Here’s a perfect example of someone who, through incredibly hard work, by the way, was very successful in one area and is now branching out. Along with the fabricated disaster scenario, Mr. Gates has gone into predicting, a game without winners. The deadline for the thermal apocalypse varies among doomsayers, but it’s coming, a guy who made a lot of money from computer programs says so.
“Gates said the deadline for the world to cut all of its carbon emissions is 2050. He suggested that researchers spend the next 20 years inventing and perfecting clean-energy technologies, and then the next 20 years implementing them.
The world’s energy portfolio should not include coal or natural gas, he said, and must include carbon capture and storage technology as well as nuclear, wind and both solar photovoltaics and solar thermal power.”
A group of monks in the Middle Ages, the story goes, were debating the number of teeth in a horse’s mouth. Some suggested the authority of Aristotle as the final arbiter, others suggested other authorities were more valid sources. A young monk, unschooled in cultish practices, suggested the debaters look in a horse’s mouth. He was immediately banished from further debate, and then, the monastery itself, for reasons self-evident. Lack of insurance doesn’t lead to death, but it does lead to political posturing and lying. This must join “The Superbowl causes violence to women and Himalayan glaciers are melting as hysterical lies serving political ends.
This is from an article about looking at evidence in the debate about medical insurance, which is really a debate about treatment entitlement.
“To my mind probably the single most solid piece of evidence is this: turning 65–i.e., going on Medicare–doesn’t reduce your risk of dying. If lack of insurance leads to death, then that should show up as a discontinuity in the mortality rate around the age of 65. It doesn’t. There are some caveats–if the effects are sufficiently long term, then it’s hard to measure, because of course as elderly people age, their mortality rate starts rising dramatically. But still, there should be some kink in the curve, and in the best data we have, it just isn’t there.”
And this:
“The possibility that no one risks death by going without health insurance may be startling, but some research supports it. Richard Kronick of the University of California at San Diego’s Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, an adviser to the Clinton administration, recently published the results of what may be the largest and most comprehensive analysis yet done of the effect of insurance on mortality. He used a sample of more than 600,000, and controlled not only for the standard factors, but for how long the subjects went without insurance, whether their disease was particularly amenable to early intervention, and even whether they lived in a mobile home. In test after test, he found no significantly elevated risk of death among the uninsured.”
Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies
