THE SECOND COMING William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

 

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

 
    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

From NYT "The Hidden Costs of Medical Student Debt" By By PAULINE W. CHEN, M.D. An Excerpt

For almost three generations, debt has been a nearly inescapable part of becoming a doctor. Over 80 percent of each medical student class will graduate in debt; and while that percentage has remained unchanged for 25 years, the increase in the total amount owed has leapfrogged over all other economic reality checks, like inflation and the consumer price index. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, which has been trying to address the problem for nearly a decade, young doctors who graduated from medical school last year had an average debt of $158,000, or $2.3 billion for the group as a whole. Almost a third of students owed more than $200,000, a number that will only increase with the addition of interest over payback periods of 25 to 30 years.

The skyrocketing costs are primarily due to the expansion and increasing complexity of universities and academic medical centers, and to the trend among university administrators to use tuition to support institutional projects that may be only indirectly linked to medical student education.
But while upgraded clinical facilities and spectacular research programs are obvious reasons, another key factor has gone largely unnoticed. It is our society’s assumption that individual indebtedness is required to obtain big-ticket items, whether they are cars, houses or higher education.
“It’s become normal now to take out loans to get anything of value,” said Dr. S. Ryan Greysen, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and lead author of a fascinating study published this month on the historical and social factors that have contributed to rising medical student indebtedness. “Getting a medical education has become similar to getting a mortgage on your house.”

The acceptance of student indebtedness as the “norm” of medical school has provided a kind of carte blanche for robust tuition increases. Median yearly tuition at public medical schools is $29,000, and at private institutions it is $47,000 — increases from two decades earlier of over 312 percent and 165 percent, respectively. While some may counter that future doctors can well afford such increases and loans, the rising debt load has had and will have repercussions on patients, particularly those in greatest need.

Paying so much up front has transformed an education that was once a path to public service into a significant financial investment that needs to yield returns. “Because of all the debt, people stop thinking of medicine as an incredible opportunity to do good,” Dr. Greysen said. For some young people, looming debts mean eschewing a calling to serve a particularly needy, less lucrative patient population or practice, and instead pursuing a well-compensated subspecialty that caters to the comfortably insured.

Kyrie Eleison

"I WAS Hungry And You Fed Me"

Oakland Man Shot While Feeding Homeless Dies

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: July 28, 2011 at 3:17 PM ET

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — Police say an Oakland man who was shot while he and his family were giving food to the homeless has died.

Twenty-nine-year-old Paris Powell was hospitalized in grave condition after being shot in the head shortly after midnight Wednesday. Police say he was taken off life support around 11 p.m. that night.

Witnesses told police that Powell, his wife and their two young daughters were serving a hot meal to a man out of the family's van when someone opened fire from a passing vehicle. Powell's pregnant wife and 3-year-old daughter also were hurt in the arm.

Police have not identified any suspects in the shooting, and the motive is unknown.

Friends and family say Powell was known to distribute meals several times a week on the east Oakland streets.

For I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger, and you invited me into your home.
Matthew 25:35

On Experts and Global Warming

By GARY GUTTING
Experts have always posed a problem for democracies.  Plato scorned democracy, rating it the worst form of government short of tyranny, largely because it gave power to the ignorant many rather than to knowledgeable experts (philosophers, as he saw it).  But, if, as we insist, the people must ultimately decide, the question remains: How can we, non-experts, take account of expert opinion when it is relevant to decisions about public policy?

One we accept the expert authority of climate science, we have no basis for supporting the minority position.
To answer this question, we need to reflect on the logic of appeals to the authority of experts.  First of all, such appeals require a decision about who the experts on a given topic are.  Until there is agreement about this, expert opinion can have no persuasive role in our discussions.  Another requirement is that there be a consensus among the experts about points relevant to our discussion.   Precisely because we are not experts, we are in no position to adjudicate disputes among those who are.  Finally, given a consensus on a claim among recognized experts, we non-experts have no basis for rejecting the truth of the claim.

These requirements may seem trivially obvious, but they have serious consequences.  Consider, for example, current discussions about climate change, specifically about whether there is long-term global warming caused primarily by human activities (anthropogenic global warming or A.G.W.).  All creditable parties to this debate recognize a group of experts designated as “climate scientists,” whom they cite in either support or opposition to their claims about global warming.  In contrast to enterprises such as astrology or homeopathy, there is no serious objection to the very project of climate science.  The only questions are about the conclusions this project supports about global warming.

There is, moreover, no denying that there is a strong consensus among climate scientists on the existence of A.G.W. — in their view, human activities are warming the planet.  There are climate scientists who doubt or deny this claim, but even they show a clear sense of opposing a view that is dominant in their discipline.   Non-expert opponents of A.G.W. usually base their case on various criticisms that a small minority of climate scientists have raised against the consensus view.   But non-experts are in no position to argue against the consensus of expert opinion.   As long as they accept the expert authority of the discipline of climate science, they have no basis for supporting the minority position.  Critics within the community of climate scientists may have a cogent case against A.G.W., but, given the overall consensus of that community, we non-experts have no basis for concluding that this is so.  It does no good to say that we find the consensus conclusions poorly supported.  Since we are not experts on the subject, our judgment  has no standing.

It follows that a non-expert who wants to reject A.G.W. can do so only by arguing that climate science lacks the scientific status needed be taken seriously in our debates about public policy.  There may well be areas of inquiry (e.g., various sub-disciplines of the social sciences) open to this sort of critique.  But there does not seem to be a promising case against the scientific authority of climate science.  As noted, opponents of the consensus on global warming themselves argue from results of the discipline, and there is no reason to think that they would have had any problem accepting a consensus of climate scientists against global warming, had this emerged.

Some non-expert opponents of global warming have made much of a number of e-mails written and circulated among a handful of climate scientists that they see as evidence of bias toward global warming. But unless this group is willing to argue from this small (and questionable) sample to the general unreliability of climate science as a discipline, they have no alternative but to accept the consensus view of climate scientists that global warming is a fact.

I am not arguing the absolute authority of scientific conclusions in democratic debates.  It is not a matter of replacing Plato’s philosopher-kings with scientist-kings in our polis. We the people still need to decide (perhaps through our elected representatives) which groups we accept as having cognitive authority in our policy deliberations. Nor am I denying that there may be a logical gap between established scientific results and specific policy decisions.  The fact that there is significant global warming due to human activity does not of itself imply any particular response to this fact.  There remain pressing questions, for example, about the likely long-term effects of various plans for limiting CO2 emissions, the more immediate economic effects of such plans, and, especially, the proper balance between actual present sacrifices and probable long-term gains.  Here we still require the input of experts, but we must also make fundamental value judgments, a task that, pace Plato, we cannot turn over to experts.

The essential point, however, is that once we have accepted the authority of a particular scientific discipline, we cannot consistently reject its conclusions.  To adapt Schopenhauer’s famous remark about causality, science is not a taxi-cab that we can get in and out of whenever we like.  Once we board the train of climate science, there is no alternative to taking it wherever it may go.

Queen Nzinga A Woman Before Her Time

One of the great women rulers of Africa, Queen Anna Nzinga (circa 1581--1663) of Angola fought against the slave trade and European influence in the seventeenth century. Known for being an astute diplomat and visionary military leader, she resisted Portuguese invasion and slave raids for 30 years. A skilled negotiator, she allied herself with the Dutch and pitted them against the Portuguese in an effort to wrest free of Portuguese domination. She fought for a free Angola until her death at age 82, after which weak rulers left the country open for the Portuguese to regain control.
0.