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’ »

The postmodernist creed is defined by “incredulity toward metanarratives” and “the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation,” asking “Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside?” “[A] metanarrative (sometimes master- or grand narrative) ‘is a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience.’” In simpler terms, postmodernism denies the possibility of useful generalizations and also denies even the possibility of deriving any legitimate conclusions that might be drawn from bulk analysis of data. Since the end goal of scientific inquiry is all about deriving metanarratives and conclusions of that sort, it can be reasonably asserted that postmodernism is committed to the destruction of scientific thinking.

The fundamentalist creed can be summarized as a belief “that human existence is innately sinful but offers redemption and eternal peace in heaven - thus representing a belief in a universal rule and a telos for humankind.” The fundamentalist thus asserts an extremely specific and highly detailed metanarrative which the fundamentalist asserts must be believed exactly as stated without variation, in spite of the fact that many variations clearly exist. The fundamentalist similarly denies the legitimacy of scientific inquiry on the grounds that any knowledge obtained from scientific inquiry will necessarily either duplicate the metanarrative of the Holy Bible or else it will not, and in either case such knowledge is at least useless and possibly dangerous. Thus, the fundamentalist is also profoundly committed to the destruction of scientific thinking.

My personal metanarrative is predicated upon scientific inquiry as the sole possible producer of legitimate beliefs, and that the foundational belief produced by scientific inquiry is that all living things are ethically obligated to survive, and to ensure the survival of as many diverse forms of life as possible. (See HERE for more.) Needless to say, I believe that my personal metanarrative is the only sane belief system of the three I present in this post.
Continue reading ‘Competing Metanarratives’ »

The intense political debate in our nation over whether we are “winning” or “losing” the war in Iraq actually misses the point. The real fact is that we never intended to win in any real sense. President Bush went into Iraq with one goal in mind: to capture Saddam and see him executed by his enemies. Even that extremely limited goal proved very difficult to achieve, as Saddam avoided capture for many months, and the total destruction of the Iraqi governmental structure took years to rebuild to the point where Saddam’s political show trial could take place with at least some semblance of decorum. But the replacement of the chief judge in the middle of the show trial simply proved to the world at large it was no real trial, but a kangaroo court of the worst kind. The appeal process proved that when the appeal court insisted that one more defendant be sentenced to death when he had been spared after his original trial. It isn’t recorded in the public news media what punishment the judges received for failing to follow the script set down by the Bush administration.

But to get back to the war, it was never stated as an objective that the United States would somehow annex Iraq as a political dependency, such as it had done in the past with Cuba and the Philippine Islands. It is true that, in the earliest days, there was talk of using Iraq’s oil money to pay back the United States for giving Iraq its freedom from Saddam. But that idea foundered when it was pointed out that the Iraqi government was not likely to keep up payments to the United States after the US military leaves Iraq, and the US military was spending $100 billion per year in Iraq to protect an oil output worth only $30 billion per year. Besides, the main idea of repayment was to pay back construction loans, but again, the US is still destroying more each year than it builds overall. So, even in that limited case no legitimate argument exists for expecting the Iraqi government to make any payments to the United States.

The real issue, which nobody points out, is that even if Bush’s war plan is the greatest success any general could conceive of from here on out, the United States still loses the war by any rational measurement. No matter what happens, the US military will eventually leave Iraq. And no matter what happens, Iraq will still be next door to Iran. And no matter what happens, Shiites with a natural friendship towards Iran will be in the majority within the body politic inside of Iraq. So, no matter what happens, eventually Iran will have far more influence within Iraq than the United States will. With a victory like that, who needs a loss?
Continue reading ‘Iraq: Winning Is Losing’ »

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’ »

After roughly two months of experimentation and occasional blogging, I’ve decided to give this a shot at creating an actual conversation. So, I’ve enabled the ability to register to post comments on the site. I will eventually even entertain the idea of adding additional posters so that this can become a multi-party dialog.

Mind you, I’m afraid of the spammers, so I will be moderating comments. I don’t want this to become known as a place to post advertisments for the enhancement of male or female body parts or bettering their interaction with one another in some way, shape or form. And, if the spam gets to be too tough to handle with Wordpress, I may be forced to go back to not allowing random passers-by to register at this site.

I would really like to have an intellgent conversation with you folks out there in the blogosphere. I am horribly upset at the divide in American politics and I despise the policy offerings of the extreme left and extreme right who feel that they have the only possible options to offer to the voting public. Instead, I firmly believe in the power of the middle ground. So, somewhere between the “lock ‘em up” attitude of the far right and the “anything goes” attitude of the far left lies the middle ground where we need to try to lock up the really bad people and not waste our time and money persecuting the rest of us folks.

So, welcome to my world, where I’m still “stuck in the middle with you!”

For ’tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist by his own petard
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 4

The initial Soviet deployment of the 40th Army in Afghanistan began on December 25, 1979. The final troop withdrawal began on May 15, 1988, and ended on February 15, 1989. Due to the high cost and ultimate futility of this conflict for this Cold War superpower, the Soviet war in Afghanistan has often been referred to as the equivalent of the United States’ Vietnam War.
Wikipedia article on the Soviet War In Afghanistan.

As hundreds of Muslim “enemy combatants” remain held in the Gulag at Guantanamo, lost in all of the moral outrage mounted by the Republicans is the fact that during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United States funded and provided arms to those very same Muslim “enemy combatants” (really, “terrorists”) for the purpose of defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Continue reading ‘USA Terrorism’ »

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’ »

To hear the right-wing talk show hosts rant and rave, one of the two worst enemies of America is socialism (the other is “Islamo-Fascists”). But socialism is so deeply embedded into our American system these days that we would not be the great nation we are without socialism. Let me enumerate a few socialist government programs that at least 80% of the people (on average) would vote to support if the question were put to them:

• Anti-Trust Laws
• Social Security
• Unemployment Insurance
• Medicare (health care program for older people)
• Pell grants
• Student Loans
• Consumer Product Safety Commission
• Food and Drug Administration
• Building roads, bridges, sewers, water systems, and other infrastructure.

Socialism has its roots in the progressive movement of a century ago, and Republican President Teddy Roosevelt was a leader of that movement, closely associated with the passing of anti-trust laws to prevent the robber barons of commerce from creating vast business monopolies for the purpose of sucking as much profit out of the public as they could manage. His cousin, Democrat President Franklin Roosevelt, gave us numerous social programs, and the most popular is probably the Social Security System.
Continue reading ‘Successful Socialism’ »

In the Bible, the Book of John, Chapter 8, verses 31-32 reads (more or less) like this:
8:31 Then Jesus said to those Judeans who had believed him, “If you continue to follow my teaching, you are really my disciples
8:32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

In this essay, I will make the same claim that Jesus made, above. If you believe me, and you follow my teaching, “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

Now, Jesus was trying to teach the Jews to be free from sin. But of course, my objective is to teach you to be free of sin too. In my case, you will be free of sin by recognizing it as an incoherent concept which cannot have any hold over you unless you willingly enslave yourself to the idea of sin. Once you reject the idea of sin, you are immediately free of sin, and of coercion by any church which preaches that you must do penance (usually by paying money) repeatedly for your sins, which the church will repeatedly assert you commit almost continuously when you are not at church doing penance (usually by paying money). Thus, this freedom I give you is economically valuable to you, as it gets you out of a lifetime of doing penance (usually by paying money).
Continue reading ‘Know The Truth’ »