Wednesday Bible Study: Ye Gods!
Now we get some (mercifully short) songs of praise. The fun thing about these is that they cast Yahweh as the greatest among a pantheon of gods. That ' s how people thought about gods in the time most of the Tanakh was written. You ' ve got your god, we ' ve got ours, but ours is the baddest baddass of all the gods. This is somewhat different from polytheistic religions. All the Roman or Norse gods were gods of the Romans or Norsemen, although Jupiter and Odin were the head honchos. So the basic structure of the Deuteronomistic history is that when the Israelites please God, he gives them victory over their neighbors,...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 10, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Dump Punts
Apparently realizing that they were caught on the horns, as it were, the dumpsters handlers wrote a statement for him in which he tried to split the baby by saying that abortion policy should be left entirely up to the states. Presumably he agreed to this although his dementia is too far advanced for him to have written the statement.The whole issue has never been anything but opportunism for him. He proclaimed himself to be a strong supporter of abortion rights until he decided to run for president as a Republican, and then he had a very difficult time articulating exactly what he thought about the entire question until t...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 8, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: The usual BS
We now have three fairly short pieces, all of which are in the same vein. The righteous will prosper, the wicked will have their downfall. Sad to say, it just ain ' t so, and repeating it every Saturday won ' t make it true. If we want the righteous to flourish, and the wicked to have their downfall, we need to make it happen ourselves. God is of no help.A Psalm. A Song for the Sabbath.92 It is good to give thanks to theLord, to sing praises to thy name, O Most High;2 to declare thy steadfast love in the morning, and thy faithfulness by night,3 to the music of th...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 7, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
More on Freeze Peach
This is a topic I address from time to time, but it seems a new post is needed now because of various nonsense that ' s going on. First, let me make one thing perfectly clear, as a man we would all like to forget used to say: free speech and academic freedom are not the same. Legally, the only meaning of Free Speech ™ is the First Amendment, as interpreted by the courts. Originally it applied only to the federal government, but the 14th Amendment extended the protections of the Bill of Rights to the States, so it now applies to all government entities within the United States, and that includes your small tow n Board of ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 4, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: A public health lesson
Psalm 90 is attributed to Moses. At least David might have existed, although he certainly did not write the psalms attributed to him. Moses is an entirely fictitious character. We know for a fact that the Egyptian captivity and the exodus never happened. But I ' ll give the writer this much credit -- the human lifespan of 70 years was probably pretty accurate at the time, in the sense that it was about the longest people could hope to live. You may recall that in Genesis 6:3 God says the human lifespan will be 120 years, and that many of the characters in Genesis lived for hundreds of years. However, life expectancy -...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 3, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Paranoia
I have a popular security product on my ' puter -- well okay, it ' s Norton utilities -- and it seems to do the job. However, they are constantly trying to upsell me, to the point where it ' s seriously annoying. Their latest ploy is to repeatedly show me pop-ups telling me that they ' ve found data brokers selling my information on the (doom chords on the organ) Dark Web. They are kind enough to reveal for me what the information actually is. My name, email address, employer, address, and phone number. Also who my relatives are. Oh no, I ' m dooooooooomed. It turns out that the phone numbers are landlines I had when ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 1, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Sadly, no
Psalm 89 is quite lengthy so it will be our only text for the day. I ' m afraid I can ' t do anything special for Easter because we haven ' t gotten to the messianic prophecies yet. It isn ' t clear when Psalm 89 was written, but Ethan the Ezrahite was an associate of King Solomon, mentioned in Kings 4:31. One problem is that the (probably fictional) reign of Solomon as described in Kings does not include any of the hard times evoked here. It was a time of prosperity, military strength, and conquest. It could refer to the invasion by Pharaoh Shisak during the reign of Rehoboam, after the civil war that saw the northern kin...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 31, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Country life
As I may have mentioned from time to time, I live in a small town, a farming community. Like a lot of people here, I heat my house with wood. We do it because we can, basically. There are only three retail businesses in town: a liquor store, a seamstress (yes) and a chainsaw shop. In my case, between my own wooded property, and my neighbor who owns extensive forest land and is constantly having trees fall down across his roads, I get all the firewood I need by dint of my own efforts. I pretty much exclusively rely on deadfall, unless for some reason we ' re removing a tree anyway, so I ' m not angering the ents....
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 30, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Medical Costs
People have complained that I haven ' t said why Medicine is costing so much in the U S of A. Give me a break -- I can ' t talk about everything at once. I ' ve been intending to get to this all along. This is just the first installment, it ' s a long story.So, thanks to all the mind boggling complexities of employer-provided insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and a few other programs, something like 90% of Americans have some form of health insurance. Great news! That means we can all afford the medical services we need and nobody has to go broke because they get sick or are injured in a car crash or ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 28, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: False prophecy
Psalm 87 is rather opaque. What seems to be going on here is that Zion, i.e Jerusalem, is envisioned as essentially the capital of the world -- that is, the world as it was known to the ancient Judeans. Obviously that never happened. It ' s not clear when this was written or what the intent really is. " Rahab " apparently refers to a legendary monster supposedly slain by Yahweh, as mentioned later in Psalm 89, not the helpful brothel keeper of the Book of Joshua, and it is thought to be a metonym for Egypt, though I ' m not sure why scholars think so. Regarding Psalm 88, nobody knows whatMahalath Leannoth means. Mahal...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 27, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Medicine as a public good
Medicine is unlike most other goods and services in the extent to which it has important positive externalities – that is, benefits for people outside of the transaction, who are not the providers or consumers. (Of course it has negative externalities as well, including carbon emissions and notably, a huge quantity of plastic waste.) A straightforward positive externality is infectious disease control. Prev enting or curing infectious diseases prevents them from being transmitted to others. This is an immense benefit to society that goes far beyond the direct value to people who are vaccinated or treated.Another positive...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 25, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Weird Theology
Now we say goodbye to Asaph, and start what was evidently originally a new hymnal. " Gittith " is probably a musical instrument, but it could be a tune. The meaning is unknown. Anway, whenever these were composed, they aren ' t monotheistic. In psalm 84, Yahweh is the " God of gods " in verse 7, and otherwise the " Lord of hosts, " referring to an assemblage of god over which Yahweh is supreme. Psalm 85 is another of those that refers to some unspecified time in which the nation is afflicted and God seems to have withdrawn his favor. It does not seem to refer to the Babylonian exile, however, because the people seem s...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 24, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Medical Economics
Sorry for missing a couple of days, been bizzy. Anyway, to continue with our trashing of the " discipline " of economics (which is actually more a branch of theology than a science),it should be obvious that Medicine exists in a world even
less like Economics 101 than most industries. To begin with, while our basic
needs for food, clothing and shelter are predictable and roughly similar for
everyone, our need for medical services is largely unpredictable, and it varies
radically from person to person and time to time. Some people go for decades
without really needing any at all, although there are some preventive measures
...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 23, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: QAnon
Psalms 81 and 82 are pretty standard fare. 81 is written for a specific observance, and it reminds the Israelites that they are God ' s chosen people and to be faithful. 82 calls on God to punish the wicked and reward the righteous -- as if he wouldn ' t do it unless we asked. Psalm 83, however, is getting a whole lot of attention right now, from people who probably don ' t read this blog and who you probably are barely aware of. It describes a broad alliance against Israel, bent on its destruction, and calls on God to exterminate them, referring to the massacres of the Midianites in Numbers 31, and the massacre of th...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 20, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Mark your ideas to market
That means that if you make a claim about what is possible or inevitable, you need to check it against reality. Here is reality. (I ' ve put this graphic up before, but apparently some people have a short memory.)Every single country on that list has one form or another of universal, government-funded health care, with a single exception. Every country on that list has a longer life expectancy at birth than the single exception, and every country on that list spends less on health care than the single exception, by a lot -- on average, they spend half as much. Furthermore, their citizens spend far less out of po...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 19, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
