Comment Re: Dust? tsarkon reports (Score 1) 133
I agree. Theodor not only avoided incomprehensibility, He instilled a love of reading in countless people.
So is the Universe coming, or going?
Coming from what?
Going to what?
Well, I don't care as long as my signal is good for the two new Big Bang Theory episodes tonight!
(Headline had me freaked for a second)
And if existence does end I hope the next one is not a re-run... I'm tired of re-runs...
He's most certainly a liberal in the sense that he says that you should have the freedom to choose. That's a bad thing?
When the Democratic party leadership decided against single payer, Ezekiel Emanuel was one of the lead hit men making the case against it (including a lot of falsehoods and misinformation), along with his brother Rahm, who provided the political muscle.
Thanks to the Emanuels, you have to buy Obamacare from your insurance company.
Here's what that means: If you have a chronic disease, like inflammatory bowel disease, you will have to pay $8,500 a year in total health care costs. In Canada, the comparable costs through taxes would be about $4,000 a year. And also, people tell me that they can't keep their doctors. One student with IBD was seeing a gastroenterologist at a major academic medical center. The plans under Obamacare would have forced her to see a neighborhood gastroenterologist who's willing to take Medicaid. That's a pretty important difference when you're taking biological modifier drugs like rituximab that kill people when they're given by a doctor who's not familiar with them.
Ezekiel (like his brother, the mayor of Chicago) is from a family with a history of liberal political activism. In a very direct way he was raised with liberal, and arguably progressive leanings. His formative years (the dying of his wool) developed the philosophies he now holds as a mature adult.
In Israel, his father a member of the Irgun, a terrorist organization responsible for the bombing of the King David Hotel and the Deir Yassin massacre. I don't think Ezekiel disagrees significantly with AIPAC.
His mother supported the civil rights movement, but I don't know of any other way in which I would consider him liberal.
I would call Ezekiel and Rahm neoliberals. I don't consider them liberals, and they certainly aren't progressives.
Most significantly, they both opposed single payer health care, and instead gave the health care industry over to the insurance industry. That basically followed the Heritage Foundation recommendations, although once Obama adopted it, the Heritage Foundation disowned it.
Rahm also supported the Iraq war (which is not surprising, since Israel supported it).
Yeah, if he's stuck in a state of decline, he can still contribute.
During his career as an ethicist, Ezekiel Emanuel did more harm than good, in my opinion.
He and his brother Rahm may have done more to sabotage single payer health care than any other American in modern history.
Totally moral and ethical fail from this so-called "bioethicist."
I have dealt professionally with a lot of medical ethicists. It took me a while to figure out that they're not telling people how to be ethical, they're telling people how to get away with being unethical.
For example, a drug company will run an unethical drug study. They'll hire ethicists for their ethics panel, who will review the study and give it their rubber-stamp of approval. Then when the drug company gets caught, they can say, "But our ethics panel approved it!"
The other thing I noticed was that the doctors who take the biggest payoffs from the drug companies wind up on their institution's ethics panel.
Einstein had an abdominal aortic aneurysm. The first time, they treated him by wrapping cellophane around his aorta. The second time, he said he didn't want to go through that again.
If you think of how the aorta goes down the torso next to the spine, and how they had to push everything else out of the way to get to it, you can imagine what major surgery it was. Even today, they destroy a lot of nerves in the process. People can be left impotent, incontinent, unable to walk, etc. And you've got a huge wound across your abdomen. That's when you start wondering whether it's worth it to continue.
My biggest problem is that 75 is such an arbitrary number.
That's the most obvious flaw in his argument. Some people are pretty healthy at 75. Others start deteriorating in their 60s.
I know people who led a fairly active life up to their 90s and died recently, relatively quickly and without much suffering. They had a pretty good life for the last 20 years, and they told me a lot of good stories. One woman wound up in a wheelchair, with an attendant, but she wasn't asking anybody to put her out of her misery.
In fact, most elderly people don't want to die. Emanuel's father didn't. This essay ignores reality.
I heard that in a medical ethics class.
People are 25, and they say that if they couldn't run 10 miles every day, they wouldn't want to live.
They finally get to 50 and they feel differently.
Most women develop the social competence to deal with these situations by age 14.
New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you. - David Letterman
