Who pays?
Okay, back to earth. Back a few weeks, I had an argument online with someone about the number, "45 million Americans without health care." semantics aside, I felt comfortable with the idea that while the U.S. has vast health care resources the cost of accessing such resources is really preventing many people from benefiting from the health care system of this country. Certainly, hospitals will treat anyone at the emergency room regardless of coverage, but preventive care suffers for those who do not have sufficient coverage which ultimately leads to more morbidity and higher cost. Just one more food for thought: "88 million Americans went without coverage for some period of time in the last two years."
NPR tackled another issue on health care tonight. I missed most of it, but it was interesting. The problem essentially is that while insurance companies have the bargaining power to effectively limit the payment to hospital and doctors at or below the actual cost of treatment the uninsured patients usually pay more for the same treatments. This effectively means the patient population that can least afford the health care actually bears the financial burden for the rest. Yeah I know, a free market, supply and demand, negotiation power. But the idea that hospitals depend on the poor to recoup its loss somehow seems wrong to me. I know making every hospital non-profit won't work--financial incentive is the basis of everything, and the best motivation for innovation and progress. But what's the answer? I really should know more about this. Baby needs a new pair of shoes, and I gotta getta paida too.
On a lighter note,
Positive things that happened today.
SpaceShipOne made it to the outer space.
Google stock briefly reached
$135 today, the upper limit of what the company initially thought to be the price for the IPO, less than six weeks after the IPO when the price is lowered to $85.
IBM's supercomputer recaptures the title of world's
fastest computer.
As much as those of us who like to be critical of the U.S. government policies, it is undeniable what a excellent country that we indeed live in. Is it fair we just happened to be born here, or that our parents or grand-parents worked so hard so we could grow up to be a part of this free society? Not really, but we should definitely appreciate what America has to offer. The three pieces of news today only highlighted the opportunities of creative endeavors and rewards a free country and a healthy economic system have to offer its bravest and brightest. I tip my hat to Burt Rutan, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and people at IBM. They personifies the greatest inspiration of our time, Higher, Faster, and yet still Stay Connected.
Why do we care?
The Oakland A's lost again last night. Now they are tied for first place with 5 games to play. I am a pessimist by nature, so I couldn't help but think of the worst for my team. In a way if the team does not make the playoff this season it would be a relief for me. It would be less painful. Think sawing off my left forearm after it got stuck under a ten ton boulder--the kind of pain that means you can go back to living afterward in a relatively short amount of time. This is in contrast to the past two seasons, when the A's charged into the playoffs, full of confidence, only to lose in the ninth innings of two Game 5s of 5-game series. Both times, for at least a month, I stopped watching ESPN on TV, checking ESPN.com on the web, and in general stopped thinking about sports completely. Now that is bad pain--sort of like peeling the skin off your body beginning from the eye lids--it means you can't go back to living the same way ever again.
I'm 27, and I should be too old to feel this way about a bunch of millionaire athletes, many of whom younger than me, playing a game that involves little white balls and wooden blunt instruments that deplete the ashwood and maple forests. So why do I care so much? Why do I identify with the people who wear the yellow and green? After a loss, do they go to bed at night thinking about how the game will effect me and the thousands of others? People say baseball is a metaphor for life, so does that mean I see the players as the protagonists who dare to challenge the mediocrity and randomness of life, thus bringing hope and purpose and meaning to it? Or should I just get a new hobby?
Phrase of the day
Down with
I am completely confused with this phrase. I recently received an email that was sent to a list that is called, "downwithdubya@..." Since the topic was on tickets to a Michael Moore appearance, I assumed that this was an anti-Bush crowd, and the phrase is used in the same spirit of "down with the capitalist roadster." However, I then recalled the song by the rap group, "Naughty by Nature,"
"You down with OPP (yeah you know me.)" Although OPP may have been short for OPPression, my readingof the lyrics only made the confusion worse.
dictionary.com really didn't help niether:
-
Depose, do away with, as in Down with the king! This imperative dates from the early 1500s.
-
be or get down with. Be close friends with, as in I'm down with that crowd. [Slang; late 1900s]
So is this "downwithdubya" group a left leaning bush-basher that hope to depose the 43rd president, or are they really just tight with the President, and are planning to ambush MM at his own tuff? These are the things that keep me up at night.
Analogy anyone?
Yes, yes, we have all heard the comparison of current U.S.-Iraq situation and the Vietnam War a million times. And the president, ever the optimist, instead chose to compare the "recon(de-)construction" of Iraq to the rebuilding of Europe after WWII during his acceptance speech at RNC. Been a lover of history, and a sucker for analogy (damn you SAT!) I thought, "why stop at these two?" Let me see.
1) The American government is supporting a strongman ruler, without the mandate of the people, in a country that never had stable democracy.
2) The American military offering weapons and training to an increasingly demoralized army.
3) The country is sinking deeper into chaos, with a possible civil war on the horizon.
4) The rebels control large areas of the country side with growing popular support, while the U.S. recognized government holding desperately on to the urban centers.
5) Foreign elements have infiltrated the country to assist the insurgence while furthering their own agenda.
6) The American government is determined to win because it believes in the absolute necessity to stop what it considers to be the number 1 threat to its security.
In his speech to the UN, Generalissimo Allawi...I mean, Prime minister. You see where I'm going on this. If you replace Allawi (1), Iraq 2004 (2,3), Islamic extremists (4), al quaeda (5), and terrorism (6) with Chiang Kai-shek, China 1946, red army, Soviets, and international communism, most of them fit. Of course, the similarities really stops here, but it is the possibility of a civil war that really worries me. The world needs to prevent this from happening, but my gut feeling is that any foreign military presence, especially that of the U.S., will only add fuel to the conflict, confuse the motives of the dissatisfied Iraqis, and result in a bloody mess.
Are you Siamese Twins?
"We are not Siamese. We are American." - Matt Damon (Stuck on you.)
A lot of people hate the hyphenated American labels, but we still use these labels because they are useful in many practical ways. I recently read that
Vietnamese-Americans prefer Bush to Kerry. Wow. That's probably as big a margin as it gets. Why? Because Kerry was anti-Vietnam war, so indirectly pro-commie, and the people who were able to emigrate to the U.S. are mostly pro-American and anti-commie (think Cuba East).
Begin venting, skip to next paragraph if uninterested. This is ignoring the fact that Kerry went to Vietnam and killed Viet Congs, while Bush tried to shoot down Commie planes in the sky of Texas. This is ignoring the admission by Bush in his AUTOBIOGRAPHY: "My inclination was to support the government and the war until proven wrong, and that came only later, as I realized we could not explain the mission, had no exit strategy, and did not seem to be fighting to win." These flip-flopping Yalies.
Can't fault the Vietnamese-Americans though, many people have become single-issue voters in this election. Former DEMOCRAT mayor of NYC, Ed Koch,
is voting for Bush, despite disagreement on all domestic issues. Why? Koch, who's Jewish, mentioned terrorism and Israel. He believes Bush will be a strong supporter of Israel. I can understand his worry, a lot of people think that the anti-U.S. sentiment in the Muslim world stem largely from our pro-Israel stand, and that we should cut them loose. My only question is, who did Koch vote for in 2000 when Joe Lieberman was the Democratic VP candidate?
At this point, you may be yelling at the monitor, "So are you Americans first or are you _________ (insert appropriate labels) first!" Or "No one's worried that Kerry will give the FOOTBALL (briefcase with arming codes for our nuclear missiles) to the Vatican just because he's Catholic!" but the left is just as guilty. They can't understand why any Gay/Black/Poor -American would vote for Bush. This stereotyping is not fair neither. I had realized that my initial anger against Koch, "is Israel more important than our country?" was too harsh. People are defined by their experiences, and their values are arranged in importance accordingly. I don't know how it feels to belong to a people living in fear of persecution, or lived through a civil war, or growing up hiding my true sexual preference. Our priorities are all different. It's fine to be a single-issue voter, but we should be careful not to vote for a leader who's not only single-minded, but also narrow minded.
Is F1 racing a sport?
Shanghai will be hosting China's first F1 racing this Sunday. It is indeed a great event. It is a symbol of how far the country has come along in 25 years, and foreshadows the 2008 Olympics. With the country's "peaceful rise" into a global economic, political, and athletic power, this is just another medal to hang on the country's trophy shelf. But speaking of athletics, should F1 racing be considered a sport?
Certainly, I think it's much more challenging than NASCAR, which by the way why do its fans support Bush when they happily see the cars making 800 LEFT turns a day. But, seriously, you are still just going in loops, albeit in fancy European, abstract shapes. Okay fine, the drivers needs to have stamina and judgment and reflexes, just like most other sports. But, isn't it more about the machines than the driver? Hello, Schumacher hasn't loss since George HW Bush was the president (okay, I'm exaggerating) but you get the point. 9 out 10 times, the driver with the best car wins, so where does that leave the mystic of the sport, if we call it a sport. Why don't we just call it a parade?
I know I'm going to catch fire from someone on this
Why men love sports more than women?
So women buy more fiction than men. Apparently male readership of fiction has been in decline for years. On the other hand, our gender's death grip on sports-watching, dare I say from spelling-bees to put-put golf to world series of poker (all thanks to ESPN), has become tighter than ever. Does the losing appeal of fiction to men correlate with the rise of color television and broadcast of sporting events? You may think this is purely speculation, and it is, but perhaps there is a deeper reason than just beers and ball games.
We live in a world of predictability. 99% of us go to work knowing what the world expects from us, and what we can expect from others. We crave the unpredictable. So where do we find it? Fiction? Naw. Many of us, dudes, find it in sports. In sports, the outcome of the game is never predictable. We see athletes, superior physically, but nonetheless doing tasks that most of us have done or haven attempted to do in P.E. classes, playground or parks, yet somehow in the face of uncertainty, they rise above the ordinary and accomplishes the extraordinary. We live vicariously through the excitement of their accomplishment, and sometimes the crushing pain of disappointment. The fan identifies with the athlete, and his quest become my quest. In sports, anything is possible and no one knows what's going to happen next. On a side note, this is probably why fixing games for gambling is an especially heinous crime in a fan's eye.
For fictions, no matter how much plot-twisting and character development, there is the subconscious knowledge that at least one person controls the outcome of the story, the writer. The fate of each character is fixed and everyone is powerless to effect change. Even the reader is powerless. It is my belief that it is this imbalance of power that divide the sports fan from a nice piece of fiction. Let's face it, most mainstream fictions, like TV shows and movies, are quite predictable, reading them merely reinforces our preset beliefs about the world.
I suppose I haven't discovered why women would prefer fiction and men prefer sports, because I don't want to venture into a discussion about the whole "women want stability and men live for the unpredictable hunt" thing (oops, I guess I just did). So what do you think?
Is Rummy a liability now?
People used to love the straight-shooter Donald Rumsfeld in the early days of the war 2003. Now we realized that we loved him for the same reason that we loved the Iraqi Communication Minister that claimed to the end "there is no American soldier in Baghdad." They both are oblivious to the truth. Rumsfeld has been keeping a low profile since the prison scandal, but he started to pop up again the last two weeks, and making comments that contradict the white house.
First he told the congress:
"Let's say you tried to have an election and you could have it in three-quarters or four-fifths of the country. But in some places you couldn't because the violence was too great,"
"Well, so be it. Nothing's perfect in life, so you have an election that's not quite perfect. Is it better than not having an election? You bet,"
That was quickly shot down by Richard Armitage of State Department,
"We absolutely want to hold them in all parts of Iraq." Asked if partial elections were under consideration, he said: "No. Not now. Not that I know of."
Flip-flopping? But of course, the white house is full of contradications but so many people are saying so many different things, nothing sticks, at least in the public's mind.
then Rummy compared Baghdad to cities in the U.S., saying hundreds of people get killed here also, but it's peaceful here in America. Yeah right, it's much better in Iraq, at least pregnant wives there are not in danger of getting chopped up by their husbands.
Last, he hinted that the U.S. troop may pull out before Iraq becomes peaceful. Really, staying the course of leaving a country to shit. Mission accomplished.
Backing into the victory lane.
The Oakland A's lost again last night. Their record this month is a robust 9w-11L so far. Yet somehow they are still in first place in an essentially two-team race, with a third party, the Rangers, playing the spoiler. From any conceivable point of view, the A's are in trouble. Ken Mecha, their commander-in-chief, is clueless as to how to use his troops. Their Big Three star pitchers have been a disaster lately, living in their past glory. The rest of the team, enemic, have been unable to mount any sustainable offense against even the mostly inferior adversaries. The whole situation is spinning out of control, and there's no way to stop the bleeding except to stay the course and finish what they started, the season. So should I credit the evil-genious mastermind, A's campaign manager Billy Beane for the state of my be-loved baseball team? it's his anything-for-winning attitude and highway-robbery tactics that have put many of his opponenets in MLB in a state of fear and second-guessing, and have put the A's on the way to winning the 2004 campaign, once again. Some people may blame the A's lead on the Angels' Kerryesque performance in September, but I would disagree. Don't call me ignorant. Even if I am, so what, as long as my team wins the whole thing six weeks from now.
Quote of the Day
"A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel."
- Robert Frost
In this definition, most successful people in the business and scientific world would be considered liberal. Speaking from personal experience, doing rigorous science requires one to propose multiple theories or interpretations for the same piece of data. Your co-workers helps you out by demanding endless control experiments to elimit each competing theory. On the other hand, a lack of conclusive evidence often left one to flip-flop between those different theories, but that does not mean you can't have a plan.
Of course, John Kerry is getting killed by the call-sign "flip-flopping," while we love Bush for his stubborness, I mean, resolve. It seems there are at least two explanations for his inflexibility, One, he hears, and people around him tells him, what he wants to hear. Two, he lacks any capacity for curiosity of the unfamiliar. Three, he's uncannily focused and goal-driven. But in any case, steadily holding on to one's old beliefs when new evidence points to the contrary should not be a quality for a world leader to have. Horrifying as it may seem, I would much prefer a Nixon over a Bush 43. Can you imagine what the world would be like if this was 1971, and Bush 43 has us in Vietnam, and the hope of ping-pong politics glimmering on the horizon? He would almost certainly have done the opposite of Nixon in both cases.
