Sunday Sermonette: What's in a name?
Psalm 34 requires some explanation, and it ' s a bit complicated. The name Abimelech appears in the Book of Judges, set long before the putative time of David. However, the word means " father of the king, " and presumably must refer to Achish, king of Gath, and the story told in 1 Samuel 21. As you probably won ' t recall, because we read it a long time ago, David learned via his lover Jonathan that king Saul intended to kill him, so he fled to Nob. As a further complication, he met a priest there named Ahimelek, so it is conceivable that this confused the scribe. David lied to Ahimelek and said that Saul had sent him on ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 24, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Econoclasm Chapter Two: Medical Economics
You hear all the time politicians and pundits saying that we should let the Free Market ™ work in health care, that Free Market™ solutions are the best. But 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 n eed 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 or screening tests t...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 23, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Econoclasm: Lesson four
I will interrupt myself here to note that yes, there are people who are pursuing economics as an empirical science, and they have indeed demonstrated that the so-called neo-classical economic theory as taught to first-year college students is not a description of the real world. My point in this presentation is that many people, including journalists and politicians, believe that it is. This pernicious falsehood horribly contaminates public discourse. So yes, it does require debunking. There are a couple of additional problems with the concept of the free market that don ’t stem directly from the faulty assumptions....
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 22, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Econoclasm: Lesson Three
Continuing with our explication of why the " discipline " of economics as commonly taught is complete bullshit, a component of the theory is called “declining marginal utility.” This means that the first two or three tomatoes you buy are worth more to you than the next three, and by the time you have more than you can possibly eat before the next one goes bad, they’re basically worthless. (We’ll leave aside that the seller, whether a co rporation or your neighborhood farmer, would like to sell as many tomatoes as possible and does not experience declining marginal utility of money.) This idea seems basically ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 21, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: The Forgiveness Scam
Psalm 32 introduces an idea we haven ' t really seen explicitly in the Hebrew Bible until now -- or if we have I missed it. That is the idea that we are all sinners but if we confess our sins to God we can be forgiven. ( " Maskil " means something like " wise, " in other words this is intended to be instructive.) The psalm is important in both Jewish and Christian liturgy. In some Jewish traditions it is recited on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and verse 8 is recited as part of the Foundation of Repentance on Rosh Hashanah. Paul refers to verses 1 and 2 in Romans 4, in asserting a central doctrine of Christian theology...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 20, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Econoclasm: Lesson Two
Let us return briefly to the lonesome world of Alice and Bob. For the transaction to truly benefit both of them, it should be obvious that they both have to know exactly what they are getting – that’s called the assumption of perfect information. If X turns to be less than Bob expected, or possibly no good whatever, Bob is not happier after all. Asymmetric information is common throughout the economy – generally, sellers know more about the product than buyers – but it’s obviou sly an inherent feature of Medicine. After all, the product for sale is expertise. Another assumption is that Alice and Bob both ent...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 19, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Econoclasm 101
I ' m going to do a series in which I explain why most of what you read in the paper, see on teevee, or hear politicians say about economics -- how the economy works, and why we should minimize taxes and government intervention -- is utter gibberish. Here is the first lesson.Introductory economics textbook writers are fond of proposing what they call “simplifying assumptions.” They invent cartoon worlds in which there are only two people with goods to exchange, or only two products for sale. They imagine how these worlds would work and then argue that these imaginings can be extrapolated to explain how the real world w...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 18, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: It's complicated
Psalm 31, first of all, cannot possibly have been written by David, because it is derivative of works known to have been written in the 5th Century BC. (Although some no doubt have earlier sources, the compilation was made in the 5th Century.) It is well known. Verse 5 is the source of the purported last words of Jesus. It is quite self-contradictory however. The speaker is in a miserable state, apparently physically repulsive, and either paranoid or in fact subject to persecution. Yet he is full of praise for God ' s goodness, begging for succor and apparently expecting to get it. This is the fundamental contradiction of ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 17, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Maybe giving too much credit
Health reporter Julie Rovner is perplexed thatRepublicans, who she maintains were once big supporters of public health, now seem to want to kill us all. Her examples of former Republican championship for public health are pretty narrow and a bit dubious. Funding for the NIH is mostly about biomedical research, not public health; and GW Bush ' s President ' s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, while certainly a good thing, was focused on Africa and probably as much about international relations as humanitarianism. But it ' s certainly true that the party has turned its back on these programs: The GOP-led House this y...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 15, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Petitioning the Lord with Prayer
To me, one of the strangest conceits of religion -- and it seems to be pretty much universal among theists -- is that it ' s worth your while to beg The Almighty to conform to your wishes. He is supposedly all knowing, all powerful, and infinitely wise, but evidently he needs your advice in order to do what ' s right. Obviously, he doesn ' t always take it, but that doesn ' t stop people from continuing to give it, as in Psalm 28. Psalm 29 is a panegyric to God ' s power and greatness, quite reminiscent of parts of the Book of Job. However, if you read this literally it seems to refer to a natural disaster of so...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 13, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
The arrogance of expertise
Here is a thoughtful essay by NYT reporter Ed Yong. (Free Gift link! [as opposed to a not free gift]) It ' s long, but worth it. Yong was assigned the Long Covid beat and he found -- as I already knew -- that people who tell their doctors about long-term fatigue, pain, and cognitive difficulties, for which the physicians could find no specific biophysical explanation, commonly found their complaints dismissed or even ridiculed:Covering long Covid
solidified my view that science is not the objective, neutral force it
is often misconstrued as. It is instead a human endeavor, relentlessly
buffeted by our culture, values an...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 11, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Tell it to Job
In Psalm 26, the singer boasts of being perfectly righteous and faithful to the Lord; he (presumably) expects to be rewarded. In Psalm 27, the singer is absolutely confident of God ' s protection. We know, of course, that the real world doesn ' t work that way. Very often, the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer. Being pious isn ' t any protection at all. This is what we call magical thinking. Praying, purporting to believe, performing the rituals, and obeying the commandments just aren ' t going to protect you from the dangers of the world. But many people would like to think so.A Psalm of David.26 Vindicate me, ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 10, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Proselytizing
I bought an electric car -- a Chevy Bolt to be specific. I bought it used, but it only has 16,000 miles on it so it ' s about as good as new. And guess what else? It was cheap. The sticker price was $16,500 and with the dealer conveyance fee, registration and taxes I handed over a check for $19,000 and drove away. I ' m spending about another $800 to install a fast charger, and that will be that. I will never pay for an oil change, or an emissions test, or a muffler, belts, coolant, any of the maintenance expenses you expect for an automobile. There ' s no catalytic converter to steal. I don ' t have to stop and pump gas, ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 9, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Economics 101: For real this time
As you know, I ' m what ' s called an econoclast -- I think standard economic theory with which freshmen are indoctrinated is bullshit. However, there are actual real facts about the economy that correspond to history and common sense. One is that over the long run -- and even almost always over the short run -- prices go up, and money is worth less and less. Here is the U.S. consumer price index since 2014: The only time it ' s actually gone down since the Great Depression is the 2008 financial crisis, and even then you can barely see it. This chart ends before the recent moderation in inflation, but yes it did...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 7, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Greatest Hits
Psalm 23 is the best known. In Judaism, it is commonly recited during Kiddush, and funeral ceremonies. It is also sung in Catholic funeral masses and is incorporated in the Book of Common Prayer. In modern times it has been given many musical settings, usually somewhat redacted to conform to rhyme and meter. Psalm 24 is the inspiration for the hymn " Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates, " written by the German protestant George Weissel during the Thirty Years War, in which he reinterprets the King of glory, referring to God in the original, as Christ the Messiah. Presumably in the original it refers to the openi...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 6, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
