For a friend who’s flying off to a vacation in the Caribbean today:
In all the recent talk about US health care reform, one comparison
that hasn’t been made enough, IMO, is with public schools.
Yes, US public schools have their share of problems (don’t get me
started on students who can’t find the US on a map), but they do serve
two important functions: they’re a backstop and a floor.
Backstop: if, for whatever reason, you can’t send your kid to a
private school — perhaps your school of choice is too far away,
or too expensive, or the uniform clashes dreadfully with her hair, or
whatever — there’s always the public school option. That is, you
never have to choose between education you can’t afford and no
education, only between education and better education.
Right now, too many people are having to choose between health
insurance they can’t afford, and no health insurance.
Floor: private schools can remain in business only if they suck less
than public schools. If you’re of the “government can’t do anything
right” school of thought, this sets the bar low enough that it
shouldn’t be a problem.
But on the whole, public schools haven’t driven private schools out of
business, any more than public libraries killed off Blockbuster or
Netflix. the US Postal Service has killed off UPS and FedEx. In fact,
those two came along after the USPS, and thrived because USPS
was widely seen as being sucky.
So a government-run health insurance plan would define the lowest
level of quality that a plan would have to achieve. If your insurance
company sucks more than the federal government, you don’t deserve to
remain in business.
Backstop again: a lot of jobs that the government does are ones that
are unprofitable, but ought to be done. When No Child Left Behind
required schools to show how much bang they were giving for the
education buck, a lot of private schools tried to dump their special
needs students, simply because kids who need special attention or
staff training are less profitable than average kids. Public schools
don’t have that option. Again, by analogy, a public plan should cover
those people too unprofitable for private plans (I’m thinking Stephen
Hawking without the wealth and fame).
Now feel free to leave a comment saying how fucking obvious all of
this is.
Here are the
notes
(also
in org format)
for the Secular Bible Study presentation I’m going to be giving in an hour or so, about the book of Ecclesiastes.
From today’s Washington Post:
Bottled Water Boom Appears Tapped Out
[…] sales of bottled water have fallen for the first time in at least five years, assailed by wrathful environmentalists and budget-conscious consumers, who have discovered that tap water is practically free.
I’ll let Penn and Teller
show the lack of difference between bottled and tap water.
I’ll just add that the
I found with a quick search costs $6.23 for 24 0.5l bottles. That
works out to $1.97/gallon. My water utility, on the other hand,
charges a
maximum rate
of $5.08 per thousand gallons.
Who could possibly have predicted that in a recession, people would
turn to the generic product, when it costs 630 times less than the
name-brand?
On Thursday, Max Pappas boasted on Hardball how his organization, FreedomWorks, mobilizes right-wingers to go to town hall meetings. These are the loudmouthed WATBs whose only aim is to disrupt these meetings to shut down any discussion of health care reform.
Then on Friday, on C-SPAN, he said that there was nothing he could do about how his members were behaving.
The passions are so deep about this issue that we can’t send out an email that says “calm down.”
In contrast, the Student Secular Alliance recently organized a trip down to Ken Ham’s Hebrew Mythology “Museum”. The group included PZ Myers and over 300 atheists, freethinkers, and skeptics — people notoriously hard to organize.
Before the trip, PZ posted this:
Here’s what I expect: EVERYONE in our group will be firm, rational, and will not shy away from asking hard questions. You will feel free to wear some distinguishing clothing — a scarlet A, a Darwin fish, a t-shirt, something so that we can tell we are members of the same group. You will discuss the material on display with your peers, but with other visitors to the “museum” if and only if they invite it.
There are a number of things you will not do, however.
Do not show up wearing obscenities or particularly abusive articles of clothing. Dress casual, but look good — you are setting an example. Pro-science t-shirts are excellent, t-shirts with naked lesbians masturbating with bibles will give them an excuse to throw you out, so don’t do it. The SSA won’t even give you a ticket if you show up looking like you want to brawl.
You will not be disruptive. This is an information gathering mission that will make you a better informed individual to criticize bad ideas. Do not interfere with other visitors’ ability to examine the place. Ask questions only where appropriate. Collect questions that you can ask of any of the real scientists who will be in our group. Do not get into loud arguments. If a discussion starts getting angry on either side I want you to be the ones to back off.
Remember, if you are calm, civil, and well-behaved, and you tour the “museum”, we win. If you are calm, civil, and well-behaved, and the security guards throw you out because they don’t like the fact that you’re an atheist, we win. If you are angry, rude, and cause trouble that gives them a reasonable excuse to throw you out, we lose, and I will be very pissed off at you.
(bold added.)
The result? The Inside Science News Service published a story with the telling headline “Tour of Creation Museum Quieter Than Expected“.
In the most noticeable moment of noticeable conflict, Derek Rogers, a computer science major at Dalhouise University in Nova Scotia, Canada, was detained by guards for wearing a shirt with a slogan recently plastered on buses by activist groups that read “there’s probably no God, so get over it.” He was escorted to the bathroom and ordered to flip the shirt inside-out.
“One family of religious people told me that I had ruined their trip, and they drove all the way from Virginia,” said Rogers.
As far as I can tell, that was the one and only “disruptive” event. And if it really did go down as described (and it probably did, since it’s mostly confirmed by Answers in Genesis), 300 skeptics and freethinkers can make it through a palace of lies without causing a scene. (Hell, even I managed to sit through one of Kent Hovind’s performances without bursting into laughter.)
But Max Pappas can’t send a message to his mailing list explaining the whole “moral high ground” thing.
Way to go, wingnuts. Way to show the country that you’re a bunch of whiny crybabies with no ideas. The sooner you run off into the woods to await the Rapture, the happier we’ll all be.
Kent Hovind gets a mention on Colbert’s “Yahweh Or No Way” segment (fast forward to 0:39 if you’re impatient):
(Via Atheist Media.)
For those who, like me, didn’t manage to make it to Ken Ham’s
Creation Hebrew Mythology “Museum”
for the
Student Secular Alliance‘s
Zerg rush,
you can read the raw twit log
here.
Some of the highlights are collected at
Attempts at Rational Behavior,
but I’m sure that more will follow.
I’m not sure who first twote that “Adam sinned so I could enjoy bacon”, but now I want that on a tee-shirt.
Local 12, a news station in Cincinnati, has a
brief story
about this, with nothing of real interest.
The MSM is obviously engaged in a coverup, since Google News doesn’t
show any reports of hundreds of baby-eating atheists raping and
looting their way through the Kentucky countryside. And Cephalopod
Überhauptmeister PZ Myers is
in on the conspiracy.
Update: 17:04: PixelFish’s LOLCreashun and Dino Haiku.
Those links at the bottom of posts that say “Tags: foo, bar, baz” should now be working.
Back when I started this weblog, WordPress didn’t have keyword support, so I installed a plugin to implement them. Then at some point keywords became a core feature of WP. I think that having tags in the core and keywords in the plugin broke things.
So I finally consed up a quick and dirty kludge to transfer all of the old tags to new-style keywords, deactivated the plugin, and things started working again. Yay!
If you don’t recognize the name John A. Davison, see here for the backstory. Basically, he has a history of not understanding the difference between posts and comments, and of starting blogs with one post and hundreds of comments.
So you understand why I was surprised to see that his new blog has a whole seven posts. Seven!
Then I realized that each post is about one topic, and the older ones have hundreds of comments.
In other words, he’s still confused. But this time, he’s confusing posts with categories.
But that’s okay. I guess I’ll be laughing out of the other side of my mouth when his lone paper on the Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis overturns 150 years of biological research.