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Showing posts from July, 2012

'A Moral Question'

"If Nikki White had been a resident of any other rich country, she would be alive today." "Around the time she graduated from college, Monique A. "Nikki" White contracted systemic lupus erythematosus; that's a serious disease, but one that modern medicine knows how to manage. If this bright, feisty, dazzling young woman had lived in, say, Japan - the world's second - richest nation - or Germany (third richest), or Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Canada, Sweden, etc., the health care systems there would have given her the standard treatment for lupus, and she could have lived a normal life span. But Nikki White was a citizen of the world's richest country, the United States of America. Once she was sick, she couldn't get health insurance. Like tens of millions of her fellow Americans, she had too much money to qualify for health care under welfare, but too little money to pay for the drugs and doctors she needed to stay alive. She spent the last

History as Farce

"Those who do not learn the lessons of history are suffered to repeat them." "The farther back you can look, the farther forward you can see." "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce."* Is history useful prognosticator? Alex Rosenberg thinks not, '"Human history is a thoroughly Darwinian process. Like all other Darwinian processes, it can't repeat itself, not even as farce. It is always unpredictably producing novelty, which historical study can't anticipate. The lesson of history - both natural and human - is that there are no lessons to extract from it." But we humans don't often accept reality, and ardently believe certain things, and argue for these things, and think these things mean something. Consider as you read the excerpt below that America had her best years after FDR's New Deal and read carefully the bold words and then ask your self, maybe history does repeat itself. Maybe today we are living in