So I said - something about AI in healthcare

Another in an occasional series of trying to provide some more content here by posting worthwhile comments I’ve posted elsewhere.

In this case, I took a YouGov survey related to public perceptions about the use of AI in healthcare. Three of the questions asked for general responses rather than picking from among multiple choices.

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November 26, 2025

What ethical considerations are most important to think about when adding AI tools to healthcare?
I was told by my surgeon some years ago “You treat the patient, not the X-ray.” The more we use AI, the more that adage is reversed.

During my recent hospitalization my PCP came by on their rounds, during which they displayed not through words but tone and demeanor a genuine personal concern for my health, something of which AI is incapable of expressing or feeling, at best offering instead merely an algorithmically-driven facade of concern, a programmed pretense, which well could be likened to the comforting reassurances of the scammer.

  

What is your overall impression of AI in healthcare?

Not ready for prime time. For now, it’s a bandwagon promising what it can’t (and perhaps never will) deliver, driven less by public health than by the profit-driven preferences of the corporate spectrum of health care (i.e., hospitals and the insurance industry) who pursue a goal of “efficiency” (read as “fewer employees”) and would, as I suggested earlier, “treat the X-ray, not the patient,” with us coming to exist less as patients than as datasets.

Is there anything else about AI in healthcare that you would like to share with us?
AI is good for, indeed excellent at, analyzing large amounts of data, producing results that can be viewed and considered mathematically because that’s what they are - mathematical derivations from mathematical data.

But healthcare in general and medicine within that reach involves more than mere data but also includes personalities and foibles and trust and other human interactions along with unavoidable judgment calls driven by such non-mathematical considerations, all of which are beyond its capabilities.

Which, by the way, makes the use of chat boxes by consumers for health information advice fraught with risk and worse as shown by recent suits against various companies whose chat boxes are accused of having encouraged teenager users to commit suicide. AI simply is not up the task to which the health care industry is trying to set it in pursuit of profit.

Liars figuring

I am sick to flaming death of our senile buffoon president claiming that in the wake of COVID we had “the highest inflation in the history of our country” and nobody ever, ever, calling out that transparent lie. I know it's a lie because remember, I saw, higher inflation than during Biden’s term.

Start with the fact that the peak year-over-year (YOY) inflation rate during Biden’s term was 9.1% in June 2021.*

In 1974, YOY inflation was 12.3%.

In 1978, it was 9.0%.
In 1979, it was 13.3%.
In 1980, it was 12.5%.

The highest in any year since 1929 was 18.1% in 1946.

Okay, next: For the year 2022 as a whole, (based on December end of year figures, the standard method) YOY inflation was 6.5%.

In the period 1941-2024, there have been 12 years with YOY inflation rates above 6.5%.**

Third: Over the course of his presidency, average YOY inflation under Biden was 4.95% - lower than under Nixon (6.10%), Ford (8.11%), or Carter (9.85%) and just a bit higher than Bush the elder (4.8I).

Has inflation been a struggle recently? Is it still a struggle, especially with slow growth and stalled real income growth? Absolutely freaking yes.

But “the highest in the history of our country?” Not even close. And dammit, some one of the White House reporters should have the guts to say it out loud to his face.

I may be considered old, but I damn well can remember 1974. And so can the Orange Overlord - unless his dementia has erased that part of his memory. Either that or he’s just a damned liar.

Actually, I suspect it’s both.

*All data via Investopedia.com.

**The years were 1941, 1942, 1946, 1947, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 2021.

So I said - somethng about elections

As it has developed, I’ve written very little here of late, partly because for whatever reason I’ve found it difficult to compose a piece of any significant depth or length - I guess you could call it some sub-variation of writer’s block - and because as I noted recently, I don’t feel that I’m adding anything of sufficient value around here to justify having a readership. The two are likely connected in some way, but that’s rather more self-analytical that I care to be right now.

Anyway, the point of this is that I thought I’d try to from time to time post some substantive comments I’ve made on others’ posts, not single line or toss-off reactions, but something that makes some kind of point. I’ll date each one and include a heading sufficient, I hope, to provide enough context for the comment to make sense. All such posts will be headlined "So I said."

This may not produce a lot of content and no guaranteed regularity because it depends on how wordy I’ve been elsewhere, but maybe enough to make it worth checking here from time to time. I’ll start with this one and thanks more than I can say for bothering to read.

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November 10, 2025
[SCOTUS will review the question of counting mail-in ballots received after election day]

This is inane. Elections are supposed to be directed and controlled by the individual states, not the federal government - including accepting mail-in ballots postmarked on or before but received after election day.

The only - the only - argument I’ve heard to the contrary is the real reach that the Constitution sets election day, so you can’t count votes cast after it.

But to do that, they have to be arguing that a vote is “cast” when it is counted, not when it’s actually cast. Which runs into two major problems. First, if they want to be consistent, that “one set election day” argument would not only require banning early voting entirely (which, admittedly, is also part of the right-wing agenda), it ignores the fact by previous decisions the votes in question were cast when that envelope was put in the mail. Cast before, not after, not even on, election day.

“Oh yes, but they were still counted after,” they say? Okay, so suppose you vote in person on election day but because of turnout, vote counting isn’t completed by midnight. Must the counting stop and remaining votes be discarded? They would, after all, by the logic of the argument be "counted after election day" and therefore cast too late, so making the very argument self-defeating.

The issue at hand is not when votes are counted but when they are cast. The power of the states to count mail-in ballots postmarked by but received after election day is not in rational question, the arguments to the contrary are flat-out voter suppression, and it's a disgrace - a revealing one, but a disgrace nonetheless - for SCOTUS to even have taken this up.

Two new rules!

One of my more popular offerings is my "Rules for Right-wingers," a compilation of tricks, deceptions, evasions, and misdirections right-wingers use to avoid honest debates, answering questions, responsibility, and truth.

 

It made its first appearance in June 2009 with 13 rules, since expanded several times with additional rules, reaching a total of 22 rules in February 2024.

 

Well, guess what. It's time for two more.

 

Rule #23: Screw the forest, look at the trees!
Drown the argument in details to distract from the overall point. Gaza again is an example, where disputes were created and questions were raised over just how many Palestinians were starving or had been killed to avoid accepting the fact that Palestinians were starving and had been killed.

Rule #24: Use passive voice as a weapon.
To illustrate, look once more at Gaza. The October 7 attack must always be called “a terrorist attack by the terrorist organization Hamas.” When forced to admit to the destruction in Gaza, refer to it only in terms of “the humanitarian situation” as if it was the result of a hurricane or tidal wave with no human agency involved. The words “Israel,” “Netanyahu,” and “IDF” must never be employed in this context.

Okay, I need help

Or maybe advice is a better word.

Y’see, up until relatively recently I kept up a reasonably steady output of political commentary both through a website (okay, a blog, as old-fashioned as that sounds now) and a web channel which also served as a local-access cable TV show in about five states.

I was never a big dog; my audience was in the hundreds, but dammit I felt useful because I knew that audience consisted mostly of people whose news sources were largely limited to things like the nightly TV news - so I knew that I was giving them information and a perspective they might not see anywhere else.

But here nowadays I feel like I’m surrounded by posters who are heavily into news and politics and related commentary. I’m neither a known quantity nor one with any special expertise or background on any particular topic, with the result that I feel I have nothing to contribute here, nothing that is not being said equally well if not better by louder voices (i.e., bigger audience), nothing that adds to the conversation other than the occasional comment. Put simply, I feel useless.

So I guess I’m asking if anyone has any guidance.

If you want to see what I do/did, you can check out my stuff here or at my Substack (whoviating.substack.com). I haven’t been able to do the videos for the last two years, but the ones before then can be found at YouTube; just search on “whoviating.”

Let me be clear: I am not asking you to subscribe. This is not a pitch. You can subscribe if you want, of course, but the idea here is that if you’re moved to consider offering any ideas/suggestions/hope, you might want a sense of where I have been up to this point.

Thanks for reading.

The next level

The fascists and the self-interested camp followers are working up to their campaign to "destroy the left" and its "terrorism networks" and we accept the threat is real because we seem to have finally embraced Maya Angelou's famous quote, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." As I remarked a little while back, "It is possible to overstate their power; it is not possible to overestimate their intentions."

But I also have a next-level concern, beyond the coming attempts at repression, that I wanted to raise, one to be filed under "be ready for the fallout from unintended consequences, even if they’re not your own."

It's what happens when the MAGA Masters can't make good on their promises to "destroy" the left? Because they won't. They can't. Oh, there may be, probably will be, some show trials or at minimum multiple prosecutions; there will be a lot of "investigations" and a surfeit of accusations; there will be repression of speech and assembly; there will be a lot of pain for those directly and the much greater number indirectly impacted - but no, while the left may even be significantly injured it will not be "destroyed." We survived the Palmer Raids, we survived McCarthyism, we survived the conspiracy trials of the 60s, we will survive this. Maybe scarred and limping, but alive and continuing and re-building. And truth be told, every time we have gone through one of these cycles, at the end of it the country is a little better than it was before. The moral arc of the universe and all that, I suppose.

So anyway, getting back to the point, what happens when after the MAGA Masters have gotten their rabid followers all pumped up, they can't produce the ultimate victory they promised? How far will they go, how desperate will they be, to keep that loyalty, to hold that blind commitment?

And will those followers try to make that victory come true on their own? It wouldn't be the first time that leaders of a movement lost control of their creation. We've already seen it here on a small scale in the refusal of some of the MAGA crowd to accede to the attempts of the Orange Overlord and company to drop the whole Epstein file business. So yeah, that could happen.

If it does and the MAGA Masters start to lose control, lose their grip on the formerly obedient, will those Masters turn on their own followers? Again, it has happened before.

And don't anyone tell me "that'd be good" because now we're talking about literal blood in the streets and guerrilla warfare and if you think that wouldn't affect you, wouldn't come to your door (it's often been said, with cause, that civil wars are the worst), you're an idiot.

This doesn't mean, of course, that other than the moves at repression this will happen. Of course and yes it's a string of "what ifs." I only raise it as a scenario for which we should be prepared - because even if you think it unlikely, you, I think, have to agree it's plausible.

And I raise it for another reason: to remind ourselves that, in another old but true phrase, the best defense is a good offense. The more strongly we today, now, don't just defend our rights but press our commitments to justice, the more strongly we don't merely say "no" to what shouldn't be done but also say "yes" to what should, the more prepared we are to sacrifice in the present for the sake of the future, the sooner and more clearly we can show "destroy the left" to be the pipe dream it ultimately is, the less pain there will be in the end to us and, more importantly, everyone else.

So carry it on. Except more.

Speaking of Kirk

What follows is rather meandering and I probably should go to bed and do it tomorrow, but I'm worried I would cool off to much by then. So with that warning and the understanding that I may feel compelled to edit this later to straighten out spaghetti syntax, I'll proceed.

When anybody among the wingnuts of the right says anything about "free speech," you can be pretty damn sure that they mean free speech for them but not for anyone else.

If it wasn't already obvious, the wave of firings, suspensions, and other penalties we've seen imposed on workers for failing to react in a MAGA-approved manner to the killing of the sexist, racist, xenophobic, trans-hater that was Charlie Kirk drove home the point.

Well, here's another example: Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau is urging people to respond to Kirk's killing by reporting to the State Department people "who glorify violence and hatred" so officials can "undertake appropriate action." What constitutes such “action” is left unsaid along with how far it can and will extend.

Why is that concerning? For one, the meaning of "people" is curiously limited to "immigrants and foreign visitors." That could be taken as an admission they can't touch US citizens, except that stripping citizens of their passports is already under discussion, the DOJ is "is aggressively prioritizing efforts" to denaturalize citizens, and there is the on-going effort to repeal birthright citizenship - so that admission-that's-not-an-admission is at best cold comfort and the phrase "can't touch US citizens" must be modified with "yet."

For another, while the meaning of "people" is curiously limited, the meaning of "glorify" is curiously broad, embracing "praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event," none of which need describe anything approaching "glorify." "I'm glad he's dead" isn't "glorifying" the murder, "he made his name spewing hatred so we can't be surprised if he generated a hateful response" certainly doesn't, and "I guess if he'd used a hammer instead of a rifle it would've been okay," while crude, likewise doesn't make the cut.

The real point, however, is that none of that matters even if any of it actually did "glorify" the murder because all of it fits quite comfortably under the banner of the "FREE SPEECH!" the reactionaries will screech at the least challenge to their vile and often enough violent rhetoric. Because that human right does not rise or fall depending on citizenship or even legality of residency. It is a right, not a privilege to be dispensed to a favored few.

But not as far as the right wing is concerned, oh no. Note that Landau's whole premise by definition excludes anyone who has used Kirk's death to issue calls, no matter how violent, for "war" against those in any way on the left, regardless of their status as "immigrant or foreign visitor" or citizen. As long as it is said in praise of Kirk, it's fine.

Well, sauce for the goose and all that and if anyone objects to you having excoriated Charlie Kirk in death for the execrable person he was in life they should just be told "It's free speech. Do you believe in it or don't you?"

Trans killers? Or killers of trans rights?

So it's being reported that senior officials at the DOJ are talking about a possible federal ban on transgender folks owning guns.

This is building on the right-wing meme machine's notion that trans folks commit a disproportionate number of mass shootings and the ban would be justified on the grounds that people with gender dysphoria are mentally ill and unstable.

If this were a rational world, it would be enough to simply dismiss this as the twisted fantasies of trans-hating bigots politicizing a tragedy to advance their paranoid fears and political ambitions - but unhappily, it is not.

So let's go through it. Note at the top that I’m not going to bother with any arguments about “but the Second Amendment,” questions that seem to be the focus of too many words on this because, y'know, guns and freedom and all that. Not only because I’d be happy to see that widely misused and historically misinterpreted provision dumped from the Constitution, but because it’s actually irrelevant. Instead, a few facts.

1. Gender dysphoria is the stress that arises when there is a conflict between someone's sex, based on their primary and secondary sex characteristics, and their gender, that is, their sense of self. It is not a mental illness. In fact, therapists will often prefer the term “gender incongruence” specifically to affirm that the issue is one of dealing with stress, not in any way one of sanity.

2. Not only are trans folks not over-represented among mass shooters, they are if anything underrepresented.

Snopes and Media Bias/Fact Check both looked at the question of a supposed overabundance of trans mass shooters and the conclusion was the same both times. Snopes called it "False" and Media Bias/Fact Check bluntly called it a "Blatant lie."

The primary sources for each were the Gun Violence Archive and the Violence Prevention Project, which use somewhat different measures for inclusion. The Gun Violence Archive records mass shootings, meaning a shooting in which at least four victims are shot, not including the shooter. The Violence Prevention Project tracks mass killings, one in which at least four people are killed, again not counting the shooter. Despite that difference in focus, their answers to the overall question were the same.

The Violence Prevention Project recorded 195 mass shootings committed by 200 people between 1966 and 2024. Of those 200 shooters, only one was listed as transgender. That's 0.50% of the shooters.

The Gun Violence Archive reports that from January 1, 2013 to August 29, 2025, there were 5,729 mass shootings - involving just five confirmed transgender shooters. If you include a few cases in which the gender identity of the shooter was unconfirmed, there may have been eight. That's between 0.09% and 0.14% of all mass shooters in the GVA database.

So transgender folks, who by varying estimates make up about 1% of US adults, make up something between 0.1% and 0.5% of mass shooters.

Which means that to what should be no one’s surprise, the Department of Injustice is either lying or so wrapped up in their paranoid hatred that they can’t even count.

Meanwhile, cis men, who make up about 47% of the US population, commit about 96% of all mass shootings. What were you saying about over-representation?