Sunday Sermonette: Hang'em high
I just have two comments about today ' s passage. The first is that the emperor twice offers Esther half of his kingdom. This seems like quite an impulsive act, especially toward a woman he hasn ' t even bothered to see for the past month. If I were her I would have taken it -- any Jews in the other half who are in danger can come to her part. The other rather weird detail is that the gallows, that Haman builds in a single day, is 23 meters high. It seems typical in the Tanakh for numbers to be multiplied by at least ten, or to even more implausibly large. Anyway, we can see how Esther is setting up Haman for a...
Source: Stayin' Alive - July 23, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
The corporatization of medicine: Part two
2016 was in fact the first year in which fewer than half of
physicians had an ownership stake in their practice, based on a survey by the
American Medical Association.[i] The
pace of acquisition of practices by hospitals and health systems during this
period was astonishing. From 2014-2018, just four years, corporate ownership of
practices increased from 24.1% to 45.6% of all physicians in a nationally representative
sample. After selling out, physicians actually experienced a reduction in their
income.[ii]The evidence that increasing concentration of medical
services is associated with higher prices is consistent and exte...
Source: Stayin' Alive - July 21, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
The corporatization of medicine: Part One
This will be a multi-part series. The days of independent community hospitals and small
physician practices are just about over. Paul Starr ’s famous book The Social
Transformation of American Medicine tells the story
of rise of a “sovereign” medical profession, consisting largely of
entrepreneurs who owned their own individual or small group practices and made
their living as independent business people. They were generally suspi cious of
alternative models such as large group practice and salaried employment. But recent
decades have been marked by one overarching trend: the consolidation of the
medical institu...
Source: Stayin' Alive - July 20, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: The plot thickens
There ' s nothing particularly noteworthy about Ch. 4. It advances the plot and builds suspense. Keep in mind that this story, like the Book of Ruth, is of a different character than the rest of what we have read so far. It ' s a consciously crafted work of literary fiction. I ' m not saying it would get published in The New Yorker, but it does show the rudiments of the art, particularly with plotting. Donning sackcloth -- which was apparently made out of goat or camel hair -- is a common way of showing humility before God in the Biblical world. So although God is not mentioned in Esther I suppose this at least sugges...
Source: Stayin' Alive - July 19, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Hey, indeedy
Remember Jack Texeira, the Air National Guard member who was sharing top secret documents with his neo-Nazi friends on social media? His lawyers want him released pending trial, and they actually have a point, although it ' sprobably the opposite of the point they intended to make.In court papers, the defense attorneys argued that Teixeira has no
financial ability or incentive to flee, and claimed the government “greatly overexaggerates Mr. Teixeira’s risk to national security.”
Teixeira’s lawyers noted that prosecutors did not seek to detain Trump —
or his co-defendant, Walt Nauta — even though the fo...
Source: Stayin' Alive - July 18, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: A powerful resonance, but an inexact analogy
It ' s obvious why the Book of Esther and the festival of Purim are important to Judaism today. While the specific events in Esther are fictitious, the story does strongly suggest that even in the first diaspora, in the Persian empire, the Jews faced hostility and discrimination. That they were literally marked for extermination speaks directly to the events of the 20th Century.There are some lacunae here. The author does not explain why Mordecai would not bow down to Haman, or exactly why Haman transferred his resentment of Mordecai to the entire Jewish people. The empire was multi-ethnic and multi-lingual generally. In w...
Source: Stayin' Alive - July 16, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Mindlessness
Academy Health is the rather oddly named society for health services researchers. They sent me a press release which I excerpt: Today, the House Appropriations Committee released a
breathtakingly reckless bill that decimates federal research, science,
and medicine programs, and puts the health of all Americans at risk. It
is so extreme that many pundits presume it has zero chance of becoming
law, but that very extremism requires that we respond quickly and
unequivocally. . . . " This bill would eliminate the Agency for Healthcare
Research and Quality (AHRQ) in its entirety. AHRQ supports r...
Source: Stayin' Alive - July 14, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Let me set the record straight
This study of parent observations and interpretations serves to develop
the hypotheses that rapid-onset gender dysphoria is a phenomenon and
that social influences, parent-child conflict, and maladaptive coping
mechanisms may be contributing factors for some individuals. Rapid-onset
gender dysphoria (ROGD) is not a formal mental health diagnosis at this
time. This report did not collect data from the adolescents and young
adults (AYAs) or clinicians and therefore does not validate the
phenomenon. Additional research that includes AYAs, along with consensus
among experts in the field, will be needed to determine if ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - July 12, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Cattle call (or, Here she is, Miss Achaemenid)
I ' d be interested in hearing the reactions of some women to the story presented here. Basically, the king needs a new queen so they round up all the good looking virgins and he auditions them for a night until he finds the one he likes. Mordecai, the guardian of Hadassah aka Esther, goes along with this, as it ' s her chance to get ahead, winning the coveted title of Chief Sex Object of the Empire, and apparently it ' s fine with her as well. I wonder if the women of Hadassah, the U.S. Zionist women ' s organization, ever give a second thought to the name. I won ' t say more than that, people can read this for themselves...
Source: Stayin' Alive - July 12, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Mobilization for Truth, or Survival?
Scott Frickel, of my own university, and Fernando Tormos-Aponte of the University of Pittsburgh,have recently reviewed studies of what they call " science activism " and find that it is " surging, " which they refer to as a " culture shift " among scientists. They write:Science activism has long been considered taboo, as many in the field fear thatpoliticizing science undermines its objectivity.
Even so, scientist-activists have still managed to shape the U.S.
political landscape throughout history. Over the past century, for
example, scientists have protestedthe atomic bomb,pesticides,wars in Southeast Asia,genet...
Source: Stayin' Alive - July 10, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Oink, oink
If you haven ' t already, please see the introduction to the Book of Esther that I posted yesterday. For Ch. 1, the main thing to keep in mind is that it is very unlikely the author intended this to be a story about the real emperor Xerxes. The Hebrew, Ahasuerus, is not the name of any actual Achaemenid emperor and we should assume that we are reading a story about a fictitious, generic emperor. That said, I would not be surprised if the real emperors, including Xerxes, were what we would consider actual sexist pigs. What we can ' t be sure of is how the author intended us to take Vashti ' s act of defiance, refusing to be...
Source: Stayin' Alive - July 9, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Special Saturday Bible Study: The Book of Esther
Esther requires a substantial introduction, worth a post to itself, so I figured I ' d get it out of the way. It was probably written in the 4th Century BCE. It comes here because we ' re following the order of the protestant Old Testament, but in the Tanakh it comes near the end. The version in the Septuagint differs considerably from the Masoretic
text, and is not really considered a translation but a retelling. Esther is notable for a few reasons, not least that it is one of two books of the Bible that does not mention God, the other being the Song of Songs or so-called Song of Solomon. (Although Solomon alm...
Source: Stayin' Alive - July 8, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Like I said
The high level U.S. delegation currently in China has a lot to talk about,but they ' re putting climate change at the top of the agenda. As I said there ' s absolutely no sense driving deeper wedges between the U.S. and China. In factthe major issues are mostly about trade, global investment, and economic relations, one way or another, and those can only be resolved by deal making, not confrontation. In fact rare earths and semiconductors and photovoltaics are at the center of many of the issues so it ' s already about climate change. We hear absurd yelping from Republicans about how the administration&nbs...
Source: Stayin' Alive - July 8, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Rationing Health Care
Lately we ' ve touched upon the absurd cost of medical services in the U.S. -- we spend twice as much as the next biggest spender and three or four times as much as others -- and we ' re less healthy for it. There are a few reasons for this, but here I ' m going to touch the third rail.In the United States, in contrast to other nations, if the FDA approves a treatment, insurance has to pay for it. The FDA does not consider cost, but only whether there is evident of clinical benefit that outweighs risks or (non-financial) harms. The definition of benefit and harm, and how to value them, is of course far from obvious, but we...
Source: Stayin' Alive - July 7, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Thank God it's over
We have finally come to the end of Nehemiah. Just a reminder, we ' re following the order of books in the protestant Old Testament, which is different from the Tanakh. That ' s important here because we have already read the Book of Ruth, which was written later than this and comes after it in the Tanakh, although it is set in the time of the Former Prophets, specifically in the time of Judges, before the founding of the kingdom and construction of the Temple.The Book of Ruth is relevant here because it is all about the marriage of a Moabite woman and an Israelite man. This chapter, parallel to the last chapter of Ez...
Source: Stayin' Alive - July 5, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
