Week in Review – February 28 - March 6, 2010: Olympic hockey, healthcare, opportunity
08/March/2010 11:14 Filed in: Week In Review
Can you believe it just a week ago last Sunday the winter Olympic Games came to an end? The men’s gold medal hockey game in which the Canadians defeated the USA in overtime was the best final in history. The problem with hockey on television is that it shares with baseball the excitement of watching grass grow, except the grass field has been flooded and frozen into an ice rink. This is contrasted with live games, where speed and subtle moves can make hockey one of the most exciting spectator sports.
At the end of it all, the United States won more metals than any nation in history and the host Canadians won more gold, again setting a record. The games now pit professionals against professionals, which in our age should be because of the dedication required to perform at such a high level of skill.
The same cannot be said of America’s politicians. Sometime this week we expect the final redux of the Democrat’s healthcare reform package. The only thing for sure is that with or without ObamaCare, within a few years American’s will be paying 20 percent of GDP for health services. Then either reform, or reform of the reform, will and should be the nation’s top domestic priority.
It is true that most Americans are happy with their current coverage and don’t want it to change, simply because they get it for free or cheap with their job. So while they can see the doctor of their choice for routine matters, they never really understand the limitations of their current plan if they seriously need something called major medical.
This however is just one of the opportunities facing not only American’s but also humans around the world. We are being forced out of our comfortable box of material security and the changes we see happening are really the antithesis of change we can believe in. What potential changes in healthcare forces us to do is to look at our own mortality and try to wish our rapidly pending death away. We can’t buy our way out of that reality, especially when our debt is now seriously beginning to affect the future we still could have enjoyed with just a little discipline, financial and otherwise.
What American culture has lost in the last half century is not just the ability to build secure boxes, but to design boxes. Furthermore the boxes that are still available are way too expensive for most people to obtain, because there really is no wealth created in just shuffling the boxes from place to place. To make matters worse the rest of the world is completely dependent on American box shuffling for much of their material prosperity also.
The options now presented in the media are basically design, build and live in your own box, or take a one size all box from the government. Of course to design and build your own box there is no money available to do that. This is contrasted with the government box that you will pay and pay, but you will never own.
But there is a middle ground that we are told no longer exists and it has a strange name, something called civilization or culture. That is built on something which we really don’t design, but something that we construct, and that is called compromise. The problem with compromise is that it doesn’t provide the aggressive hostility required to get advertisers to buy box pushing ads, because drawing from our Olympic moment above, watching it on the tube you really can’t see the subtle nature of the compromise game.
One of the realities of life that is no longer understood, is if you find your identity outside culture, there is a much higher probability that you will be eliminated from the active gene pool. Both the right and left, up and down, of the political junkies in the United States do not realize that they are the extreme.
Healthcare is not rocket science, neither should it be religion. Wise healthcare is essentially statistics. Those statistics show that a small portion of the population will someday need a significant life saving or quality of life procedure that they never can pay for by themselves.
Most people are healthy enough that their insurance premiums pay for those who don’t have health insurance either through lifestyles choices or financial ability, Furthermore most people who have health insurance through their employer, don’t have a clue on how much their take home pay is reduced by the cost of their so called free insurance. Until people have the opportunity to make actual choices and are forced to live with the consequences of those choices, the potential for true healthcare reform is impossible.
Directly related to this is the concept of box design and building. The United States not that long ago used to be the entrepreneurs of the world. The Germans were the engineers, and the Japanese were the manufacturers.
Now with the Toyota recalls, the manufacturing prowess of the Japanese, especially in the USA, is called into question. The Germans are shackled by the egalitarian demands of the European Union. The United States has made true entrepreneurs the most endangered human subspecies in the country, if not the world, and tried to replace them with just passive debt consumers.
History will show that we are living in historic times; we are all being forced out of the boxes of our security. Greatness is no longer a virtue, just getting by the norm, risk is packaged and scammed as securities, order is only discussed within the limits of human intellect, and hence the broken is never fixed, just patched and never replaced.
What is missing is the reality of transcendence. That is true first of all in our religion; our best life now has evaporated, because it never was real. We all have religion, for to say I have no religion is the ultimate religious testimony. In history we see that when people were forced out of their secure boxes by transcendent reality, real positive change took place quite rapidly, but not without making the past and the present an untenable problem. Change beyond our understanding of security, makes all the difference.
At the end of it all, the United States won more metals than any nation in history and the host Canadians won more gold, again setting a record. The games now pit professionals against professionals, which in our age should be because of the dedication required to perform at such a high level of skill.
The same cannot be said of America’s politicians. Sometime this week we expect the final redux of the Democrat’s healthcare reform package. The only thing for sure is that with or without ObamaCare, within a few years American’s will be paying 20 percent of GDP for health services. Then either reform, or reform of the reform, will and should be the nation’s top domestic priority.
It is true that most Americans are happy with their current coverage and don’t want it to change, simply because they get it for free or cheap with their job. So while they can see the doctor of their choice for routine matters, they never really understand the limitations of their current plan if they seriously need something called major medical.
This however is just one of the opportunities facing not only American’s but also humans around the world. We are being forced out of our comfortable box of material security and the changes we see happening are really the antithesis of change we can believe in. What potential changes in healthcare forces us to do is to look at our own mortality and try to wish our rapidly pending death away. We can’t buy our way out of that reality, especially when our debt is now seriously beginning to affect the future we still could have enjoyed with just a little discipline, financial and otherwise.
What American culture has lost in the last half century is not just the ability to build secure boxes, but to design boxes. Furthermore the boxes that are still available are way too expensive for most people to obtain, because there really is no wealth created in just shuffling the boxes from place to place. To make matters worse the rest of the world is completely dependent on American box shuffling for much of their material prosperity also.
The options now presented in the media are basically design, build and live in your own box, or take a one size all box from the government. Of course to design and build your own box there is no money available to do that. This is contrasted with the government box that you will pay and pay, but you will never own.
But there is a middle ground that we are told no longer exists and it has a strange name, something called civilization or culture. That is built on something which we really don’t design, but something that we construct, and that is called compromise. The problem with compromise is that it doesn’t provide the aggressive hostility required to get advertisers to buy box pushing ads, because drawing from our Olympic moment above, watching it on the tube you really can’t see the subtle nature of the compromise game.
One of the realities of life that is no longer understood, is if you find your identity outside culture, there is a much higher probability that you will be eliminated from the active gene pool. Both the right and left, up and down, of the political junkies in the United States do not realize that they are the extreme.
Healthcare is not rocket science, neither should it be religion. Wise healthcare is essentially statistics. Those statistics show that a small portion of the population will someday need a significant life saving or quality of life procedure that they never can pay for by themselves.
Most people are healthy enough that their insurance premiums pay for those who don’t have health insurance either through lifestyles choices or financial ability, Furthermore most people who have health insurance through their employer, don’t have a clue on how much their take home pay is reduced by the cost of their so called free insurance. Until people have the opportunity to make actual choices and are forced to live with the consequences of those choices, the potential for true healthcare reform is impossible.
Directly related to this is the concept of box design and building. The United States not that long ago used to be the entrepreneurs of the world. The Germans were the engineers, and the Japanese were the manufacturers.
Now with the Toyota recalls, the manufacturing prowess of the Japanese, especially in the USA, is called into question. The Germans are shackled by the egalitarian demands of the European Union. The United States has made true entrepreneurs the most endangered human subspecies in the country, if not the world, and tried to replace them with just passive debt consumers.
History will show that we are living in historic times; we are all being forced out of the boxes of our security. Greatness is no longer a virtue, just getting by the norm, risk is packaged and scammed as securities, order is only discussed within the limits of human intellect, and hence the broken is never fixed, just patched and never replaced.
What is missing is the reality of transcendence. That is true first of all in our religion; our best life now has evaporated, because it never was real. We all have religion, for to say I have no religion is the ultimate religious testimony. In history we see that when people were forced out of their secure boxes by transcendent reality, real positive change took place quite rapidly, but not without making the past and the present an untenable problem. Change beyond our understanding of security, makes all the difference.