An Unhealthy Profit

Just a quick question on health care and motivation.  If the foundation of a health care system is so that people or companies providing the care can turn a profit, how possibly could this mean that one would get the best possible care?  In the health care systems of Europe, people are given health care that are mostly designed simply to provide for better health.  The services are designed by and run predominantly by the countries themselves and answer to a democratically elected populace.  They are not run by private companies, as in the US system, who's actual first priority is to the share holders and to profit maximization.  These companies then use providing health care as a way to make money and generate this profit.  This minor word choice is a major distinction.  In the US system companies have found a way to make a profit, not found a way to provide health care.  This is huge!!  How is it possible that the United States health care system is designed to make money first, not make us healthy.  We can talk about all the details we want in terms of healthcare policies (who pays, how much, HMO's, etc) and how the current system works/can be changed, but FUNDAMENTALLY it is flawed. 

We are not getting the best care because corners get cut if profit, or not enough profit, can be made.  As I've said before, profit is actually an extra cost that raises prices and increases inefficiency.  Yes, it does provide incentive for investment, but should we need financial incentive to care for the health of people, families, childern?  If you take the profit away from these companies they could charge lower prices.  State health care providers may be looked at as inefficient, but they are wholly inclusive and include the entire populations, have lower costs per person, and most importantly they are motivated by the right reasons - care, not money.

How many of us hate it when we go into a store or call a company, and you can tell that the sales person is really just interested in getting a sale, making a commition, or just simply doing whatever it takes to make money, even at the expense of service.  Yet we have no problem allowing our entire health care system to function like this - based on making money. 

Now, this may seem like I am pushing for state run health care, but I am not.  I am asking for health care that is not firstly profit motivated.  Health care designed to provide for the people in medical need, not financial desire.  Does such a company structure currently exist?  Does it have to be done by non-profits?  Is the state the only option?  This is quite the grey area.  I personally believe that if the system does not specifically reward or motivate in a certian direction - i.e. doesn't explicitly try to promote it - then people will not so readily follow a specific option.   We need to another level of legal corporate distinction - 'for-service' companies as I see it (I'm working on an outline for this type of company, check back).  But ultimately, we need our healthcare to be about us, not about money.

An Olympic Spectacle

So I must admit, as an athlete I have always loved the Olympics. It has always seemed like the universal standard for athletic achievement. To be an Olympian, to walk out during the opening ceremony, to stand on the medal podium, to hear your country’s national anthem – the pride that everyone in your country and in your heart must feel at that victorious moment. Years of hard work, pain, long hours pushing your body and mind. The pinnacle of an athlete’s achievement.

However, there is one thing that has begun to dampen the spirit of it all for me. A realization that the event is really about nothing but blatant nationalism. That is all but what the Olympics have become, especially on the larger scale. It is just another way for a country to exert its national ‘superiority’ (or inferiority). Athletes and the national public simply focus on national pride and root for their countrymen. All this does is reinforce a nationalistic vision of our lives (which of course those in power have no problem with). When even our entertainment and leisure activities are based upon one area of land being ‘better’ or ‘more important’ than another, we as a society are moving in the wrong direction.

I understand that it might be tough to put together any representation scenario that would not instill this same type of stigmatization, and/or whether people would take so much pride or watch so fervently. But I think it’s worth thinking about this. Our lives are designed to keep our focuses on certain things and in certain directions. If our whole gaze is ‘supposed’ to be on our own country/local piece of land, than we won’t spend money or use resources in other places, we won’t force our politicians and companies to spend money in these places or take those places into proper account. We are taught to view other countries and their athletes as our foes – even on a leisure level. Competition may make us ‘better’, but it also makes us see others as adversaries, and is the precursor to conflict. If we are taught to only care about the local, then why would we care about the global or force anyone else to care about the global?

Equally Ignorant

What are we doing?  I mean here.  Why is it that we exist, and what gives us the right to choose it as such?  Do we singularly exist to procreate the species, or is there something else something more?  Now don't get me wrong, I am not trying to discuss spiritual existence or religious intrigue.  But more about what we actually do with our time and how this actually benefits anything.

Some would say that we are here to procreate the species, to make more of us.  But if we really want to make more of us, then why are we killing each other?  Granted there are very few orgasms in feeding starving children, so it isn't quite as 'sexy' as the typical act of procreation.  But so what?  Look at ourselves.  We live in our happy little worlds with all of our nice little things while only a few miles - yes, just a few miles away - people are hungry and suffering.  Never mind that around the world some 2 billion people will struggle for the basic necessities of life this year.  Yet here we sit, with our nice cars, big houses, and all the other 'spoils' of a claimed and marketed 'equal' opportunity.  And this is what we think, that everyone on earth has the same opportunity.  I mean if I can do it, so can everyone right?  Think about the world, what do you think would be the single biggest determiner in a person's life expectations?  No not color or ethnicity, it is where they are born.  If a person is born in the United States they have such a better opportunity to live a healthy and secure life than someone who is born in Sierra Leone.  Color doesn't matter, simply what side of some man-made arbitrary border they were born on.

But don't think this is only about foreign countries.  Suburbanites like to sit in their self made castles and act like everyone in the US still has an equal opportunity.  No way.  If a person is born in the inner city ghetto to a minority family with a single mother, poor school districts, lots of siblings, and little food there is no way you can say that people have the 'same' opportunities in life.  history does not disappear, and 'capital' does not grow on trees.  Simply by walking in a door as a black person in America or a Roma (gypsy) in Europe you are seen differently than a white person.  This is not an equal opportunity, it is a different world that varies by color, socio-economic status, gender, whatever, and one that those on the top never see.

If every women had the 'same' opportunity as a man, then why do women make almost 30% less than men do?  Are you saying that women are not as intelligent as men?  Are they not as hard working?  And what of minorities?  Is it no coincidence that one of the poorest performing ethnic groups are of those people descending from slaves?  Fact is, America is and never was about equal opportunity.  From the time the Europeans landed equality was never part of the picture.  The native americans should have 'theoretically' had a better opportunity than the europeans - they were here first after all - but this didn't matter.  They were shoved aside - murdered with 'equal' passion, Sioux, Cherokee, Mohawk, whatever.  Guns, germs and steel don't create equal opportunities, never mind greed.

Yeah, I suppose from the dawn of time we all had equal opportunity, but that was a long time ago - no matter who you ask.  But not today.  This line of thought is simply something designed to make us feel ok about our lives.  To make us feel like its ok to be rich while other's suffer.

If we bathe ourselves in the ignorance given to us, we will never understand life, and we will never truly be free...

Can one country actually be 'Best'?

So an old friend writes his five best countries in the world on facebook. USA USA USA USA USA, and then claims it was a ‘no brainer’. I wanted to ask three questions, 1, how many/have you ever been to other countries, 2, do you really know WHY you are saying that, and 3, what information and decision making process are you using? The reality of it is that most people that claim this have spent very little time outside the country they live in, and even if they have it is generally on vacation, or through the uninterested, narrow-minded eyes given to them in their home country. It is really sad that people take in so much information with such little questioning of its merits, sources, and purposes…

I just want to say things to these people, to try to open their eyes... It is not that America is the best country, or that it is not, but rather just that that is simply what they have been taught to believe. Indoctrinated into the system as ‘they’ want you to be… But even if I say something, I don't see it as doing anything but pushing me further away from everything – friends, family, society, etc. People don’t want to change things, they don’t want to up-heave their entire lives, those in power like them as they are... 

The Generation of 'Scientific' Information.

Does anyone else have an issue with the social sciences hold over the world of information? I mean if you think about it, why is it that the realm of high level interpretation given the social interaction of our world rests on the shoulders of a few individuals 'trained' to see things 'scientifically'? After all what is this “scientific” inquiry and how does it translate to the real social world? We have a group of people that sit around reading the same old eight white dead European mens' ideas and re/interpreting our social existence through these same eyes, based on the same foundations of knowledge, and keep coming to the same explanations and understandings. .

Take one case in point from social science methodology. When you discuss ethics and methodology, it is generally accepted that if you wish to study someone, observe them, that you should (or really have to if you want to do things 'properly' / 'respectably'), gain their permission to observe them. I certainly understand the implications of rights and freedoms of individuals and am sympathetic to this concept. But how can you tell me that this is a 'scientific' way of observing the actual world as it exists? I mean just think about it. When you are sitting at home alone and you know full well that no one is watching you, what do you do? You do whatever you want to do and however you want to do it. Now imagine if you know that someone is watching you, studying you, trying to decipher exactly how you and your human life exist and function. Would you act differently? If you knew your fiends and family would be watching? (see my previous post about acting as if everyone is watching you as a motivator for you to be 'better')

The bottom line is being observed changes a person's behavior. If no one is there do you close the door when you pee? Do you walk around naked? Do you sing along with the radio? Think about it in family settings. Does an abusive father beat or verbally accost his children in public? Does he do this in his own home if there is a visitor? Probably not. I mean its illegal, and unaccepted. But it happens daily. Women are abused all over the world and it goes 'unnoticed', yet how often is it 'seen'? The bottom line is that people live their lives differently in public and in private. This is absolutely no surprise to anyone. So how is it that we somehow believe that 'scientifically' we are actually doing something admissible when people have been given notification before being watched. It is a false and manufactured act and in no way mirrors a controlled laboratory 'scientific' experiment. The problem is that observation or filming without peoples' consent is considered unethical, even though it would actually be the most true study. Yet it still doesn't stop social scientists from claiming these tests bring about 'facts' and/or truths – 'scientifically'.

Ultimately, social sciences have a monopoly on the generation of actionable 'information' in our society. Sociologist and anthropologists work on studying how it is that he live, political scientists focus on our governing and 'compromising', economists on how we allocate scarce resources, etc. Yet every one of these 'scientists' is caught up too implicitly in the world that we/they live in to be socially objective. They are trained to be 'scientists'. In this training they are taught 'scientific' methods and given specific lens to see things through. But, if you look at society through the same 'lens' that someone else has in the past, are you not destined to see society in pretty similar, if not the same ways? If you spend your entire higher education life learning ways of looking at things and begin to identify with one or a few of these lens, and even perhaps feel like one resonates best with you. You then start thinking in these manors and seeing the world through those already used eyes. If you believe society is based on class relations or power relations then you will start looking at your studies through these same eyes. Your experiments will begin to be colored by these same concepts, and your conclusions tainted by the structure of your studies and the 'things' you were searching to prove. A hypothesis can be nothing more than a self-fulfilling prophecy in the social sciences.

The problem with all this is that it is exactly these 'scientists' that society relies upon to generate the wealth of the information that we use to govern our society. Sociological data is used from everything from polling, to conclusions about how we interact daily and they easily create opportunities psychological profiling within us all. Political policies are put into place based on studies of regions and cultures which are specifically designed through unimaginably and unknowingly influenced eyes. Yet it is specifically these eyes that we trust to create policy based on observed 'facts' (this is not even to mention the 'interpretation' and selection of this information given political and business implications/influences).

What percentage of the population are these social scientists? In the US it is just under 1%, and in the world it is far less than that. Yet it is exactly these people that are determining the lives of the remainder of the people in the world – all highly salaried, highly 'educated' (of course in the ways of the system and it presumptions), and highly funded. Yes, this may see like a bit of a stretch, but trace the dots. Politicians and people with money, i.e. power (especially businesses and business persons) are the ones that set the tone and agendas for laws and practices. Those with 'ownership of the means of production' – including intellectual production – control the world. That process of control really hinges on direct lines of communication. Politicians make the laws, they base these laws on what society 'needs'/'wants', this is largely influenced and even controlled by business interests and people in positions to promote their interests (wealthy individuals, etc.), the politicians and then turn to the 'technocrats' or experts – generally the scientists – for justification and methodology as to how best to go about things. The 'proper' way of implementing things, the ramifications of various options, etc. So in-fact, while social scientists are capable of creating and illuminating a 'need' for polices or practices, even more over they are the ones that are turned to once a 'need' has been determined to exist, and a 'solution' is sought. Upon this, the sciences are of profound influence on our daily lives, the laws we live by, and our socio-political/economic interaction. This gross minority of the population comes up with all our 'solutions'.

Where is the other 99% of the population's say in this? Many would say that is what democracy is for, so that these people can have a 'say'. But this is utopian under current scenarios. In these representative democracies do we really have a say? Many democracies are lucky to get half the voting age population to actually vote. And even once someone is elected, then our only recourse is to 'contact our congress person'. This of course really means to contact that congress person's intern or assistant and doesn't even feel much like having a 'voice'. It is done by such a small percentage of the population (not to mention excludes people with less means or confidence in contacting, writing, or speaking on that level) that it is thoroughly under representative of the population as a whole. And even the information expressed, where does this go and how is it used? Once something I say or write something 'to' my congress person it then gets lumped into various categories or put on a desk in some aid's office. It is compiled and interpreted, categorized and transformed into specific issue related files that may mean you never even really get heard by the congress person you intended to or that the concept is picked from and lost in its entirety (think, if I write three pages on my thoughts on healthcare, and part of the whole concept includes a public option – but only under the other circumstances, in its entirety – yet this likely gets lumped into “58% of constituents support a public option.” Yet I only support it under certain circumstances).

How is this having a voice? And how is this having a voice on policy and legislation? We in fact have virtually no voice. The illusion of this exists, and for the few that try to express themselves, even less are actually 'heard' in legislative debate, and our political and social culture does not promote it. The fact is the a gross majority of the population of the US is never even heard from. And an unimaginably larger proportion of the world population (especially given the US's power position) is never ever heard from. A single women living in Africa has absolutely no say in the world she lives in. Even if she had a voice in the local African government's political process, that country has little to no voice abroad – and of course the world and its mechanisms are global. What she will need in her life to 'survive' is lead by others and determined on largely macro levels she has no control over. The things she must do in life, and how they are defined, to find 'success' are determined in no way at all by her.

So what do we all do? What do the other 99% do? Those with computers may blog if they can find the time and effort. But then what happens with that? Where does that go? This blog here has virtually no readers as it is not yet wired into the grid. A direct search of a copy and pasted sentence from this blog on Google does not show this blog in any of the immediate results. Only other sites that have some of the words. So who will read it? How will it ever get anywhere? In-fact, we have no say. We have no voice. We need a place where the average person can take all the 'information' that we have available to us today and write our own interpretations and ideas in one place. A place where we can cooperatively build upon ideas without the dilution and filtering of our existing decision making apparatus.

Imagine if the social sciences had a competitor – the average person. There are countless intelligent people out there: from laborers, to office workers, to unemployed, to entertainers, to postal workers, to whoever. Everyone of these people have ideas about life, about how they would like things to be. Where do they get to put their voice? Just because they are not 'trained' to examine society and/or present possible solutions doesn't mean they don't have both good ideas and possibly even good solutions. We are an information society, it is available to anyone with the internet, yet we are not doing much of anything with all this information. Where does the average person put their ideas, and why can't we find a way to be listened to?  

Real Policing...

Ironic.  The day I post on policing I find myself in the middle of a debacle.  I went to see a step show in a midsize American city.  The event was in an amazing old (for american standards) venue.  There were probably 1500 people there, almost all of which were african-american save the venue staff, and four white people that I saw.  The show was great (the hour it lasted).  But at almost an hour into the show, a fight broke out in the balcony near where we were sitting.  People began to scatter, the fight moved about that section and was eventually squelched by the police with their characteristic knee in the back while handcuffing a young kid.  Now, the performers in this event were mostly high school and college teams, though there was one junior high team.  Hence the audience was largely the same.  Within a few minutes of the fight being stopped the lights came on and the show was stopped (though I must give credit to the Alpha phi Alpha team for stepping right through the fracas, not to be deterred).  Following the end of their performance the organizers stopped the show.

Now lets examine this, how many people have ever been to a show of any kind and there was a fight?  Heavy metal concerts are fights, especially in the mosh pit.  What about concerts full of drugs, and anything else?  A high school football game?  I've heard of a fire alarm going off in a electronica trance funk type show and the show continuing on.  I was amazed that at the door though for this step event, there was NO security.  No frisking, no wanding, no metal detectors, no nothing.  There wasn't even any real security watching as people came in.  There were two police officers there that I saw at one point.  Now think about concerts or other events, security is impeccable (down to taking in water), but with a blind eye to certain things and substances.  The event was poorly organized.    

Anyway, the point of all this is what happens from there.  After the show got closed down the cops rolled in.  at least 30 police officers, including three I saw three mounted on horseback.  Within the theater it was abysmal, 15-16 year old kids (rightfully upset that the show was canceled) yet NOT causing any trouble, and the cops are pushing them out the door, literally, pushing them.  Rude as can be, like they all were criminals (it was about 10 degrees fahrenheit, -13ish celsius).  Now the worst thing about this is that as a white person, I was spared of all of this.  I was able to walk up to event staff and chat with them about the situation, I was able to ask about a money refund, and the police didn't push or harass me at all.  Outside in a mob of people the cops were a huge display, I mean cars with their lights on ever curb and corner, horses, menacing, etc.  I saw one walking around with his chrome extendable stick ready to just start hitting people, and he looked like he was 'looking' to.  And the saddest thing about it, is as a white face in the middle of a sea of black, they didn't bother me at all.  Even chatted with me as I asked for directions.

This was an overwhelming use of force and an underwhelming display of any form of compassion, understanding, and/or racial (or any other kind of) understanding or sensativity.  Now obviously, the kids need not to fight.  American society and culture needs to find a cure for this (maybe take away the me first, individualism and 'tuff guy' mentality that is 'cool'), and the cops are responding based on history and training.  But ONE fight!?! and this is the display of force you bring out to show a bunch of 12-22 year old kids?  What do you expect them to think of 'cops'?  They were shown no respect and no understanding because of just a couple individuals.  And I tell you this and you can believe it or not, but in my wholly honest opinion, if this was a regular concert - full of white faces - one fight would not have stopped the show, never mind bring the entire police force down upon these kids.  It was abysmal.  We just keep making things worse for ourselves, on both sides and as a society.