Follow this link to an interesting post on Marden Seavey’s blog.

The video and the links to the author Robert Wright are intriguing.  I have yet to figure out exactly what I think about these musings.  They do approach some of the topics of  my recent readings that are more from the scientific side of such a discussion.  Wright takes a more sympathetic approach to the non-scientific side while not exactly subscribing to it.

As I said on Mardy’s facebook page:

This certainly makes you think. I haven’t decided yet what I think, but I think I am thinking about it.

The existence of a moral order, I’ve said, makes it reasonable to suspect that humankind in some sense has a “higher purpose.”

I keep wondering when he contemplates a huge asteroid striking the earth and making extinct all animals “higher” than a cockroach how he reconciles this with a “higher purpose”.

This moral order, to the believer, is among the grounds for suspecting that the system of evolution by natural selection itself demands a special creative explanation.

An explanation is not the same thing as making up a story with zero basis in fact and ruling millions, if not billions, of people based on the made up story.

Granted, we believe in the existence of the electron even though our attempts thus far to conceive of it have been imperfect at best.

Our belief in the electron may be imperfect at best, but the various theories have tremendous predictive value.  There is a huge body of evidence that is easily measured and verified that comes from the theories about various aspects of the electron.

One concept that is not perfect but gets a large number of things right and only a few esoteric things wrong is not comparable to a concept that is almost perfectly wrong, predicts close to nothing that is measurable and verifiable (and falsifiable), and doesn’t do any better with the esoteric.

The types of arguments that Wright makes are the kind that made me stop reading Deepak Chopra.  Chopra also uses scientific concepts that are out of the experience of non-physicists and conjectures that certain words used in that domain might mean something completely different in another domain yet prove something similar to what the physicists have proved.  It is hard to imagine many arguments that  have ever been put forth to more purposely deceive the gullible than these arguments.

For those who remember my stories of my college years, they might remember the story of how I got a “D” on a paper that explained the weaknesses of Plato’s similar style of exposition. I guess I was too stupid to realize that if the Professor had us reading this stuff, he had already fallen victim to the sophistry.  He certainly did not appreciate me pointing out the flaws.

What Wright does not understand in physics is far more elegant and mind boggling than what he does understand. If he only knew about some of the issues that physicists are struggling with these days, then his worries about god would seem trivial to him.

Follow this link to proof of the value of the Windows operating system.

Do you speak insurance Jive as in the above video?

The pointer to this video came with this email:

Dear Steven —

For 20 years, I defended what some might call “death panels,” operated by the health insurance industry, which denied health care coverage to people who needed it.

As head of corporate communications for one of the nation’s largest health insurance companies, I had to find new and creative ways to defend an industry with a profit incentive to deny, drop or delay health care coverage. I was very good at creating language — what my friends at the Courage Campaign call “insurance jive” — that justified the harm we were causing to families across the nation.

I spoke “insurance jive” as well as I could. Then, one day in 2007, I saw hundreds of Americans waiting in the rain for hours in Virginia to get free medical care they otherwise could not afford. My conscience told me I had to stop. So I quit my job and began to speak out for real health care reform.

My experience in the insurance industry taught me that the only way we will stop the insurance companies from denying coverage to sick and dying Americans is to keep them honest with a strong public health insurance option. If more Americans have the option to receive health insurance from the government — like Medicare — competitive pressure on the private insurers will force them to clean up their act.

That’s why I’m proud to introduce the Courage Campaign’s powerful “Insurance Jive” video, which dramatizes the true story of a California patient who had her insurance policy canceled after she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

“Insurance Jive” shows that insurance companies actually operate de facto “death panels” — and demonstrates why we must demand that a strong public option be included in health care reform.

Click here to watch this powerful 40-second online video. Then forward this message to your friends and ask them to watch “Insurance Jive” as well. The more people see it, the more we can spread the progressive message that health care reform is desperately needed:

https://www.couragecampaign.org/InsuranceJive

The health insurance industry is spending millions of dollars lobbying Congress to kill the public option. They know that a strong public option will force insurers to cut costs and ensure that patients get the health care they need. Only competition from public insurance can keep the private insurers honest.

The Obama Administration has been sending mixed signals on the public option in recent days. But progressive organizations and blogs including ProgressiveCongress.org, Democracy for America, CREDO Mobile, MoveOn.org and Firedoglake — and netroots activists including Californians David and Dante Atkins and Howie Klein — are leading the fight to save the public option.

This growing movement is keeping the public option alive. By making sure our representatives oppose any bill without a strong public option, we can increase pressure on the White House to continue to fight for the public option as well.

It takes just a minute to watch “Insurance Jive” and forward it to your friends. It takes just one more minute to use the Courage Campaign’s easy “click-to-call” tool to tell your Congressmember to support the public option. Click here to watch the video and make a call now:

https://www.couragecampaign.org/InsuranceJive

Thank you for helping us put an end to insurance jive.

Wendell Potter

This blog aspires to the high tact and diplomacy of Barney Frank as exemplified in the above video.

Death panels in our health care system are a frightening thought.  However, look who introduced this idea into the discussion.  It was the Republicans who thought about this as a way to save money, not the Democrats.  The Republicans are saying it is a horrible idea now in order to frighten you away from the Democratic plan.  However, if they came to power and a public insurance option were in operation, might they change their tune about how horrible it is?  The Republicans are the ones telling you that government doesn’t work.  Whenever they come to power, they set out to prove their point.  Instituting such a policy might be one way they would do it.  This could be similar to how they treated the people of New Orleans during hurricane Katrina..

Who was it that thought torture might be a good war tactic?  Again, Republicans not Democrats.  Remember they disguised their actual thoughts by telling us that they do not torture.  In fact, at the highest levels of government,  they were requiring water boarding even as they denied that it was torture.

When you look at the ideas that people bring to the public forum, it gives you an insight into how their minds work.  Especially when they originate the idea without prompting from actual events. Although, maybe the death panel idea does come from some of the private insurance companies where some Republicans have worked.  The private insurance companies do seem to be able to put roadblocks in front of promising to make their rightful payment until the patient dies.  After death they promise that they would have covered the surgery that would have saved the patient’s life.

The lesson to be learned here is that when we do get health insurance reform in this country, we must make absolutely sure that no Republican death panel dreamer ever gets control of the reins of this public program.

I can’t imagine what other ugly schemes they can dream up to save money, but I bet they have lots of them.

For those who don’t remember the news for more than a few days, I’ll remind you that people like Sarah Palin helped popularize the myth of the mandatory government death panels that would sit in judgment of people to decide if their lives had sufficient merit and future prospects to warrant spending money to preserve their lives.

The Republicans pretended that this was the same thing as the Democratic proposal to fund optional conversations between a patient and a doctor about how to handle the practicalities and options that present themselves toward the end of your life.  I don’t call a discussion between a doctor and patient to be a panel.  It is certainly not government run.  Also voluntary is not mandatory although I guess it is easy to confuse the two words.

But at least they told us what options would come to their minds if they had the chance to run things.

If you need any further reminders, see my posts on this blog, Palin’s ‘death panel’ comment on health care is challenged and Special Comment On Sarah Palin.

The following comment from Huffington Post, is typical of those who believe government programs cannot work well:

The Postal System, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security all have one thing in common. Their bankrupt.

Yes, lets socialize health care.

Who thought that was a good idea?

This argument may seem reasonable at first blush, but my response was made in the following rebuttal:

If Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid could take in premiums and then refuse to pay the health care bills of its subscribers, then it could profit like private insurance does.

If the postal service were not mandated to provide service that the profitable companies avoid, they might make a profit, too. Fedex and UPS do not deliver to my house 6 days a week. They deliver when it is convenient and profitable for them.

Well, to some extent local governments have known how to do this for years.

My father owned and ran a small drug store in a working class to poor neighborhood for 40 years up till he retired in the 1980’s. Many of his customers were on welfare as it was called back then. He would submit bills to the welfare office that would bounce them back for minor errors. He would fix the bills and resubmit them and wait and wait for payment. He frequently had to take out personal loans to float the store’s inventory until the payments would finally come in.

Now that drugstores are run by big corporations and welfare is partially Federally funded through Medicaid, the burden has been shifted to the recipients who are now denied coverage unless they can hire a lawyer and fight for it.

This tactic of denying coverage was something that seemed to be a brainchild of the Reagan, Bush, Bush administrations.

The lesson learned should be that if we ever do get a public option for health care, don’t ever elect Republicans to national office to control it.  Remember that all the nasty things that you are worried about such as death panels are ideas that come from Republican minds.

Follow this link to a paper by Emmanuel Saez of University of California, Department of Economics.

I know, I know, what can you expect out of Berzerkley?

From Miami Herald

From Lexington Herald-Leader