Sunday Sermonette: A digression to current events
The next two psalms are just the usual pleading for God to be good to me and to screw over my enemies, so I won ' t say anything else about them. But I will take this opportunity to comment on the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that an embryo is legally a child, with Chief Justice Tom Parker writing that " human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy
God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself. " Presidential candidate Nikki Haley said she agrees, that she believes an embryo is a baby. It is something of a mystery why this very weird belief has become ce...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 25, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Root causes
My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to explain why we ' re spending all this money on medicine and getting sick and dying more and sooner than the countries that spend half as much. First, we need to take a step back and consider the actual determinants of health. The Kaiser Family Foundation has offered a convenient picture: You ' ll notice that the so-called " Health Care System " appears in two of the six columns, but on the leftmost, it ' s actually negative -- medical bills and debt harm people ' s health. Only in the rightmost column does it have positive value, and even then it ' s unevenly distr...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 24, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Hoovering up the cash
I think I might have shown this before. It ' s spending on " healthcare, " i.e. medical services and goods in the U.S., as a percent of GDP. It leveled off for a while after passage of the ACA, but it ' s going back up: All that moolah isn ' t buying us better health though. We ' re spending twice as much as comparable countries and getting the least for it: Naturally, all that cash is going mostly to one place: capitalists.Recent
decades have seen one overarching trend: consolidation of the medical industry into fewer and larger entities.•Horizontal
consolidation: similar institutions merge into chains. ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 22, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Imprecatory prayer for terrorism
In Psalm 69, the protagonist has for unspecified reasons become an outcast, so he begs God to destroy his enemies. Check out verse 22 et seq. While this is attributed to David, there isn ' t really any point in David ' s story that would correspond to this situation. But petitioning God to commit mass violence is a common theme in the psalms.To the choirmaster: according to Lilies. A Psalm of David.69 Save me, O God!For the waters have come up to my neck.2 I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold;I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me.3 ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 21, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
The inflection point
Okay, pretty correct answers from our two commenters on the previous post. Not just chlorination, but clean water generally, i.e. sewage treatment and separating sewage from drinking water sources. Also pasteurization of milk was very important. But the story is a bit more complicated. Pre-industrial people were mostly rural, obviously drank their milk fresh and didn ' t have a lot to fear from waterborne diseases since their population was sparse. Obviously they did suffer greatly from other plagues -- the Black Death killed something like half the population of Europe in the mid-14th Century, and plague recurred in lesse...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 20, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Mid-term exam: Essay question
Here is a historical graph of life expectancy at birth, for Homo sapiens on planet Earth. The picture for the U.S. specifically is very similar, although the upturn started a bit earlier. (That mysterious dip around 1959 is the Chinese famine resulting from the so-called Great Leap Forward. In a graph of just the U.S., you would see a similar dip around 1918, from the influenza pandemic.) You can extend that horizontal tail back 6,000 years or more. In any given local area it might have gone up a bit in good times and down in times of plague or famine, but it basically stayed at around 30 years, never abov...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 19, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Obscurantism
Psalm 67 is a mercifully brief, simple song of praise. Psalm 68, however, is both exceedingly long and has been called the" most difficult and obscure of the psalms. "The RSV actually covers up some of the difficulty, for example by translating verse 4 as " His name is the Lord, " whereas the Hebrew actually says " His name is Yah. " That is a specific short form of Yahweh. The KJV spells if Jah, as do Rastafarians who prefer it as the name of god, but the Hebrew pronunciation is closer to English Y than J. The form Yah appears 43 times in the Psalms, but otherwise only once in Exodus and several times in Isaiah. It is par...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 18, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
More epistemology
Many people find it uncomfortable to live with deep mystery. They want their questions answered. Many people also need to be handed meaning and purpose on a platter -- it ' s too difficult to make their own, especially in the face of hardship and injustice. Making up stories that seem to satisfy the need for explanation and meaning is a temptation that many just can ' t resist. But for other people, testing stories against empirical reality is more important. Whatever dissatisfaction or psychological distress we suffer from choosing to live in reality is worth it to us, because we want the truth more than anything. On...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 17, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
The knowledge machine
That ' s the title of a book my Michael Strevens, which I recommend. (Liveright, New York, 2020)Strevens presents his own take on the philosophy of science accessibly and persuasively. If you ' ve even dabbled in this area you ' ve heard of the so-called demarcation problem -- how can we tell science from pseudoscience -- and the two best-known modern conceptions of science, Kuhn ' s construct of paradigms and paradigm shifts, and Popper ' s construct of falsfiability. Strevens doesn ' t think Kuhn or Popper are quite right. However I would say that without quite realizing it, he ' s pretty close to Popper -- he just...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 15, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: The show is about nothing
The next three psalms are just not very interesting. The first amounts to a curse against the singer ' s unspecified and undescribed enemies, who he is confident God will shoot with an arrow. The second is a standard song of praise, giving God credit for nature and what it offers. The third is more praise for God and a pledge to keep on worshiping and sacrificing. There isn ' t much to say about these, except that they seem to fulfill the function that songs do today in religious services, to remind people of what they are supposed to believe and deepen their investment. Of course these beliefs are contradictory -- God wil...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 14, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: The Divine Right of Kings
Psalm 61 implies that God will always protect and reward those who are faithful to him. Of course we know that isn ' t so. Then we get two psalms, also attributed to David, and all implying, in one way or another, that David is chosen of God -- to be an enemy of David is to be an enemy of God, and vice versa. Not to worry, though, God is going to come through and destroy David ' s enemies, who are by definition unrighteous. This was the common ideological basis of nations in that time -- an alliance between a priestly caste and warrior kings, with the king ruling by divine sanction. It is very weird that a substantial part...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 11, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
The bias of reality
Stephen Colbert -- or rather " Stephen Colbert, " in his former character -- famously said that " Reality has a well-known liberal bias. " And so conservatives must deny reality, which as in the case of anthropogenic climate change means denying scientific findings, and the very integrity and authority of science. But that doesn ' t usually work very well with the courts --viz. the jury award of $1 million to climate scientist Michael Mann -- so they also result to scientific fraud.You may recall that U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled to suspend FDA approval of the abortion medication mifepristone,relying largely...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 9, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Moar genocide
Regarding Psalm 60, the meaning ofShushan Eduth is disputed. It means something like " Lilly of Testimony, " which doesn ' t make a lot of sense. It could be the name of a tune, but some authorities say it ' s the name of a city where Jews resided during the Babylonian exile, although that doesn ' t make much sense in context since this supposedly refers to a battle recounted in 1 Samuel 10, and repeated in 1 Chronicles 19. It could just be a metaphor for the content. Joab is one of David ' s generals, and like various passages in the Deuteronomistic History, this describes the massacre of the Moabites. Psalm 61...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 7, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Must Read
I ' m not going to discuss this or try to add to it, I ' m just going to ask you to read it.This is the McLuhan Lecture from Berlin, given by Cory Doctorow, on the subject of enshittificiation. We ' re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in
which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into
giant piles of shit.It ' s frustrating. It ' s demoralizing. It ' s even terrifying.I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to
explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the ' great
forces of history, ' and into the material world of specific dec...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 4, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Right to life?
The RSV labels Psalm 58 " A prayer for vengeance. " Since that is an addition by modern translators, I don ' t include it here, but at least they ' re frank about it. There ' s no indication of what, specifically, has provoked this fantasy of gory torture and murder, but the writer (not actually David) was really pissed about something. Note that according to the Bible, the literal, inerrant word of God, God wants the unborn babies of the unrighteous to be aborted (verse 8). I ' m not sure what the " pots " are in verse 9, and I can ' t find an explanation. Note in verse 1 that there are multiple Gods. Evidently the o...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 4, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
