Found this on the web regarding Obamacare – not sure how valid, but it is interesting.

What is it specifically about Obamacare that you dislike? What are some real examples of it ‘ruining’ America?

I employ about 250 people in New York, and about another 200 in Maryland and Pennsylvania. Prior to the ACA, we provided health care for any of our employees that choose to take advantage of it, and many dozens did. Post-ACA, the costs have risen dramatically, and very few of my employees can afford it, even with the company paying for a good fraction of it, so now we have about seven people that take advantage of the health insurance plan. Worse, the deductibles are so high that no one will ever actually get the insurance to pay for any medical care, unless something catastrophic happens. Ironically the ACA made low-cost catastrophic plans illegal, so now these Middle Class employees pay more than 5x for what is effectively the same catastrophic insurance, for all intents and purposes.

Even more ironic is that I, as the employer, am actually better off, because the company pays almost nothing towards this benefit now that so few take advantage of it. So I’m personally better off by a country mile, but my poor employees are screwed. That’s the main reason that I hate the ACA.

Another reason is that it may literally be killing people. The states that rolled out the ACA have seen their mortality spike, while the ones that haven’t don’t see the same trend. The speculation is that, because of the higher deductibles, fewer people are accessing the care they need. It could also be that most of the expansion was pushing people to Medicaid, and, writ large Medicaid outcomes are worse or no better than having no insurance at all. Obviously there could be other explanations, but this is a peculiar correlation, to say the least.

Do Christians believe they will share the same heaven with Hindus, atheists, and Muslims?

Interesting question. Most religions posit a “better place” after death; but to lump all of them together under the uniquely Christian term Heaven is just plain ignorant.

Buddhists teach negation of all earthly things including relations with others; their Nirvana is to merge with the All and thereby cease to exist as an individual.

American settlers picked up the idea that First Nations peoples looked forward to a “Happy Hunting Ground” – no idea whether that is remotely accurate, but the nominally Christian settlers “heard” the First Nations peoples through a filter o their own expectations.

Judaism in Jesus’ day held two different views, either that at bodily death the game was over, or at bodily death the spirit continued to exist. After Christianity arose, the “game over at death” camp seems to have dominated – corrections greatly appreciated.

Islam has its own idea of Heaven – a place where forbidden earthly pleasures are freely available.

Christians view Heaven as an eternity spent in the presence of a love and peace that pass all understanding.

This has been trivialized into harps and hymn sings, which are sufficiently boring to earn the sobriquet “pie in the sky bye and bye” – you figure out which one a GOD would intend.

Atheists profess that anything happening after the gray matter dies is a contradiction in terms (again, corrections gladly sought.)

“Same heaven” therefor assumes that one vision of heaven exists, and that Christians recognize it – – – making all others strangers there?

If someone proves abiogenesis and debunks the evolution theory, would that guarantee the top Nobel Prize?

PROVING abiogenesis is a warm and comfy thing to people who are fine without a deistic explanation. for the world we live in.

DISPROVING it, as if you can prove a negative, would push people toward a deistic explanation (the other one is pure unadulterated random chance, but disproving abiogenesis means proving that those odds-against are infinite. Good luck with that.)

Once you persuade absolutely everyone that the origin of life has to be deistic, you are still on the whole wrong street to look up anything with regard to evolution. A deistic explanation is fine for me, by the way. I consider GOD saying “Let there be light” a rational idea. But then the echoes of that Creation are pushing fourteen billion years old and the count of stars in the knowable universe seems to require a twenty-four digit number.

What that means is that, if GOD chose to let abiogenesis take place, He made the universe big enough for that to have a decent chance.

Is anybody ready to assert that GOD is going to make simplistic answers a valid road to His company, His embrace?

Could humans evolve over time to adapt to changes caused by global warming, or will life no longer be sustainable within the timeframe that would require?

Here’s a benchmark datum. Two million years ago the homo genus brain case was smallish. There ensued a continuous wave, at very roughly two hundred thousand year intervals, of severe weather pattern disruptions. Wet became dry, you name it – food gathering strategies, how to find shelter, dangerous species – everything turned *different*. Each time, adaptability to change improved survival. After ten or so of these, homo sapiens (v. sapiens) stood alongside homo sapiens (v. neanderthal) and homo sapiens (v. denisovan). Different varieties, not different species. For reasons we can only guess at, we voted the other guys off the island.

But global warming is a single weather change, likely a lot more severe than the continual changes that elevated sapiens (v. lucy) to sapiens (v. sapiens.)

Yes of course homo sapiens will figure this out – although at the same time the pressure to secure habitat and food could give rise to massive starvation, population movements, and war. Given that we have war-making abilities that can poison the planet and wipe people out in handfuls of millions with one bomb, what we call civilization is in serious danger. No of course sapiens will not disappear. After many dozens of centuries of successive small adaptations we may have “a new variety.”

But: bear in mind that a cloned, fully featured homo sapiens (v. neaderthal) would still be fully capable of interbreeding with homo sapiens (v. sapiens) and long-long-time-from-now homo sapiens (v. atomicus) would also be capable of interbreeding with v. sapiens, and doubtless also with v. neanderthal.

Species level changes absolutely take place, but the math says it happens only over spans of many thousands of generations. It’s been roughly one thousand since v. neanderthal, and close to two thousand since Australia lost contact with Asia. Evonne Goolagong, anyone? Fifty years ago she was a world tennis phenomenon, and of mixed aborigine/European parentage.

Why do most contemporary intellectuals tend to be on the left, in terms of political spectrum?

They don’t – but the ones who show up are much more prone to opine than to operate.

My take. But it’s a huge question because the Academic Left

Here is a quote from a quota post which mentioned a TED talk that, I believe, is eye-opening:

The post which included the above link quoted from a comment by “brilliant Quoran and academic Frederick Dolan (who) illustrated the point very, very well.”

Part of the background to this is the consolidation, beginning in the 90s, of what John Diggins in The Rise and Fall of the America Left calls the “academic left.” These academics regard the purpose of their discipline’s scholarship and teaching as that of undermining the legitimacy and authority of traditional Western beliefs and values and advancing the cause of women, minorities, non-traditional gender identities, etc. They reject traditional scholarly values, regard knowledge as a form of power in disguise, and see culture as a conduit of ideology rather than a form of knowledge.

I observed this at close range at the California College of the Arts, where I went to be associate dean of graduate studies upon retiring at Berkeley. With a few honorable exceptions, the humanities faculty and administration there view teaching as the practice of instilling what they regard as correct beliefs and values in their students, as opposed to reading and thinking critically. Critical thinking – in the jargon, “criticality” – is now functionally defined as “attacking the institutions and values of American and Western society.” That this is the faculty’s role isn’t even controversial; it’s taken for granted and no other perspective is acknowledged (bolding mine)

So it’s not simply that there’s an imbalance in the political views of professors. It’s far worse than that: the very meaning of scholarship and teaching has been redefined as a kind of ideological practice. In my opinion this has created a crisis in the humanities, but it’s a crisis that is invisible inside the humanities because the authors of the crisis, ironically, perceive it as an achievement.

What is a one sentence statement that both proves evolutionism and disproves creationism?

There isn’t any I can think of. BUT:

Most creationists (not all) look at Genesis and see GOD speaking. They believe He means every single word. They believe that GOD doesn’t speak in images, only in digital data, facts. They also believe that GOD does not lie.

Today we “look into the heavens to see GOD’s handiworks and wonders.” As of the twentieth Century we have seen those wonders. The Hubble telescope returns pictures that are both beautiful and beyond simple explanation. They show how impossible it is to believe that GOD created the universe six thousand years ago.

They also make it impossible to believe that GOD created planet earth before He said, as of Genesis chapter one verse three, “Let there be light.”

We know for a fact that GOD said, “Let there be light,” the Word proceeded to make all things that have been made. GOD works “in the fulness of time.” We look out upon His handiwork and realize that this, too, is GOD speaking to us. He does not lie. He really dedicated almost fourteen billion years to let this universe unfold. It contains so many stars we need a twenty-four digit number to count them.

GOD is not mocked; forcing oneself to take an understanding of GOD’s word that is both literal and appropriate is a contradiction in terms—which mocks GOD.

Now if only creationists will bite down hard and realize that, yes indeed, they are offering GOD mockery when they insist He’s that young. Do they accuse GOD of manufacturing a world that shouts lies from every layer of rock?

At Palm Sunday Jesus says, “If these people did not cry out my praise, the very rocks themselves would do it.” Every layer of rock shouts GOD’ praise by showing us a Creation that beggars description. The earth itself builds a very very complex picture of how it formed. It shows the incalculably precise kind of planning that resulted in the planet we inhabit and the constellations we see. And it shows the way those constellations guided the magi to Jerusalem to see the newborn Jesus.

All these things are knowable. Science is to Scripture what a lectern is to the Bible. It upholds the Bible – all we have to do is open our eyes and read all of GOD’s words.

What are some recent studies that have shaken the understanding of human evolution?

The answer is, none.

No scientist from the fields of biology, paleontology, geology, biochemistry, and so forth—in short, no scientist for whom the validity of what is known today about evolution impinges on his/her research in any way—has ever encountered any validated, peer-reviewed, accredited study which fails to undergird or expand upon the understanding of how evolution has operated and how it has produced the evidence we find in living flora/fauna and/or in the remains preserved in the earth.

If “peer-reviewed” raises the suspicion that somehow scientists are in league to support something untrue, reflect on this. Science has exactly one “god,” the god of data. Fudge, misconstrue, or misunderstand your data, and the consequence will be that YOUR SINS WILL FIND YOU OUT. That’s as close to Christian teaching as you will get. 🙂

What could persuade you to vote for a Democrat in the next presidential election over Trump? (zip zilch nada?)

Found this on the web – the guy regards busing as a “bad thing” – here let me note that prior to Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, busing happened to black kids, taking them past multiple white schools to reach a black one. Kid you not.

He’s also against Ike using troops to integrate Little Rock High School – he loses me there, but one black mark on a creamy face is called a “beauty spot” and worked well for Marilyn Monroe.

The high point, for me, is his final comparison. ROTFLMAO even though that’s a rude reference.

PS I will vote for Biden if the Dem’s succeed in nominating him – lesser of two evils. DJT is two bags of poo past a full outhouse, IMVHO. Outhouses promote vegetable growth, but not the kind of lettuce I’d put on my salad.

– – Ahem. Here’s the post. Watch him evolve. —

For a while, I was a “Bernie or bust” kind of guy.

I was homeless, on foot, and had just become employed after a long bout of unemployment. My wife had cheated and moved on. To keep a roof over my children’s heads and keep them from feeling the shock too much, she stayed in the home while I moved out. I was at rock bottom and was stuck there.

Bernie Sanders seemed to have all the answers. So when he ran, I thought “Now he can get America back on track.” I didn’t think much of either party. As far as I was concerned, Bernie was the one point of light.

Then I saw what the DNC, and by extension Hillary Clinton, did to him. The DNC was bankrupt, and threw their support for HRC in return for a donation to keep them afloat.

She was fed debate questions while Trump was not.

Then the e-mail scandal broke. HRC seemed to have a lot of baggage, deserved or not.

Then when the primaries hit, there were some states where Bernie clearly was the choice, but HRC got the nod. That’s when I started giving the Dems the stink-eye.

Still wasn’t a fan of Trump, but Bernie was out, and I couldn’t abide by Clinton any longer. So when the general election came along, I voted for Johnson.

In the meantime, I worked every hour I could, and put any social life on hold. I had to come up with a place of my own, my own car, furniture, dishes, towels, bedding, etc. I just couldn’t live with family any more. In other words, the government didn’t save me…my family and I saved me. Mostly me.

So Trump won. I was kind of “meh” about it and moved on. The economy rebounded, taxes went down, and my checks were bigger.

Still, Trump comes with a lot of baggage too. The claims against him made him seem to be a monster. So I did some digging.

He’s a frat boy in an old man’s body. He’s not a good speaker. He says dumb stuff. But something happened. Every time he said “we’re going to do this” and people said “that will never work”, IT DID.

Still, he’s a brute. So I researched both parties. The Republicans were closer to what I really wanted than the Democrats. Guess I changed my thinking when I realized that the government stepping back and letting me exercise my freedom of choice worked better than having the government help me could.

The Republicans weren’t ideal either, but their message was closer to home.

Then I researched the Democrats, and I didn’t like what I saw. I was a Democrat no more.

So what would it take to make me vote for a Democrat? A sincere apology from the party for the things it has done. Things it has never apologized for. Things that if you really look at history, show that the Democrats have a lot to answer for.

For you Democrats out there, be forewarned. You aren’t going to like what you hear. If you are easily offended, hate the truth, or just plain don’t want to know, go back now. Don’t go any farther. You’ve been given your trigger warning.

Here’s what they need to apologize for:

When it came time to abolish slavery, the Republicans voted for it. The Democrats did not. Never apologized for that faux pas.
Starting the Ku Klux Klan.
Setting up Jim Crow laws.
Segregation.
Lynchings.
Voting against the amendments that gave full voting rights to blacks.
Restarting the Ku Klux Klan.
Letting their party head set up Japanese internment camps.
Creating the welfare state.
Forcing a Republican president to send in troops so black kids could go to the same schools as whites. (italics mine)
Perpetuating the Great Switch myth.
Lackluster support for civil rights legislation.
Only supporting civil rights for votes from the black communities.
Switching over to the racism of soft expectations.
Sanctimonious virtue signalling.
Trying to take away some of our most inalienable rights regarding speech and maintaining the security of a free state.
Tearing down the reputations of people with no evidence.
Urging people to harass people they don’t like while they are at home or in restaurants and stores.
Blaming one group of people for all the problems our nation faces, then having the audacity to say that it isn’t racist or sexist.

Democrats have at times done good things for the working man. And some of our politicians of the Democratic bent have been good people. But the party itself is a broken, incoherent mess.

When a party demands that the whole populace really needs to give reparations for slavery, when it is they themselves that caused the problem in the first place, all I see is political hubris.

I’m still not a fan of Trump, but I’d still rather hold my nose and vote for him than vote for any of the looney toons in the Democratic party.

Trying to pick a Democratic candidate who is acceptable to me is like trying to find a tootsie roll in an outhouse.

What is challenging about writing stories with more than one protagonist? Does having two protagonists make anything easier?

You wind up writing two stories. The only reasonable approach is to make the stories intersect in a way that completes both of them. What pops into my head is a he-she meet-cute where the action at that point highlights both of their problems.

Every story revolves around resolving a conflict.

Their conflicts have no intersection other than a plot-collision that (oh, this is good!) puts them in opposition to each other.

Over time resolving these two unconnected conflicts gives you the chance to make the two resolutions somehow require that they work together.

If you can’t write act three after that, don’t call me!

As a Christian I have never heard God speak to me directly. Do you think that God really speaks to people?

Once myself and twice a friend. Dave’s was a “Yes, you’re doing it right,” feeling of comfort when, in angst, he questioned whether his path was the right one. No trumpets, no angels, just an immediate quiet reassurance.

Mine was much more prosaic. Stopped at a light, one sunny afternoon, I (slightly Aspergers) marveled that the meter sat precisely in the center of cosmic measurements – quantum distance is around 10 ** -47 meter and the size of the knowable universe is around 10 ** 47 meters. I addressed GOD the way you would any amazing engineer, “Was that on purpose?” and got back a feeling of “It just worked out that way.” Again, no trumpets, nothing profound, but in an open moment I asked a question that struck me, and got back a low-key, accommodating answer.

GOD is beyond our ability to comprehend and too intense to survive a direct encounter, but His gentle love can make Him as comfortable as an old friend.

The best! More of a waking near-death experience—a young woman spoke of trying to find her way in life. She felt so bound in by conflict and failure that she prayed in her heart to just be released from life. A warmth and love surrounded her and gave a taste of “the peace that passes all understanding.” She realized that we are here for a time, and will eventually move on to that permanent joy and peace. The reassurance reenergized her to walk where her feet took her, so to speak; fear and depression died because she knew she was loved by GOD.

None of these experiences amounted to “a new revelation” or “a commission from GOD to correct the evils of the world or realign its understanding.” Each was a single moment that left an indelible memory of being connected beyond one’s own self.