A fact. Make of it what you will.
Via Barry Ritholz: (Source: Stayin' Alive)
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 5, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: A whole different story
The reign of Manasseh is described in the Book of Kings (2 21), and it starts off the same way, with him taking the throne at age 12 and doing all the abominations, but it ends completely differently. In Kings, God just threatens to do bad shit to Judah, specifically:12
Thereforethus saith
the LORD God of Israel,Behold, I am bringing such evil upon Jerusalem and
Judah,that
whosoever heareth of it, both his ears shall tingle.
God said to his prophets,
Because Manasseh has been so wicked, even more wicked than the Amorites,and has made Judah sin with his idols,I will bring so much evil on Jerusalem and Judah that it will mak...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 5, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
The People's Hospital
That ' s a new book by Ricardo Nuila, M.D. (Scribner) I ' m not going to do a full-scale review, but it ' s definitely worth a mention. He ' s a physician at Ben Taub hospital in Houston, which is a charity hospital that takes care of people who are uninsured or underinsured. He tells the stories of many individual patients he has known and weaves them together into a tapestry that reveals the fundamental insanity of the way we pay for, or don ' t pay for, medical services. Of course I talk about that all the time here, but maybe statistics and facts and figures don ' t make the case for everybody. Tragic stories of r...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 4, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
The profoundest mystery
To me, and everybody who I consider to be in contact with reality, the nature of Donald J. Trump is completely obvious. He is morally depraved and functionally deranged. There are specific labels in the DSM-5 (the manual of psychiatric diagnoses) for his pathologies, of which I am usually skeptical but of which he is absolutely paradigmatic. These are malignant narcissism and sadistic psychopathy. In other words, the only person in the universe is himself. He has an insatiable, bottomless need for adoration and obeisance. The interests and feelings of others mean absolutely nothing to him except insofar as he revels i...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 3, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Getting real
We ' re at the point where the story in Chronicles and the Deuteronomistic history have emerged from the mists of myth into a basis in historical reality. The failed siege of Jerusalem by Sennacherib is established history. The story is also told in Kings, but it ' s a completely different recounting of very similar events, which is more evidence that this really happened, in other words at least two different people wrote an account of the same events. (The Chronicler is evidently drawing on, or copying from, a lost source.) Historians aren ' t convinced that a plague was the reason for Sennacherib ' s defeat, but otherwi...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 2, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Real journalism, for a change
A continual irritant to the community of people who can think straight is the pervasive journalistic norm that when prominent entities -- be they individual politicians, corporate executives or general billionaires, well-paid bloviators or even clearly partisan institutions -- say stuff, it has to be treated respectfully, and when said stuff is objectively false the journalist cannot say so, and even when some other prominent entity steps forward to speak the truth the journalist is not allowed to speak, said journalist cannot adjudicate between them. Some of you are old enough to remember when the New York Times " public ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 1, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Artifiicial Stupidity
A few weeks ago I posted a sample of ChatGPT output, specifically a (very lame) fairy tale. What I didn ' t discuss here, as far as I remember, was that I later asked it some fairly technical questions in my academic specialty and it answered them accurately enough that a student would definitely get full credit on an exam. The New England Journal of Medicine today has launched what will be a series of articles on so-called Artificial Intelligence in medicine, beginning with ChatGPT and its competitors. Unfortunately it ' s paywalled, but I will just tell you that ChatGPT can pass the U.S. Medical Licensing Examinatio...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 30, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: The priests clean up
Basically, Chapter 31 is about how the people donate immense amounts of loot to the priests, which is of course a good thing in the eyes of the Lord. As usual, the Chronicler is also very interested in lists of names and genealogies, which would seem to be of no interest whatsoever a century or more later when he actually wrote this but we all have our obsessions. BTW the Asherah poles mentioned in the first verse are shrines to a goddess who, according to an account I recently read, scholars believe was originally Yahweh ' s wife or consort. So this history of going back and forth with putting up the Asherah poles an...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 29, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Murderous capitalism
This essay by Hunter is mostly a summary of a Washington Post story but I ' m sending you there because of the WaPo paywall. It ' s rather long-winded and repetitive -- you ' ll pretty much get the idea before you read to the end. To put it in a coconut shell, the first main point is that the only purpose of AR-15 rifles and knockoffs thereof is to kill humans. They are military rifles that can get off a lot of not particularly well-aimed shots quickly and that cause horrendous tissue damage. They are not useful for hunting or target shooting or any other conceivable " sport. " They are military weapons designed to k...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 28, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Something got passed over
In Ch. 30, Hezekiah restores observance of the Passover. Just to be clear, while Passover in Rabbinical Judaism is observed in the home, the original version included sacrifices at the altar, specifically of barley and a lamb. So okay. There are a couple of details about this that are a little off from the original instructions in Exodus, but that ' s no biggie. However,this is in direct contradiction to the Book of Kings, in which Josiah restores the Passover three generations later. To quote from 2 Kings 23: 21 And the king [Josiah] commanded all the people, saying, Keep the passover unto the LO...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 26, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Hey indeedy
Utah is among the many states that are now encouraging parents to ban books from school libraries. Well, a parent has exercised the right torequest banning what is one of the most indecent books there is, the Bible. We ' ve been reading it here, blithely enjoying the multiple accounts of incest, rape, and seduction. Consider just a single character, Judah, the guy after whom the Jewish people are named and supposedly an ancestor of Joseph, husband of Mary:Judah marries the daughter of Shua, aCanaanite.Genesis chapter 38 Judah and his wife have three children,Er,Onan, andShelah. Er marriesTamar, but God kills him because he...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 24, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Cleanup on aisle 9
Chapter 29 is an extremely long winded way of saying that when Hezekiah became king, he repaired and restored the Temple, and removed stuff that shouldn ' t have been there, and restored the sacrifices to Yahweh. In the previous chapter, king Azah had established shrines to other gods and engaged in alien rites, but it doesn ' t mention anything about the Temple. 2 Kings 18 has a much briefer account of Hezekiah destroying Azah ' s shrines to other gods and quite bizarrely destroying a brass serpent that Moses had made (Numbers 21:9) which has not been mentioned since. That Yahweh had ordered Moses to make a graven image i...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 22, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Why does health care cost so much in the U.S. part the infinity
I ' m on a lot of email lists thanks to my profession. A message I got today is below. I won ' t make you read it before I explain that one reason medical services cost so much in this godforsaken country is that providers have to hire people to with specialized training and pay them salaries to deal with this crap. Keep in mind that they see people with multiple different kinds of insurance and they need to keep track of what insurance the person has, what it will pay for, how much, and how, based on manuals containing hundreds of pages of similar dreck. And if they don ' t get it just right, they won ' t be paid. In civi...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 20, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Worst apostasy ever
The story of Ahaz is told in 2 Kings 16. Although the facts largely overlap, it ' s a completely different version of the story. It ' s basically the same old idea -- Ahaz forsakes Yahweh, worships Baal, and Judah gets trashed. Somewhat unusually, one of the instruments of the trashing is the northern kingdom. However, a prophet persuades the " people of Israel, " oddly without mentioning their king or leadership, to release the Judean captives, essentially on the grounds that they have no right to enslave fellow Israelites.Ahaz goes on to humiliate Judah before the Syrian king Tiglath-Pileser, by bribing him with some of ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 19, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Platinum Anniversary
As some readers know, for many years I maintained the Today in Iraq blog, during the U.S. occupation. The invasion of Iraq was an illegal war of aggression, and U.S. troops and mercenaries committed innumerable war crimes. The result was an indescribable catastrophe for Iraqis, with a conservative death toll estimate of 800,000 and most likely far higher, at least as many people injured, and entire cities destroyed. (Notably Fallujah and Mosul.) The consequences for the U.S. were not as dire, but $8 trillion wasted and immense damage to the nation ' s international standing, along with 4,400 military dead and 32,000 w...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 18, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
