02/29/2010: Costs to Save America (not finished)

Let's see, on one side, we have the costs to destroy 2 governments, get nearly a quarter of a million people killed, set up two failed states, and be involved in protracted military operations that may last decades. One war was premised by the desire to capture the 9/11 mastermind. Remember the jaunty "He can run but he can't hide."? The other was justified by the premise that we needed to disarm a Middle Eastern dictator who was on the verge of attacking the United States. As it turned out, the vaunted weapons of mass destruction we were told would be used against us never existed. He had no plans to attack.

According to a report by Congressional Research Service in 09/28/2009, the total cost of war as counted by the war-related portions of the budgets DOD, State and USAID, and VA Medical comes to $1.08 trillion, including the FY 2010 budget request. By contrast, in 09/29/2009, the Congressional Budget office estimated that a health plan based on mandatory insurance and public "health exchanges" would cost $894 billion over 2010 to 2019. On 7/14/2009 it had estimate $1.04 trillion for a more expansive plan including an expansion of Medicare and a generous public option.

In the richest nation in history, 62.1% of all bankruptcies in 2007 were related to medical expenses and 78% of these bankruptcies were filed by people who had medical insurance. 15% of population has no health insurance, making them one accident away from total lifetime financial ruin. The Economist's “Pocket World in Figures, 2009 Edition” sheds some light. The U.S. leads the world in spending 15.2% of GDP, vice number 5 France at 11.1%, on health care. For our expense, we rank number 41 in life expectancy, behind number 9 France and Canada. In the country where conservatives value family values so much, we do not even make the top 25 in lowest infant mortality rates, whereas France is number 12. Conservatives love to denigrate world ranking studies, but these are from the U.K.'s leading conservative news magazine. The data from the World Health Organizations is more sanguine. The U.S. has always performed abysmally compared to the rest of the world in Health Care System performance, behind a frequently ranked number 1 France. Conservatives dismiss the WHO studies as biased, but are unable to produce contrary evidence beyond shallow appeals to patriotism. On the home front, the New England Journal of Medicine published an accepting nod to the data in a 1/6/2010 post. Americans pay world class pricing for their health care and get Third World benefits. Earlier this year, at the peak of the Bush recession, Humana, the large insurance company, posted record profits.

One will know a movement by its followers. The American Medical Association, the American Heart Association, and the American Hospital Association have all lined up in support of Obama-Care. Opposing it is a collection of insurance industry groups, like America's Health Insurance Plans, and Republican small government ideologues, neither of which put the health of the individual American as first priority.

The Republicans tell us not to put a government bureaucrat between us and health care. The government bureaucrat is at worst a disinterested mediator who's job would be to dispense medical care as fairly and legally as possible. If the small government advocates – in 1900, they were called anarchists – have their way, an insurance claim adjuster will remain the adjudicator of health care. As an insurance industry employee, the adjuster's primary job is to maximize corporate profits, not ensure fair, equitable, or even humane health care provision.

If the Republicans win on Sunday, America will remain herd cattle health insurance fodder for an outrageously profitable insurance industry dispensing Third World grade medical care.

01/30/2010: Tea Heads

Over the past 13 months, the U.S. has been spending roughly $10 billion a month garrisoning 120,000 or so troops in Iraq to prop up George W. Bush's failed government there. We've been there for 8 years, mostly at troop levels and monetary burn rates significantly higher than these numbers. The Tea Heads blanche at spending $800 bill to ensure every man, woman, and child in America has access to medical care that is not dependant on their employers. Where were their voices as the man they so enthusiastically put into the Presidency bumbled his way into two wars he didn't and couldn't win and which he financed by borrowing from the Chinese?

The Tea Heads chose their name aptly. The French and Indian War was provoked when the English colonists began pushing west across the Appalachians into lands claimed by the French and native Indian tribes. While the Indians welcomed the French who came mostly to trap and trade with them, the English colonists, with their encroaching settlements, were unwelcome. The British Government attempted to forbid expansion westward, but was ignored by the colonists. When intrusion caused a military response by the French and Indians, the colonists demanded and received protection from troops of the British Empire.

Subsequently, the English had to pay the war debt. After several trans-Atlantic exchanges, the British levied a tea tax on the American colonists to help pay for the costly war with France. Incensed, and apparently expecting their war to be free of charge, the Boston Tea Party participants sealed their place in history by vandalizing merchandise in Boston Harbor.

War for free or war on credit, is there much of a difference?

01/05/2010: Two Poems

Auden's "Shield of Achilles" and Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" both left life time impressions on me. I cannot think George Bush or Sarah Palin ever read them.

Notes from Freud in preparation for a synopsis.

"true source of religious sentiments" p 10. "It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of 'eternity', a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded--as it were, 'oceanic'." p11

One may, he thinks, rightly call oneself religious on the ground of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one rejects every belief and every illusion. p11

Normally there is nothing of which we are more certain than the feeling of our self, of our own ego. p12 That such an appearance is deceptive, and that on the contrary the ego is is continued inwards, without andy share delimitation, into an unconscious mental entity which we designate as the id and for which it serves as a kind of facade .....

p13 But towards the ouside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. ...Pathology has made us acquainted with a great number of states in which the boundary lines between the ego and and the external world become uncertain or in which they are actually drawn incorrectly.

"adult's ego-feeling cannot have been the same from the beginning....it muchs have gone through a process of development, which cannot, of course, be demonstrated but which admits of being contructed with a fair degree of probability." p13

p14. He must be very strongly impressed by the fact that some sources of excitation, which will later recognize as his own bodily organs, can provide with sensations at any moment, whereas other sources evade him from time to time--and only reappear as a result of his screaming for help. In this way there is for the first time set over against the ego an 'object', in the form of something which exists 'outside' and which is only forced to appear by a special action.

A tendency arises sto separate from the ego everything that can become a source of such unpleasure, to throw it outside and to crate a pure pleasure-ego which is confronted by a strange and threatening 'outside'.

One comes to learn a procedure by which, through a deliberate direction of one's sensory activities or through suitable muscular action, one can differentiate between what is internal-- what belongs to the ego-- and what is external--what emanatesf rom the outer world....the reality principle.

p15. In order to fend off cerain unpleasurable excitations arising from within, the ego can use no other methods than those which it uses against unpleasure coming from without, and this is the starting-point of important pathological disturbances.

Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive ...feeling.. the ideational contents appropriate to it would be precisely those of limitless-ness and of a bond with the universe--.the same ideas with which my friend elucidated the 'oceanic' feeling.

p20 The derivation of religious needs from the infant's helplessness and longing for the fater aroused by it seems