Hopeful signs on health care

Like others who strongly support a single-payer health care system, I have been highly critical of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), seeing it as a bureaucratic monstrosity that was designed to keep the useless and parasitic health insurance industry in business while also allowing the hospital and drug industries to keep making exorbitant amounts of money. I also felt that while it would help some people, it would not do enough and would not reduce costs much. [Read more…]

The inspection paradox

When it comes to probabilities, our intuitions are not reliable, as I have written about before (see here and here). On so many occasions, I have thought that the result to a problem was so obvious as to not be worth thinking about more deeply, only to find myself proven wrong. And the new solution seems also so obvious that you wonder why you ever believed the earlier wrong answer. [Read more…]

The pettiness of international politics

Poor David Cameron. Apparently Britain’s prime minister is smarting from the fact that parliament’s refusal to give him authority to wage war on Syria has resulted in him being at the receiving end of petty indignities at the G20 summit, being treated like just another person there, rather than reflecting in the aura of being president Obama’s BFF. Nobody seems to care anymore about what he thinks about anything. [Read more…]

Is this to be Syria’s future?

Although Libya has vanished from the US news front pages, it may be good to revisit that country to see what has happened since the US last attacked another country. (At least I think it was the last, it is hard to keep track of all the US military campaigns.) Patrick Cockburn writes that two years after that attack, Libya has descended into lawlessness and ruin, a country that now resembles Somalia, where militias fight for control of land, with a weak government unable to do much about it. [Read more…]

The goal of US spying revealed: “Unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace”

The Guardian, ProPublica and the New York Times yesterday simultaneously published articles on the latest revelation to come out of the Edward Snowden documents and they are doozies. The articles reveal that the government has been very successful in trying to break the encryption codes that are used to protect all our data, like our medical records and bank accounts and everything else. And it reveals that US tech companies (both hardware and software) have colluded with the government to provide backdoor access to the government in order to gain that access. The result is a system where little or nothing in our lives is safe from the prying eyes of the government. [Read more…]

Why is breakfast different?

In principle, there should be no difference between what one eats at the three canonical meals of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You should be able to easily switch the menus. But in actual practice, the interchangeability only applies to lunch and dinner, with the food eaten at breakfast being distinctively different from the other two meals. [Read more…]