Dear every single person in America:

Like many I’m following the debate on potential changes in our health care system in United States. I feel strongly about this as I feel all Americans should.

When I’m talking to my son, who is 17, about why this is such a big deal I find it very difficult to convince him that all of these methods for paying for hospitalization are important. Yet I remember distinctly as a man in my 20’s who had just started working for the state as a teacher, actually being amused by the requisite insurance lecturers we had to happen at the beginning of every

Every year there would be innumerable meetings that we were required to attend. We would need to sit in for an hour or so to listen to some insurance representative. This person would tell us what our deductible was depending on the plan we chose, what our benefits would be in the event of some debilitating illness, how much our families would reap if indeed we were killed in a terrible hunting accident. Through these meetings I remember fighting off gallows humor as one grievous possibility after another was itemized by this insurance rep.

The only thing that prevented me from sharing my glib disregard for these meetings was how serious all of the older (and by older I mean late 40’s and 50’s) instructors took all of this. They paid attention with a grim dedication that I took to be part of their teacherly attention to detail. Now I’m in my 40’s and I have seen parents, friends, and siblings bump into his serious health issues I have lost quite a bit of my grin when it comes to details of paying for all kinds of hospitalization and medication.

Talking to my children about what we reference as Disney, circle-of-life issues we will consistently discuss the relationship between prey and predator. That way my young daughters, who are reasonably dismayed by the attack and dismemberment of certain types of animals, might have a more grounded philosophy in their opinions of carnivores. If the National Geographic special that one is watching is about lions, and the Lions are slowly starving to death during a lean season, it’s very easy to feel sorry for the lion. If the special is focused on the tenuous life of an antelope or gazelle then it’s very easy for us to feel sorry for the prey and resent the predator. All of these lectures end with a single question: how many gazelles die of old age? The answer, of course, is none. As they lose a step they get eaten.

So lately I’ve been thinking about health care for those in the United States who need it I have been asking myself the same question. Well, okay, not exactly the same question. But I have been asking how many of us go through life without needing serious medical attention? The answer, none. Just like antelope and gazelle our time is going to come. We will at some point require serious medical care.

This has made me evangelical on the issue of government-funded health care. And before I get very far into this conversation I will point out that some might argue if the government, and when I say government I suppose I should say “government” pays for something, really that means we are paying for something. And I’m okay with that. If a hobo has broken his leg, or a NFL star has broken his leg or of migrant laborer has broken his leg we need to get that looked at. So, yes the government is us. We need to pay for health care.

If every single American requires coverage at some point and logically why would we ask for businesses to underwrite that? As we have all become far too familiar lately, businesses are in the business of making money for stockholders. That’s why they call it business. Unapologetically businesses are concerned about stockholder profit. One can argue that there are green companies out there, that there are rainbow-sunshine factories, that there are really nice businesses, and so on all day long. But when one observes what has taken place over the last year in our country with businesses gambling so that their executives can become fabulously a wealthy, it’s hard to imagine that we live in a country where those same corrupt individuals will try to create a safety net for people who are not advancing their bottom line. And if you’re advancing their bottom line today, you probably won’t be helping very much tomorrow or the day after tomorrow anyway.

Furthermore, insurance companies are businesses themselves. No great insight here. But still, insurance companies exist as independent businesses whose primary goal isn’t even longevity. They exist in a world of American enterprise where short-run profits dominate the mindset of every BMW-driving executive in the company. One can argue that insurance companies are really a delightful concept of shared responsibility and so on. But that Pollyanna perspective on why a business exists does not reflect at all what we know to be true and what we’ve seen over the past year and before.

Insurance companies, while not the devil, are not the devil only because they don’t care. The devil cares. He has an evil laugh, he has an evil grin, and he takes joy in your suffering and pain.

The opposite of caring isn’t cruelty the opposite of caring is the absence of care. Insurance companies don’t. Really. Suffer or be well, a corporation does not have a smile. They don’t have a corporate conscience. They can’t be evil because they are amoral money-making structures who really can’t care if you live or die. Corporations are legal fictions. They can be sued as individuals. They can be constructed. They can merge. They can be taken over. They can go bankrupt. But they don’t exist as people. And, unlike the devil, they don’t give a damn if you suffer and die.

So my first point is that we all need health care. My second point is insurance companies have a mandate that does not address that need. Governments are these odd structures we’ve created to take care of things like building castle walls around the village, paving highways to promote commerce and enterprise, and funding officers to take care of bad guys. I believe we all agree that we want to keep out the Huns, have nice highways, and prevent criminals from raping our wives and stealing our valuables.

But we live in a time where the bad guys don’t do as much damage as STDs, and lung cancer, and carcinoma sarcoma, and the list is truly endless. When health care was about mending broken legs and taking out appendixes, while we were birthing our own babies and burying our own dead it was a different world that we live in now. Now we have this gigantic industry that is profoundly inefficient in this country that we rely on for life and death. It is time for our government, as inept as it may very well be, to create some efficiencies that will allow us to all get effective and low-cost coverage for the host of plagues that will someday chase us down in the field and eat us up. We are all gazelle the lions that will someday catch us aren’t morticians, and they aren’t doctors but they are bill collectors.

Michael as a Pirate

If you don’t know him, Mike is the better brother. He was the best until Ed died. Then we became comparative, not superlative. We both did. Well I almost lost my comparative last week. Mike had a stroke and brain bleed. I don’t know much about medicine except for what I see on “House.” Those illnesses are always interesting and the doctors are always only interested in them as a complement to their personal stories. I suppose I am as shallow as they are, as I see all of this through my own filter and how it affects me. And it affects me bad. You don’t have to know much medicine, or watch much television medicine to figure that a brain bleed joins two words together that you don’t want sitting next to each other. As for strokes, I knew/know that Anne Bancroft was all messed up for a long time and then everyone said how great she recovered, but you could always tell.

So I drove to see mike and feared the worst. I suppose the worst is drooling incoherence. It was not the worst. It was vastly better than the worst, although I understand he almost died. He is sitting  up under his own power in the required hospital wheelchair, with half of him wholly on board using the same gestures, being as sharp as ever and listening with the intelligence for which he is known. The other side is inactive, asleep. You can’t tell of course, but it’s like a dentist’s visit gone awry. He is fully numb on his left and when he speaks you can tell. He feeds himself making a mess for which he would have been mortified last week, and which he disregards this week.

We talk. I try to let him speak at first and nod indicating I hear him. But, truth is I understand precious little right away. Short sentences I get. But anything longer gets lost on me and I still nod. He tells me not to. He understands that he is largely not understandable. When Anna, my niece is there I talk to her mostly so that she can respond and she keeps up his side of the conversation. Mike, neither stupid nor bothered by this, only adds that she should expand on some topics. He tells her to say more. She is a tad timid and is not as verbose as her dad.  No one is verbose as her dad. So as she takes the task of being his general respondent he allows that she does voice the family catching up vocabulary. My kids could speak for me on the word streams of family gossip. But mike always shares the long version and Anna not.

He wears out after an hour or two and starts drifting off. He has the stamina of a little old man and looks a bit like a pirate speaking out of one side of his mouth, and sounds like a very drunk pirate. But all of those ungenerous observations aside he is wholly Michael. He is sharp, impatient, completely patient, kind, abrupt, funny, serious, demanding, self effacing, loving and eager to get back to the next thing on his lengthy and demanding personal agenda. While easy to exhaust, and visually frustrated he is clearly not feeling sorry for Michael. He still has an enormous amount to do. He has a job to do, five kids, to get finished with and out of the house, he has that car to work on, those thirty three books to read, and a demanding wife to accommodate. In short he is a busy man who will take this in stride. This may sound foolishly hopeful, as Anne Bancroft was messed up and Mike is messed up. But I know Michael.

He will be that patient on House who defies the doctors, insults the staff and changes their lives. He will. That’s is who he is. Until he finishes he will get no kind words from me. He is my older brother, who has picked on me mercilessly for years. I will call him names and taunt him and tell him I expect him to hold up his end of the deal. He is the better brother. Let’s see him act like it.

Christ said “take up your bed and walk.” Not lie there and be a weenie. So, Mike, let’s see what you made of. Get up, get better, kick my butt.

Writing and Donald Miller

Introduction to Writing with Donald Miller from Brian Mosley on Vimeo.

Spaghetti Farmers from History

 

For MacKensie: the Pasta Queen.

Valentines Day: Serious Implications

 

it’s viral for a good reason…

Be careful out there.

Blog Jumping

Ripping off the fine people at Back Reaction

So I have a few blogs I read every now and then. Reading a lot of blogs is rather like reading other people’s mail. And while I am not opposed to that, per se, it is still necessarily a procrastination technique, and I have far too many of those as is. Not the least of which is good parenting. But more on that later.

Now I know that one is not supposed to just grab all the stuff off of another blog and claim it as the results of their own mining, anymore than one should descend on poor old John Sutter and overrun his mill and take his gold. But claim jumping is tough to resist.

Look at these crazy cool links that Sabine Hossenfelder (theoretical physicist from Canada, really) and Stefan Scherer (from Frankfurt) have on their way cool blog:

This is crazy cool as it tells me artistically that which I fear to be true in my own heart every day.

From chris Jordan dot com Yowee what a great way to show what you are saying…

This is just fun as it is the low-tech way to be high tech…

Look over their Blog and you will see stuff about the Plank phase and entropy and specialization and god. What bright folks who write ever so well.

Thnks S&S,

kevin

Links for the APSA talk

Us Gov sites

American Memory

An important site yet will be known by most. Much primary data.

Congressional Search-CRS

Through the University of North Texas, but serves as a point to request docs from members of congress

Gov Printing Office GPO

Another source for primary data.

Statistical US-Census.gov

Links to PDF stats that all should know

U.S. Gov Search

The US gov meta search tool

 

The Rest

Archive.org

Serious archive of media. Major tool

Avalon-Yale-Archive

Large archive site with primary data

Congress.org -Roll Call

The DC paper, Roll Call sponsors this tool for researching congress votes

Crooks and Liars-Blog

Sample of an active, partisan sponsored blog that includes streaming embed files.

GMU Center for History and New Media

The George Mason materials seem the best on line. This site takes some time to discover the many offerings. Note their “copyright explanation section,” that links to copyright.gov.

Google Earth
an important app/site. Imporatnt because of the mix of site and application

Google Scholar

While this search tool is limited to many for-pay destinations. It is worth knowing the direction of academic search tools. Also note the full-text possibilities.

History matters-collection

Great site with tools and archive and links. Sort of a “secondary-school” flavor.

History.com-Streaming

Worth noting when corporate interests get involved. Example of what’s wrong with advert sites.

Huffington Post

What is replacing the print papers. Lost of fluff as time passes.

national geographic maps

Not mapquest.

oyez Supreme Court Summaries

Political Compass-diagnostic (bias)

A biased albeit interesting tool for students to note categorization.

Politico.com
A political (no doubt partisan) site that is clean and easy to use.

ScholarPress

The academic version of WordPress.

Slate V – Streaming

Slate is Newsy of course, but is an example of a streaming media mix. With great blog use.

Stanford Accessibility Program

Looked and found little on assistive technology

WorldCat-Search

The entry level for research but can be shared and stored etc…

Write Source-Reference

Nice reference site.

Tech should include handhelds

“death of E mail” thoughts.

Social Networking, Blogs, Twitter.

Cut equick demos of al that new and ha not been seen.

Need hip flashy timeline app, and concept map use.

Indirect Education: Thoughts on “You Suck at Photoshop.”

I have been thinking about ways to tell a story about one thing in the foreground with the true message happening in the background. This technique is not exactly new, but it fascinates me when a story can behave as though it is about a boy’s adventures growing up in the pre-Civil War south, when actually it is a profound critique on cultural norms of an entire society. It is amazing when a story like, David Means’ “The Secret goldfish” describes the relative condition of the a goldfish’s tank, and from this wonderful unknown perspective he describes the level of peace and unrest of a family’s domestic health. The story is about the fish, but is not about the fish at all. I want to make a video of a simple foreground story while actually introducing characters and a second narrative in the background.

There are hundreds of examples of this kind of thing but I recently heard a piece on NPR by my hero, Scott Simon, as he discussed a tutorial series called “You Suck at Photoshop.” This sounds like any of the hundreds of these self-assigned tutorials where folks or varying skill levels take it upon themselves to narrate screen captures and show the world how to click and drag. This one assumes a few things up front. Things that educators tend to assume in a less explicit fashion all of the time. The narrator knows things that the listener wants to know. That the expertise offered is of enough value to put up with the inherent condescension of the instructor, who does not view the pupil as a peer with different skill sets , but as a bone head who is likely to make all of the cliché errors that the expert has seen countless times. The theme of this tutorial is not that there “are no stupid questions.” But rather that stupid questions are all there are or one may ever hope for.

The podcast is a parody and while it does do some instruction, it hooks the viewer with the back-story: that the narrator, Donnie, is a troubled soul with a broken marriage whose every instructional comment is saturated with self-involved soliloquy and telling, unhealthy obsessions. The target audience for this parody of dismal pedagogy and a no-life YouTube producer is the coveted 13-29 demographic I assume, and it is pleasantly sophomoric as he gives every listener far more than the student of Photoshop would want to know. In this case I am amused not because the number two story is the main point, but rather because there is instruction at all. How interesting is it when a skilled instructor hides real meaning in a personal narrative? How can stories be told on multiple levels? How can, how should we make education interesting? I am not suggesting that this is the model, but it may be closer than most would want to admit.

We have had instructors who had the uncanny ability to make the bland interesting. Listening to lectures by physicist, Richard Feynman; author, Bill Bryson; or psychologist Jeremy Wolfe (through MIT opencourse)Their stories and illustrations enhance the material so much that while they tell a story you don’t just (as preacher Maurice Boyd says) hear the illustration and miss the point. As an instructor myself the goal is to blur the lines between living and learning. We can enjoy learning. We should enjoy living. Setting aside learning activities as unenjoyable chores is like telling kids up front that painting fences at always a bore. Who knows it may be fun

kyte test

20 things I hate about the iphone

20 things I hate about the iphone

1. If you must enter numbers during a call, you then press the live keypad to your ear.
2. If you are sent a picture you cannot view it.
3. The still camera is either too dark or too light every time
4. The video camera is… well, non existent
5. The voice recognition is, well it has none.
6. To send a picture… oh that’s right you cant…
7. It does not recognize Flash
8. If you use the map feature while driving you will die
9. If you try to dial while driving you will die
10. If you try to change tunes while driving you will die
11. If you rent a stupid movie and start it evaporates.
12. If your battery wears out you are out of luck
13. As it ages it gets quieter so I cannot hear the receiver nor the ring.
14. Ringtones are a hassle or a scam
15. I lose signal all of the time.
16. Sending email away from home is a hassle.
17. Form over function: It is a lovely, pretty, elegant, slippery, fragile brick.
18. Likelihood of dropping it in the course of a year? 100%
19. Likelihood of it breaking? 100%

And the last thing I hate is not about the phone but about the mindless droves who think it was so great.

   20.  Apple fans are zombies as Jobs says it has a 90% approval rating.