Against the Wind

Arrived a bit early on Amtrak, did a great tour of the momunents–thanks B &P. Came home tired and exhausted to a fine dinner.

Marianne and Cameron in Redman’s pool

I’ve been sewing all day. I’ll post a couple Proverbs of Solomon. It is Sunday after all.

Proverbs 10:8-9 (Young’s Literal Translation)

The wise in heart accepteth commands, And a talkative fool kicketh.
Whoso is walking in integrity walketh confidently, And whoso is perverting his ways is known.

I wonder why Young’s Literal translation uses the “eth” form of the verbs. And the Whosos? I rather like the “kicketh.” None of the other translations I saw used anything half so colorful.

Anyway, I’m not so wise in heart. I really do have a hard time doing what I’m told. I certainly qualify as the talkative fool often. The “interim study” in the Sunday school class has been on Wisdom literature… Job, Ecclesiastes, Proverbs. We spent a bit of time talking last Sunday and this about integrity. It really doesn’t seem a hard concept to me. It does seem fairly rare…a man of integrity is unusual for sure. Or maybe I’m just cynical, and think everyone has ulterior motives.

I’ve loaded my system with antibiotics (bladder infection), it’s time to find my bunk.

Wanda Watkins was out taking her exercise walking in her neighborhood when she encountered a big boar. The animal scared her; so leaping into the bed of some neighbor’s truck, she dialled 9-1-1. After animal control and police arrived she found that the pig, which had shambled up to her, making soft sorts of snorting sounds, was a neighbor’s pet. She had seen him out the night before while taking out garbage, and so was a bit on edge while she was walking.

Barbara knows everyone who walks in Heritage Park in the morning, as well as the main keeper of the grounds. So she was asking about what was going on, as I walked around in her “counter via” path with her for a while. Susan the main grounds keeper told us the tents were going up for a school supply give away by one of the non denominational churches in the area. They meet in the movie theater, which explains the Sunday morning traffic there. They were organized to a faretheewell, and the park was full of people with their kids coming for free school supplies. Susan also told us about the rail accident in the morning. Some man fell asleep on the tracks. When the train was coming, he sat up, held his hand up as if to stop the train, but it didn’t. The tracks were closed for several hours in the wee hours cleaning that mess up.

From my photo journal: I spent the Fourth of July holiday at the home of a local realtor (the kind that’s built a large local firm.) She’s had to rebuild twice since Katrina, but it’s all coming together. And it was lovely to be invited to play games and celebrate Independence day in a truly “old lady” style. I even took sparklers. And the bulkhead at dusk just called to the camera which I toted along as well.

Wretchard once again provides great blog leads. He quotes extensively today from Daylight’s Mark I’ll snip and exerpt a bit myself, as it’s a considered discussion of the medical reform moving through congress, inexhorribly as grass through a cow….

It’s a long excerpt, and the whole thing is worth reading if you’re interested in a pov expressed in “non bumper sticker” terms.

Now, how would I go about deciding what to cut and how to save money and “bend the future cost curve”? I would rate behaviors & services on a scale of evil (which for this discussion I define as greed:utility ratio). So things that I’d like to see happen that I think would curb costs without degrading current or future quality of care would be:

1. Significant tort reform…
2. Assigning the cost burden of unnecessary or likely futile services to patients or their families
Eliminating television and direct to consumer pharmaceutical marketing …
3. Breaking the oligopolies of health insurance coverage present in many states …If ever there was a reason for anti-trust intervention, this is it. Consumer choice is constrained… and costs are dramatically increased to patients and physicians. The solution to this is not creating a government monopoly of health care, but using deregulation & anti-trust law to allow cross-state insurer competition, and nurturing novel health care coverage systems … Government could do a great service by jumpstarting the infrastructure to create such a true free market but it should not take over such a market.
4. Encouraging charity care: Lawyers can treat pro bono work as a tax deduction; hospitals treat charitable services (which are often overcharged in the first place) as a tax write-off and get income tax exemption for being nonprofits. Physicians currently have no such benefit.
5. Cost Transparency: …quite often indigent patients get stuck with full charges while Medicare or large insurance company patients get charged much less due to contractual arrangements. This process is just insane. If the rich or foreigners want to pay for concierge care and first-class service, so be it. But for the system as a whole, doctors should be allowed to set their own fees … waive standard fees for the poor (remarkably, underbilling is considered fraud), and charges should be transparent and consistent.
6. Encourage innovation: Increasing tax credits for R&D, establishing prizes for translating discovery for big problems, and extending patent protection for new molecular entities while limiting patent extension for me-too drugs …would promote advances in drug and device development and maintain America’s edge in science & technology.

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Is the likely Democratic plan a good idea?
I have to say no. Expanding Medicare & Medicaid for all opens the door to government price controls, which will devolve into wait-lists, poor quality personnel, salaried staff (who by definition are incentivized to give minimum effort), increasing physician refusal to see Medicare & Medicaid patients, and underinvestment in research and facilities (see Great Britain, and Canada). The Australian system, where public hospitals are well-funded and physicians can choose to accept government rates or charge higher, might be a viable option. The VA system (which was held up as an example by Hillary Clinton) is good at certain things (traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury) but is poor at infrastructure maintenance, efficient clinic and surgical flow, and customer service; further, its costs are held down as much of VA health care is in reality delivered by residents. The proof of the pudding on the VA is that the vast majority of VA patients are enlisted personnel; the retired officers go elsewhere.

Which of the plans bouncing around have useful ideas?
I think the Daschle-Dole idea of giving tax credits to all who pay income or payroll taxes to purchase health care is a good thing – equalizing the playing field of those with employer health coverage and those without. We want health insurance to be available to all contributing or productive members of society, but we don’t want free health care as a dole to contribute to persistent unemployment.

Lots of other bits and pieces drifting through my life. But enough already.

Once again, I’ve shilly shallied until it’s later than I really want to be awake. But Marianne is getting married and I think this is the ceremony we need!

Another grin inducing video.

Then there’s a little color, from Deb’s design wall in Houston, the center…border was part of the shopping I did while in Houston.

I had a blog essay of sorts in mind…something about how the lines we draw to make categories and groups of people or academic fields or genres of music are never as clearly defined as we think, and we miss a lot (or I do) by not dealing with specific people with specific behaviors and fears…. I guess it’s a follow on to my thoughts on psychopaths. Evil exists but is anyone purely evil? Furthermore, we miss a lot of fascinating and interesting phenomena because we catagorize some of the serendipty of life as random chance, when there may be something else…

I really liked this draw back from the past on what motivates conservative thinking. From Powerline this morning

In some ways William Buckley’s Up From Liberalism (1959) is a dated book, but Richard Brookhiser quotes the book’s timely penultimate paragraph:

I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yestereday at the voting booth.

Wretchard keeps on writing to draw a line between red state and blue state outlooks and philosophy.

Joel Klotkin, writing in the journal of the American Enterprise Institute discusses the relative outlooks of the Blue and Red State models, terms he uses as shorthand not only to describe a cultural divide, but also an economic outlook.

Dividing our world, our picture in our heads of the world around us into abstractions which may or may not have relevance to the truth…. there’s cost to that, but it also simplifies

Bob of Bob’s blog from CO is reading and posting about a book on the Columbine killers.
Something in the description made me think that I may know one of those. Crazy thought but could be. Emotionally unconnected. Check. Very good at disguising it. Check. I woner what the distance is between garden variety narcisism and psychopath.

Just a truly scary thought.

Lately, I’ve needed some quick and easy reads. I’ve also been previewing books for possibly reading with Quentin as we ride the Train to DC and New York. We’re off on that big adventure in a week. Scary!

I mentioned my love of adolecent literature while some of the church ladies were there helping with Bible School. G– brought me a whole sack full of books. I’d just picked up a few at Sam’s club. I reread “Sara Plain and Tall” and remembered how much I love the well done specimens of this genre. Coming of age books are so full of the delicious promise of the changes of life. My view is that we continue to change throughout or abandon the journey prematurely. The best of them are wonderful!

The next book I read was one that was new to me. So I decided to try to write something between a blurb and a review of it.

Walk Two Moons, Sharon Creech 1994

Salamanca Tree Hiddle tells a tale, the tale she told to her grandparents. The road trip across the whole “ding dang country” needed a story to fill the hours, so Sal told the story of the friend she found in Phoebe Winterbottom. Phoebe had respectable parents with regular habits and she also possessed a great imagination.

Phoebe’s story included a lunatic, a murderer, journals written for English class strange messages showing up on the porch, and a disappearing mother.

Behind Phoebe’s stories, “I hope everything turned out alright, I’m a little worried about Peeby,” says Gram (Gramps’ “Gooseberry”) is Sal’s story. As they drive across the country Sal is hearing a whispering, “hurry, hurry, hurry!” She wants to be reunited with her Mother on her Mother’s birthday, and hopes against hope to bring her home.

Sharon Chreech weaves stories of love and loss and living as smoothly as a Navajo braid. A tale within a tale, one quirky, one bittersweet, and a third of a gift of love form into a single story. A multiple award winning book of delights. Don’t wait for it to fall into your hands.

A topic that never fails to catch my attention is that of locating truth, and examining facts and evidence to try to find it. Wretchard always serves up some interesting ideas. This post from today deals with some of my favorite themes. Belmont Club

A provider of business intelligence services asked me whether “reality always won” in the face of a determined disinformation campaign. Without thinking much about why I said “yes”. It was a bold assertion because the spin doctor’s tools have become so great (think for example of Photoshop) it is easy to believe that an imposture can be maintained indefinitely.

Freedom implies the ability to make mistakes; it may even imply the necessity of them. Well might the perfect being exclaim: “not till now have I understood the tale of your people and their fall. … For if this is indeed, as the Eldar say, the gift of the One to Men, it is bitter to receive.” Bitter indeed; for freedom is humanity’s curse and greatest gift, the ground of both fall and redemption. It is our common fate and our staircase to the stars.

Last of all, a quilt top photo. This is the top I took to Houston.

Our little church has had so much turmoil it’s a miracle we’re still hanging in. But when we called RevB, at least one parishoner cast a no vote for making the call.

After church today, LizE who has made a vocation of getting the cookies and punch together for after the service said, please say something supportive to RevB. We are so lucky to have a preacher at all, and LizE seems to think that the carping that has rent the congregation several times before is getting to RevB.

I have a lunch date with RevB and a couple of other ladies on Wednesday so maybe I’ll get a clue what’s at the foundation of this story later.

This afternoon, I decided to have an “Amish Sunday.” Not a no technology day, but no computer this afternoon at all. I did play with my I phone. Still need to get the voice mail set up, and the email doesn’t send properly.

JoeM was looking for a date to go with him to the Little Theater this evening, so I got to see Guys and Dolls and had a nice time.

Are there a couple things you still want to do? Victora lists her two. What are yours?

Lately I’ve had an earworm of a sort. A recurring thought theme. “What is the chief end of man? To Glorify God.” “And what would you do to God’s Glory if you weren’t so afraid?”

One of the things I’d do is get into education and research. But not in any form in which I’ve experienced it up to this point. I keep thinking somehow I could start a very small very private school. The grandboys? Maybe I could use students who had been ejected from the public schools or maybe I could just do private teaching for some wealthy client who needs a tutor for their child/children. Or maybe the church needs to open a small school. We need to touch young lives. The part of the puzzle that came into play today was this.

Of all the qualities that distinguish humans from other species, how we learn is one of the most significant. In the July 17, 2009 issue of the journal Science, researchers who are at the forefront of neuroscience, psychology, education, and machine learning have synthesized a new science of learning that is already reshaping how we think about learning and creating opportunities to re-imagine the classroom for the 21st century.

“To understand how children learn and improve our educational system, we need to understand what all of these fields can contribute,”

We need to teach children in ways that they can be involved in social skills and use the setting to learn about the world we are leaving them.

This is what I want to do, this is where I want to be.

It goes to Steve Chapman in his discussion of the government’s health care reform proposals and what they promise:

But efficiency is to government programs what barbecue sauce is to an ice-cream sundae: not a typical component.

Today Neo-neocon takes time out from politics to highlight a wonderful bird clip.

The kids gave me a nice party. Last time we went to the little Lebanese restaurant in town there was no business and the food was delicious. This time the pita was stale or something.. it was just off. Can’t stay in the food business in this area cutting those sorts of corners. I won’t hurry back.

The youth of Banner Elk gave the local aged Presbyterians one heck of a VBS. The little children just bloom under the attention of the teens. And the kids from NC swept up, packed up and headed out today. Like a visitation from angels.

This aged Presbyterian is BEAT.

Now I need ideas for Quentin sorts of activities in Washington D. C.

Just tried to add a photo and it’s more effort than I’m putting into it tonight.  Ok, back a little later… think I’ve got it now

The Youth Group

Linda mentioned in comments that our health system certainly needs some sorting.  Tara passed through the other day with the stories from the drug store counter.  She’s authorized to offer a very reduced price on generics to uninsured customers if they ask for it.  On the other hand she had a insured patient getting $600 prescriptions to grow eyelashes for a $50 copay.  The disconnect between the cost of a service to a customer and the cost if some sensible market prices were allowed to exist is astounding.

There was a wonderful bit of parody written today if I can find it… Ed Morrisey hits a triple!

Just to show that it can be done