Mr. Moderate

The one thing which is most broken here in the United States is the health care system. I believe that the reason it is broken is rooted in the economics of health care. When it comes to individual doctors treating individual patients, I believe that the free market economy, as ruled by the law of supply and demand, ought to produce a good outcome for everybody. However, for almost a century now, there has not been a free market in health care.

If we look back a century and a half or more in America, all it took to become a doctor was enough learning from books to absorb the concepts of how the human body worked and what could be done (based upon what was known at the time) to repair whatever was deemed to be wrong. Many of my ancestral cousins in the old south were deemed to be “doctors” because they had enough learning from books to be able to treat slaves and assist mothers to give birth to babies. Of course, so little was known about “proper health care” in that day and age, that the concept of medical malpractice rarely entered the picture. Even today, it is difficult to find one “expert witness” doctor who will tell a jury that what another doctor did was absolutely wrong and caused injury to the plaintiff. In the distant past, juries were supposed to use common sense in deciding cases, and “expert witness” testimony was rarely used.

But my real point here is that the law of supply and demand is broken now when it comes to health care. All of the changes in how medicine is practiced have led to a situation where there isn’t any real free market in health care, and thus it is easy to understand why costs are out of control.
Continue reading ‘Economical Health’ »

I have written two recent posts, one about the lost art of logic and the other about young Earth insanity, where I discussed a recent poll reported in USA Today that claimed 66% of Americans now believe “that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.” In this third post about that same poll result I’m going to discuss the long-term implications for this rise of fundamentalist religious belief in our nation’s population. What it really amounts to is a national death wish, as such beliefs require the abandonment and rejection of scientific thinking. This leaves science to “those other countries” which have no religious restrictions on scientific advances, most importantly nations like China. As China becomes the leading scientific power over the next few decades, it will take over the leadership of the world, and will eventually be in a position to dictate its policies to the west, including the United States.

Is this what you folks really want to see happen? Do you want to abandon the world to a Chinese hegemony of scientific power?
Continue reading ‘America Rejects Science; Adopts Suicide Plan’ »

I wrote yesterday about the lack of logic it requires to simultaneously believe that humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, and that God created humans much as we are today at one time in the past 10,000 years. It would seem from the USA Today poll that roughly 22% of all Americans believe both ideas to be definitely or at least probably true. Yesterday’s post was about the total illogic involved with that 22% of Americans believing both ideas to be true.

In this post I would like to take seriously the idea, expressed in that same poll, that 66% of all Americans believe “that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.” Ever since Bishop Ussher produced his Bible chronology that “deduced that the first day of Creation began at nightfall preceding Sunday October 23, 4004 BC in the proleptic Julian calendar, near the autumnal equinox,” back in the 1650s, people who desired to take the Bible literally have asserted that no fact produced by science can possibly contradict the idea that God created everything that now exists about 6,000 years ago. Some modern young-Earth creationists, disturbed at chronologies of Egyptian civilization that seem to be unbroken to much earlier dates, have accepted that Ussher might not have computed everything exactly right, and they are willing to push back the creation of the universe to somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, but no further than that.
Continue reading ‘Young Earth Insanity’ »

USA Today reports the results of a national poll which purports to measure whether people believe that Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is true or whether people believe that the Creation story of the Bible is true. In spite of greatly-slanted questions that left no room for an overlapping decision, roughly 22% of the population of the United States appears to believe that both ideas are true. What this really means is that roughly 22% of the population either did not understand the questions or else they refuse to recognize the total impossibility of a rational human being holding both ideas, as stated, to be true.
Continue reading ‘The Lost Art of Logic’ »

Before World War II (1939-1940), about 31% of all jobs were manufacturing jobs. Recently (March, 2007), manufacturing jobs represented only about 10.2% of all jobs. (All numbers quoted in this report are either extracted from the Bureau of Labor Statistics web site or are computed directly from those numbers.) As recently as 1956, we still had 30% of the workforce employed in manufacturing, which was about 15.9 million jobs. In terms of absolute numbers of jobs, the peak was reached in 1979, with about 19.4 million manufacturing jobs. Ever since then, the number of manufacturing jobs has been declining on an absolute basis, and it has been declining even faster in terms of a percentage of the total workforce. We are no longer a nation of factories that manufacture things.
Continue reading ‘Losing Our Factories’ »

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) seemingly makes it hard to extract some facts about the workforce. I won’t dig deep enough to even begin to conclude that it is a deliberate attempt to hide some inconvenient truth. But I will note that the figures normally presented for women in the workforce seem to be almost deliberately misleading of the truth.

A typical statistic asserts that 76.1% of men over the age of 20 participate in the labor force while only 59.5% of women over the age of 20 participate. From these statistics you might conclude that there are still a lot of “stay-at-home moms” out there who are staying home with the kids and not participating in the workforce. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Continue reading ‘Most Moms Work!’ »

Today I watched a C-Span show where Al Gore talked about his latest book, The Assault on Reason. Gore clearly recognizes the problem: reason is getting shoved out of public dialog. But he also clearly misperceives why that is happening. The advocates of God have realized that they are in a battle against rational thought and that they have been loosing since at least the Enlightenment. What we are witnessing in the arena of public discourse is just the most obvious examples of them fighting back. And, unfortunately for those who associate rational thought with civilized behavior, God is winning, and reason is on its way out.
Continue reading ‘God vs. Reason’ »

Unable to find a decent “permanent” job, I took a one-year contract position with a major contract labor company. This at least allowed me to have access to a decent health care plan, even if I was required to pay the entire group rate premium out of my gross earnings. However, I’m approaching the end of my one-year contract term, and that means I’m approaching the end of my ability to (barely) afford health care. Now, its true that I will have the option of continuing my coverage under the COBRA law. But it is also true that my maximum monthly unemployment benefit will just about equal my health insurance premium under COBRA, so how am I supposed to afford food, shelter, and other basic needs?

Unfortunately, my family and I have chronic health care problems. As long as we are covered by health care insurance, our chronic problems are manageable. But if we ever become uncovered, we descend into medical Hell, and getting covered again becomes increasingly problematic as our chronic conditions are all “pre-existing conditions” for any new plan. This means that I do not dare allow my plan to lapse, as exclusions for “pre-existing conditions” are waived if you are simply moved from one plan to another. That being the case, though, how do I afford food, shelter, etc. while paying for health care?
Continue reading ‘Health Care Horrors’ »

Implicit in any battle between evolution supporters and opponents is the conflict between the sides as to whether or not science intrudes into the religious Magisterium. The late Dr. Stephen J. Gould propounded his view that science and religion occupied nonoverlapping magisteria (NOMA), leading to this oft-quoted observation by Dr. Gould:

The net of science covers the empirical universe: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for starters, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty). To cite the arch clichés, we get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven.

When it comes to the science of evolution, as early as 1922, the American Academy for the Advancement of Science had this to say:

The Council of the Association affirms that, so far as the scientific evidences of evolution of plants and animals and man are concerned, there is no ground whatever for the assertion that these evidences constitute a “mere guess.” No scientific generalization is more strongly supported by thoroughly tested evidences than is that of organic evolution.

In other words, within the Magisterium of scientific inquiry, nothing “is more strongly supported by thoroughly tested evidences than is that of organic evolution.” Thus, to reject evolution is to reject the very foundations of modern science; it is to deny, on grounds of religious belief, the entire Magisterium of science!
Continue reading ‘My Dog In This Fight’ »

One of the greatest speeches in the history of US trial courts was given by Dudley Field Malone on Day 5 of the Scopes “Monkey Trial” where he argued in favor of admitting expert testimony on the subject of evolution:

There is never a duel with the truth. The truth always wins and we are not afraid of it. The truth is no coward. The truth does not need the law. The truth does not need the force of government. The truth does not need Mr. Bryan. The truth is imperishable, eternal and immortal and needs no human agency to support it. We are ready to tell the truth as we understand it and we do not fear all the truth that they can present as facts. We are ready. We are ready. We feel we stand with progress. We feel we stand with science. We feel we stand with intelligence. We feel we stand with fundamental freedom in America. We are not afraid. Where is the fear? We meet it, where is the fear? We defy it, we ask your honor to admit the evidence as a matter of correct law, as a matter of sound procedure and as a matter of justice to the defense in this case. (Profound and continued applause).

The above comments represent a touchstone of intelligent discussion and debate. We recognize that some people may have been indoctrinated to believe falsehoods, or that some people might have misunderstood the evidence presented for examination, but the truth allows for any question to be met with facts and reason. To survive, untruth must protect itself from exposure by any means possible. This is, in essence, the morality play that the Scopes trial represents.
Continue reading ‘Eternal Truth Always Beats Orthodoxy’ »