Voltaire

Senate Republicans pledge that their first crack at repealing The Affordable Care Act (ACA) won’t be their last.  Some refer to it as Obama’s Health Care Law or Obamacare.  The ACA is about Freedom.  Some factions are adamantly drilling in the idea that the ACA is taking away our freedom to not have insurance.  They push the idea that the government is trying to control your body and kill your grandma. When our presidents wife suggests we grow our own food and get more exercise she is compared to Stalin.  It is OK for a child to grow up and die in a war to protect our freedom to not have health insurance?  Please read the truth…

Today, employers can begin submitting applications for the Early Retiree Reinsurance Program. Created by the Affordable Care Act, this program provides $5 billion in financial assistance to employers, unions and state and local governments to help them maintain coverage for early retirees age 55 and older who are not yet eligible for Medicare.

For too long insurance company bureaucrats have stood between Americans and their doctors. On Tuesday, President Obama announced new regulations that will crack down on unfair practices by insurers and change the balance of power back in favor of consumers – putting consumers back in charge of their health coverage and care.

Secretary Sebelius marks the three month anniversary of the Affordable Care Act with a live webchat where she will answer your questions.

Today, HHS announced new investments under the Affordable Care Act to support prevention activities and develop the nation’s public health infrastructure which will improve health and enhance health care quality.

To read more facts go to…

Most Americans without insurance don’t have insurance because they can’t afford it not because they don’t want it.  The gentleman who owns the small restaurant had to let his family plan go to keep the business afloat and ignored his chest pains.  The waitress let her private plan go after rates increased due to her kidney stones in order to pay for her condo she paid too much for in 2005.  Most emergency rooms are full of “self-pays”  because self-pays use ER’s as their only source of health care.  Preventative care does not exist for the average self-pay American.
Most restaurants and small businesses can’t afford to offer insurance plans and private plans are expensive, with high deductibles.  There are a those not yet experiencing problems with their health, but they have rent and weddings and cell phone plans to pay for and insurance premiums just don’t fit in to the budget.

The ACA will enhance our freedom — freedom from worry about accidents and sickness, freedom from worrying that if you use your insurance the rates will go up or worse yet you’ll no longer be covered, free from discrimination, free to provide insurance for our adult children, and free preventive care for seniors.

My favorite freedom is the freedom to have your own business because you are no longer forced to work in the corporate world to provide insurance for your family.  Many corporations don’t want us to have that kind of freedom and are backing politicians who convince us to keep things just as they are.

Just be careful what you wish for.

“…The health care law is little different from Social Security. The court unanimously recognized  in 1982 that it would be “difficult, if not impossible” to maintain the financial soundness of a Social Security system from which people could opt out. The same analysis holds here: by restricting certain economic choices of individuals, we ensure the vitality of a regulatory regime clearly within Congress’s power to establish. The justices aren’t likely to be misled by the reasoning that prompted two of the four federal courts that have ruled on this legislation to invalidate it on the theory that Congress is entitled to regulate only economic “activity,” not “inactivity,” like the decision not to purchase insurance. This distinction is illusory. Individuals who don’t purchase insurance they can afford have made a choice to take a free ride on the health care system. They know that if they need emergency-room care that they can’t pay for, the public will pick up the tab. This conscious choice carries serious economic consequences for the national health care market, which makes it a proper subject for federal regulation.

By LAURENCE H. TRIBE

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I feel that an individual whose actions are motivated by the wish to bring others happiness necessarily meets with less misfortune that one who does not. Sickness, old age, mishaps of one sort or another are the same for us all. But the sufferings which undermine our internal peace – anxiety, doubt, disappointment – these are definitely less.

Dalai Lama

While drinking my hot beverage made from the beans of a tree and paying my water bill I started thinking more about water.  Coffee bean trees grow because of water and my coffee is brewed in water.

Water keeps our exquisite Earth alive.  It saves us and our earth from being lifeless mineral globs.  Of course, we nor the earth would be alive long if all the earths water was contaminated.  I wonder why we care more about oil,  than clean water?

The critter above seems to be savoring that little orb of clean water the way I am savoring my coffee right now.  I am a lifeless mineral glob without my Java.

Water plus carbon and a few other minerals makes us.  To give anything life, to keep anything alive it must have water. Someone came up with a way for cars to run on water.  Who would interfere with that technology and why, someone devilish?

Water is so life giving that I think maybe God is water and we are drilling for –> well,  you get my point?

Do you think that an otherworldly influence is trying to get a message to us?   Or am I reading too much in to all the earthquakes and volcanoes.  Religious extremists say that bad things happen because of our heathen ways and disregard for our maker.  George Carlin said the earth is going to shake us off like a bad case of fleas.  I look at these pictures and that is one pissed off volcano wreaking havoc and causing millions to just stop.  Maybe the message is we need to stop for awhile and hang out on cots and talk about stuff with strangers in large rooms.

or else…

See more volcano images and havoc at –> http://blogs.tampabay.com/photo/2010/04/iceland-volcano.html

PS:  this woman and her daughters were highlighted in a blog I did in December.  Well…

The thoughts of this person are worth sharing.  There is a book called The case for God.  I haven’t read it, yet.  This commentary makes me want to. (the black words are Johannes and the blue words are mine.)

Johannes says:

There’s a tendency to disparage people who believe in God as weak, groveling sheep. Kindness is often equated to weakness as well. It’s easier to debunk only evangelical Christianity, rather than Judaism or Islam or Hinduism or the Quakers or Gnostic tradition or Episcopalians. But let us not forget that Western mathematicians Goedel, Newton, Gauss or scholars like Emerson, Kierkegaard, and more had their own particular way of discovering what God meant to them. Kierkegaard was an affluent depressed Danish philosopher who wrote some very interesting papers on faith. He loved his woman so much that he didn’t marry her.  He didn’t want her to have to deal with his depression.  He wrote that faith can only exist where there is doubt. You don’t have to have faith in a table because you can see it and feel it and put stuff on it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson lost his memory in later years and it embarrassed him.  I once read that fish have no memory and that is why it is ok for them to live in a bowl.  Everytime they swim to the other side of the bowl there is a whole fascinating and undiscovered world.  I had a betta fish in a bowl on my desk here. I was so sad when he died.  I used to put a mirror next to his bowl sometimes and he would try to fight his reflection.  No one taught him to fight it was just inately in him to do so.  I think some people are like that.

I’m getting off track.

Ms. Armstrong’s work is another scholarly breath of fresh air to people that Christianity is more complex and God was often viewed as more apophatic than paternal deliverer of goodness to your prayers. what is apophatic? One of her main points indeed is that both logic and myth have their place in thought, just as reason and emotion have their place in humanity. otherwise we’d be conformist robots.  We’d run around killing and pillaging those who don’t think like us. I think they call that religious wars.

If you ever studied advanced mathematics (I mean beyond the standard calculus or linear algebra/diff eq course), there are places where “logic” becomes less insightful — Russell’s paradox is an example or invoking Zorn’s lemma just to create something as basic as counting (natural) numbers. What does it mean to the mind that there are different sizes of “infinity”? Yet Cantor, who formalized set theoretic foundations of all modern mathematics, proved that indeed we do have different orders of infinity. (when you look up Bertrand Russell, Max Zorn, and Georg Cantor you read some pretty heady stuff.  Brilliance and depression seem to hang out together.  I think I’m glad I’m not that brilliant.  They all seem to allow science and fact to co-exist with faith.  I like that.)

Read Ms. Armstrong’s metaphor on music and the limits of human understanding of God. Blanket rejection of faith in such a smug, strident attitude is rather sad and unappreciative of the beauty of a free mind engaging in something fully outside the limited realms of “self.” I think Johannes is trying to tell us to “step outside the box”.

Yes, there is doubt, but faith without doubt is mere credulity as Kierkegaard posits. Faith is not to simply overcome doubt, but it, like love, transcends rationality. Religion ought to be more than just a set of logical beliefs, as music is more than just notes on a page and dry theory or mere vibrations or life is more than books, theories, and philosophers. The theory came after the experience, to explain and justify and to share. I love what Johannes says here. Love is something you can’t see or prove, the color yellow is something you can’t describe to a blind person, yet they exist.

Ms. Armstrong emphasizes that religion is embodied in practice, in action, in process with something greater than yourself. The existence of God is not so much a falsifiable hypothesis, and the semantics of language obfuscate much communication. Religious zealots, the oil industry and the tobacco industry hire lobbyists who do an incredible job of obfuscation. Show me where “love” exists. Show me where “music” exists. Show me where “beauty” is. There are many things outside the faculty of logic and language. Be humble and grateful that there is more. I am

Isn’t this a beautiful picture?  There is a guy in our town named Chip Ford who takes pictures for the Lovely Citizen.

I’m glad there are scientists and philosophers busy trying to find out why a pear smells like a pear or why the beautiful colors represented in this photograph happen.  I guess it all fits in the periodic table somewhere.

My point is Faith should not be mocked because it is based on doubt.  Faith is the driver for scientists and activists and incredible discoveries that people have made through all the recorded eras.  Faith and prayer saved my son.  I believe in the incredible power of faith.

http://knopf.knopfdoubleday.com/2009/09/22/the-case-for-god-by-karen-armstrong/

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So while we are enjoying the company of like minds and learning from opposing view points, we need to be careful so that our innate desire to seek out like minds doesn’t lead us into blind opposition. Blind opposition is dangerous and gets people killed and countries bombed and religions hated.  Television is entertaining and comforting and we tend to trust it.   TV’s droning familiarity can be as comforting as being in a room full of like minds, on the other hand,  it is a great source for blind opposition.

Sometimes, you just want to write your thoughts down, get them on paper, or blog, or comment. So here I am, stumbling around and falling over some information that needs to be shared. The authors aren’t always available to me while stumbling; I’ll try to give credit to the sites and authors of information retrieved and commented on. Quotes are in black and my comments are blue.