That's Not The Point - That IS THE POINT!!

Due to Michigan's proximity to Canada, we are exposed to semi-regular news stories detailing the issues with the Canadian healthcare system that drive Canadians to America to receive needed care.  That is one reason among so many why I remain steadfastly opposed to any further movement toward a nationalized healthcare system in the US.

One of the primary criticisms of healthcare in the US is that healthcare is rationed by virtue of cost.  If you can't pay, then you can't have.

With national healthcare systems such as those in Canada and the UK, healthcare is rationed by virtue of time.  You can't have any until the government approves the procedure.  In some cases, approval takes a very, very long time.  Approaching "never"...or just simply never.

Along comes the case of Jolene Van Alstine, a citizen of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan.  She suffers from a rare parathyroid condition.  The solution to the condition is the removal of the parathyroid.  This is a standard procedure that is known to resolve the problem.

So to solve the issue one sets up an appointment with a doctor and has the procedure done.  Spit.  Spot.  Move along.

Except, one must first get a referral to an appropriate doctor to perform the surgery.  No such qualified doctor exists in Saskatchewan.  And their NHS has (thus far) declined to offer a referral outside of Saskatchewan.

Apparently, this condition is quite painful.  Ms. Van Alstine is in sufficient distress that she has begun the process of applying for MAID from the Canadian healthcare system.

MAID stands for Medical Assistance In Dying.  The stated purpose is that a person suffering from an incurable, intractable medical issue can request assistance in committing suicide.

For the record, I think the approach stated above is a sound basis upon which to create assistance in dying.  If a person dying from cancer (or Parkinson's, or nerve damage rendering them a quadriplegic, or...so on)  is faced with the choice between several months of increasing pain or a quick exit at the moment of their choice, then the latter is the most humane and ethical option on the table.

But in this case, the problem persists because their NHS refuses to give permission to a qualified doctor to set up a practice in Saskatchewan.  And they have, thus far, declined to issue a referral to Ms. Van Alstine to visit a qualified doctor outside of Saskatchewan.

You may want to read [one] and [two] articles on this event.

What I find unconscionable is the response from various officials responsible for healthcare in Canada.  From the articles:

Starting with this bit of mealy-mouthed non-responsiveness.

"Due to patient confidentiality, we cannot comment on specifics of an individual’s case and outcomes," the spokesperson said. "The Government of Saskatchewan expresses its sincere sympathy for all patients who are suffering with a difficult health diagnosis.

"The Ministry of Health encourages all patients to continue working with their primary care providers to properly assess and determine the best path forward to ensure they receive timely access to high-quality healthcare."

After an American broadcaster steps into help:

Tom McIntosh, a professor of politics and international studies at the University of Regina who focuses on health policy, says Canadians should not allow political posturing to draw their attention away from the real problems.

“Whatever kind of foolish opportunism that Glenn Beck is demonstrating for his own purposes, we, I think, should try not to be distracted by that,” McIntosh said in an interview on Wednesday.

 And this from the government health ministry:

A Ministry of Health spokesperson confirmed the meeting shortly after and sent CBC a statement.

"Due to patient confidentiality, we cannot comment on specifics of an individual’s case and outcomes," the spokesperson said at the time. "The Government of Saskatchewan expresses its sincere sympathy for all patients who are suffering with a difficult health diagnosis.

"The Ministry of Health encourages all patients to continue working with their primary care providers to properly assess and determine the best path forward to ensure they receive timely access to high-quality healthcare."

The point, from their perspective, is not that their system is broken in a way that leaves people vulnerable to not receiving needed care.  The point is not that they need to take quick action to resolve the issue to keep a person from the alternative; preventable suicide.

Their point seems to be that this is all just an American circus pitching its tent in Canada for fun and profit.

That's not the point.  The point is that nationalized health care systems deny citizens their ability to access needed care.  Nationalized health care systems fail to respond to market pressures because they destroy the market signals that reveal those pressures.

Had they allowed physicians to open an office where ever the physicians saw an opportunity to serve people (and earn a profit), then this wouldn't have been an issue.  Ms. Van Alstine would have had multiple doctors from which to choose.

Had their system allowed a local doctor to make a referral to ANY qualified doctor in Canada, then this would not have been an issue.

The problem is created by rationing care which is the inevitable result of any nationalized health care system.

Sauce The Gander But Never The Goose

I am something of a middling fan of Larry Correia's fiction.  I have not been attracted to his various MHI series.  But I love his Saga of the Forgotten Warrior series and consider it to be one of the 5 best fantasy series to have been published this century.

Some of you may recall Larry's interactions with the WorldCon community over the years.  Basically, he asserted that the Hugo Awards have been compromised by those that put politics ahead of quality storytelling.  I think it is fair to say that he made that assertion inelegantly.  I think it is fair to say that elegance has never been a priority for Larry.

From that issue flows a tangential connection with George R.R. Martin, author of a bunch of stuff along with the unfinished A Song of Fire and Ice series.  Along with other fans, I'd love for George to finish the series.  Along with other fans, I suspect that he won't for various reasons.

Over the last 5-10 years, Larry has made it a habit to taunt George.  He even wrote the dedication to the capstone novel of his Saga of the Forgotten Warrior series to George.

"To George R. R. Martin. See? It’s not that hard"

Recently, Larry posted a writing update where he noted that he has a lot of irons in the fire.  He stated that we shouldn't take his lack of attention to our personal favorite series as a personal slight.

And the worst frequently asked question of all (which is really more of a perpetual whine) here’s my perpetual answer: I’m terribly sorry that I’m working on (the series you despise) rather than (the series you love) and yes, even though I claim to write different things at different times for logical business or creative reasons you don’t grasp, in reality writers are like those soda machines with a hundred flavors and you just push the button you want and wonderful stories effortlessly come out super fast on demand, so clearly I am only writing books in this order because I am cruel and spiteful against you personally, even though I don’t know you at all. Cool? Run with that.

Given that George also has many creative irons in the fire, one would hope that Larry would have been a bit more tolerant over the years.  Or that he might acknowledge the irony of choosing the properties he works on and those that get ignored while simultaneously castigating George for making precisely the same choices.

I'll read more books from the Song of Fire and Ice series if George ever finishes them.  I'll be reading more books by Larry as well.  (His most recent Kickstarter is in my Kindle queue.  I have high hopes!)

I also think calling all of the balls and strikes is a useful habit.  

The Star Trek You Never Knew

So what was life on the USS Enterprise really like? I mean...really, really like? Did the Star Trek episodes really cover all the best events? Were there events that are more important in retrospect but were treated as mundane and left on the cutting room floor? Was life on the Enterprise a bit spicier than you thought?

The good folks at Quadrivo [Patreon link - they have a "free" option!] have their NetDystopia Music project on YouTube where they offer a variety of electronic music. They also have a unique collection of Star Trek scenes that somehow never made it into the TV shows!

These clips are mildly episodic. Watching them in order will be more satisfying than watching them randomly.

Episode 1 - Picard and Q had an infamously fraught relationship where each tried to outsmart the other in a sort of mental chess. Did their relationship ever break down into something simpler? Checkers? Tic-Tac-Toe? Trading insults? Your mom!

 

Episode 2 - Commander Riker's escapades were legendary. Going on planet-side liberty with Riker guaranteed an "interesting" time. As a result, Picard is compelled to have an HR discussion with Riker about some of his more disturbing conduct aboard the Enterprise. But that man sure knows how to use a chair! Leg up!

Episode 3 - Nothing works forever. While the holodeck is offline and Picard has to use a gaming console with all the RGBs to play Borderlands 44, but the lag is a killer.

Episode 4 - Commander Riker's antics rubbed off on some of the crew. And now Picard has to have an HR discussion with Troi. She successfully invokes a Kirk originated fleet directive.

Episode 5 - Kirk and company have trouble complying with a new fleet safety instruction. Kirk's twin brother impersonates Kirk to get the last of the "good" safety gear. Rather than deal with the older tech, Kirk issues one of his infamous fleet directives.

Episode 6 - Harry Mudd has a new podcast. The Warp Factor! Harry interviews the Ferengi Fur about the console performance requirements for Fur's latest video game, Borderlands 44. Episode sponsored by Dr Crimson and her OnlyScans channel. Yoga!

Coming soon! Chief O'Brien and the transporter!

I enjoy solid animation. The scenes in the above have a bit of a rotoscoped feel with a bit of Studio Ghibli tossed in. Most of the character animations are pretty close to how the live actors appeared. From the Quadrivo Patreon page, it appears that these video clips are all created using some level of AI.

As always, the Internet is replete with diamonds amidst the sludge. For those with an ear for relaxing electronica, Quadrivo has a channel on Spotify.

Also, while doing the research I had a moment of serendipity and discovered this piece titled "Dave Brubeck - Golden Brown" which is a piece inspired by Dave Brubeck's "Time Out" and the Stranglers' "Golden Brown". The music is original, but the video is cut from a video of Dave Brubeck's band playing Time Out. The algorithm for the win!

Thanks for stopping by. I hope this provided some enjoyment to your day.

Review: In the Belly of the Whale

In the Belly of the Whale by Michael Flynn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a 4-star review. This was closer to 4.5 stars, but not enough to push it to 5.

The book tells the story of a generation starship on its way to a far flung star with the purpose of expanding human habitation. The ship is home to roughly 40000 humans largely consisting of people taken from Asian and UK/European cultures. The ship has completed less than a millennia's worth of travel with more than a millennia to go. The crew are all great, great, great....great grandchildren of the first generation that launched from the Earth.

Roughly 80 years prior to the current story, the ship experienced a catastrophe where a section of the ship collapsed rendering that section theoretically uninhabitable. "Theoretically" as there are people who live there. They don't live well, but they are free of the strictures and structures imposed on the crew.

Those legal and social constraints form the core of the conflict within the novel. There are two leadership classes. One is in charge of navigation of the ship. These elites are viewed as being mostly benign as they are prevented from having children and thus cannot form any sort of dynasty. Instead, they "adopt" the next generation of navigators from the crew based on aptitude.

The other leadership class runs the various systems needed to keep people alive; i.e. food, air, water, maintenance, security, etc. Those leaders have evolved a self-limiting social structure whereby their children frequently inherit positions of great power. They use the power of those positions to accrue great wealth and still greater power.

The rest of the crew finds this situation intolerable. A mutiny/revolution eventually unfolds.

That is the general plot of the book. The subtext comments on what it means to be elite, what it means to lead, and what sort of organizational principles are needed to ensure that power is not turned toward the support of private/personal interests at everyone else's expense. The author does a great job of keeping the subtext from subsuming the plot/text of the book and becoming a thinly veiled polemic.

There are two features of the book that limited my enjoyment. The first is the number of characters. The book begins with a listing of the cast/crew including formal and informal names. Perhaps my age may be getting in the way, but the number of characters and the number of names (formal/informal/nicknames/positional) for each character got in my way a few times. There wasn't enough differentiation between the characters/names.

The second feature is the author's choice to include disparate scenes within a single chapter with no visual demarcation between those scenes. The book will spend several paragraphs and/or pages following one set of characters. The following paragraph then jumps to a different group of characters and different location without any additional visual indication that the location has shifted. This sort of jump occurs several times within a single chapter. This storytelling technique was unusual, quirky, and periodically disconcerting. Perhaps it is a byproduct of reading an e-book rather than a physical book.

One very positive feature of the book is the author's ability to show a culture that exists hundreds of years after our own. There are many cultural facets that are obviously derived from our time. But it is equally obvious that time has changed those cultural touchstones. The result is that the reader experiences a bit of anticipation for the next moment when an echo of our modern society is revealed through the lens of a culture that exists hundreds of years in our future.

Another positive feature is that the author has carefully considered the technical demands of maintaining a starship and crew for thousands of years. What limits must be put in place to prevent over population? How can problems associated with inbreeding be avoided? What sort of weapons are going to be acceptable? How much security/surveillance will be tolerated?

Overall, this is a highly enjoyable book. Well worth the effort.

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Socialism and Communism - Kissing, Turbulent Cousins

One of my many pet peeves is the incessant mischaracterization of the Nazis as being "far right" on some sort of linear political spectrum.  There are no common elements between the economic/social controls that the Nazis imposed and the typical, liberal, capitalist, small-d democratic form of government practiced by most western nations.  The communist assertion that the Nazis were "far right" is patently false.

[More about political spectrums at the bottom.]

My understanding of the history of leftist ideology is that the communists originally call themselves "left wing socialists" while they label fascists and similar ne'er-do-wells as "right wing socialists".  Free markets don't even register on the communist political spectrum.  Those of us that support free minds and free markets exist outside of their reality.

Fascist governments have historically engaged in social and economic controls that are very similar to those imposed by communists.  The problem is that no socialist group wants competition.  As a result, the first thing the socialists do after getting into power is shoot the communists.  And vice versa.  They are competing to position their faction as the best expression of collectivist ideology.

I came across a brief essay by Gustavo Jalife at The Conservative Woman.  His thoughts on the topic are quite similar to mine.

The characterisation of the ‘far right’ as nationalist, racist and authoritarian ideologies that seek to eliminate democratic systems, even through violence, is repeated daily by mainstream media pundits who deliberately try to smear whoever defends democracy by resisting the intrusion of the state into every crevice of private life. However, the formula perfectly applies to forces dwelling on the opposite side of the political arc. The Soviet Communist Party, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party NSDAP (the Nazi Party), the National Fascist Party of Italy and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, among other totalitarian ensembles, fit the description precisely. That the flagrant subversion of a primary concept has taken root even among presumably learned people confirms the resounding success of one of the greatest propaganda operations ever undertaken.

Gustavo referenced a longer essay by Allen Gindler titled "How and Why Fascism and Nazism Became the ‘Right.’” originally published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies.  I'm still chewing through the essay, but there were some early nuggets worth quoting.

Instead, Marxism is a particular and extreme current of socialism called communism. In other words, Marxism is undoubtedly leftist, but the Left is not entirely Marxist. Marxism did not invent socialist thought, which originated centuries earlier and is known by the collective name “utopian socialism.” Marxism’s founders initiated the communist camp and clearly distinguished themselves from contemporary socialists, whom they contemptuously called “so-called socialists.”

and

According to Engels, the last group—democratic socialists—shared the majority of communists’ political objectives but stopped short of accepting all the provisions of Marxist doctrine. They were satisfied with achieving goals within the framework of social democracy. Communists engaged in partnerships with democratic socialists and tried to convince them to embrace communist thought in its entirety.

and

The lesson to be learned and remembered is that left-wing intellectual circles were vibrant yet at the same time hostile environments. Despite the fact that the Left has only one common enemy—capitalism—intractable contradictions in the tactics and strategies of its overthrow made them implacable adversaries.  Even though the bourgeoisie was the Left’s openly proclaimed enemy, they were treated less harshly than opponents from their leftist circles, who were treated like vile traitors. History showed that as soon as one of the left-wing parties gained real power, it immediately persecuted its fellow socialists from other factions.

I invite you to read the essay for yourself.  Thus far it is a clarifying piece that documents the history of leftist factionalism.  From my perspective, there are no significant differences between socialism (even so-called "democratic socialism") and communism.  The only differences are a matter of style...and how they put the bullet in your head for having the temerity to utter the phrase they hold in highest contempt; "I disagree".

---

Regarding political spectrums.  The entire framing of politics as a linear spectrum also has roots in early French republics and other parliamentary systems.  Representatives in those governments had partisan seating such that those on the perceived "left" were seated to the left.

A more accurate depiction of political options is offered in the image below.  Whenever I engage with one of these quiz-based political maps, I generally wind up somewhere in the green circle.  Communists generally end up somewhere toward the left edge of the black circle and fascists end up in the blue area of the black circle.  My point is that communists, socialists, and fascists frequently have far more in common than might be imagined if one uses the flawed, linear political spectrum that places communism at one extreme and fascism at the other.

Horseshoe theory is real.

Most western societies, including the United States, including the much-reviled MAGA movement, generally fall into a range that is a bit above and a bit to the left of my green circle.  You can take one such quiz here. 

Review: Academy of Outcasts

Academy of Outcasts by Larry Correia
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a 3-star review which is a reasonable estimate of my experience.

Larry's other fantasy works have been uniformly great. It took me until the afterwards of this book to figure out the problem. This is LitRPG. I rarely find LitRPG worth the effort of reading.

This book was no different. As is typical for LitRPG, there was a focus on "levels" for magic users. Not so much for fighters.

As is typical, the names used for other creatures involved minimal creativity. Sometimes no creativity.

There were enough spelling/grammar errors that I started making notes in my Kindle edition. People wear "striped" shirts and not "stripped" shirts. And once my editor's hat was on, other elements of the novel became noticeable.

One big incongruity is how the first mages set up the Nexus in the first place. All of the elemental components were on elemental plains. So how did those first mages get the elements that would allow them to cast spells to allow them to travel to elemental planes so they could mine more elemental components?

If you like LitRPG, then give this a try. It might be for you. Larry is a very good author...just not enough to make LitRPG interesting for someone that doesn't like LitRPG to begin with.

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Review: Orconomics

Orconomics by J. Zachary Pike
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a 5-star review.

I rarely give out 5 star reviews. This book is something special.

[I failed to write a review when I read the book in 2019. So this will not be as detailed.]

The world of Orconomics is the world of old-school, hack-and-slash, raid dungeon for gold Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. The only good version of AD&D, in my opinion.

The sub-text of the book is the story of Wall Street trading in stocks, derivatives, and other financial tools. There is, to my layman's eyes, a pretty solid critique in this book to the activities that led to the financial collapse of 2008.

Back to the story, our hero assembles a team of adventurers to go get the McGuffin. In the process of hacking and slashing their way to the McGuffin, they learn that the whole system is a bit of a Ponzi scheme that gets adventurers to rob nominally peaceful non-humans (i.e. orcs, etc.) in order to fulfill investment contracts.

There is a ton of humor in the story. The characters are highly relatable. The economics sub-text informs rather the story rather than surpassing it. This is a solid book that is worthy of your time.

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