Categories
Healthcare Political

Need

Another thing that Bush talked about yesterday was how it was ‘junk lawsuits’ that are driving the cost of medical care up so high that health insurance costs have grown beyond what the average person can afford. If it weren’t for the fact that people sued doctors and hospitals, why everyone would have access to health care now.

That’s good to know. My Dad fell yesterday and broke his hip and has to have it operated on today, not something that’s lightly done when you’re 93 almost 94 years old. Luckily he has medical insurance to cover most of the costs of this, because his assisted living expenses are eating up his savings. Not to mention all the drugs the doctors keep giving him, though most don’t do a bit of good.

But I want to assure President Bush that if Dad dies during treatment, we won’t hold the hospital responsible and sue them. In turn, will he then get the health insurance premiums lowered in this state so that I can afford to get coverage? It would be nice not to be worried about getting sick. And if I am sick, it would be nice to know I could go into the doctor without being financially ruined by the trip.

But I’m a little lost on the mapping between limiting malpractice suits and available, affordable health care for all. Could he spend a little more time on that one?

Watching Bush yesterday, among that crowd of just plain folk, I thought that he came off rather charming. Likeable even. You know, I don’t think President Bush is evil. I think he grew up in an environment where people are supposed to take care of themselves and their friends and family, not have the government do it. I think he was taught that when people have a run of bad luck, it’s up to them to make the best of whatever situation they’re in. He grew up believing that every little boy or girl, well, maybe just every little boy, could be president someday. After all, just look at him? His Daddy was President, and now he’s president. Things work out, his brother will be president in four years. That’s the way these things work.

I think growing up he looked out on his father’s horse ranch and he saw wide open skies and plenty of green, so he didn’t understand why people talk about Texas being one of the worst polluted states in the country. He listened to his Daddy’s friends as they talked about how this country is rich with oil and Nature, she’s a tough old broad and isn’t going to be hurt by a little drilling.

He was raised in Texas where you just don’t step on another’s man’s shoes, boy, unless you’re willing to pay the consequences. Al-Queda stepped on our shoes, but Saddam was going to, he just knew this – why can’t most of us make this connection? And now that we’ve found out that Saddam really wasn’t much of a threat to us, well, the President said recently that sometimes people make mistakes. The Democrats chortled over that one.

His approval ratings shot up three points after that quiet bit of reflection. To the people here abouts, it takes a real man to admit he can make a mistake.

My own Dad didn’t grow up in a rich family, but he was brought up to believe that family takes care of family, and people don’t ask for help if they find themselves down on their luck. They make their own luck. Of course, it’s a lot tougher when your family isn’t rich, but that just makes the victory that much sweeter.

Dad also thinks that anyone that goes to live in a tree to protect it from being cut down is a nut, and those women who bare their pink bras to protest the war are silly, and pretentious. As for Iraq, well, he thinks it’s the Iraqi’s problem that they can’t see what a great opportunity they now have, and continue to fight among themselves. After all, government can’t do everything for them, either. Shame about our boys, though. And those nice foreign workers. The terrorists, they kill because they like to kill. They enjoy killing, and nothing we do will change this.

As for the cost, well everyone knows war is good for the economy. Look what WWII did for us?

If my Dad survives to November, which is iffy right now, and is capable of making cognitive decisions at the time, he’ll vote for Bush. I think that the President will appreciate that.

Categories
Political

Timing

President Bush was in Missouri yesterday, in Sedalia. That’s a friendly part of this state to Bush – solidly red.

He looked good during his talk, dressed in one of those cotton work shirts he tends to favor. Looked just like the people he was talking to. He said that in the next four years he plans on reforming the tax filing process, to make it simpler. Yeah, that’s something that we’re all worried about now – our taxes being too complicated.

He also focused a lot on the economy, and how tax cuts have helped and how people are doing better now than they were a few years back. I guess it was too bad, then, that Ford picked this day to announce it was laying off upwards of 800 employees at one its plants in the St. Louis area–another layoff in a series of layoffs that have hit this state since 2002.

But that President, he sure looks good in a cotton work shirt. Looks just like one of us.

Categories
Political

But not all is silent

In a piece in The Australian about the tragedy at Breslan, Mark Steyn wrote:

I remember a couple of days after September 11 writing in some column or other that weepy candlelight vigils were a cop-out: the issue wasn’t whether you were sad about the dead people but whether you wanted to do something about it. Three years on, that’s still the difference. We can all get upset about dead children, but unless you’re giving honest thought to what was responsible for the slaughter your tasteful elegies are no use.

Taking a moment to mourn is taking a moment to acknowledge the grief and loss. It’s taking a moment to reflect on what might have been if these children had not been horribly wasted. It is an act re-affirming that human life has value. If we push this aside in order to rush that much more quickly to revenge and retribution, then all we’re doing is perpetuating what’s been started by the terrorists in the first place: that belief that individual human life has little meaning now.

There are those that kill because of a quirk in their mind; others are made that way by being being part of an event, to protect or take, to stand, or march. Of the latter, some may like to kill; most are forced to kill and do so reluctantly. But there are those for whom killing means nothing; it brings no sadistic delight, nor thoughtful regret because whatever love and value for life that was in them was stripped away, over time, until they are as indifferent to the act of killing as they are to the act of life.

I don’t have insight into the terrorists who entered the school in Breslan, but I have to believe that they were the latter type of killer–indifferent to lives, their own or others. The sadistic killer wants to inflict but not experience, and the reluctant killer could not shoot a child in the back as they run away. I truly believe this is so.

If these people were indifferent killers, they weren’t born that way. At some time in their past, they were like the children who they killed, with the same needs to have security, love, affection, and the same right to be safe. What changed for them over time, we won’t know because I doubt will learn much about them individually; we’ve labeled them ‘terrorists’ and that seems to be enough.

To Steyn and to a growing number of people, including an uncomfortably large number of webloggers, all that we need to know about these people is that they are Muslim, and that is explanation. What is it that he says?

The good news is that the carnage in Beslan was so shocking it prompted a brief appearance by that rare bird, the moderate Muslim. Abdulrahman al-Rashed, the general manager of al-Arabiya Television, wrote a column in Asharq al-Awsat headlined, “The Painful Truth: All The World’s Terrorists Are Muslims!” “Our terrorist sons are an end-product of our corrupted culture,” he wrote. This is true. But, as with Nicolson’s prettified prose in London, the question remains: So what? What are you going to do about it? If you want your religion to be more than a diseased death cult, you’re going to have to take a stand.

Moderate Muslims are no more rare than moderate Christians or moderate Jews or moderate Hindus. Every religion is capable of sustaining hate and feelings of persecution long enough and strongly enough to strip the life away from soulless soldiers who kill as easily as they put pepper on their eggs. It takes events to crystalize and concentrate the extremists and then when they act, the rest look on and point and cry out, ‘There are no moderates in this religion!”

But have we forgotten the plight of the Bosnian Muslims so soon, after their own children were raped and tortured and killed by Orthodox Christian Serbs? This was less than ten years ago – how can we have forgotten?

Or can we forget Christian turning against Christian in Ireland?

Here in the United States, have we forgotten Timothy McVeigh and those who bomb abortion clinics, or kill those who are different colors or beliefs, or who are gay, all the while holding up a cross? Does anyone remember four little black girls who were killed by a bomb as they sang in a church not all that long ago? Not many places safer than a church. Not even a school.

You say, but these were isolated incidents, not part of a global conspiracy. Frankly, I find all religions to be a conspiracy; a conspiracy aimed at robbing people of their intellect and their empathy.

Categories
Political

Moment

A person who goes by the name of Ripper has been dropping an odd sort of comment spam here and there. He finds whatever post is supportive of Kerry or not supportive of Bush and writes in comments the fact that he or she, when doing a search on the site, doesn’t find the word “Breslan”. I think the assumption is that those who don’t support Bush won’t mention this event, because that will remind people what an ‘effective’ leader he is in the fight against terrorism. Or some such thing.

Let’s leave aside, for now, my amazement that some view Bush as a leader in the fight against Islamic terrorism, when such terrorism has actually increased rather than decreased during his tenure. Let’s ignore, for now, that the only decisive move he’s made among supposedly Islamic countries is invade Iraq –one of many, yes many, primarily Islamic countries not interested in sending terrorists against us. Instead let’s focus on Breslan.

What can be said other than it is inconceivable that anyone would want to go into a school and just start killing children. Unfortunately, we have experienced this ourselves in this country when disturbed young men have entered our schools and killed classmates and teachers, so we can share with Russia the pain of losing children to senseless violence–made more difficult because it occurred in a place normally seen as safe and secure (because, unfortunately, children are lost to senseless violence all too often in warfare, though usually in their homes or in the streets).

But my first reaction to this event is that there is nothing meaningful that I can say–my words won’t be heard or give comfort to the families, nor do I have any insight into why people would do such a thing. I remember reading or hearing once, long ago, and I’ve now forgotten the context, that certain native American people believe that one cries and rents the air with anguish when the loss is small, the hurt brief; but when the pain is beyond what can be imagined, one stays silent.

Categories
Weblogging

Right tool for the right job: XML formats redux

In the last post, I said I was a pusher of code, not a designer. As a pusher of code, then, I do feel comfortable commenting on the user of Atom or RSS for an import/export format.

Danny Ayers recently pointed out that there’s a new Atom format spec. Good, clean writeup with an interesting twist in the Introduction:

Atom is an XML-based document format intended to allow lists of related information, known as “feeds”, to be synchronised between publishers and consumers. Feeds are composed of a number of items, known as “entries”, each with an extensible set of attached metadata. For example, each entry has a title.

The primary use case that Atom addresses is the syndication of Web content such as Weblogs and news headlines to Web sites as well as directly to user agents. However, nothing precludes it from being used for other purposes and kinds of content.

That’s a bit like saying, “Here now, we have a specification for the banking industry wot would be a good spec for those of you who run petrol stations, what say?”

In my opinion, Atom, as with RSS, make a great syndication format, but there’s too much of the underlying purpose to the format to make them exceptionally good for universal weblog transforms, including pushing weblog data from one tool to another. For instance:

  • Each item in Atom, or RSS for that matter, has a link associated with it. I suppose one could use this to hold a slug, or filename, but the two are not the same information.
  • Atom has the concept of an identifier, atom:id, which doesn’t translate well in weblogging terms. Each tool would have it’s own unique identification system.
  • Too many of the fields are associated with the mechanics of the feed, such as atom:generator. While this is essential for syndication feeds, there’s no need for this in weblog migration. Though you can say it’s optional, if you find there is no fit in the business for most (all?) of the optional bits, then you may be looking at a poor fit, overall, between the spec and the use.
  • There is a lot of data missing in Atom. Keyword-value pairs is something I think a format has to support. There isn’t anything in the specification to do with categories, or how hierarchical categories would be managed. One could say the same for comments – right now they have to be artificially transformed into little feed items, when what they are, are comments to a post, not individual feeds.

The latter item is the kicker for me. If you say that one can extend the model to include this extra data since Atom supports namespaces, why not take this a step further and say, well, then we’ll go with a new model specifically focusing on migrating data between tools; a syndication feed is not the same thing as porting an entire weblog between tools.

Of course, saying something like “Atom is not a good fit for this purpose” is similar to invoking the Lazy Web to have it done, and I’m sure a dozen feeds will be created that use Atom, or RSS, to produce and consume migration data. However, I’m not saying it can’t be done; I’m saying that the forcing a specification for one purpose into being used for another purpose will, in the long run, be more trouble then its worth. Especially when you consider the political ramifications to using a syndication feed.

One could write a tool that both exports and imports data directly into the database, rather than interfacing through the tool, but this is not a comfortable option for many non-geeks. They could be concerned, and rightfully, that the underlying data model could change for the tools, and what worked one time may not work the next. The best approach is to use something that tools support, so that users have a degree of comfort with the post.

What we don’t need is one tool using an RSS formatted import mechanism, while another uses an ATOM formatted export. Asking all tools to support all syndication formats for weblog imports and exports is a bit much; generating multiple syndication feeds is a matter of a new arrangement of tags, but consuming the different feeds is a whole different game.

At the same time, telling people who are already apprehensive about learning a new set of template tags that they need to transform the output generated by one tool before it can be used the another (oh, and there will probably be loss of data between the two) is a Geeks Choice response.