Wednesday Bible Study: Miscegenation
Formatting problem with the previous post is fixerated, I hope. So, Ezra discovers that the Jews have been intermarrying with other people of the area and he completely loses his marbles. He pulls out his hair and beard, and can ' t even manage to stand up for hours. Then he finally pulls it together, berates the people, and convinces them to expel their gentile wives and children, which they do without, apparently, a murmur of protest. Indeed the Torah, and notably Deuteronomy, which was actually written late in the First Temple period, does forbid intermarriage. But there is some tension about this in the Tanak...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 17, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Lock'em up, part three
This study happens to have been done in New York City but the population is presumably typical.EducationMaleFemale< HS46.2%63.2%HS or GED26.7%18.1%Any college or technical27.1%18.7%Employed at arrest44%18.6%Homeless/shelter past 12 months25.7%35.7%Health Issues past 12 monthsDepression19.4%26.5%Anxiety Disorder8.2%13.8%Visited ER26.3%41.7%Admitted to Hospital11.6%26.6%*Freudenberg, et al.Comparison
of Health and Social Characteristics of People Leaving New York City Jails by
Age, Gender, and Race/Ethnicity: Implications for Public HealthInterventions.
Public Health Reports 2007. 122(6)Okay, so you ' re likely to have li...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 15, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Temple II?
Ezra 8 makes a very strange implication, or actually a couple of them. First we get a long list of families who decide to return to Jerusalem with Ezra, but like Ezra himself, their parents and grandparents all must have decided to remain in Babylon and not return when they had the chance at least 80 years earlier. Somehow, for two or three generations, they have retained their ethnic and religious identity, and now, for unexplained reasons, suddenly decide to return to Jerusalem after all. Even stranger, however, is that although they have held on to their religion, there are no Levites among them. Yet Ezra kno...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 14, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Lock'em up -- cont.
In answer to a reader ' s question, no, mass incarceration in the U.S. is not because we have more crime. Violent crimes are easier to count internationally, and people care about them more, so that ' s the metric the Prison Policy Institute used for this comparison. They also show the huge disparities among the states of the U.S. This is a little hard to read so just keep in mind that low and to the right means a high rate of incarceration compared to the rate of violent crime. France and Louisiana, for example, have about the same rate of violent crime, but Louisiana locks up about 8 times as many people per capita. ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 13, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Lock'em up
This post is just the introductory background to what will be a brief series. Here ' s a fun fact to know and tell. According to some calculations, the United States imprisons a higher percentage of its population than any country on earth. (There are a few different ways to calculate this, and some have us more like fifth than first, but believe me, you don ' t want to be the competition.) Note that we ' re ahead of Russia and Iran, among others. If you just want to look at more comparable countries, there ' s this: And, no big surprise here I hope: So in coming posts I will address ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 12, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Ianap
I am not a physicist, but I do think I have a good intuitive understanding of the state of physics and cosmology today. Rather than continue this discussion in the comments to an earlier post, I thought I ' d elevate it to the front page. I would say that a funny thing happened on the way to a Theory of Everything.The profound discoveries of the 20th Century -- relativity, quantum theory, field theories and the so-called Standard Model of particles and forces, and of course Big Bang* cosmology -- to many signaled the end of metaphysics. Mere speculation about the deep nature of the universe and first causes was obsolete. T...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 10, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Let's do the time warp again
The Book of Ezra continues to be chronologically challenged. The character of Ezra finally appears, in the 7th year of the reign of Ataxerxes, which would be 72 years after the death of Cyrus and something like 80 years after the return from exile described in the opening chapters. Therefore Ezra ' s father, and grandfather must have chosen to remain in Babylon, along with other priests, musicians, and temple servants as described in verse 8. While in Babylon, these people apparently exercised their offices, and Ezra studied to assume his hereditary priesthood. Why and how this happened is not explained, and it ' s especia...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 10, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
The debt limit scam
I am continually agog at the gullibility of Democratic politicians and public officials who nearly unanimously insist that just ignoring the congressional debt limit would be some sort of constitutional or political catastrophe. I am not in the least agog at the gullibility of reporters and pundits, who are generally ignorant of the subjects they write about, but at least the New York Times has for once given a platform tosomebody who knows what he is talking about. (This is the first time I ' ve tried gifting a NYT article, let ' s hope it works.) Robert Hockett is a professor of law at Cornell and he has worked for...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 9, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: The man grants permission
Ezra 6 probably requires some historical context that the book itself does not provide. Darius was a cousin of Cyrus the great, who usurped the Persian throne in 522 BCE, eight years after the death of Cyrus. So, on the one hand it is plausible that he would not have known about Cyrus ' s orders concerning the Jewish temple and so would have had to search the records, on the other hand the chronology doesn ' t seem entirely plausible. The temple should have been finished, or at least well on the way, by this time. Also, the mention of Ataxerxes, who took the throne in 465 BCE, is entirely anachronistic. The muddled ch...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 7, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Poll question of the day:
If a mentally ill person is behaving in a way that annoys you, should it be legal to kill the person? (Source: Stayin' Alive)
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 5, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Twenty questions, and forty questions, and 60 questions . . .
I had cataract surgery today, on the left eye. They ' ll do the right in a couple of weeks. The surgery itself was no big deal. It took about 1/2 hour, I ' ve had zero pain, and the vision in the left eye seems just fine.*But you knew there ' s a but. When I first started seeing my ophthalmologist, I naturally had to fill out a detailed questionnaire about my medical history. No, they apparently couldn ' t get it from the previous eye doctor. Then, when I decided to go for the surgery, I met the surgeon at the ophthalmologist ' s office and they made me fill out another questionnaire all over again with the same informatio...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 4, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Meet the Jews
Ezra 5 is the first time we encounter the word Jew, at least in the English translations I have seen. That ' s interesting because it signals a new kind of identity, no longer national but ethnic. Judah is now subsumed into a province of the Persian empire. This chapter essentially establishes that, but this chapter and the next affirm that the empire has granted the newly defined Jews -- no longer a separate kingdom but now a people within a larger empire -- religious rights. Note, however, that it also undermines any historical basis for the modern nation of Israel. Now, the Jews are no longer a nationality, but an ethno...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 3, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Deep Thought
I ' ve been doing a lot of reading lately -- history and science as well as material that ' s directly relevant to my book. Right now I ' m reading On the Origin of Time by Thomas Hertog, who was a student and then a collaborator of Stephen Hawking. I would definitely recommend it if you ' re into that sort of thing. And I ' ve read a few more books recently on physics and cosmology, as well as biology, which I can also recommend if anyone is interested..I think I get why there is so much denial of science. I forget who it was who said something to the effect that the more we know about the universe, the more pointless it ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 1, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Neighborhood dispute
Ezra 4 is chronologically muddled, evidence that the text accreted over time. Of course, we don ' t know how much of this actually happened. On the one hand, it ' s hard to see why these stories are here if there isn ' t some basis for them, on the other hand some of this doesn ' t seem very plausible. I ' ll try to sort out some of the complications. In verses 1 and 2 Zerubabbel is not identified but he is the leader of the community, identified elsewhere in the Tanakh as being of the Davidic line and as the governor of Judah. The reference to Esahaddon king of Syria is to the story in 2 Kings 17, in which the Assyri...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 30, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Rationing by red tape
One of the worst features of our absurd Rube Goldberg non-system of Medicine is that it buries people in paperwork in order to get the benefits they ' re entitled to. When my mother went into a nursing home, I assumed I could complete the application to get her onto Medicaid myself, but it turned out that even for a guy with a Ph.D. in Social Policy who was a full-time professor of health services, policy and practice, it was impossible. I had to hire a lawyer, and we have to pay the lawyer every year to do the required re-determination. And by the way, the only entity that ' s ultimately paying my mother ' s lawyer is the...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 28, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
