The Costa Rican health care system

In the August 30, 2021 issue of the New Yorker, Atul Gawande takes a close look at the health care system in Costa Rica that, within a few decades, improved so rapidly that now its people have a higher life expectancy than the US and at a much lower cost. The numbers alone tell the story.

In 1950, around ten per cent of children died before their first birthday, most often from diarrheal illnesses, respiratory infections, and birth complications. Many youths and young adults died as well. The country’s average life expectancy was fifty-five years, thirteen years shorter than that in the United States at the time.

Life expectancy tends to track national income closely. Costa Rica has emerged as an exception… Across all age cohorts, the country’s increase in health has far outpaced its increase in wealth. Although Costa Rica’s per-capita income is a sixth that of the United States—and its per-capita health-care costs are a fraction of ours—life expectancy there is approaching eighty-one years. In the United States, life expectancy peaked at just under seventy-nine years, in 2014, and has declined since.

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Civil resistance versus revolution

Sometimes people who get frustrated by deep injustices in democratic societies seem to give up on their governments doing the right thing and start to consider the possibility of violent revolution as the only way to get any meaningful change. Andrew Marantz writes about an empirical study by Erica Chenoweth, the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, to try and address empirically the question of which kind of effort, mass civil rights struggle or revolution, is more likely to produce the results sought.
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Delegitimizing government as a means to avoid progressive measures

It has long been clear that the Republican party in Congress, aided by some in the Democratic party, has a straightforward strategy: Block everything that does not provide benefits to the ruling class. By creating gridlock and impasses at every turn, they have sought to give the impression that government is useless. This is part of their greater strategy of creating a sense of voter apathy among the less affluent so that they will wash their hands of government and thus be less likely to vote.

In the August 16, 2021 issue of the New Yorker, Louis Menand writes that given the chance, government can do many things that are of great benefit to many people and he points to a two-year window that demonstrates this.
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How do pandemics end?

In an effort to curb the rise in infections and deaths due to the spread of the Delta variant of covid-19, Joe Biden has announced sweeping measures to try and turn the tide. He has mandated that all federal workers and contractors be vaccinated and that all businesses with over 100 employees do the same. He has greatly reduced the options available for not getting vaccinated, especially for federal workers.

In his most forceful pandemic actions and words, President Joe Biden on Thursday ordered sweeping new federal vaccine requirements for as many as 100 million Americans — private-sector employees as well as health care workers and federal contractors — in an all-out effort to curb the surging COVID-19 delta variant.

Speaking at the White House, Biden sharply criticized the tens of millions of Americans who are not yet vaccinated, despite months of availability and incentives.facilities receiving federal benefits will also face the same requirements, he said.
…

The expansive rules mandate that all employers with more than 100 workers require them to be vaccinated or test for the virus weekly, affecting about 80 million Americans. And the roughly 17 million workers at health facilities that receive federal Medicare or Medicaid also will have to be fully vaccinated.

Biden is also requiring vaccination for employees of the executive branch and contractors who do business with the federal government — with no option to test out. That covers several million more workers.

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Robert E. Lee statue goes out with a whimper

The massive statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee that existed in the former confederate capital city of Richmond, Virginia has come to an ignominious end, removed from its pedestal on a prominent part of the city, cut up into pieces, and hauled away and placed in a storage unit.

A statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee that towered over Richmond for generations was taken down, cut into pieces and hauled away Wednesday, as the former capital of the Confederacy erased the last of the Civil War figures that once defined its most prominent thoroughfare.

Hundreds of onlookers erupted in cheers and song as the 21-foot-tall bronze figure was lifted off a pedestal and lowered to the ground. The removal marked a major victory for civil rights activists, whose previous calls to dismantle the statues had been steadfastly rebuked by city and state officials alike.
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The origins of the lizard people theory

I must admit that hearing that some people believe in the existence of ‘lizard people’ took me by surprise, even though you would think that by now I would have become accustomed to hearing that people believe in all manner of fantastical ideas. So what is this theory and how did it originate? Cultural historian Lynn Stuart Parramore walks us through this strange world that has anti-Semitic roots. She says that while the theory is undoubtedly bonkers, it is definitely not harmless.

The world-ruled-by-lizard-people fantasy shot to prominence in recent years in part through the ramblings of David Icke, a popular British sports reporter-turned-conspiracy theorist known for his eccentric ideas.

Icke would have you believe that a race of reptilian beings not only invaded Earth, but that it also created a genetically modified lizard-human hybrid race called the “Babylonian Brotherhood,” which, he maintains, is busy plotting a worldwide fascist state. This sinister cabal of global reptilian elites boasts a membership list including former President Barack Obama, Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and Mick Jagger.

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Another possible reason as to why are flight attendants are being attacked

I have been thinking about the incident in which a passenger viciously attacked a flight attendant who had told her to buckle up and put her tray away since the plane had not yet docked at the gate. This was just one of a large number of such attacks that flight attendants have been subjected to in the last year.

I posed the question as to why people exploded in rage like this but did not really answer it. I initially put this phenomenon down to the pent-up frustrations that people have these days because of the confinements caused by the pandemic. But on reflection, I think it runs deeper than that and is a manifestation of class attitudes that is a relic of feudalism
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The free speech dilemma

Speech is a hot-button issue these days, with inflammatory rhetoric being spouted everywhere and those who are called out on it claiming to be victims of censorship and ‘cancel culture’. The radio program On The Media had a very thoughtful discussion on the controversial issue of free speech. Host Brooke Gladstone spoke with Andrew Marantz about the heated response he got to a 2019 New York Times op-ed Free Speech is Killing Us that he had written that had argued against free speech absolutism, saying that noxious speech can metastasize into physical violence. He cited many instances where hate speech had resulted in deaths.

Having spent the past few years embedding as a reporter with the trolls and bigots and propagandists who are experts at converting fanatical memes into national policy, I no longer have any doubt that the brutality that germinates on the internet can leap into the world of flesh and blood.

The question is where this leaves us. Noxious speech is causing tangible harm. Yet this fact implies a question so uncomfortable that many of us go to great lengths to avoid asking it. Namely, what should we — the government, private companies or individual citizens — be doing about it?

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