Group items tagged

In addition to pondering the notions of changeability and continuity that watching a stream flow into a river tend to prompt, I was also counting and weighing glass eels, tiny transparent fish only two or three inches long that enter the tributaries of the river each spring. Which is to say, I was practicing something called citizen science, loosely defined as scientific research in which amateurs help experts gather data. Eels are tiny envoys from the realm of the inconceivable. Scientists have never been able to document their mating or birth in the North Atlantic's Sargasso Sea, nor do they know what governs their voyage to the coast's freshwaters.

Until very recently, technology had a clear, if boring, purpose: by taking care of the Little Things, it enabled us, its human masters, to focus on the Big Things. "Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible," proclaimed that noted connoisseur of contemplation Oscar Wilde. Fortunately, he added a charming clarification: "Human slavery is wrong, insecure and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends." ...Alas, most designers, following Wilde, think of technologies as nothing more than mechanical slaves that must maximize efficiency. But some are realizing that technologies don't have to be just trivial problem-solvers: they can also be subversive troublemakers, making us question our habits and received ideas. Recently, designers in Germany built devices - "transformational products," they call them - that engage users in "conversations without words." My favorite is a caterpillar-shaped extension cord. If any of the devices plugged into it are left in standby mode, the "caterpillar" starts twisting as if it were in pain. Does it do what normal extension cords do? Yes. But it also awakens users to the fact that the cord is simply the endpoint of a complex socio-technical system with its own politics and ethics. Before, designers have tried to conceal that system. In the future, designers will be obliged to make it visible. While devices-as-problem-solvers seek to avoid friction, devices-as-troublemakers seek to create an "aesthetic of friction" that engages users in new ways. Will such extra seconds of thought - nay, contemplation - slow down civilization? They well might. But who said that stopping to catch a breath on our way to the abyss is not a sensible strategy?

Pro's & con's on assisted suicide, & adequate support for patients & caregivers at end-of-life - initiated by letter by Janice Lynch Schuster, at Ctr for Elder Care & Advanced Illness, Altarum Institute

In actual fact, however, in the years before the Civil War, there was no capitalism without slavery. The two were, in many ways, one and the same. At the end of the 18th century, slavery in the United States was a declining institution.... Wage labor was increasingly replacing slave labor in both the urban and the rural areas of the upper South. And then came cotton.... By the end of the 1830s, the Seminole, the Creek, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw and the Cherokee had all been "removed" to lands west of the Mississippi. Their expropriated land provided the foundation of the leading sector of the global economy in the first half of the 19th century.... Between 1820 and 1860 more than a million enslaved people were transported from the upper to the lower South, the vast majority by the venture-capitalist slave traders the slaves called "soul drivers." ...It is not simply that the labor of enslaved people underwrote 19th-century capitalism. Enslaved people were the capital: four million people worth at least $3 billion in 1860, which was more than all the capital invested in railroads and factories in the United States combined. Seen in this light, the conventional distinction between slavery and capitalism fades into meaninglessness.

But the "last chance" for a 4-year-old to quit his screeching, lest he get a timeout? There are usually another seven or eight chances still to go, in a string of flaccid ultimatums: "Now this is your last chance." "This is really your last chance." "I'm giving you just one more chance. I'm not kidding." Of course you are, and your kids know it. They're not idiots. But they're also not adults, so why this whole school of thought that they should be treated as if they are, long before they can perform such basic tasks of civilization as driving, say, or decanting? Why all the choices - "What would you like to wear?"- and all the negotiating and the painstakingly calibrated diplomacy? They're toddlers, not Pakistan. I understand that you want them to adore you. But having them fear you is surely the saner strategy, not just for you and for them but for the rest of us and the future of the republic. Above all I'm confounded by the boundless fretting, as if ushering kids into adulthood were some newfangled sorcery dependent on a slew of child-rearing books and a bevy of child-rearing blogs.

Dostoevsky's great virtue as a writer is to be so utterly convincing in outlining what he doesn't believe and so deeply unconvincing in defending what he wants to believe. As Blake said of "Paradise Lost," Satan gets all the best lines. The story of the Grand Inquisitor places a stark choice in front of us: demonic happiness or unbearable freedom? And this choice conceals another, deeper one: truth or falsehood? The truth that sets free is not, as we saw, the freedom of inclination and passing desire. It is the freedom of faith. It is the acceptance - submission, even - to a demand that both places a perhaps intolerable burden on the self, but which also energizes a movement of subjective conversion, to begin again. In disobeying ourselves and obeying this hard command, we may put on new selves. Faith hopes for grace.

'I went on my first Christian radio show, a year ago, and the host set out to save me.... 'I have spent a lot of time thinking about the complexity of faith, and have tried to take theologically conservative faith seriously. As I did so, over a decade of research, I found myself more open to the idea of God, and more aware of the fragile human grasp on the real. '....It was a shock to have my host grill me about the state of my soul. It reminded me that one of the things that makes mutual respect between believers and nonbelievers difficult is that there is a kind of line in the sand, and you're either on one side of it or on the other. Skeptics do this too, of course.... 'Anthropologists have a term for this racheting-up of opposition: schismogenesis. Gregory Bateson developed the word to describe mirroring interactions, where every move by each side makes the other respond more negatively.... 'These days we Americans live not only with political schismogenesis, but also religious schismogenesis. 'Yet believers and nonbelievers are not so different from one another.... When I arrived at one church..., I thought that I would stick out like a sore thumb. I did not. Instead, I saw my own doubts, anxieties and yearnings reflected in those around me.... 'Many of my skeptical friends think of themselves as secular, sometimes profoundly so. Yet these secular friends often hover on the edge of faith. They meditate.... 'We need to recognize something of what we share, and to carry on a conversation - and if we can keep the conversation going, we will, however slowly, move forward. If we can't, we're in real trouble. '

'When I began to spend time, 10 years ago, at an evangelical church in Chicago..., I soon came to realize that one of the most important features of these churches is that they offer a powerful way to deal with anxiety and distress, not because of what people believe but because of what they do when they pray.... 'Rev. Rick Warren's "The Purpose Driven Life," one of the best-selling books of all time, teaches you to identify your self-critical, self-demeaning thoughts, to interrupt them and recognize them as mistaken, and to replace them with different thoughts.... 'In my own research, the more people affirmed, "I feel God's love for me, directly," the less stressed and lonely they were and the fewer psychiatric symptoms they reported.'

'I went on my first Christian radio show, a year ago, and the host set out to save me.... 'I have spent a lot of time thinking about the complexity of faith, and have tried to take theologically conservative faith seriously. As I did so, over a decade of research, I found myself more open to the idea of God, and more aware of the fragile human grasp on the real. '....It was a shock to have my host grill me about the state of my soul. It reminded me that one of the things that makes mutual respect between believers and nonbelievers difficult is that there is a kind of line in the sand, and you're either on one side of it or on the other. Skeptics do this too, of course.... 'Anthropologists have a term for this racheting-up of opposition: schismogenesis. Gregory Bateson developed the word to describe mirroring interactions, where every move by each side makes the other respond more negatively.... 'These days we Americans live not only with political schismogenesis, but also religious schismogenesis. 'Yet believers and nonbelievers are not so different from one another.... When I arrived at one church..., I thought that I would stick out like a sore thumb. I did not. Instead, I saw my own doubts, anxieties and yearnings reflected in those around me.... 'Many of my skeptical friends think of themselves as secular, sometimes profoundly so. Yet these secular friends often hover on the edge of faith. They meditate.... 'We need to recognize something of what we share, and to carry on a conversation - and if we can keep the conversation going, we will, however slowly, move forward. If we can't, we're in real trouble. '

Problems with Private Insurance (by financier)

...like SPV: independent living to ALF to SNF care.

...Love and understanding, even without knowledge, are tremendous gifts; and religious knowledge claims are hard to support. We should, then, make room for those who embrace a religion as a source of love and understanding but remain agnostic about the religion's knowledge claims. We should, for example, countenance those who are Christians while doubting the literal truth of, say, the Trinity and the Resurrection. I wager, in fact, that many professed Christians are not at all sure about the truth of these doctrines -and other believers have similar doubts. They are, quite properly, religious agnostics.

"In 2005, Ms. Brainard-Barnes was a 22-year-old single mother who had difficulty holding down a steady job. She never could afford her own place, staying with her sister for long stretches and occasionally with a boyfriend. As soon as she enrolled on a site called ModelMayhem.com, that, after a few clicks, turned out to mean nude modeling and sometimes working as an escort. Within a few months, Ms. Brainard-Barnes was making up to $2,000 a day on trips to New York City. Online, she could be her own boss and not share what she made with anyone - not a pimp, not an escort service, not a boyfriend. In 2010, Maureen Brainard-Barnes's body was one of four uncovered close by one another in the sand dunes of Gilgo Beach, Long Island, wrapped in burlap.... The Web enables some people to take risks they never would have imagined. In this way, the women of Gilgo Beach still have something to teach us. The Internet might have made pimps less necessary, but today's escorts are as marginalized as ever, and every bit as vulnerable. The police rarely help them when they are at risk, and they rarely take their disappearances seriously. As far as the authorities are concerned, their profession still seals their fate."

>'With unrealistic expectations of our ability to prolong life, with death as an unfamiliar and unnatural event, and without a realistic, tactile sense of how much a worn-out elderly patient is suffering, it's easy for patients and families to keep insisting on more tests, more medications, more procedures. >Doing something often feels better than doing nothing. Inaction feeds the sense of guilt-ridden ineptness family members already feel as they ask themselves, "Why can't I do more for this person I love so much?" >...At a certain stage of life, aggressive medical treatment can become sanctioned torture. When a case such as this comes along, nurses, physicians and therapists sometimes feel conflicted and immoral. We've committed ourselves to relieving suffering, not causing it. A retired nurse once wrote to me: "I am so glad I don't have to hurt old people any more." '

Even when the system works as it's supposed to, and palliative care specialists arrive like the cavalry to provide comfort care, to stop fruitless and painful interventions and to support what patients want, their own colleagues may brand them murderers. It takes strong doctors to stand up to that kind of verbal abuse, to explain that courts and ethics committees have approved care that's intended to reduce suffering, to point out that the patient's own wishes are paramount. Perhaps they have to be stronger than we know. "The culture is changing," Dr. Matlock told me. "But it's not changed yet."

In a globalized economy, the countries that pay the most and offer the greatest chance for advancement tend to get the top talent. South America's best soccer players generally migrate to Europe, where the salaries are high and the tournaments are glitzier than those in Brazil or Argentina. Many top high-tech workers from India and China move to the United States to work for American companies. And the United States, with its high salaries and technological innovation, is also the world's most powerful magnet for doctors, attracting more every year than Britain, Canada and Australia - the next most popular destinations for migrating doctors - combined.

Quality of living & dying

Poor analysis of mis-spent $ at EOL

The researchers found that in areas where end-of-life care costs were normally high, having an advance directive significantly lowered the cost of care. On average, end-of-life care spending was $5,585 less per person in the high-spending regions when someone had an advance directive. > Having an advance directive didn't necessarily limit the initiation of aggressive treatments, but seemed to lead to their earlier withdrawal. Author said this finding was particularly important because some people make the argument that having an advance directive might limit all of the care you receive at the end of your life. But, this finding shows that while treatments are often started, for "patients with an advance directive, there's an earlier recognition of when treatments aren't working and when it's time to go to hospice."