health care?

When I read about health care, the issue seems to be about insurance. Only insurance. As if once everyone has insurance costs will go down and we’ll all be healthy. But insurance just spreads the costs around. It seems to me any comprehensive discussion has to include (1) public health, (2) personal fitness, responsibility and risk avoidance, (3) evidence based medical practice (how many commonly accepted medical procedures and practices actually work? and for whom?), (4) poverty, (5) the problem that a few people drain the system disproportionately, (6) the issue that most people tend to incur most of the medical expenses for their entire lives in the last year of their life.  I don’t know what could come out of such discussions (some of the obvious ‘remedies’ are obviously untenable), but I know other people are probably a lot more imaginative ideas than I do. And I’d like to hear.

creationism

In the February 23, 2008 New Scientist a letter from Denis Alexander caught my eye. He suggests that a way to talk about Creationism is not to attack it head on (like Dawkins et al) but by showing that not all Christians believe in creationism.I had just watched an episode of Bill Moyers journal with an interview with Susan Jacoby (“The Age of American Unreason”). She had said, among other things, that people don’t bother to listen to contrary views.  Not exactly news. But she also pointed out that people don’t know much about their own views. I’ve noticed that few Christians I’ve talked to have read the Bible. There is a word I need here. I come up with ‘Isolation’, though that’s not quite right.  We get ideas. Creationism, Intelligent Design, Capitalism, Marxism, Darwinism. But they lack context. They lack connection to anything else. Association, commutation, you know what I allude to, but I get the impression in the wide world these ideas largely shine as isolated as stars in the universe. So what happens if Christians get to see that within their own galaxy, from their own community, there are worlds of ideas and opinions not just like their own? 

welcome to my body

I get gout. I don’t eat rich fancy foods, I’m not royalty, any of those cliche things. It started when I took diuretics for high blood pressure.  I haven’t taken diuretics for years now but I still have gout attacks. So questions: did the diuretics change my body permanently somehow. If they did, what did they do.  And if they did, what about those other people who took/take diuretics for weight loss and other reasons?  Are they having problems, aches and pains, they can’t explain?  Even after going off their diets?I thought I’d post this here in case anybody notices and has observations about this. 

Ignorance

You can’t precisely measure ignorance. But you can precisely indicate that you have. Or maybe not. If you cannot precisely measure what you do NOT have, can you measure precisely what you do have? I thought I had a nice collection of LPs but transferring them, most of them anyway, to an iPod changed the nature of “my collection” in ways that I still can’t fully comprehend or describe. At first I thought shuffle play was just a ‘feature’ that grew out of something the programmers could do rather than growing out of any felt need. But in use, shuffling through Hildegard von Bingen, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Marisa Monte is well, I don’t know. That is, literally, I do not know. I do not have a mental framework that can neatly handle or process it. And I like that.