue,  ’It was wunnerful, wunnerful, wunnerful’!”

“I hope Arnold wins the presidency.” Schmidt said. “We’d love to have a Presidential Library here. We even have a location—a vacant lot between Munchen’s Elevator and the Ace Hardware. It’s only a block or so from the old Schwarzenegger place, which also burned down in the Fire of 1948.”

“Yeah, sure. That’d be a big deal here,” said Ottmar Phluggenmeister, Napoleon’s mayor. “And it would be swell to have someone in the White House who sounds just like us.”

Schwarzenegger spent only a couple of days in North Dakota before returning with his mother to Graz, Austria, where he grew up before moving back to his birth country and beginning a career as a professional body builder, contractor, and then movie actor and Republican governor.

Phluggenmeister said a lot of memories of the Schwarzenegger birth are blurry and no one is alive today who actually attended the birth.

“But, by golly, he has that certificate of live birth, don’t ya know. That’s good enough!” the mayor beamed.

The aforementioned is a work of fiction, employing the same basic techniques that Dean Swift employed in 1729 in “A Modest Proposal.” Since the piece is well written, I asked for permission to publish it here.

Ralph’s fiction, I boldly predict, will have a long and interesting life on the Internet for several reasons:

1. It is well written. Good writing attracts readers.
2. It deals with a hot topic–Obama’s birth and birth certificate.
3. Many of people those who surf the Internet have no sense of irony whatsoever. I predict that in a week or so, someone will take this story as the starting point for a rant on why Governor Schwarzenegger should or should not run for POTUS in 2012.  The satirical nature of the piece will escape the blogger’s attention.  Over time, the story will be posted and reposted in other blogs and sent in e-mails, each one adding or subtracting something from what I’ve just posted.
4. Ralph will know for sure that his literary endeavor has achieved Internet superstar status when Snopes publishes an entry, declaring that the rumor that Governor Schwarzenegger was born in North Dakota “ist unrichtig!”

Once the Obamacare debate resumes next month, following the fate of Ralph’s literary offering on the Internet will be a welcome relief.

I bought mine at the Apple Store at Memorial City.  They did the transfer of my data off of my PC onto the Mac.  Everything went very smoothly, perhaps because I bought and read several books on Macs in the “For Dummies” series.  I feel like an idiot for not having made the transition years ago.  Better late than never!

The only negative aspect of the purchase was that when my bride and I went to the Apple Store last weekend, we really felt our age, since we didn’t see many people over thirty in the store.  But, I guess that is really a comforting thing, since it shows that this dog hasn’t gotten too old to learn new tricks.

On a completely unrelated topic, Michael Barone published an incredibly insightful piece this week on Scott Rasmussen’s web site..  http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_commentary/commentary_by_michael_barone/when_liberal_leaders_confront_a_centrist_nation  In in the piece, he did a fine job of explaining the factors that force Democratic presidents to govern from the center. His analysis puts the Obamacare debacle into a wider context.