Year: 2013

In today’s video, Charles argues that the animal soul may resemble the human soul much more than we realize:

About his new book:

For Love of Animals is an honest and thoughtful look at our responsibility as Christians with respect to animals. Many Christians misunderstand both history and their own tradition in thinking about animals. They are joined by prominent secular thinkers who blame Christianity for the Western world’s failure to seriously consider the moral status of animals. This book explains how traditional Christian ideas and principles—like nonviolence, concern for the vulnerable, respect for life, stewardship of God’s creation, and rejection of consumerism—require us to treat animals morally.

His previous videos are here. A reader writes:

Thanks very much for this interesting series. Camosy says that we should not eat meat because we should live non-violent lives. I believe that violence should only be used in self-defense. When we eat eggs, meat, or dairy we are complicit in acts of violence against the innocent defenseless who do not threaten us. We would be choosing violence for no good reason. This is a compelling point. He goes on to say that animal products should only be used if there is a need, and that in modern society there is no need for these products. Eggs, meat, and dairy are totally unnecessary.

Camosy’s most important point is that factory-farmed animal products are a sin.

This should be obvious. Everyone should boycott those products completely, whether based on religion, basic morals, or both. Some people may feel that it is acceptable for them to use animal products that are not from factory farms. While I would not use them, I believe that these people are sincere. There is a massive problem with this approach though: there are almost no animal products that are not from factory farms, and the products that are labeled and marketed to suggest that they are not from factory farms really are from factory farms. When you see labels like “cage free”; “free range”; “grass fed”; “humane”; “natural”; “organic”; etc. you can very safely assume that these are all factory-farmed products. One would have to avoid all eggs, meat, and diary sold in stores and at restaurants, visit the producers oneself, visit their suppliers, and see where and how the animals are slaughtered. It would be a full-time job for most people and it would yield little food.

Our full Ask Anything archive is here.

This embed is invalid

It’s an uplifting story that also makes you want to despair of government. Three 20-year-old programmers from San Francisco have set up a website – thehealthsherpa.com – that already does a huge amount of the work that the government website cannot effectively handle yet. No, you can’t enroll in Obamacare on it, but you can quickly see your options. What a concept! Available information! Money quote:

“They got it completely backwards in terms of what people want up front,” said Liang. He added: “They want prices and benefits, so that they could make the decision.” Liang showed CBS News how it worked. “You come to our website and you put in your zip code — in this case a California zip code. You hit ‘find plans,’ and you immediately see the exchange plans that are available for that zip code.”

It didn’t work for me, because they don’t have New York or DC plans yet in their system (California is their strong suit). But I did get instant access to both states’ exchange sites – no clogged system at all:

Using information buried in the government’s own website built by high-priced government contractors, they found a simpler way to present it to users. “That’s the great thing about having such a small team,” said Kalogeropoulos. “You sit around a table and say, ‘Okay, how does this work?’ There’s no coordination meetings, there’s no planning sessions. It’s like, ‘Well, let’s read the document and let’s implement this.'”

They’re busy updating and adding new features, like calculations for the various tax subsidies, as the video shows. So why not use this site or encourage other young geeks to set up similar ones outside the government just to convey information that is currently buried in healthcare.gov? You can then use that information to call up an insurance company or broker or navigator and buy your insurance. Then ask yourself: how did three 20 year-olds manage this in weeks while the feds had three years and fucked it up so bad it seems like an episode of computer Hell?

One reason is small scale. It reminds me of the difference working for the Dish as an independent, small group of peers rather than embedded in a larger media organization. If we have an idea, we execute it. Before, we’d have to run it up endless ladders, wait for approvals, get last-minute delays, persuade some busy guy to help us, lobby for resources, and on and on. Now I just click my fingers and say: “Get on it, Special Teams!” and we have House ads. Well, not quite like that. But we never want to grow too much for exactly these reasons. In technology and creativity, smaller is better.

We know Obama has the skills to do this. He did it in both campaigns to stunning effect. But then he was out of government, out of all those cumbersome contracting rules, able to be more nimble. Why, one wonders, did he not fight the entrenched ways of doing things and innovate more aggressively? Why did he not focus on this in ways that were not simply urging his officials to make sure they got it right?

A cartoon (after the jump because of its length) that will probably put a lump in your throat:

Stories of three-legged pups from readers here.

Julia Ioffe describes what it’s like to have whooping cough:

At this writing, I have been coughing for 72 days. Not on and off coughing, but continuously, every day and every night, for two and a half months. And not just coughing, but whooping: doubled over, body clenched, sucking violently for air, my face reddening and my eyes watering. Sometimes, I cough so hard, I vomit. Other times, I pee myself. Both of these symptoms have become blessedly less frequent, and I have yet to break a rib coughing – also a common side effect.

Unsurprisingly, she has some choice words for vaccine denialists:

How responsible are these non-vaccinating parents for my pertussis? Very. A study recently published in the journal Pediatrics indicated that outbreaks of these antediluvian diseases clustered where parents filed non-medical exemptions – that is, where parents decided not to vaccinate their kids because of their personal beliefs. The study found that areas with high concentrations of conscientious objectors were 2.5 times more likely to have an outbreak of pertussis.

Yes, she was vaccinated in childhood:

The problem, in part, is that the protection offered by the pertussis vaccine wears off by the time you reach adulthood. Until recently, however, this was not a problem. Back in those halcyon days when we vaccinated our children, the disease was not bouncing around our population and so it was okay that adults did not get re-immunized. (That’s the whole point of herd immunity: it’s hard to get sick from people who aren’t sick.)

Razib applauds Ioffe for her strategic shaming:

Over the past few years I’ve become much more aware of cultural streams in public health, and the public’s reaction to that health advice, because I have become a father. More specifically, when my wife was pregnant with my daughter, and after she was born, we encountered major pressure from peer networks to not vaccinate. In the social circles in which we were embedded, “progressive,” “crunchy,” and “alternative,” vaccinating one’s child was the heterodox decision. It was rather obvious to us that one of the major reasons that many people do not vaccinate their children is that many of their friends, and vocal people whom they trust, do not vaccinate their children. … [T]his groundswell of denialism must be countered by public opprobrium, and yes, shaming. Peer pressure kills, but it can also save lives.

(Infographic: Jen Kirby)

Tomasky gets real about the ACA:

Obamacare will never be a raging success. This is another error much of journalism is prone to make—looking for it to be an overwhelming success. That won’t happen because at the end of the day we’re still talking about private health insurance, and private health insurance was a pain in the tuchus before Obamacare and will remain one after it. People will always complain about their coverage. But by early 2016, I have little doubt, there will be millions more Americans who’ll be doing the complaining, and they’ll be happy to have the opportunity to do so.

Along the same lines, Beutler expects the GOP’s latest Clinton-seconded reform proposal to backfire:

The Keep Your Health Plan Act would be immensely damaging to Obamacare if it ever became law, and preventing it from becoming law will require Senate Democrats and President Obama to sustain real political damage over the next few weeks. But looking ahead, it will be useful for them to have Republicans on the record against forcing people off of their insurance.

Suderman is much more pessimistic:

[I]t’s time to start considering the worst-case scenarios: that the exchanges continue to malfunction, that plan cancellations go into effect, that insurers see the political winds shifting and stop playing nice with the administration, and that significant numbers of people are left stranded without coverage as a result. Rather than reforming the individual market, which was flawed but did work for some people, Obamacare will have destroyed it and left only dysfunction and chaos in its wake.