My thesis: what most people refer to as god is an idea, personified by ethnocentric religions, un-named for sheer effect, and the capitalization of this idea into Proper-Noun-hood is full of logical inconsistencies that ultimately weaken the benefits of believing in such a transcendent being.
Note: I won't try and prove this tonight, as I should be sleeping, but I'm going to go ahead and point the way to what I'm thinking and hopefully not sound like an angry heretic, which is not what I am.
Say two strangers meet and peace is disrupted between them. They only communicate by writing. One says, "you have offended my god, and that is why I must make holy war on you." The other says, "God told me to say what I said, and God's bible says that your god is a crappy false idol," for humans are afterall nothing if not egocentric.
On balance, I call the former man the wiser man. To assume that God is a proper noun is to assume that you're talking about the same god the other person is talking about. To say 'my god' is more accurate, since only a great fool would think that anyone's conception of GOD THE CREATOR THE UNIVERSE ITSELF THE QUESTION AND THE ANSWER TO ALL THEOLOGICAL QUESTIONS IN HUMAN MYSTICISM SINCE THE BEGINNING AND BEYOND THE END OF TIME is the same as anyone else's conception of that concept. It is hubris, aggression, and repugnant ethnocentrism/egocentrism that leads so many people of faith to capitalize their one true god. To not capitalize (especially once precedence has been set and so religiously adhered to), if it offends the Christian or other, shows that a small symbolic correction somehow diminishes their faith, or worse yet, brings the possibility of other gods existing to the forefront of their minds. This is tantamount to walking into Congress and publicly declaring that capitalism is not the best economic system. You'd get stoned, and not in the Dylan kind of way.
Counterarguements they will make and my responses to them:
from wikipedia:
"The capitalized form God was first used in Ulfilas's Gothic translation of the New Testament, to represent the Greek Theos. In the English language, the capitalization continues to represent a distinction between monotheistic "God" and "gods" in polytheism.[6][7] In spite of significant differences between religions such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, the Bahá'í Faith, and Judaism, the term "God" remains an English translation common to all. The name may signify any related or similar monotheistic deities, such as the early monotheism of Akhenaten and Zoroastrianism."
However, one does not need to distinguish a non-plural monotheistic God from polytheistic gods. First of all, it's all theism, so the only reason to distinguish is in the case of reference to a monotheistic god vs. one particular polytheistic god - in which case surely, SURELY, context might provide some hint. Second, although it is stated that God is not the same for any of the Abrahamic religions, a decent reason for God being referred to in a unified way is never given. Other than the interests of ecumenical peace negotiations, I'd say the only reason is to piss off and marginalize atheists and polytheists. Any characteristics of their god that are all shared are probably just good ways to keep patriarchy and oligarchy seeming reasonable and expected in the minds of the serfs.
Same source: "Conceptions of God can vary widely, but the word God in English—and its counterparts in other languages, such as Latinate Deus, Greek Θεός, Slavic Bog, Sanskrit Ishvara, or Arabic Allah—are normally used for any and all conceptions. The same holds for Hebrew El, but in Judaism, God is also given a proper name, the tetragrammaton (usually reconstructed as Yahweh or YHWH), believed to be a mark of the religion's henotheistic origins. In many translations of the Bible, when the word "LORD" is in all capitals, it signifies that the word represents the tetragrammaton.[8] God may also be given a proper name in monotheistic currents of Hinduism which emphasize the personal nature of God,..."
All the names listed here are clearly proper nouns, but religions designed to spread tend to drop the proper name (seems like Christianity does this the most) since walking into a village and saying, "you will all worship Bob" or "Allah" doesn't work as well as walking into a village and saying, "I come representing the one true God who has no name and is also every name you can think of - take these trinkets and the gift of literacy so that you may tithe and be sold to slavery." Note that this last critique speaks to some of the history of Christianity, not modern necessarily - back when the capitalization tradition was started.
Same source (0nly source? we'll see): "Proper nouns (also called proper names) are nouns representing unique entities (such as London, Jupiter or Johnny), as distinguished from common nouns which describe a class of entities (such as city, planet or person).[8] Proper nouns are not normally preceded by an article or other limiting modifier (such as any or some), and are used to denote a particular person, place, or thing without regard to any descriptive meaning the word or phrase may have.
In English and most other languages that use the Latin alphabet, proper nouns are usually capitalized."
So if I'm talking about God, who isn't 'any' god or 'some' god, then God denotes a particular person, place, or thing without regard to any descriptive meaning the word or phrase may have. Congratulations capitalizer, you just anthropromorphized yourself into a shoddy religion that automatically assumes everyone else in the world will point to the sky and agree with you. You probably just pissed off every other culture in the world accidentally because your philosophy innately assumes universal agreement.
More importantly, I'd say that someone enlightened enough to refer to God as 'my god', 'our god', or even Yaweah or something, has a leg up on being well recieved by other human beings who have their own ideas about creation, philosophy, spirituality, and morality. Someone who strictly adheres to capitalization probably also thinks that the U.S. is a Christian nation where God has mandated the sacred unwritten eleventh commandment "Thou shalt be armed at all times, especially at political rallys." Evolution has a thing or two to say about cultures with that philosophy.
and...my wife says lastly...also wikipedia: "Sometimes the same word can function as both a common noun and a proper noun, where one such entity is special. For example the common noun god denotes all deities, while the proper noun God references a monotheistic God specifically."
This outlines the logical fallacies I've been trying to point out. God is not specific. Never has been, and never will be, and I would argue on philosophical grounds couldn't be. Something that is undefinable, transcendent, everywhere and nowhere, and most of all culturally constructed, cannot be a proper, specific, special, identifying referant called God.
Case closed.
Merry Christmas.
I capitalize Merry because it's at the beginning of a sentence. I capitalize Christmas because it is a Holiday known around the world since, though it bears the 'annointed' name, it is derived from a half-a-dozen religions, cultures, and traditions.
Plus it is a great opportunity to focus on peace, charity, joy, and the un-egocentrizing of everyone in your family or peer group. I don't have to go to mass to celebrate Christmas, and I don't have to capitalize god to have faith, feel blessed, or live life as a good person. Meanwhile, it is an important lesson to understand why things are the way they are, and to give a little more room in our lives for the acceptance and empathy of other ways of being.
Oh, and Happy Haunika. If Aimee reads this she knows I meant no offense by misspelling her cultures solstice tradition. I made up for it by capitalizing Happy. : )
Monday, December 21, 2009
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Fiction is as Fiction Says - Gary Sutton: The Fiction of Climate Science; Debunked
Why the climatologists get it wrong.
Correction: Why we shouldn't listen to a douche-bag about climate change.
From a facebook post I felt compelled to write (contained link to article I'm about to shred):
Gary Sutton sounds like a drunk bum who drank whisky through a Forbes magazine straw, while missing every scientific discovery of the 80's 90's, and aughts, then woke up on a park bench and stammered into the journalistic crowd shouting that everything was nonsense and crying about who put all the bad-tasting cotton in his mouth.
1. the 70's cooling thing was mostly a media hype. What science was behind it is still valid, but during a great wave of atmospheric data compilation in the early 70's, some scientists thought the data showed a cooling trend - which it did from 1940's to 1970's. Then the trend reversed. Now (and some then) most scientists say the data shows warming on the way. Note also that warming creates further temperature instability (a property of accelerating dynamic systems) so any given year in the future could indeed have snow storms and worse and worse winters, but overall, the global average will go up.
2. Scientists care about this because a change of a few degrees globally would radically alter the living systems in our biosphere. Hence, if there is a way to exist without pumping shit into the air (keep it out of Clayton's kids' lungs), we would be smart to do so. After all, the Earth can cope with any change - we however cannot.
3. I agree that gov. hype is b.s., but, just b/c Al Gore looks in need of punching doesn't mean he's wrong. Read Malthus, read Ehrlich, read a world census. You have to be pretty dumb to look at i) an exponential population curve, ii) an exponential per kappita consumption curve, and iii) a heavy sloped linear vegetation (CO2 scrubber) curve in the down direction, and still not see why bringing change isn't just the rantings of your economic enemy trying to change your consumption behaviors. I can kill my neighbor with a lawn mower much more effectively in a direct assault, but if our culture doesn't start bending the curve, we're going to be breathing nothing but cow fart, coal plant, and truck exhaust within a few generations. And all because crapheads felt the need to tranfer-of-affect what they should have felt for Bush on to the first semi-sane political leader we've had since...?... It is all not ALL about government control. It is also about U.S. citizens putting fingers in their ears and going 'la,la,la,la,la'.
Here, Mr. Gary Sutton's article begins. I've interspersed my comments in red - as I often do. It portrays my anger nicely.
Many of you are too young to remember, but in 1975 our government pushed "the coming ice age."
From Wikipedia (and the only reference I can find to any government "pushing" in 1975:
"The 1975 NAS report titled "Understanding Climate Change: A Program for Action" did not make predictions, stating in fact that "we do not have a good quantitative understanding of our climate machine and what determines its course. Without the fundamental understanding, it does not seem possible to predict climate." Its "program for action" consisted simply of a call for further research, because "it is only through the use of adequatelycalibrated numerical models that we can hope to acquire the information necessary for a quantitative assessment of the climatic impacts."The report further stated:The climates of the earth have always been changing, and they will doubtless continue to do so in the future. How large these future changes will be, and where and how rapidly they will occur, we do not know..This is not consistent with claims like those of Science & Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) that "the NAS "experts" exhibited ... hysterical fears" in the 1975 report.[21]"
So, when this guy tries to tell you that he remembers the government pushing stuff, remember that he's probably a highly indoctrinated wacko Libertarian (unlike the cool libertarians that are out there) who saw a PBS special on global cooling in middle school or high school, as it was apparently an widely viewed thing that brought the new sciences around climate change some attention. Then again PBS is a leftist pinko organization brainwashing our kids so that pot-dealing terrorists can enter our country and... Between that and a National Academy of the Sciences Report, this is apparently supposed to qualify as "our government pushing a coming ice age". Maybe he thought the gas shortage had something to do with it too - who knows. (That one was caused by the Oil of Petroleum Exporting Countries, by the way.)
Random House dutifully printed "THE WEATHER CONSPIRACY … coming of the New Ice Age." This may be the only book ever written by 18 authors. The Bible? All 18 lived just a short sled ride from Washington, D.C. Newsweek fell in line and did a cover issue warning us of global cooling on April 28, 1975. And The New York Times, Aug. 14, 1976, reported "many signs that Earth may be headed for another ice age."
Cheer up Mr. Tea Party, you can rest assured that the Earth will actually have another ice age in all probability. They come every 20,000 years or so due to irregularities in Earth's orbit affecting how much sunlight we get and possibly for other reasons as well.
OK, you say, that's media. But what did our rational scientists say?
In 1974, the National Science Board announced: "During the last 20 to 30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade. Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end…leading into the next ice age."
How dare those rational scientists get something wrong. Naturally we should stop being rational.
You can't blame these scientists for sucking up to the fed's mantra du jour. Scientists live off grants. Remember how Galileo recanted his preaching about the earth revolving around the sun? He, of course, was about to be barbecued by his leaders. Today's scientists merely lose their cash flow. Threats work.
This guy actually thinks that it is politically expedient to advocate tighter regulation of industrial emissions. He assumes anything the government pays a scientist to do is bogus. So one guy gets paid to study the flow rate of ketchup and 60 Minutes does a show about it - get over it. This 'out-of-the-hat government is bad' reasoning is the sure sign of a dim wit. Remember how seemingly intelligent intellectuals ignored Galileo en masse because they had dogmatic heads up stoic asses and they relied on their worldview to support their own ego's? Sound familiar my vitriolic friend?
In 2002 I stood in a room of the Smithsonian. One entire wall charted the cooling of our globe over the last 60 million years. This was no straight line. Straight line is neither expected nor necessary to show trends. Well, not since Gaussian Random Variables hit the scene around 1800. The curve had two steep dips followed by leveling. There were no significant warming periods. Smithsonian scientists inscribed it across some 20 feet of plaster, with timelines.
Last year, I went back. That fresco is painted over. It's called re-decorating - not the liberal conspiracy you think it is. The same curve hides behind smoked glass, shrunk to three feet but showing the same cooling trend. Hey, why should the Smithsonian put its tax-free status at risk? News flash: dim-witted climate change nay-sayer believes the Smithsonian would lose funding if they drew a non-straight line graph of world temperatures. If the politicians decide to whip up public fear in a different direction, get with it, oh ye subsidized servants. Downplay that embarrassing old chart and maybe nobody will notice.
Sorry, I noticed. I'm sorry you noticed and then didn't spend more that an airborne-bird-droppings length of time looking into the history of this complex, scientific, and fascinating subject.
It's the job of elected officials to whip up panic. Panic only gets you votes if you run as a Republican. Sorry dude. They then get re-elected. Their supporters fall in line. Dems aren't known for their ability to "get in line". Neither are scientists. Once again, mainly just Republicans fall into this category.
Al Gore thought he might ride his global warming crusade back toward the White House. Don't think he's dumb enough to think a power point and a speaking tour/video would win him the presidency. If you saw his movie, which opened showing cattle on his farm, you start to understand how shallow this is. And by 'this' do you mean Al Gore's whole spiel? He could be spending millions on reforestation, recycling, alternative energy, but to you those head of cattle are enough reason to ignore his arguments. The ancient Greeks would be very disappointed in your ability to reason my friend. The United Nations says that cattle, farting and belching methane, create more global warming than all the SUVs in the world. Which will be true for a few years, until the Indians and Chinese, who don't eat much beef, all begin driving SUVs. Even more laughably, Al and his camera crew flew first class for that film, consuming 50% more jet fuel per seat-mile than coach fliers, while his Tennessee mansion sucks as much carbon as 20 average homes. Pay attention people, if you're going to criticize Mr. Tea Party here for his dumb economic ideas, you'd better be prepared to forswear all modern convenience - or else! your argument holds no water! Oh, never mind, I forgot, that's PRACTICALLY IMPOSSIBLE. THAT'S THE WHOLE PROBLEM! Put in cap and trade and suddenly the airlines have incentive to move to more efficient flying wing designs and offer some slower flights that use up less carbon per passenger.
His PR folks say he's "carbon neutral" due to some trades. I'm unsure of how that works, but, maybe there's a tribe in the Sudan that cannot have a campfire for the next hundred years to cover Al's energy gluttony. I'm not even going to...at least he admitted he's unsure of how this works. Al puts money into cleaning up after himself - not that complicated to understand, unless you're a moron and a dinosaur. I'm just not sophisticated enough to know how that stuff works. Now I'm sure you're a Tea Partier. Probably thinks Palin is a genius too. You know you suck if you have to profess your own ignorance of things to get people to like you. But I do understand he flies a private jet when the camera crew is gone. Totally agree that Al and others should reduce consumption. Totally amazed that Forbes would print something full of more fallacies than a book about fallacies.
The fall of Saigon in the '70s may have distracted the shrill pronouncements about the imminent ice age. Actually, the Vietnam war had nothing to do with scientists redacting their former theories. What happened was the world started warming up again like it hadn't been for the previous thirty years. Vietnam was just the only other event you noticed in your kool-aid-drunken stupor, so you naturally associate the two concurrent phenomena. You see, unlike greedy demagogues, when scientists (or President's named Obama) find out they are wrong about something they tell everyone they were wrong, instead of clinging to the edifice of a pater-familia ethic about never looking back and always staying the course. Science's prediction of "A full-blown, 10,000 year ice age," came from its March 1, 1975 issue. The Christian Science Monitor observed that armadillos were retreating south from Nebraska to escape the "global cooling" in its Aug. 27, 1974 issue. It cracks me up how he keeps accusing scientists of saying things, then cites popular magazine journals. Guess they are easier to find on the internet than the scholarly journals that would have the records of what happened beyond what pop culture said. But, we've already established this guy isn't too deep, so...
That armadillo caveat seems reminiscent of today's tales of polar bears drowning due to glaciers disappearing. That actually is happening ass munch. Or did you miss the news about world governments vying for control of the newly opening Arctic passage. That couldn't have anything to do with global temperature change could it? Well, even if we don't care about polar bears, I reserve the right to caveat the hell out of a country really only caring about the almighty dollar.
While scientists march to the drumbeat of grant money, at least trees don't lie. Scientists by nature don't march, and trees by nature don't tell us much about anything that happened more than a few hundred years ago. Sometimes a thousand. Their growth rings show what's happened in the last couple hundred years maybe! no matter which philosophy is in power. I think he means political party. Apparently to this guy, being a Republican/Libertarian is a Philosophy (*laughs). Tree rings show a mini ice age in Europe about the time Stradivarius crafted his violins. Chilled Alpine Spruce gave him tighter wood so the instruments sang with a new purity. But England had to give up the wines that the Romans cultivated while our globe cooled, switching from grapes to colder weather grains and learning to take comfort with beer, whisky and ales. The oldest known tree is less than 10,000 years old. Then again, this guy is probably religious and thinks dinosaurs were just bones put in the dirt by god to test the true King James believers.
Yet many centuries earlier, during a global warming, Greenland was green. And so it stayed and was settled by Vikings for generations until global cooling came along. Don't think vikings were around since the last ice age. Greenland is habitable on the edges and stuff, regardless of its not being green. Leif Ericsson even made it to Newfoundland. His shallow draft boats, perfect for sailing and rowing up rivers to conquer villages, wouldn't have stood a chance against a baby iceberg. Well at least talking about vikings and violins makes you sound kind of smart. Kind of.
Those sustained temperature swings, all before the evil economic benefits of oil consumption, suggest there are factors at work besides humans. Yes. Many other factors. Humans have never been a factor until recently when we went from a few million to many billion and from rarely eating meat or burning oil to eating nothing but meat and driving armored urban assault soccer mom vehicles.
Today, as I peck out these words do you really want to take climate change cues from a guy who never learned to touch type? If so it's called the observation bias and your reason has been compromised, the weather channel is broadcasting views of a freakish and early snow falling on Dallas. Snow in Dallas = all climate change scientists are wrong. Got it. The Iowa state extension service reports that the record corn crop expected this year will have unusually large kernels, thanks to "relatively cool August and September temperatures." And on Jan. 16, 2007, NPR went politically incorrect, briefly, by reporting that "An unusually harsh winter frost, the worst in 20 years, killed much of the California citrus, avocados and flower crops." Dumb ass. Political correctness was only made laughable by the most bleeding of bleeding heart liberals. But, I get it, you're trying to make your empty headed readers laugh. Well, I got news for you - NPR isn't sacred to me at all. I think it sucks.
To be fair, those reports are short-term swings. And by short term, he means a couple days. But the longer term changes are no more compelling says the guy who can't type and thinks Republicanism is a Philosophy, unless you include the ice ages, and then, perhaps, the panic attempts of the 1970s were right. Is it possible that if we put more CO2 in the air, we'd forestall the next ice age? No douche, you can't claim you're saving the world by commuting in a Hummer. If anything you're pissing off hippies and ensuring our nation is dependent on foreign oil (which is guaranteed to become more and more scarce and expensive in the next 100 years btw).
I can ask "outrageous" questions like that because I'm not dependent upon government money for my livelihood. You can ask dumb-headed questions like that because you're a checkers-brained individual writing nonsense about a chess-brain level global issue (chaos mathematics is a bit above your head - let me assure you). From the witch doctors of old to the elected officials today, scaring the bejesus out of the populace maintains their status. Agreed. Funny that you state this in an article that has nothing to do with the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, consolidation of media, our stimulant worshipping culture, the flaws in modern entertainment media, or the attempts to undercut public education by your best buddies over at the Cato Institute.
Sadly, the public just learned that our scientific community hid data and censored critics. Yeah, like five datums and one critic, out of, thousands. maybe tens of thousands. Maybe the feds should drop this crusade and focus on our health care crisis. This dude is DUMB and DUMBER. If you're going to claim the feds need to drop this crusade in favor of something important they are currently ignoring, YOU SHOULDN'T PICK HEALTH CARE, WHICH THEY ARE CURRENTLY WORKING DILIGENTLY ON. IN FACT THE WHOLE COUNTRY IS TALKING ABOUT IT. You should have said Entitlement Expenditures or Torte Reform or something. They should, of course, ignore the life insurance statistics that show every class of American and both genders are living longer than ever. Imagine what our lifespans would be if all the poor/sick weren't bringing the figures down. That's another inconvenient fact. What was the first inconvenient fact? That it snowed in Dallas or that you watched a PBS special on Global Cooling when you were in high school and have ignored science since then? I'm just not clear on this last point, though his last sentence did read vaguely like a clincher.
Gary Sutton is co-founder of Teledesic and has been CEO of several other companies, including Knight Protective Industries and @Backup.
Final analysis on Climate Change:
1. Oil is great - we use it for everything - let's not waste it uneccessarily so our great great grandchildren can find toys in their cereal boxes too. Our cruise ships won't be able to expose the glory of the Tongass National Forest if we burned it all watching Spongebob in the back of the Excursion.
2. Refuting modern science by saying "but they said the opposite thing forty years ago" is the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. Forbes is now a stupid magazine.
3. Currently in America we need to do several things: quit whining when things change; vote more; educate our kids so they're smarter than we are; quit spending money on wasteful things like guns and bombs (i.e. the bloated U.S. military - now on the road to becoming human-free in the age of drone warfare); start spending money on things that will pay off higher in future dividends (both as a country and as individuals); spend more time thinking and listening and less time bloviating; AND MOST OF ALL, WHETHER IT'S FOR CLIMATE CHANGE, ETHICS, or just to turn our culture into one of health and economic sustainability WE HAVE TO ADMIT OUR ADDICTION TO OIL AND CONQUER IT. Since the industrialist rhetoric like this guy spews forth has gone too far, we now have to resort to peoples' empathy for polar bears in order to convince the somnambulant public that there is a crisis we have to do something about. Gary won't live to see the polar bears disappear. My nieces, however, might. (clincher ending).
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Climate Change, Global Warming, Global Cooling, and the Fogey's That Don't Buy It
"You cannot find your soul with your mind,
you must use your heart.
You must know what you are feeling.
If you don't know what you are feeling, you will create unconsciously.
If you are unconscious of an aspect of yourself;
if it operates outside your field of awareness,
that aspect has power over you."
~ Gary Zukav
Apparently in the 70's scientists were predicting a global cooling cycle that would bring another ice age. Twice since I've been at UAA I've heard this, followed by an exasperated sigh and a critique of the current debate surrounding Global Warming/Climate Change. I inwardly reacted to this by feeling squirmy and angry, but not really knowing why. Ultimately, I think I worry when anyone seems to be advocating for 'staying the course' of profit-driven environmental exploitation and disregarding the new science of sustainability; the idea that we won't be able to rethink our consumer paradigm in time to share this planet brings about images of global resource wars, mass starvations/diseases, and all kinds of other nightmare images. Furthermore, a world surrounded by nightmare images is exactly the kind of environment where reason and enlightenment dwindle in the face of fear and desperation. Malthus wrote about population explosions long ago. 'An Inconvenient Truth' pointed out some of this, but even Al Gore lives 'on the grid' and consumes products from the great military industrial complex. Few other options exist, and no alternatives exist that don't come with ridicule from popular culture (only dirty hippies live in the mud, grow their own food, don't wash their hair with 'normal' shampoo, etc.).
So, here's what I wish I could say to people who don't want to look further into the details of Climate Change.
First, here's what the Climate Change believers AREN'T saying:
1. Quit manufacturing everything.
2. Give up all your conveniences.
3. We're all going to die if you keep using oil and plastics.
4. We're all going to die if we don't become vegetarians.
Granted, there are probably some environmentalists out there that do say these things, and not without reasons, but by and large, Climate Change is a mainstream concept accepted by people on Wall Street, Main Street, and by the vast majority of scientists who study it.
Here's the concept in a nutshell: every human requires resources (food, lumber, textiles, and especially transportation and stuff). Everyone (except those noble "savages" still left in the world) uses oil, plants, and trees. People 200 years ago used about a tenth to a hundreth the amount of resources as people do today. More importantly, the more everyone lives like Americans do, the more resources they use (by a whole lot - we eat more, waste more, buy more, and trash more stuff than any other culture), and literally billions of people are on a fifty year road to becoming more American-like. This last bit ignites ire in some people. Conservatives are correct that we shouldn't demonize the American way of life. They are wrong who say we shouldn't change it.
American wastefulness comes from prosperity. To make money, here are some things we do broadly: transport people places for pleasure; prepare as much food as we need to guarantee profit maximization during the dinner rush; design products that last a certain amount of time, then need to be replaced; design products that are cheapest to manufacture by not building them durable enough to be taken apart, parts replaced, etc. I don't claim that making money is bad. But, as Ani Difranco says, "what a waste of thumbs opposable, to make machines that are disposable."
Here's a good example. I live in a place that is less than zero degrees half the year and I pay money to freeze my food inside my heated house. Where is the sense in that? OK, maybe it's true that food needs a more constant temperature than 'outside' otherwise it could all spoil in a couple of fluke warm days, but still, we have the technology to be more efficient, reusable, etc. These technologies don't make anybody any money, so they aren't available at the local box store. Simple as that.
Back to Climate Change and Global Warming/Cooling. Now that we understand that people use resources and Americans super-use resources compared to poor people. We all want the world standard of living to increase, so people aren't poor any more. We could make this happen without impacting the environment, but it wouldn't be as profitable as the status quo. The more oil we burn, the more carbon we produce. Every piece of food we buy at the grocery store takes oil to transport, oil to fertilize, oil to spray with chemicals (being an oil based economy means even the chemicals we buy are made by using the energy in oil to drive chemical tranformation processes), and so on. The more papers we read (and don't recycle) the more trees we cut down - same with houses we build, and in the case of South American beef farms, the more hamburgers we eat (rainforest deforestation occurs largely to use inefficiently to raise meat animals since everyone loves cheeseburgers). The more we drive, the more caffeine we drink, the more disturbing shows we watch and articles we read, the more malnourished we become...all these things make us eat more, buy more, and want to consume more. Our culture has even gone so far as to replace fulfillment with materialism. Advertising has made billions over the last eighty years or so making sure we want want want. Climate Change is just one reason - the most compelling reason - to bend this curve and become a bit more native/hippy/counterculture-like.
As more carbon ends up in the atmosphere, less taken out by less and less trees (which doesn't even get into the ocean-change argument), the more solar energy remains in the complex dynamical system we call the biosphere - that which supports all life in the universe as far as we currently know. Energy can be stable and produce predictable weather, but increasing the levels of energy in our biosphere will do several things (a super-majority of scientists agree): make weather patterns more unstable and unpredictable; more heat will melt polar ice caps (oops, I mean are already melting polar ice caps).
Now, the chain of events goes like this: ice caps melt, oceans rise. Oceans rise, and more water is available for absorbing heat energy, and global cooling happens. So global warming becomes global cooling.
Based on sound scientific data, here's how people should think of (or frame if you will) Climate Change: humanity has had a relatively stable period for many thousands of years but the more we super-consume (which by the way only makes us sick, obese, and otherwise cantankerous), the more likely we are to bring the carbon levels to a tipping point. All we have to do to screw ourselves is reach that point once.
Here's the rub: the Earth will survive either way. We really only hold our own survival in our hands. We can become efficient, smart, and less wasteful, or we can become oil for the next species nature endows with reason and technology to use us. We're using up all the dinosaurs (roughly where oil comes from), so it's only fair that we return the favor.
Alternately, consider this: the biosphere is a closed system which, during the time of the dinosaurs contained much higher levels of CO2. All that CO2 turned into Hydrocarbons and atmospheric oxygen, giving us the rich air we breath. By burning all the dinosaurs, the carbon all goes back into the air, and since the biosphere is a closed system, we get to breath the same kind of air that dinosaurs breathed.
But I get it, you don't want to give up what we have, and since solar panels, electric cars, and spending time growing our own food, repairing and reusing our own waste, or worst of all, not buying stuff from box stores, would totally take away our luxuries, you don't like the self-criticism posed by Climate Change scientists.
So warming, cooling, boiling, brewing...whatever. We've created a monumental system based on resource extraction and utilization. Practically everyone in the world is starting to get this at some level or another. I'm sorry those scientists in the seventies told you something that seems like a contradiction. It isn't a contradiction in actuality, and I don't give a crap about the seventies. I care about my great-great-grandchildren, and homegrown produce tastes way better anyway. In the meantime we all get the privilege of feeling like hypocrites, acting like Americans, and striving to be better while applauding ourselves (somewhat hypocritically) for our efforts. All we have to lose is waste, and what we have to gain is the lifestyle of thousands of generations of homo sapien sapiens, which I'm sure we can improve on even if we're living right. Maybe we can keep electric cars and espresso stands.
Ani Difranco: Your Next Bold Move
coming of age during the plague
of reagan and bush
watching capitalism gun down democracy
it had this funny effect on me
i guess
i am cancer
i am HIV
and i'm down at the blue jesus
blue cross hospital
just lookin' up from my pillow
feeling blessed
and the mighty multinationals
have monopolized the oxygen
so it's as easy as breathing
for us all to participate
yes they're buying and selling
off shares of air
and you know it's all around you
but it's hard to point and say "there"
so you just sit on your hands
and quietly contemplate
your next bold move
the next thing you're gonna need to prove
to yourself
what a waste of thumbs that are opposable
to make machines that are disposable
and sell them to seagulls flying in circles
around one big right wing
yes, the left wing was broken long ago
by the slingshot of cointelpro
and now it's so hard to have faith in
anything
especially your next bold move
or the next thing you're gonna need to prove
to yourself
you want to track each trickle
back to its source
and then scream up the faucet
'til your face is hoarse
cuz you're surrounded by a world's worth
of things you just can't excuse
but you've got the hard cough of a chain smoker
and you're at the arctic circle playing strip poker
and it's getting colder and colder
everytime you lose
so go ahead
make your next bold move
tell us
what's the next thing you're gonna need to prove
to yourself
you must use your heart.
You must know what you are feeling.
If you don't know what you are feeling, you will create unconsciously.
If you are unconscious of an aspect of yourself;
if it operates outside your field of awareness,
that aspect has power over you."
~ Gary Zukav
Apparently in the 70's scientists were predicting a global cooling cycle that would bring another ice age. Twice since I've been at UAA I've heard this, followed by an exasperated sigh and a critique of the current debate surrounding Global Warming/Climate Change. I inwardly reacted to this by feeling squirmy and angry, but not really knowing why. Ultimately, I think I worry when anyone seems to be advocating for 'staying the course' of profit-driven environmental exploitation and disregarding the new science of sustainability; the idea that we won't be able to rethink our consumer paradigm in time to share this planet brings about images of global resource wars, mass starvations/diseases, and all kinds of other nightmare images. Furthermore, a world surrounded by nightmare images is exactly the kind of environment where reason and enlightenment dwindle in the face of fear and desperation. Malthus wrote about population explosions long ago. 'An Inconvenient Truth' pointed out some of this, but even Al Gore lives 'on the grid' and consumes products from the great military industrial complex. Few other options exist, and no alternatives exist that don't come with ridicule from popular culture (only dirty hippies live in the mud, grow their own food, don't wash their hair with 'normal' shampoo, etc.).
So, here's what I wish I could say to people who don't want to look further into the details of Climate Change.
First, here's what the Climate Change believers AREN'T saying:
1. Quit manufacturing everything.
2. Give up all your conveniences.
3. We're all going to die if you keep using oil and plastics.
4. We're all going to die if we don't become vegetarians.
Granted, there are probably some environmentalists out there that do say these things, and not without reasons, but by and large, Climate Change is a mainstream concept accepted by people on Wall Street, Main Street, and by the vast majority of scientists who study it.
Here's the concept in a nutshell: every human requires resources (food, lumber, textiles, and especially transportation and stuff). Everyone (except those noble "savages" still left in the world) uses oil, plants, and trees. People 200 years ago used about a tenth to a hundreth the amount of resources as people do today. More importantly, the more everyone lives like Americans do, the more resources they use (by a whole lot - we eat more, waste more, buy more, and trash more stuff than any other culture), and literally billions of people are on a fifty year road to becoming more American-like. This last bit ignites ire in some people. Conservatives are correct that we shouldn't demonize the American way of life. They are wrong who say we shouldn't change it.
American wastefulness comes from prosperity. To make money, here are some things we do broadly: transport people places for pleasure; prepare as much food as we need to guarantee profit maximization during the dinner rush; design products that last a certain amount of time, then need to be replaced; design products that are cheapest to manufacture by not building them durable enough to be taken apart, parts replaced, etc. I don't claim that making money is bad. But, as Ani Difranco says, "what a waste of thumbs opposable, to make machines that are disposable."
Here's a good example. I live in a place that is less than zero degrees half the year and I pay money to freeze my food inside my heated house. Where is the sense in that? OK, maybe it's true that food needs a more constant temperature than 'outside' otherwise it could all spoil in a couple of fluke warm days, but still, we have the technology to be more efficient, reusable, etc. These technologies don't make anybody any money, so they aren't available at the local box store. Simple as that.
Back to Climate Change and Global Warming/Cooling. Now that we understand that people use resources and Americans super-use resources compared to poor people. We all want the world standard of living to increase, so people aren't poor any more. We could make this happen without impacting the environment, but it wouldn't be as profitable as the status quo. The more oil we burn, the more carbon we produce. Every piece of food we buy at the grocery store takes oil to transport, oil to fertilize, oil to spray with chemicals (being an oil based economy means even the chemicals we buy are made by using the energy in oil to drive chemical tranformation processes), and so on. The more papers we read (and don't recycle) the more trees we cut down - same with houses we build, and in the case of South American beef farms, the more hamburgers we eat (rainforest deforestation occurs largely to use inefficiently to raise meat animals since everyone loves cheeseburgers). The more we drive, the more caffeine we drink, the more disturbing shows we watch and articles we read, the more malnourished we become...all these things make us eat more, buy more, and want to consume more. Our culture has even gone so far as to replace fulfillment with materialism. Advertising has made billions over the last eighty years or so making sure we want want want. Climate Change is just one reason - the most compelling reason - to bend this curve and become a bit more native/hippy/counterculture-like.
As more carbon ends up in the atmosphere, less taken out by less and less trees (which doesn't even get into the ocean-change argument), the more solar energy remains in the complex dynamical system we call the biosphere - that which supports all life in the universe as far as we currently know. Energy can be stable and produce predictable weather, but increasing the levels of energy in our biosphere will do several things (a super-majority of scientists agree): make weather patterns more unstable and unpredictable; more heat will melt polar ice caps (oops, I mean are already melting polar ice caps).
Now, the chain of events goes like this: ice caps melt, oceans rise. Oceans rise, and more water is available for absorbing heat energy, and global cooling happens. So global warming becomes global cooling.
Based on sound scientific data, here's how people should think of (or frame if you will) Climate Change: humanity has had a relatively stable period for many thousands of years but the more we super-consume (which by the way only makes us sick, obese, and otherwise cantankerous), the more likely we are to bring the carbon levels to a tipping point. All we have to do to screw ourselves is reach that point once.
Here's the rub: the Earth will survive either way. We really only hold our own survival in our hands. We can become efficient, smart, and less wasteful, or we can become oil for the next species nature endows with reason and technology to use us. We're using up all the dinosaurs (roughly where oil comes from), so it's only fair that we return the favor.
Alternately, consider this: the biosphere is a closed system which, during the time of the dinosaurs contained much higher levels of CO2. All that CO2 turned into Hydrocarbons and atmospheric oxygen, giving us the rich air we breath. By burning all the dinosaurs, the carbon all goes back into the air, and since the biosphere is a closed system, we get to breath the same kind of air that dinosaurs breathed.
But I get it, you don't want to give up what we have, and since solar panels, electric cars, and spending time growing our own food, repairing and reusing our own waste, or worst of all, not buying stuff from box stores, would totally take away our luxuries, you don't like the self-criticism posed by Climate Change scientists.
So warming, cooling, boiling, brewing...whatever. We've created a monumental system based on resource extraction and utilization. Practically everyone in the world is starting to get this at some level or another. I'm sorry those scientists in the seventies told you something that seems like a contradiction. It isn't a contradiction in actuality, and I don't give a crap about the seventies. I care about my great-great-grandchildren, and homegrown produce tastes way better anyway. In the meantime we all get the privilege of feeling like hypocrites, acting like Americans, and striving to be better while applauding ourselves (somewhat hypocritically) for our efforts. All we have to lose is waste, and what we have to gain is the lifestyle of thousands of generations of homo sapien sapiens, which I'm sure we can improve on even if we're living right. Maybe we can keep electric cars and espresso stands.
Ani Difranco: Your Next Bold Move
coming of age during the plague
of reagan and bush
watching capitalism gun down democracy
it had this funny effect on me
i guess
i am cancer
i am HIV
and i'm down at the blue jesus
blue cross hospital
just lookin' up from my pillow
feeling blessed
and the mighty multinationals
have monopolized the oxygen
so it's as easy as breathing
for us all to participate
yes they're buying and selling
off shares of air
and you know it's all around you
but it's hard to point and say "there"
so you just sit on your hands
and quietly contemplate
your next bold move
the next thing you're gonna need to prove
to yourself
what a waste of thumbs that are opposable
to make machines that are disposable
and sell them to seagulls flying in circles
around one big right wing
yes, the left wing was broken long ago
by the slingshot of cointelpro
and now it's so hard to have faith in
anything
especially your next bold move
or the next thing you're gonna need to prove
to yourself
you want to track each trickle
back to its source
and then scream up the faucet
'til your face is hoarse
cuz you're surrounded by a world's worth
of things you just can't excuse
but you've got the hard cough of a chain smoker
and you're at the arctic circle playing strip poker
and it's getting colder and colder
everytime you lose
so go ahead
make your next bold move
tell us
what's the next thing you're gonna need to prove
to yourself
Monday, November 2, 2009
Attacking the Roots of Monday Morning
I hope you're lucky enough to have had a functional compass of instincts set up for you when you were young. My family and community did pretty well, and I'm blessed to be able to let go of Philosophy and Religion both when life flows in unalterable directions. Otherwise we're caught on a track that needs rails. Both ways have advantages, and both ways have a noble purpose in keeping a community thriving and surviving.
I'm glad you're here and I'd love to chat about something I think is very important. It's about how we think of each other and the world around us, and the tremendous benefit it is for us to come to common terms in the pursuit of Life and Liberty (for my purposes, Liberty includes Happiness). How could you declare anything but your agreement once you've heard some clear reasons why our lives and ideas must change - the more in concert together the better. If we are truly individualists, we could at some point see how even an individual prospers in a community of individuals that do what they can to work together. To achieve this, the doubters, the negative person-ions (picture the meanies from Yellow Submarine, only every-day people you know), even the Ayn Rand self-actualizers-at-all-costs will some day be forced by tragedy or poverty to unite with their community or perish (except for those lucky few who are born with means and left untouched by the humbling power of life to make you it's occasional victim). Even the lions get toothaches, after all.
So what I think is important is that we, nearly all of us, accept some plausible ideas offered by all sides of the political spectrum. The Greens have some great election reform ideas; the right has some ... well, I admit I'm at a loss sometimes to know what Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, or even Mark Sanford have to offer this country - but I'm also willing to listen and negotiate. Maybe tort reform is a good idea for health care...whatever.
What I'm really trying to get at is this: quit your Wal-Mart addiction, your recent romance with that new show on the tube, halt the fast food and processed food and the meat cheese and bread conglomerate that is holding you by the gas nozzle. Wouldn't work be nicer if it was closer and couldn't we have it easier if we biked there. Couldn't you do with less busy places to go and more natural energy to expend. How much caffeine to we need to keep a country running, and how much corn oil, saturated fat, and artificial chemicals? Could I own a dozen cars and be happy, or is one right, or one twelfth - like if my neighbors and I ran our own conglomerate to keep money in our pockets and everyone tries to keep the money in the community in the city where the things they buy are hopefully produced. How much of long term economics requires this thought?: How much do I pay Coca-cola Corporation over the course of my life to provide the fizzy beverage that destroys my body if taken in large quantities - who's diet variety contains ingredients cause tumors in lab rats - when a little sugar, some water, yeast, and flavorings are all that is needed.
I watched a homebrewer batch some brew up today, and I thought about my life in the web of the economy. How many Coca-cola and Missal Defense Corporations do I support with my consumption habits, my addictions, and my choices in my day? The conscience of the nation should have some humility before these crowded streets, and take the pulpit away from their egos, and do whatever it takes to get the actions of our government and, more importantly, the daily lives and routines of you and me and everyone we know 's collective act together and get smart like our ancestors were: keeping means of production and organic homespun technologies at the forefront of our rearing and legacy efforts. Being a survivalist means far from just packing heat - the more self-sufficient you are the earlier to bed and earliest to wise you become. Turns out that making your own root beer is also much cheaper and makes far less trash than the way Coocoo-Loco does it. It's been said that if you aren't living well, that you should travel wide to help alter your perspective into a more corrective mode; whether you travel or not, then please join the rest of the world in our struggle for survival during the first great epoch of our populations eruption. At least begin with a little effort to become humble and less needy in the face of the obviously and potentially huge calamities that are now within our collective event horizon.
Thanks.
I'm glad you're here and I'd love to chat about something I think is very important. It's about how we think of each other and the world around us, and the tremendous benefit it is for us to come to common terms in the pursuit of Life and Liberty (for my purposes, Liberty includes Happiness). How could you declare anything but your agreement once you've heard some clear reasons why our lives and ideas must change - the more in concert together the better. If we are truly individualists, we could at some point see how even an individual prospers in a community of individuals that do what they can to work together. To achieve this, the doubters, the negative person-ions (picture the meanies from Yellow Submarine, only every-day people you know), even the Ayn Rand self-actualizers-at-all-costs will some day be forced by tragedy or poverty to unite with their community or perish (except for those lucky few who are born with means and left untouched by the humbling power of life to make you it's occasional victim). Even the lions get toothaches, after all.
So what I think is important is that we, nearly all of us, accept some plausible ideas offered by all sides of the political spectrum. The Greens have some great election reform ideas; the right has some ... well, I admit I'm at a loss sometimes to know what Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, or even Mark Sanford have to offer this country - but I'm also willing to listen and negotiate. Maybe tort reform is a good idea for health care...whatever.
What I'm really trying to get at is this: quit your Wal-Mart addiction, your recent romance with that new show on the tube, halt the fast food and processed food and the meat cheese and bread conglomerate that is holding you by the gas nozzle. Wouldn't work be nicer if it was closer and couldn't we have it easier if we biked there. Couldn't you do with less busy places to go and more natural energy to expend. How much caffeine to we need to keep a country running, and how much corn oil, saturated fat, and artificial chemicals? Could I own a dozen cars and be happy, or is one right, or one twelfth - like if my neighbors and I ran our own conglomerate to keep money in our pockets and everyone tries to keep the money in the community in the city where the things they buy are hopefully produced. How much of long term economics requires this thought?: How much do I pay Coca-cola Corporation over the course of my life to provide the fizzy beverage that destroys my body if taken in large quantities - who's diet variety contains ingredients cause tumors in lab rats - when a little sugar, some water, yeast, and flavorings are all that is needed.
I watched a homebrewer batch some brew up today, and I thought about my life in the web of the economy. How many Coca-cola and Missal Defense Corporations do I support with my consumption habits, my addictions, and my choices in my day? The conscience of the nation should have some humility before these crowded streets, and take the pulpit away from their egos, and do whatever it takes to get the actions of our government and, more importantly, the daily lives and routines of you and me and everyone we know 's collective act together and get smart like our ancestors were: keeping means of production and organic homespun technologies at the forefront of our rearing and legacy efforts. Being a survivalist means far from just packing heat - the more self-sufficient you are the earlier to bed and earliest to wise you become. Turns out that making your own root beer is also much cheaper and makes far less trash than the way Coocoo-Loco does it. It's been said that if you aren't living well, that you should travel wide to help alter your perspective into a more corrective mode; whether you travel or not, then please join the rest of the world in our struggle for survival during the first great epoch of our populations eruption. At least begin with a little effort to become humble and less needy in the face of the obviously and potentially huge calamities that are now within our collective event horizon.
Thanks.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
To Fly Through The Face Of Life
Yes. Indiscriminately Capitalized. Hope the world learns how to get past that.
Well, the first thing I can do today, so as to start my day out with as much easily accomplished importance as possible, is to write. Either way, today has to be made of Staying Focused. Can't capitalize without capitalizing on that.
The PK Theorem:
Our lives contain, just as our collective history and the whole of all creations contains, the entirety of maths relations Plus all that of similarity which remains undiscovered in that field.
Not sure what this means or why, but it is a kind of spiritual analysis for someone who is striving to endure the teachings of Maat, that ancient Egyptian Goddess of balancing equations for fairness' sake.
In an up-to-date fashion, I'll say that I have lots of studying to do today, and that life moves along well. Halloween this year seems to be going on without a party, and a certain math student is no longer taking distraction for an answer. But, toil is prosperous.
Current theme-song: "First In Flight" by Blackalicious - really that whole album Blazing Arrow.
Toil on everyone, toil on.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Blackalicious: "Blazing Arrow"
This album has captured me recently, which nothing has done in a while musically speaking.
My favorite excerpt of the moment:
I'm not the pro you wanna knock cause on the real
I got the glow
Cosmic flows as I suppose thats how its supposed to be
and got to go!!! How'd ya know? Intuition
I was on the old safe surface figure out your purpose
that's impossible
But logic will disturb the thought
or focus what its not is all about
the grow about the kind of onus only god can know
I rock it for the chocolate, for the awkward
for the thoughtless
in your home or at your office
I'm your early morning coffee so who got the ball?
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Excoriating David Brooks: [Kennedy] The Great Gradualist
If the Dems "use" Kennedy's death as a political or PR tool, that's not good. But if David Brooks talks about him and then pundit-hits some conswervative talking point in there, that's worse.
The Great Gradualist
In the days since Ted Kennedy’s death, the news programs have shown and re-shown the unforgettable ending of his 1980 Democratic convention speech — the passage from Tennyson and the beautiful final lines: “The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.” also the title of a book about Teddy, "The Dream That Never Died."
Skip to next paragraph 
David Brooks
But if you go back earlier into the heart of that speech, you see how bold (you mean how normal for political left, and not nearly as far from centrist, traditional American political beliefs as you would have us believe Mr. Brooks) Kennedy’s agenda really was. His central argument was for a policy of full employment (An intolerable situation for the bourgoise to be sure; cheap labor comes from high unemployment rates, where people are desperate for jobs enough to live their careers out at the Wal-mart near you). Government should provide a job for every able-bodied American. His next big goal was what he called “reindustrialization.” The computer revolution was just getting under way, but Kennedy called on government to restore the industrial might of America’s cities (unfortunately, due to our high standard of living, even the poor among us won't tolerate working conditions or churn out handi-crafts as fast as children in Bangladesh (?) or people in China, so our computer revolution was built by their hands instead of by the hands of a wont-of-growing American Middle Class).
The third big goal was national health insurance. “Let us insist on real control over what doctors and hospitals can charge,” Kennedy cried. (Public Option, cried back a Senator and President from the next generation).
There were other proposals. He vowed to use “the full power of government to master increasing prices.” (Probably perscription drug negotiations for elderly Medicare recipients - whoops, no our country didn't do that - you're still better off getting them in Canada where the politicians don't enact laws written by Big Pharma and his Fountain of Pharma Phun Lawyers - or maybe it just happens a little less there.) Kennedy was proposing to fundamentally transform America’s political economy (This is David's cute little way of calling Teddy a socialist without calling him a socialist. FYI, socialism is an economic system which, if paid attention to in our current situation, and incrementally as your title, was applied to our nearly-fascist Military/Industrial Complex-ocracy, would single-handedly make drugs cheaper for old people who will die without drugs and many of whom are choosing between food and medicine). He knew he had lost the nomination by this time, and his liberalism was unbound. (He knew he still had a chance to bring much needed change to Washington and his honest critique of the Status Quo was called out by that last ditch effort to stand up for the lowest among us.)
The speech was radical (is it just left that is radical, so Reagan probably wasn't radical, just ass-backwards; ass-backwards being the name of a radical-right viewpoint), and he could have gone back to the Senate, content to luxuriate in his own boldness (I outta slap David in the mouth for implying that Teddy's political opinions were merely a matter of self-satisfaction and superficiality). He could have excoriated his opponents for their villainy and given speeches about dreams that would never come true (because standing up for the least among us is purportedly so far off the map that David doesn't think it will ever happen in our lifetime, though I think David doesn't understand American history like I do, where life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are gradually, incrementally bestowed on all those who yearn for it and work for it).
But Kennedy became something else. He became a compromiser (sounds less potent than being the "decider"). He became an incrementalist.
Those words have negative connotations. But they shouldn’t. Kennedy never abandoned his ambitious ideals, but his ability to forge compromises and champion gradual, incremental change created the legacy everybody is celebrating today: community health centers, the National Cancer Institute, the Americans With Disabilities Act, the Meals on Wheels program, the renewal of the Voting Rights Act and the No Child Left Behind Act (What parts of NCLB did Teddy sponsor or advocate?). The latter law, by the way, has narrowed the black-white achievement gap more than any other recent piece of legislation (Random thing to say here, and without any source citation for this fact, hmmm.).
Kennedy’s life yields several important lessons. One is about the nature of political leadership. We have been taught since, well, since the days of Camelot to admire a particular sort of politician: the epic, charismatic Mount Rushmore candidate who sits atop his charger leading transformational change.
But the founders of this country designed the Constitution to frustrate that kind of leader (So Washington, Roosevelt, Lincoln and ?? were all frustrated by the Constitution? Is lowering the cost of health care epic transformational change?) . The Constitution diffuses power, requires compromise and encourages incrementalism (or at least a Congress that does little as possible so as not to be not re-elected would like you to think that slow incrementalism is the way to go). The founders created a government that was cautious so that society might be dynamic. (Yet if the government is so cautious that the industrial dynamics usurp the liberties of the people, eventually taking their livlihood, denying their claims, then government no longer has the ability to uphold the Constitution by upholding the life liberty and pursuit of happiness of the People).
Ted Kennedy was raised to prize one set of leadership skills and matured to find that he possessed another. He possessed the skills of the legislator, and if you ask 99 senators who was the best craftsman among them, they all will say Kennedy. He knew how to cut deals. He understood coalitions and other people’s motives and needs.
I once ran into John McCain after a negotiating session with Kennedy on an immigration bill they had co-sponsored. McCain was exhausted by the arduous and patient way his friend negotiated. In my last interview with Kennedy, I asked about big ideas, and his answers were nothing special (yeah, you let me be the judge of that - which interview was that? I'm looking it up). Then I asked about a minor provision in an ancient piece of legislation, and his command of the provision and how it got there was jaw-droppingly impressive.
There is a craft to governance, which depends less on academic intelligence than on a contextual awareness of how to bring people together. Kennedy possessed that awareness.
A second lesson involves the nature of change in America.
We in this country have a distinct sort of society. We Americans work longer hours than any other people on earth. We switch jobs much more frequently than Western Europeans or the Japanese. We have high marriage rates and high divorce rates. We move more, volunteer more and murder each other more.
Out of this dynamic but sometimes merciless culture, a distinct style of American capitalism has emerged ( a merciless one that increases the wealth-gap faster than anywhere else, yet gives us a higher infant-mother mortality rate than most every other industrialized nation). The American economy is flexible and productive (except of course where it is inflexible and not-productive for all but the upper eschelons of our economy). America’s G.D.P. per capita is nearly 50 percent higher than France’s (yet our per capita GDP growth is 107th as of 2007). But the American system is also unforgiving. It produces its share of insecurity and misery.(Especially since we live in a media culture driven by sex, consumerism, and fear. That tends to produce a lot of insecurity and misery in the populous. Not to mention factory-farmed and processed foods.)
This culture, this spirit, this system is not perfect, but it is our own (so we should stay the miserable course?). American voters welcome politicians who propose reforms that smooth the rough edges of the system. They do not welcome politicians and proposals that seek to contradict it (deep reform only feels like contradiction, but if we want this nation to go on, we must contradict decisions and policies of the past, even if it frightens our paranoid and mal-informed conservatives). They do not welcome proposals that centralize power and substantially reduce individual choice (Health care power currently resides in the hands of private corporations regarding your new life-saving stint or drug therapy. Reducing company profits by increasing the number of people who receive health care benefits may reduce the marketplace somewhat, but in exchange we'll all enjoy lower premiums from the uninsured no longer giving us a hidden tax, and we'll live in a world where your grandmother won't be choice-erradicated upon by a an insurance company that doesn't want to pay). They resist proposals that put security above mobility and individual responsibility (Do they also resist proposals that will prevent the much lauded GDP of the U.S. being spent .80 to the 1.00 on Health Care by the year 2080, because that seems like a pretty big mobility and security issue. And, individual responsibility is in no way affected by the government creating a new Health Care Exchange for Americans who can't afford what's already out there or can't quit the job they hate because it's the only one that makes sure their family is taken care of).
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Obama On ABC
My friend who writes Faithfool (link included below) wrote to me the other day, saying he keeps his blog tidy; short and sweet. A great idea. I'll emulate.
In Weekend Opinionator, a feature of the NYTimes, they conclude a poor review for Obama's ABC Health Care Special. With 4.7 million viewers, Obama had less than half the number of viewers of CSI: New York, rerunning itself on who knows how many channels. Pardon my french, but whoopty-shit - just because America the Beautiful are junked out TV zombies, that doesn't make 4.7 million a small number of people. I'd be much more worried if more Bill O'Reilly videos were us-Tubed during the same period.
However, in the same breath I have to say not every Obama article need be favorable. Personally, I remember him saying, "make me do it" (referring to reform) and so I'd be perfectly happy if every media bit about Obama included a heady critique or three of his policy making. That being said, the NYTimes puts crap in it's html when they call 4.7 million a flop.
If I were Aristotle, I'd analyze that rhetorical point - the NYTimes announces a 4,700,000 viewer TV special a "ratings loser" (which kind of sounds like a good Onion headline). I'd say, well, maybe instead of trying to say 4.7 mill is a ratings loser, they're really just professing the viewpoint that watching the President isn't very popular. Even if I weren't Aristotle I'd be able to see that if everything that's less popular than CSI: New York (and the few other shows that beat Obama for rating that night) then literally more than ninety-nine percent of TV sucks. I figured that out myself long ago, but with different reasons. Using a misleadingly simple analogy, like determining popularity by measuring it against CSI: Miami is what the Greeks liked to call fallacy.
If I were the media, I'd be worried about providing a reform oriented President hours worth of direct persuasion to swaths of the country at a go. After all, hailed as the second coming by Oprah the Baptist, there is no telling what all this President might do. Bush really warmed up the plate for him by putting all our hopes and anxieties into a packed stadium with a six year losing streak. So Status Quo stadium is a little dumpy right now but if more of us cheer for the home team, maybe our Congressional players will make enough runs to get us the pennant. Meanwhile, please don't believe the people who think a President talking to America on the TV is a bad thing. What would Bush have said for an hour? Maybe one of the great purposes to civilization creating things like leaders is so that the leader can unite the people just enough to escape the denizens of fear and folly. Of all the things that can destroy the financial well-being of the country, steeply rising health care costs is probably the most likely, most needless, and the hardest to explain and understand. Even if you disagree with him and the liberal conspiracy which is quickly transforming the younger generation into secular pragmatists of great hedonism and worldly conscience, even if you're afraid that the government will end the good thing we don't have going with health care, even if you are supremely confident that the newest CSI is a new eschelon of entertainment perfection and is the one thing your entire day's joy comes down to, I urge you to listen; if Obama speaks we should centrally process what he's saying. You can bring your gun to church if you don't like what he says - that'll show him.
As a post-script, it's worth mentioning that television does more harm to America than every jihadist in the world put together. If obesity were a spirituality, TV would be it's holy icon. If an informed electorate were a rubix cube, TV would be the cretin that beat the cube with a big hammer for outsmarting him. If TV were a religion, it would be the Baptist evangalism brought to you by Coke, Holy War, Falwell, and Bakker, but it's only pay per view if you believe in god.
In Weekend Opinionator, a feature of the NYTimes, they conclude a poor review for Obama's ABC Health Care Special. With 4.7 million viewers, Obama had less than half the number of viewers of CSI: New York, rerunning itself on who knows how many channels. Pardon my french, but whoopty-shit - just because America the Beautiful are junked out TV zombies, that doesn't make 4.7 million a small number of people. I'd be much more worried if more Bill O'Reilly videos were us-Tubed during the same period.
However, in the same breath I have to say not every Obama article need be favorable. Personally, I remember him saying, "make me do it" (referring to reform) and so I'd be perfectly happy if every media bit about Obama included a heady critique or three of his policy making. That being said, the NYTimes puts crap in it's html when they call 4.7 million a flop.
If I were Aristotle, I'd analyze that rhetorical point - the NYTimes announces a 4,700,000 viewer TV special a "ratings loser" (which kind of sounds like a good Onion headline). I'd say, well, maybe instead of trying to say 4.7 mill is a ratings loser, they're really just professing the viewpoint that watching the President isn't very popular. Even if I weren't Aristotle I'd be able to see that if everything that's less popular than CSI: New York (and the few other shows that beat Obama for rating that night) then literally more than ninety-nine percent of TV sucks. I figured that out myself long ago, but with different reasons. Using a misleadingly simple analogy, like determining popularity by measuring it against CSI: Miami is what the Greeks liked to call fallacy.
If I were the media, I'd be worried about providing a reform oriented President hours worth of direct persuasion to swaths of the country at a go. After all, hailed as the second coming by Oprah the Baptist, there is no telling what all this President might do. Bush really warmed up the plate for him by putting all our hopes and anxieties into a packed stadium with a six year losing streak. So Status Quo stadium is a little dumpy right now but if more of us cheer for the home team, maybe our Congressional players will make enough runs to get us the pennant. Meanwhile, please don't believe the people who think a President talking to America on the TV is a bad thing. What would Bush have said for an hour? Maybe one of the great purposes to civilization creating things like leaders is so that the leader can unite the people just enough to escape the denizens of fear and folly. Of all the things that can destroy the financial well-being of the country, steeply rising health care costs is probably the most likely, most needless, and the hardest to explain and understand. Even if you disagree with him and the liberal conspiracy which is quickly transforming the younger generation into secular pragmatists of great hedonism and worldly conscience, even if you're afraid that the government will end the good thing we don't have going with health care, even if you are supremely confident that the newest CSI is a new eschelon of entertainment perfection and is the one thing your entire day's joy comes down to, I urge you to listen; if Obama speaks we should centrally process what he's saying. You can bring your gun to church if you don't like what he says - that'll show him.
As a post-script, it's worth mentioning that television does more harm to America than every jihadist in the world put together. If obesity were a spirituality, TV would be it's holy icon. If an informed electorate were a rubix cube, TV would be the cretin that beat the cube with a big hammer for outsmarting him. If TV were a religion, it would be the Baptist evangalism brought to you by Coke, Holy War, Falwell, and Bakker, but it's only pay per view if you believe in god.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
All We Have To Fear
I honestly believe that all we have to fear is fear itself. (there was a great T-shirt I saw the other day and almost bought, totally Alaskan or other outdoorsy places, with a picture of a tent, campfire, and night mountainous starry sky, and the caption below it read: "All we have to fear is fear itself, and bears.") Sometimes I feel like the more we invoke, remember, and pay homage to the mysterious and terrible events of 9/11, the more we give the perpetrators what they wanted from us. I idealogically agree with all such sentiments to remember and pay homage to the tragedy, but I pragmatically take exception to giving the event undue significance. I came by this opinion honestly and through the confluence of three or more things.
I) right after nine-eleven-oh-one, I had been a pharmacy cashier and then wine-salesman/gift-store cashier at a little place in vaguely conservative Corvallis, OR. By ten-eleven the place had literally hundreds of U.S. flags, all makes and models, for sale and on display. I hadn't thought anything of it, until a random customer, having recently returned from a trip to Europe and having been overwhelmed by the fervor in her home town, literally broke into tears in the store after having walked around and shopped amidst our patriotic looking store. The lady wasn't just freaked out by the sudden out-pouring of flag-waving, she felt clenched and frightened by the idea that if she didn't salute, she'd be completely frowned upon and ostracized. Since she had become vocal and angry while in the store, telling me all these things she was upset by since I was the Rice's Pharmacy representative closest at hand (and fortunately empathic enough to calm her down and preserve the company's reputation a bit), I received the brunt of her anger at our perceived symbolic demagoguery and opportunistic faux-patriotism. I myself hold the flag dear in terms of the Enlightenment ideals it represents, but also agree with the late great George Carlin, opponent of anti-flag-burning laws, who said: "I'll leave symbols to the symbol-minded." The lady I described points to the overwhelming pathos generated in the wake of my wedding day, and how odd the national reaction would have seemed had we all not been living it day by day. My reaction to her was colored by my own understanding of our national commerce and media: in a nutshell, I agree with the theory of Manufactured Consent developed by Noam Chomsky and that other guy. What this theory informs me of is that things like excessive flag waving or the demonization of flag burning (or if, say, some purportedly liberal senator did or didn't wear a U.S. flag lapel pin) is a social control designed to marginalize critics of the Federal government. The neo-con\military-industrial agenda was more than served by the hordes of symbol-minded patriots waving flags in the faces of the Progressives and True Conservatives who were both calling for a non-reactionary response (which ended up being cast as "offering counseling and sympathy to the terrorist enemies."
II) a few years before, my cousin had attended a WTO riot in Seattle that made world news headlines. His involvement and, much later, a Sociology class I took at UAA educated me as to what the WTO does or could represent. There is no excuse for violent action, but if those responsible for the nine-eleven attacks were muslim extremists who attacked us because we represent freedom and infadel threat, why would they attack the World Trade Center? I understand that in the world of economics, New York represents the heart and capital of the U.S.'s might. I get that there definitely is such a thing as muslim extremism, but again I think that unless you view the twin towers as a particular symbol for the United States (the patron saint of economic hegemony?), the World Trade Center itself is way less tragic to lose than the thousands of U.S. teens and twenties from poor cities and farms who were sent off to Iraq.
III) a little while ago I was posting a blog about things along these lines and tried looking up the actual statistics on an average American's chance of dying from a terrorist attack on U.S. soil from a muslim extremist. So this guy Michael Rothschild estimates: "Even if terrorists were able to pull off one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 atrocity, that would mean your one-year risk would be one in 100,000 and your lifetime risk would be about one in 1300. (300,000,000 ÷ 3,000 = 100,000 ÷ 78 years = 1282) In other words, your risk of dying in a plausible terrorist attack is much lower than your risk of dying in a car accident, by walking across the street, by drowning, in a fire, by falling, or by being murdered." -source, http://www.reason.com/news/show/36765.html.
These three things made me realize that whatever happened that day, nine-eleven has been repeatedly pushed and invoked to the benefit of American militarism. The only reason Americans accept the notion of a war on terror is because they're all mostly terrified of something less dangerous to them personally than cars, or, by some estimates, being struck by lightening. The only threat to the elite of America is that the U.S. political system will work, and peace will prevent the military/industrialists from continuing or furthering economic hegemony through U.S. and key U.S. ally military actions designed to open foreign markets to exploitation. Fortunately nationalism struck a resounding chord that day (even internationally in the form of sympathy by non-U.S. entities) and another Pearl Harbor let the Pentagon fill up on orders for newly mechanized, self-guided bombs, drones, and global reconnaisance while simultaneously marginalizing the rising tide of true patriotism, which questioned the wisdom of pissing off everyone on the planet by consuming 25% of it's resources.
I) right after nine-eleven-oh-one, I had been a pharmacy cashier and then wine-salesman/gift-store cashier at a little place in vaguely conservative Corvallis, OR. By ten-eleven the place had literally hundreds of U.S. flags, all makes and models, for sale and on display. I hadn't thought anything of it, until a random customer, having recently returned from a trip to Europe and having been overwhelmed by the fervor in her home town, literally broke into tears in the store after having walked around and shopped amidst our patriotic looking store. The lady wasn't just freaked out by the sudden out-pouring of flag-waving, she felt clenched and frightened by the idea that if she didn't salute, she'd be completely frowned upon and ostracized. Since she had become vocal and angry while in the store, telling me all these things she was upset by since I was the Rice's Pharmacy representative closest at hand (and fortunately empathic enough to calm her down and preserve the company's reputation a bit), I received the brunt of her anger at our perceived symbolic demagoguery and opportunistic faux-patriotism. I myself hold the flag dear in terms of the Enlightenment ideals it represents, but also agree with the late great George Carlin, opponent of anti-flag-burning laws, who said: "I'll leave symbols to the symbol-minded." The lady I described points to the overwhelming pathos generated in the wake of my wedding day, and how odd the national reaction would have seemed had we all not been living it day by day. My reaction to her was colored by my own understanding of our national commerce and media: in a nutshell, I agree with the theory of Manufactured Consent developed by Noam Chomsky and that other guy. What this theory informs me of is that things like excessive flag waving or the demonization of flag burning (or if, say, some purportedly liberal senator did or didn't wear a U.S. flag lapel pin) is a social control designed to marginalize critics of the Federal government. The neo-con\military-industrial agenda was more than served by the hordes of symbol-minded patriots waving flags in the faces of the Progressives and True Conservatives who were both calling for a non-reactionary response (which ended up being cast as "offering counseling and sympathy to the terrorist enemies."
II) a few years before, my cousin had attended a WTO riot in Seattle that made world news headlines. His involvement and, much later, a Sociology class I took at UAA educated me as to what the WTO does or could represent. There is no excuse for violent action, but if those responsible for the nine-eleven attacks were muslim extremists who attacked us because we represent freedom and infadel threat, why would they attack the World Trade Center? I understand that in the world of economics, New York represents the heart and capital of the U.S.'s might. I get that there definitely is such a thing as muslim extremism, but again I think that unless you view the twin towers as a particular symbol for the United States (the patron saint of economic hegemony?), the World Trade Center itself is way less tragic to lose than the thousands of U.S. teens and twenties from poor cities and farms who were sent off to Iraq.
III) a little while ago I was posting a blog about things along these lines and tried looking up the actual statistics on an average American's chance of dying from a terrorist attack on U.S. soil from a muslim extremist. So this guy Michael Rothschild estimates: "Even if terrorists were able to pull off one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 atrocity, that would mean your one-year risk would be one in 100,000 and your lifetime risk would be about one in 1300. (300,000,000 ÷ 3,000 = 100,000 ÷ 78 years = 1282) In other words, your risk of dying in a plausible terrorist attack is much lower than your risk of dying in a car accident, by walking across the street, by drowning, in a fire, by falling, or by being murdered." -source, http://www.reason.com/news/show/36765.html.
These three things made me realize that whatever happened that day, nine-eleven has been repeatedly pushed and invoked to the benefit of American militarism. The only reason Americans accept the notion of a war on terror is because they're all mostly terrified of something less dangerous to them personally than cars, or, by some estimates, being struck by lightening. The only threat to the elite of America is that the U.S. political system will work, and peace will prevent the military/industrialists from continuing or furthering economic hegemony through U.S. and key U.S. ally military actions designed to open foreign markets to exploitation. Fortunately nationalism struck a resounding chord that day (even internationally in the form of sympathy by non-U.S. entities) and another Pearl Harbor let the Pentagon fill up on orders for newly mechanized, self-guided bombs, drones, and global reconnaisance while simultaneously marginalizing the rising tide of true patriotism, which questioned the wisdom of pissing off everyone on the planet by consuming 25% of it's resources.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Health Care Debate: The People vs. Dollars
I've been mentally engaged in following the current health care debate; Obama says health care is priority one, so I jump. You could argue that this means I'm a sheep, except that I've never been a sheep in my life - ask anyone who knows me just how "conformist" I am. In fact, I hear a lot of that rhetoric from the right, and it really ticks me off - if being a sheep means uniting under a leader who can put us back on an enlightened path, then I am a exceptionally sheepish sheep among sheep who happen to be the majority. Well gang, the fact is that I'm sick of business as usual in so many ways and though he's still a politician, B.H.O. is the only new train through town.
My Critique of: Following the Money in the Health Care Debate
Congress appears ready to confront one of the nation’s most contentious issues — health care reform — and arguments will fill the air in the coming months.
Luba Lukova
I left this link above here in because I like how the title sounds kind of panicky in a way related to a fallacy coming up here soon. You can talk about saving American families in two different ways: 1) lowering the costs of living so less people are foreclosed, bankrupt, poverty-stricken, depressed, driven to crime/illness, etc. ; or 2) cutting payments to industry. The problem with casting "payment cuts" as the headline/link above does, is that mean pharmaceutical companies and health insurance companies benefit the economy and Dow Jones Industrial Average, but they do so by selling the same drugs to Canada for half the price as what we charge Senior Citizens or AIDS patients for those same drugs here (unless they buy them in Canada, which works out better including the bus fare). They aren't punished for doing this, and much to the contrary, Wall Street would be very happy if such companies could charge even more.
So would a person generally on the Right or generally on the Left try to spin a National Health Plan by saying it "May Mean Payment Cuts" instead of "May Lower Cost of Health Care"? Further: is our national crisis called "We Need Lower Health Costs" or "We Need More Payments To Health Insurance Companies and Health Care Providers"? Just a fun rhetorical question to begin with...
So would a person generally on the Right or generally on the Left try to spin a National Health Plan by saying it "May Mean Payment Cuts" instead of "May Lower Cost of Health Care"? Further: is our national crisis called "We Need Lower Health Costs" or "We Need More Payments To Health Insurance Companies and Health Care Providers"? Just a fun rhetorical question to begin with...
Todd Heisler/The New York Times
TOP PRIORITY One thing is certain. Everyone will argue that the patient is their No. 1 concern.
Correction: everyone, if asked by a Newspaper or other media outlet, would say their patient is their No. 1 concern, without a doubt. But, shareholders of Health-related companies (with control of lobbying money money money), if asked by an Economics professor from their alma mater, would say that profit is their No. 1 concern. The very hallmark of the commerce we live in is, undisputedly and openly stated to be that profit should drive everyone and everything's economic decisions.
Much of the discussion so far has focused on President Obama’s proposal for a government-sponsored health plan that he says will reduce costs. Insurers and doctors argue it will limit patient choice. Drug companies warn that the quality of care could be compromised.
Many many more people than just Obama think such a plan will reduce costs. Many many doctors think it's a good idea, and how many people have any choice in health insurance right now? Do you have a choice when you get a plan from your employer (other than maybe plan A or plan B) or, and this is very critical, when you look into getting a job (like at an interview) do you find out what the health plan is before deciding whether to take the job? Also, how often do you decide not to take a job just because the health plan isn't sufficient for your needs or desires?
Anything drug companies warn me about, I'm going to take as a hostile act by a vile industry that is second only to oil in the Quantities of Dollars category. Oil does amazing things, and so do drugs, but oil companies like to wait twenty years before compensating oil spill victims, and drug companies like to spend more money on researching erectile dysfunction than anything else (wonder what feminism would have to say about this).
But Mr. Obama’s proposal is only one of many that await Congress as it wrestles with how to rein in exploding health care costs while taking care of the country’s nearly 50 million uninsured. The size and complexity of the issue are daunting. To help understand what’s going on, you need to follow the money.
Roughly $2.5 trillion is at stake, the amount the nation spends each year on health care, nearly a fifth of the American economy. How that money is divided up — or prevented from rising at its current pace — is at the center of the debate. Many doctors, insurance companies and drug companies say they fear that their revenues could shrink significantly and patient care could be threatened.
Before we talk about how that fifth of the American economy is divided up, I think we should mention the overarching goal: the nation shouldn't be spending a fifth of it's money on health care when we're buying lower quality at higher prices than any other industrialized nation on the planet. IF AMERICANS BEING UNINSURED AND DYING OF TREATABLE ILLNESSES OR POVERTY IS THE PROBLEM WE'RE TRYING TO SOLVE, THEN HOW DOES INCREASING INSURANCE AND DRUG COMPANY REVENUES OUT OF FEAR HELP THEM. It doesn't. It can't. If the profits these companies were making (which are already huge, successful, and amazing by any analysis) went towards outreach clinics or something I could see the logic in this. But, profits don't go there. That's why there's this thing called non-profit entities, also called charities.
Their arguments may prove to have merit. Doubt it. But “people are voting with their own economic interests,” said Les Funtleyder, a Wall Street analyst who is following the debate closely for Miller Tabak & Co. in New York.
When you hear nothing from one of the interest groups on an issue that is part of the larger debate, you can assume the silence means it has no financial stake in the outcome, he said. “You wouldn’t probably weigh in if you don’t have any skin in the game because if you weigh in, it makes you more of a target,” Mr. Funtleyder said.
Riiiight. Because Mr. Funtleyder knows insurance companies are really worried about their PR right now, so they're definitely policing themselves, spending extra to hire people to double check their persuasive efforts to make sure they are completely benign, utterly noble, and beyond reproach of those who would criticize their lobbying efforts as being somehow motivated by self-interest or profit-centered thinking. Riiiiiiiiiight. Those little drug and insurance organizations that have so much to fear from being a "target" of...my Mom...or, something...especially when they spend more money on television advertising than any other industry in America.
What all of the interest groups reliably support is any new program that would expand coverage to the uninsured. Such a program would translate into tens of millions of new, paying customers for hospitals, doctors, insurers and drug makers.
What all of the interest groups (from both sides of the aisle in Congress) reliably support is, and I'm paraphrasing here from the paragraph above: any new government paid program that wasn't like medicare - the monied interests lobbying Washington want to make sure nothing like Medicare happens, and that the U.S. spends dollars on the penny for their crappy services. Such a program would line millions of pockets for companies that profit from denying health care to policy holders or keeping really sick people off the books - namely for-profit Hospitals, Doctors, Insurers, and Drug Makers.
But what worries those groups is the accompanying talk in Washington about how to address the skyrocketing cost of health care, since any decline in spending would correspond to a reduction in revenues. Yes, helping the people would ideally mean not letting the industry take a fifth of our GDP every year. The discussion has become particularly heated over exactly how the government will find the savings necessary to help generate the $1 trillion or so that the government will need over the next decade to pay for universal coverage. A trillion per decade? Can the drug companies live on that? That's only 8.3 Billion a year - only an Air Force bomber or two. The nation’s doctors, for example, say they wholeheartedly support health care reform. But the American Medical Association has a long history of being opposed to legislation that threatens the status quo. It opposed the creation of Medicare more than 30 years ago. Indicative that the A.M.A. may fear socialism almost as much as Cheney does. Cuba has awesome health care, but their doctors can't even buy German automobiles - why bother?
What concerns doctors about a government-run insurance program that looks like Medicare is the possibility that it will pay like Medicare, said Robert Laszewski, a health policy consultant in Alexandria, Va. “Medicare pays doctors 80 percent of what an insurance company pays,” he said. “If you get a public plan, the doctors are going to get a 20 percent pay cut.”
WRONG WRONG WRONG. First of all, part of why Medicare pays 80 percent is that only old, poor, or otherwise destitute people get Medicare. If Medicare recipients pay only 80 percent for the drugs they buy we'd applaud that twenty percent savings as smart negotiating, but it's somehow different for other medical profiteers? Second of all, "If you get a public plan" the doctors across the nation will be able to give preventative medicine to every child and young adult, and only a small percentage of their customers (the currently uninsured) will suddenly be paying them .80 to the 1.00 (still a better rate than we get with privately administered health plans). Overall, doctors will get a pay increase since they'll have millions of new paying customers, and in this recession, even new customers who only pay 80% is a good thing in the long run. I hate the way the last sentence reads..."20 percent pay cut"...it's just like the link above in the way it spins saving the country from tailspin health care costs. Look at it this way: insuring everyone will tend to increase preventative care. But, by increasing preventative care, the rates of preventable diseases (like diabetes for instance) goes down in the population. So, all the companies that profit from the health care of people with these preventable diseases will no longer have as many customers. HEALTH CARE COMPANIES WILL ALWAYS SUFFER IF FEW ARE SICK, YET YOU DON'T SEE JOURNALISTS WRITING: "DRUG COMPANIES WARN THAT INCREASING NATION'S HEALTH WILL REDUCE PATIENT CHOICE." This is why I always say the media is far from left-biased, and is if anything military-industrial-right-biased.
But doctors are also likely to disagree among themselves over how different types of physicians should be compensated. Most people everywhere disagree about most things. Congress is thinking about raising the pay of primary-care doctors — general practitioners, family physicians and the like — as a way to encourage them to more actively oversee the care of patients and reduce expensive visits to specialists and hospitals. The record will show that Congress hardly ever votes for anything that reduces the amount of money it spends, much to our detriment. Congress has no business raising anyone's pay.
The specialists — the cardiologists, neurologists, surgeons and others — may have a different take on the discussion, Mr. Laszewski noted, especially if Congress cannot raise salaries of primary-care doctors without taking money from the highly paid specialists. “The question is, how are you going to help the primary-care doctors without cutting the cardiologist and the other specialists?” he asked.
Who cares? Let them fight over it in their BMW's. They can all eat cake as far as I'm concerned. Like I said, Congress shouldn't be legislating pay increases - I'm baffled as to why this is even in this article.
But even the family physicians, who stand to benefit the most, say they are opposed to a government-run plan if it reimburses them at the Medicare rate.
I love how this tiny bit of Health Care Reform minuteua is delved into by this supposedly broad treatment article - I've never heard anyone talking about how government run health care is going to affect family practicioners in particular, and even after this article, I'm not sure this argument is remotely central to the issue of skyrocketing health care costs - no one's complaining about family practicioners raking in too much profit, or that family practicioners are going to suddenly go out of business because of thirty new patients who only pay 80 percent. Just do the damn math!
Another group with a lot to win or lose is the nation’s private health insurers. Yeah, one of three stakeholders you've explicitly mentioned a couple times already, and also the only stakeholder that: benefits nobody's health, sacrifices nothing, does nothing except block access. With the number of people who are privately insured through their employer or their own policy not increasing, insurers are eager to find a new source of business. Health reform promises them at least some new customers who cannot afford insurance now but who might receive government help to pay for coverage. Yeah, cause conservative pundits need ammunition to rally against public health care...
But the trade association, America’s Health Insurance Plans, has clearly staked out its opposition to any kind of government-run health plan (wow, what NEWS!), which it says would have an unfair advantage (anything fair to us will seem unfair to them - guaranteed). The trade group fears its members would be driven out of business as the government uses its purchasing power to demand much lower prices from doctors and hospitals. Translation: Insurance giants fear their days are numbered because American's have figured out that we're the only country who throws money at health care to no avail. They're worried they can't survive if Health Care costs don't reach 75 % of GDP by 2075.
I'm not going to bother posting and critiqueing the second page of the article. It reads much like this last paragraph, and is really just old, thoroughly debunked rhetoric left over from the Reagan administration. Needless to say, I feel very negatively about it because it is printed in mainstream press and goes rather unchallenged despite it's many fallacies and figures misleading to the cause of progress. So a hearty wheat toast to you and your health, may we all profit from the losses of wealth!
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