Keith Burgess-Jackson

Alex Rodriguez has finally realized that he will never be as popular with New York Yankees fans as Derek Jeter.  Jeter’s skin has pinstripes. A-Rod is a mercenary.

See here. Someone nominate me already! I’ll know I made it big when these idiots consider me an idiot.

See here for an essay about George Washington.

The editorial board of The New York Times wants to limit the liberty of adults on the ground that, you guessed it, they’re harming themselves. See here. I have an idea: Why not allow adults to decide for themselves how to live? Somebody get the nascent totalitarians at the Times a copy of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859).

To the Editor:

There is no doubt that there is a health care crisis. There are now 47 million uninsured Americans.

Annually, 18,000 deaths in these United States are attributable to lack of coverage, and, as revealed by Paul Krugman (“The Health Care Racket,” column, Feb. 16), those with insurance are far too often not “covered” when the bills come due.

Proposals to mandate the purchase of insurance by those who can’t afford it are not a solution to a broken health care system whose spiraling costs are anticipated to exceed the profits of the Fortune 500 companies by next year. A full one-third of those costs go to the middle man, the health care insurers.

The other major cost driver is pharmaceuticals that are priced at three to four times as high as Canadians pay for the same prescription medications.

The only solution is what every other industrialized country has adopted, a single-payer system in which the cost of administration and pharmaceuticals are strictly regulated.

Ernest A. Canning
Thousand Oaks, Calif., Feb. 16, 2007

Note from KBJ: Ah yes, socialized medicine. But why stop there? Why not socialized food, socialized drink, socialized fuel, socialized shelter, and socialized clothing? As Karl Marx (1818-1883) put it in his Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”

What are the advantages and disadvantages of doing science in accord with methodological naturalism? There is a good deal to be said on both sides here. For example, if you exclude the supernatural from science, then if the world or some phenomena within it are supernaturally caused—as most of the world’s people believe—you won’t be able to reach that truth scientifically.

Observing methodological naturalism thus hamstrings science by precluding science from reaching what would be an enormously important truth about the world. It might be that, just as a result of this constraint, even the best science in the long run will wind up with false conclusions.

(Alvin Plantinga, “Whether ID Is Science Isn’t Semantics,” Science & Theology News [7 March 2006])

Here.