Love in the time of Internet

In which the nearly irresistible Brontë reference is manfully resisted:

Ann Althouse, 58, is a law professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison who blogs about politics, law and cultural whatnots in a sharp, occasionally ribald tone. She admires Rush Limbaugh, voted for George Bush in ’04 and Barack Obama in ’08. She attracts derision and applause from 500,000 monthly visitors. The jeers spiked ever since the March 22 announcement on her blog that this divorced mother of two adult sons, stalwartly single for more than 20 years, is engaged to a commenter known simply as “Meade.” Except for her closest readers, the blogosphere was taken by surprise.

Good for Ann. And, for that matter, Meade. I don't think it speaks well of Kaus, Sullivan, or anyone else who mocks the upcoming nuptials. People meet in all sorts of varying circumstances, many stranger than this, and at least the medium of a blog provides two individuals the ability to get to know each other on a philosophical plane without the usual fog of pheromones, looks, and other physical complications obscuring the larger issues.

So, I hope you will join me in wishing the two of them very well.

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The experiment: an all-female staff

A woman has the bright idea to hire only women for her new media startup. Hilarity ensues:

Five years ago, I was working as a TV executive producer making shows for top channels such as MTV, and based in Los Angeles. It sounds like a dream job and it could have been - if I'd been male. Working in TV is notoriously difficult for women. There is a powerful old boys' network, robust glass ceiling and the majority of bosses are misogynistic males.

Gradually, what had started out as a daydream - wouldn't it be great if there were no men where I worked? - turned into an exciting concept. I decided to create the first all-female production company where smart, intelligent, career-orientated women could work harmoniously, free from the bravado of the opposite sex.

Anyone who has any experience of women in the office can probably guess how well the experiment worked out, but the story really has to be read in order to appreciate the comedic fullness of the disaster. Her conclusion: "[I]f I were to do it again, I'd definitely employ men. In fact, I'd probably employ only men."

Now, I don't mind employing women myself; in certain detail-oriented roles I tend to prefer them. There are no shortage of women who make excellent employees, especially those whose personal strengths fit their responsibilities well. But these women usually tend to get along well with men and have no problem being held to objective standards. The problem is that the pettiness and narcissism to which many women are prone is an absolute workplace cancer, especially if a woman with such tendencies finds herself in a position of power over anyone.

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Mailvox: taking the homeschool plunge

Whoschad and wife make the move:

I’ve been a reader of your blog for quite awhile now. Anyway, my wife and I decided to take the plunge and homeschool our kids. I remember you mentioning something about Spacebunny having some online resources for this, but I couldn’t find anything posted when I looked.

Congratulations, I very much doubt you will regret it. I'm sure a lot of people will have suggestions for you, and SB also has the aforementioned discussion group. As for online resources, here are a few little reading aids.

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Making it worse

It's hardly shocking that economists are taking a dim view of the TARP program:

The government's official view that toxic assets are incorrectly priced due to illiquidity "fire sales" is wrong, a new study by Harvard and Princeton finance professors suggests.... This latest paper effectively demolishes the "fire sale" view. It draws three important conclusions.

Many banks are now insolvent.
"...many major US banks are now legitimately insolvent. This insolvency can no longer be viewed as an artifact of bank assets being marked to artificially depressed prices coming out of an illiquid market. It means that bank assets are being fairly priced at valuations that sum to less than bank liabilities."

Supporting markets in toxic assets has no purpose other than transfering money from taxpayers to banks. 
"...any taxpayer dollars allocated to supporting these markets will simply transfer wealth to the current owners of these securities."

We're making it worse.
"...policies that attempt to prevent a widespread mark-down in the value of credit-sensitive assets are likely to only delay – and perhaps even worsen – the day of reckoning."

The Wall Street bailout was never about stabilizing the economy, much less fixing it. It was simply a means of insulating the banks from the consequences of their actions and the consequences that their actions have had on the economy. Years before the current crisis became evident, it was apparent that Washington runs for the benefit of the bankers, not the electorate. Which is why, as more and more economists are coming to realize, it simply isn't going to work.

"What the Obama team is proposing is disconcertingly similar to the actions of Japanese Prime Ministers Hashimoti, Obuchi, and Mori in 1995 and 1998: Rather than ask the legislature for straightforward recapitalization money, you have the political leadership preferring to risk overpaying current owners of toxic assets rather than forcing sales. For all of Japan’s supposed intervention in markets, its government still lacked the stomach for taking over banks, let alone closing them."

Keen economic historians will probably recall that Japan was not exactly known for its economic growth during this time. This isn't to say that I support nationalizing the banks, as the UK has done, only that nationalization is actually a less disastrous approach.

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Mailvox: tea parties

JW asks if he is wasting his time protesting with the Tea Party:

What are your thoughts of the coming tax day tea parties on April 15th? I know that "protests" are nearly always irrelevant for creating change, but I also think that it is one the very few things a can do to create change despite the very insignificant chance that it will change anything. Perhaps a blog post in the near future can help provide so more outside insight on whether or not I am wasting my time standing outside with a stick and John Galt T-shirt.

Yes, I'm not a big fan of protests myself, as to me they usually appear to be events that are manufactured in order to provide an rationale for pushing something that is in the works anyhow. But the reaction of the media in attempting to bury these anti-government protests indicates that they are important; if nothing else, it makes it clear to the rest of the nation and the world that America is not supinely submitting to its financial rape.

Will it change anything? I don't see how it really can. Washington demonstrated its complete contempt for public opinion in forcing the House of Representatives to vote until it got it right on the Wall Street bailout despite the overwhelming opposition of the American public, and it's no secret that I have long believed the die is already cast. But, is it worthwhile? I think that it probably is, especially for those conservatives and Republicans who rightly feel conscience-stricken about putting Bush and the GOP into power in 2000. Even if such protests are little more than the difference between striking out while swinging and getting caught looking, the distinction is one of character and conscience. Also, as Daniel Hannan pointed out last week, you just never know what is going to be the last straw on the camel's back.

So, I fully support the Tea Party movement, in fact, I think that would be an excellent name for a third party not just focused on limited government, but genuinely limiting the size and scope of government.

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The reason is irrelevant

When you hand over control, you hand over control, and there's not much point about crying over the fact that you lost it later:

Under the Bush team a prominent and profitable bank, under threat of a damaging public audit, was forced to accept less than $1 billion of TARP money. The government insisted on buying a new class of preferred stock which gave it a tiny, minority position. The money flowed to the bank. Arguably, back then, the Bush administration was acting for purely economic reasons. It wanted to recapitalize the banks to halt a financial panic....

After 35 years in America, I never thought I would see this. I still can't quite believe we will sit by as this crisis is used to hand control of our economy over to government. But here we are, on the brink. Clearly, I have been naive.

The Bush administration bluffed the banks and Obama is taking advantage of it. This is how the expansion of government in a two-party system usually works! It's the Counterpush principle, the Nixon-to-China concept. The party which is supposedly against something is used to punch a hole through the wall of popular opinion, then the other party exploits the breach.

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Monday column

Grow and Die

"Grow or die" is one of the corporate mantras of the late 20th century. The peculiar shape that corporations now take, courtesy of the perversion of capitalism that is modern finance-driven corporatism, requires constant growth. Rather like great white sharks, which must keep swimming to avoid suffocation, modern corporations have had to keep growing to avoid seeing their stock prices punished by an increasingly avaricious Wall Street.

From 1948 to 1985, the financial sector accounted for around 12 percent of American corporate profits, never reaching 20 percent nor dipping below 5 percent. After 1985, however, the profits of the sector rose dramatically, going from 19 percent in 1986 to 41 percent in 2000. That meant that more than 40 cents out of every corporate dollar of profit was paper profit, not generated by actual wealth-generating activity, but by monetary inflation and corporate gambling....

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The Keynesians are wrong again

The chancellor admits his error and pushes the date of anticipated economic recovery further into the future:

THE chancellor, Alistair Darling, has admitted that he and his Treasury officials got it wrong over the length and severity of the recession and that he will be forced to tear up his economic predictions.... “I thought we would see growth in the second part of the year,” he said. However, the chancellor now thinks any recovery will come later: “I think it will be the back end, turn of the year time, before we start seeing growth here.”

I anticipated this, as you may recall, last October: "Increasing government spending to escape a recession? Now, there's a new concept! Considering that Darling's brilliant plan has literally been textbook macroeconomics for the past five decades, what are the chances that this is somehow going to fail? Infinity to one against or Infinity squared to one?"

As an encore, I'm going to go out on a massive limb and predict that Jim Cramer is completely incorrect in declaring, on April 2, 2009, that the depression is over and a new bull run is commencing:

Throughout that day, the “Mad Money” host told viewers of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” CNBC’s “Street Signs” and finally on his own program that the Depression was over and that we were on the verge of a bull run for the financial markets. “We have reached the land of a thousand bull dances – phoney maroney, why? Because the market swallowed its Prozac,” Cramer said on CNBC’s “Mad Money” April 2. “And right now, right here on this show – I am announcing the Depression over!”

There will probably be a nice bear market rally. I correctly anticipated the first leg of it a few weeks ago when I told the shorts to get out. But, sometime during 2010, Cramer is going to be eating mega-crow about this absurd announcement.

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Hitchens gets his ass kicked again

Fortunately for Hitchens, if not his credibility, it's only metaphorical this time:

The debate went exactly as I expected. Craig was flawless and unstoppable. Hitchens was rambling and incoherent, with the occasional rhetorical jab. Frankly, Craig spanked Hitchens like a foolish child. Perhaps Hitchens realized how bad things were for him after Craig’s opening speech, as even Hitchens’ rhetorical flourishes were not as confident as usual. Hitchens wasted his cross-examination time with questions like, “If a baby was born in Palestine, would you rather it be a Muslim baby or an atheist baby?” He did not even bother to give his concluding remarks, ceding the time instead to Q&A.

That summary, by the way, was not provided by an evangelical Christian, but an atheist blogger known as Common Sense Atheism. He wasn't the only one, as John Loftus of Debunking Christianity even predicted that Hitchens would get his head handed to him. A similar summary of the debate by a Christian in the audience can be found here. As is so often the case when the theist knows how to take the offensive, the atheist barely even attempts to defend himself against straightforward attacks on his arguments, but instead attempts to evade them because he simply doesn't have any defense to offer.

Doug Geivett's concise summary of Hitchens's performance should suffice to finish him as a serious disputant on the subject: "While Hitchens did make arguments, they were largely unfocused, sometimes disconnected, and often irrelevant." The honest observer of any creed, or lack of creed, will note that this could serve equally well as a description of the man's book on the subject.

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Addressing a run-of-the-mill atheist

Skepdude apparently lacks a dictionary:

First, I would like to see what evidence he is referring to when he says that “all of the available evidence demonstrates rather conclusively that the objects of their ridicule are, as a point of fact, rather more intelligent”, because I suspect he’s using a very unorthodox definition of evidence here.

Logical and empirical evidence. Or, to be more specific, logical, documentary and statistical evidence. Let us consider the most readily available example: Since I am known to possess, at a bare minimum, a Mensa-required +2SD IQ, it is obvious that most of my atheist critics are statistically bound to fall well short of that not-terribly-impressive level. In further support of this observation, I have seen many run-of-the-mill atheists, the vast majority of whom use logic and grammar in such a manner as to indicate a moderate-to-average level of intelligence, describing individuals such as Alister McGrath, Dinesh D'Souza, and me as if we are uniformly possessed of a sub-standard level of intelligence. (It is, of course, amusing to see an atheist suggest that I might elect to make use of an unorthodox definition of evidence, when almost every single atheist claim that "there is no evidence for God's existence" requires ignoring the standard definitions of evidence provided by every English language dictionary from American Standard to Webster as well as the definitions used in the American legal system.) I could point to dozens of these spurious accusations of stupidity on Scienceblogs alone, but it is perhaps more usefully ironic to note that a prime example of what I am describing can be found right there in the first comment on Skepdude's post.

Amusing, but inconsequential. Skepdude's much more serious error follows, however, when he writes:

Bit hypocritital no? First he says that our primary form of “debate” is calling people stupid, which of course must be wrong, then he turns around and presents his argument/debate which basically amounts to nothing more than calling us fools. Now, I’m nothing but a mere run of the mill internet atheist, who is mentally inferior as demonstrated by all the available evidence, but this sort of reasoning sounds a little….well…..stupidfoolish to me!

This is precisely the same sort of thing we have seen so often before. Call it the First Law Fandango. Because Skepdude possesses an above-average intelligence, he assumes that because he does not understand what an individual of superior intelligence has written, that individual and/or his reasoning must be stupid, foolish, hypocritical, etc. But there is a basic logical flaw in his errant attempt to find hypocrisy here, because it is eminently obvious - based on the readily available documentary evidence - that a single reference to a well-known Bible verse is neither a) an argument, nor b) my primary form of debate. So, no, not in the least bit hypocritical.

Shall we pull out the telestrator? Very well. Even if I had been making an argument there in the second of those two sentences - which I was not, I was merely offering scriptural support for my assertion that atheism has been around for a very long time and will probably always exist so long as there is conceptual space for it - a single argument does not dictate any specific form of debate, much less define my primary form of debate. In fact, a keen observer might even be able to detect that my primary form of debate is to read the other side's material, point out the verifiable errors that were made in that material, and then show how those errors render the other side's conclusions unviable. Then, use the demonstrable fact of those errors and that unviability to justify all sorts of terrible intellectual abuse. The main variant, of course, is to begin with the abuse, then demonstrate why the abuse is fully justified.

There is rather a great deal of evidence showing this to be my primary form of debate; there is at least a book full of it. However, we know that most atheists reject both documentary and testimonial evidence out of hand, which leads one to wonder what sort of scientific evidence could be sufficient to prove my hypocrisy or lack of it to Skepdude... and upon what he could possibly attempt to base an actual argument in support of his implication. At times, I seriously begin to wonder if the most useful definition of atheism is "epistemological incoherence".

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LoUC strikes in mysterious ways

When one attempts to forcibly remake society, it's almost impossible to guess how the Law of Unintended Consequences is going to cause things to go awry. But it will always strike somehow:

These and thousands of other children stolen from the teeming industrial hubs of China’s Pearl River Delta have never been recovered by their parents or by the police. But anecdotal evidence suggests the children do not travel far. Although some are sold to buyers in Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam, most of the boys are purchased domestically by families desperate for a male heir, parents of abducted children and some law enforcement officials who have investigated the matter say.

I don't have much that's positive to say about the Chinese Communists. But I rather doubt that they anticipated, or desired, mass kidnappings as a result of their literally inhuman One Child policy. Since we've already seen some bizarre behavior of this type in the West, particularly among women, it will be interesting to see if children become more of a commodity as they become less common outside the religious communities.

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England fails to get the message

It seems Mr. Teleprompter must have missed the flight:

Barack Obama, the World's Greatest Orator (™all news organisations), didn't exactly cover himself in glory when the BBC's political editor Nick Robinson asked him a question about who was to blame for the financial crisis. Normally word perfect, Obama ummed, ahed and waffled for the best part of two and a half minutes.

It's not exactly a mystery. As I've shown before, the man doesn't possess a superior intelligence and he is almost completely unable to speak coherently unless he's reading. Notice how much Obama laughs when he's interviewed... he uses it as a means of covering up the fact that he cannot construct complete sentences on the fly.

Seriously, who is still babbling things like this by the time they reach the END of a statement: "I'm a great believer in looking forwards than looking backwards." Did the newspaper blow the transcript or is this some sort of presidential ebonics?

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Good times

Earlier this week, I had the excellent fortune to run into a friend I met last year. I don't use the word "amazing" very often, but he is a genuinely amazing pianist. It's not that he did things with the piano I hadn't seen before, it's that he did things I'd never even heard of before. Yesterday evening he put on a performance, at least part of which I know was impromptu, that was musically spectacular.

To describe the man as talented doesn't half do him justice, and ironically, unlike many individuals who aren't anywhere nearly as gifted, he's an intelligent and personable guy who is remarkably down to earth. I highly recommend checking out his music if you happen to have any appreciation for the piano.

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Sinking the world

When your economic model fails again and your economy is once more on the verge of collapse, what's the solution? Do the same thing but big it up!

World leaders on Thursday heralded the G20 summit as the day the world “fought back against the recession” as they put on a show of unity that lifted global markets and mapped out a new future for financial regulation. Gordon Brown, UK prime minister, host of the summit, said the meeting marked the emergence of a “new world order”, as he unveiled what leaders claimed was a $1,100bn package of measures to tackle the global downturn, including support for lower income countries and a $250bn plan to boost the international money supply.

There's a pattern at work here. After the 1987 Asian currency fiasco nearly sunk Wall Street, the Fed managed to inflate the tech equity bubble. When that blew up in 2000, they used the martial response to 9/11 and the housing bubble to reinflate. Now, since their usual national tools have failed, they're attempting to throw the combined weight of the G20's resources at the problem, based on the same precisely the same set of assumptions that have repeatedly made the problem worse!

This action doesn't "save the world", in fact, it makes it much more likely that what was mostly an American depression from 1929 to 1940 will be repeated on a scope that is an order of magnitude larger. If we're unfortunate, it will also be on a scale that is an order of magnitude larger as well.

The fundamental problem isn't a lack of resources, it is a misallocation of resources. Giving GM more money isn't going to cause more people to want to buy GM cars, it merely postpones the inevitable collapse and increases its economic and social costs. And don't forget what happened the last time the media announced the world's salvation... in February 1999.

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There is no downside

PZ Myers provides amusement by worrying about the economic crisis harming America's "intellectual infrastructure":

One of the challenges facing the country right now in this time of economic crisis is that we're also about to be confronted by the result of a decade of neglect of the nation's infrastructure, in particular, the chronic starvation of our universities. It's an insidious problem, because as administrations have discovered time and again, you can cut an education budget and nothing bad happens, from their perspective.

But where is the evidence that America's universities are its intellectual infrastructure? It's a self-serving assumption, and a problematic one when considered in a realistic light. The comments are an absolute gold mine of comedy - to which I have referred before - as the hard scientists begin by beating up on the humanities and the fake sciences until eventually both sides join hands, sing Kumbaya, and reach a general agreement that Womyns' Studies and Postmodern Philosophy are just as important as Biology and Physics and that every academic discipline should be lavishly funded by the taxpayers.

However, the Pharyngulans are confusing theory with reality here, as they discuss what the liberal arts are theoretically supposed to be as opposed to what they actually are at an American university. This is ironic, as their community is one of the foremost examples of how an American university system does not teach one how to think ; indeed, it does precisely the opposite as one will not find a less thoughtful, more dogmatic individual than the average American academic.

And, as others have noticed, it's becoming evident that the best and brightest coming out of America's most elite universities are actively contributing to America's economic demise. There is arguably a stronger case for shutting down the universities entirely than there is for not reducing their funding; paying to obtain a piece of paper calling itself a university degree is no longer tantamount to obtaining what passes for an education. From politics and business to economics and the liberal arts, the American university system has been a massive failure.

"“It is so obvious that something big has failed,” said Angel Cabrera, dean of the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Arizona. “We can look the other way, but come on. The chief executive officers of those companies, those are people we used to brag about. We cannot say, ‘Well, it wasn’t our fault’ when there is such a systemic, widespread failure of leadership.”

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Mogadishu on the Mississippi

Minnesota continues its descent into utter madness:

Muslim workers receive $1.35 million under a religious discrimination settlement. A federal judge gave approval for Gold'n Plump Inc. and an employment agency to pay $1.35 million to settle lawsuits alleging religious discrimination against Muslims at a chicken processing plant in Cold Spring, Minn. The money will go to 128 Somali Muslims who claim that St. Cloud-based Gold'n Plump violated their religious rights by refusing to allow them prayer breaks during work hours, and to another 28 workers who said a St. Paul employment agency, the Work Connection Inc., required them to sign forms acknowledging they would be required to handle pork.

During the latter days of Rome, I wonder how many Roman citizens found themselves looking around at all their new Teutonic neighbors and thinking: "yep, we're well into the decline and heading fast for the fall." Seriously, how can anyone possibly imagine that this is going to end well?

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Atheist contra New Atheism

The author of Atheism: a very short introduction, declares the New Atheism to be "destructive":

This is most evident when you consider the poverty of the new atheism’s “error theory”, which is needed to explain why, if atheism is indeed the view evidence and reason demands, so many very bright people are still religious. The usual answers given to this are not good enough. They tend to stress psychological blind-spots and wishful thinking. For instance, Dawkins says “the meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.”

But if very intelligent people are so easily led astray by such things, then shouldn’t the new atheists themselves be more sceptical about the role reason plays in their own belief formation? You cannot, on the one hand, put forward a view that says great intelligence is easily over-ridden by psychological delusions and, on the other, claim that one unique group of people can see clearly what reason demands and free themselves from such grips. Either many religious people are not as irrational as they seem, or atheists are not entitled to assume they are as rational as they seem to themselves.

Baggini's efforts are well-placed, but one thing he misses in his essay is that the New Atheists, having seen their "error theory" repeatedly blown away and shown for the logical and empirical nonsense that it is, are in the process of shifting to what can be described as the "compartmental" theory. This hasn't yet made its way down to the run-of-the-mill internet atheists, whose primary form of "debate" still consists of calling people stupid despite the fact that all of the available evidence demonstrates rather conclusively that the objects of their ridicule are, as a point of fact, rather more intelligent than the atheist himself.

It is a pity that Baggini hasn't actually troubled himself to read the New Atheist tomes. Had he done so, there can be little doubt that he would not only describe the New Atheism as destructive, but as a hopeless parody of an intellectual movement as well.

Atheism will always exist. As it is written, there have always been fools who have said in their hearts that there is no God. But the cancerous form of anti-intellectual and ill-tempered atheism that is the New Atheism, as exemplified by the evangelicalism of Richard Dawkins, has already seen what passes for its heyday and its lifespan will be a short one.

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The ashes of England

I posted about the infuriating behavior of the British police standing by and watching people burn to death yesterday, but I deleted the post because it was simply too vicious. Mark Steyn has a rather more civilized post on the further decline of the British people:

The incident has strange echoes of that fire at a school in Saudi Arabia not long after 9/11, where the fleeing schoolgirls escaped the blazing building but, because they were unveiled, were beaten back by the stick-wielding religious police to die in the flames. In both cases, the emergency responders who are supposed to save you (or at least make an attempt) instead wind up killing you - because a rote prostration before rule enforcement trumps their basic humanity. In recent years, the British police have evolved from being merely useless (at least when it comes to traditional activities such as solving crime) into what John O'Sullivan calls "the paramilitary wing of The Guardian" - the blundering enforcers of the nanny state.

It's clear that the governments of the world are actively seeking to raise humans that are more sheep than wolves. Americans should seriously consider fighting against government-funding for genetic research, as there can be little question that if the sort of lunatics who are now running the capital city asylums are ever given the opportunity to incorporate sheep DNA into the citizenry, they'll do it in a heartbeat.

Don't defend yourself. Don't rescue your neighbors. Just sit there and bleat, and perhaps the badge gang will elect to help you. Or not, as the case may be.

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Death Hospital

Americans who like to trumpet the wonders of the British NHS should probably think twice before subjecting themselves to its tender mercies:

Patients admitted for emergency treatment at an NHS Trust were subjected to “shocking and appalling” care that included untrained receptionists carrying out medical checks and heart monitors being switched off, a report concluded today. The Healthcare Commission, the NHS standards watchdog, said that evidence suggested that as many as 400 deaths at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust could have been prevented and may have been the result of poor care.

That's 400 deaths at a single hospital. When discussing how the government - the government! - is going to save money by running things, does no one ever stop to think precisely how the government is going to save that money? The answer is pretty simple. Reduce and Remove. They'll REDUCE the quality the service or product and justify that by REMOVING your other options.

UPDATE - Make that 400 to 1200 deaths, in three years! On the plus side, if a socialized nationalized health service does kill dear old mum as the reports indicate is not at all unlikely, you will get an apology from the Prime Minister and the Health Secretary. Which, it has to be admitted, is more than you'd ever get from a private corporation or church charity. One could, of course, argue that they're a great deal less likely to kill dear old mum in the first place, but let's not focus on the negative:

The British government apologised Wednesday after a damning official report into a hospital likened by one patient's relative to "a Third World" health centre. Stafford Hospital in central England was found to have appalling standards of care, putting patients at risk and leading to some dying, according to a report on Tuesday. Between 400 and 1,200 more people died than would have been expected in a three-year period at the National Health Service (NHS) hospital, according to an investigation by the Healthcare Commission watchdog.

"We do apologise to all those people who have suffered from the mistakes that have been made in the Stafford Hospital," said Prime Minister Gordon Brown, questioned on the matter at his weekly grilling in the House of Commons....

Health Secretary Alan Johnson said: "I apologise on behalf of the government and the NHS, for the pain and anguish caused to so many patients and their families by the appalling standards of care at Stafford Hospital.

You know there's a Fox News executive reading about patients wandering around fighting each other and thinking: "I know... reality TV show.... Survivor: Death Hospital!"

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