I've been obsessing over the miserable non-debate on health care, dominated by the noise of the crazies and the deliberate liars and propagandists, and finally was driven to...
...yeah, really, I did. Finished a complete descent into fuddy-duddyism: wrote to the president.
Well, they make it really easy at whitehouse.gov. And here's what I said. Frustrated speech-writer that I am, I even told him what to say.
President Obama,
As a nerd myself I generally admire your cool, thoughtful approach to issues. However, that coolness is not serving you well, and not serving the country well, in the intense health care battle.
Your opponents have seized the emotional high ground with strong, gut-level rhetoric and images. Oh, most of their arguments are spurious—and the people who intentionally disseminate rumors like the "euthanasia of the elderly" notion are simply despicable—but they are being effective and, more important, are dominating the discussion, driving out rationality.
Please, sir, it is essential you begin to show heart, emotion, and commitment in your public statements. You need to drive the health-care issue back into the realm of morals, family, and patriotism.
Forgive my presumption in putting words in your mouth, but this is the kind of thing I think you need to be saying, to get on top of this debate once more:
"This is not merely an economic issue. This is not merely a political issue. Health care for Americans is a moral issue.
Access to basic health care is essential to maintaining your basic human dignity in the face of adversity.
To deny that access to someone because their employer laid them off is to say, you don't have work so you don't count as a human being.
A system that denies that access to a child because its parents are poor, is a system that says, poor kids have no value as future citizens.
It is simply wrong that in America, anyone should be forced to choose between buying medicine and buying food.
It is simply wrong that in America, any parent should ever be forced to choose between paying the rent, and taking their child for a routine visit to a pediatrician.
It is simply wrong that in America, infant mortality is worse than in forty-four other nations. (CIA World Factbook)
Let me break that down for you.
A newborn infant delivered in Sweden, or in the Czech Republic, or in Greece, or in forty other countries including even, I kid you not, in Cuba,
that baby is more likely to live to be 1 year old than is an American newborn.
American babies die in their first year almost three times as often as newborns in Sweden or Japan.
Now, is that because American parents love their babies less? Of course not!
Is it because American pediatricians are less skilled? Of course not!
I believe that the greatest part of that difference is due to one simple cause:
That there is a significant number of parents in this nation who have to think twice, have to agonize about whether they can afford to see their doctors for prenatal checkups, whether they can afford to bring their children to clinics for routine checkups,
And when a child gets sick, they have to agonize over what other basic budget item they will have to cut back on—rent, food, clothes?—before they can afford to take a sick child to a doctor.
And too often they are forced by the cruel economics of health care to wait, and agonize, and pray a sick child won't get worse, and finally take the baby to the emergency room of the hospital because that's the only place they can afford to go. Our emergency room people are skilled and caring, but this is not the right way to deal with infant illnesses.
This is one big reason why in these United States, three times as many newborns don't live to see that first cake with the candle on it, as in some other countries.
Is that the America you know?
I think I live in an America that has always been able to accomplish what it needed to do—in style, with class, and spirit, and efficiency. Isn't that the America you know?
I know that we Americans can build a health care system that truly is the world's best—
and one that ensures proper basic care of every citizen,
and we can do with with style, with class, with spirit, and efficiency.
And I say that anyone who says this isn't possible, isn't practical, isn't sensible—they are simply slandering America..."
Yup, that's what I told him. If there's any response, I'll post it here.
I've never registered Republican (excuse me while I spit). I was Independent for years, switched to Democrat last year so I could vote Obama in the primary. But somehow I've had the luck to be picked up by the Republican National Committee (RNC) for a mass mailing of a push-poll. My opinion, it seems, will count as "representative of all Republicans living in your district."
Oh, goody.
Old Story
A quick Google search shows me that the RNC has been sending out these polls for some time: at least in 2003, 2007 (a lovely presentation, that) and 2008. I didn't find any links to positive reactions to the poll, but these negative ones are kind of fun to read.
Sleazoid Package
This is such a sleazoid package. First off, the envelope is made up like one of those property-tax scam letters, blazoned "Official Business" and "To Be Opened by Addressee Only Under Penalty of Law."
In the cover letter, Michael Steele (or his publicist) does his level best to scare the bejabbers out of me. Sample phrases: Democrats have absolute power in Washington, D.C. ... Harry Reid, one of the most ruthless, liberal partisans in Congress ... Oh RNC, save me from da ruthless liberal! Hey, wait a minute, isn't "ruthless liberal" an oxymoron? ...the gun-grabbers and red tape regulators are emboldened (time to bury my collection of AK-47s in the back yard).
Then he gets down to the lying part: President Obama embraces a socialist economic philosophy... Barney Frank has proposed a massive 25% cut in national defense spending... Democrats plan... to shut down conservative talk radio ... permanently destroy the 2nd Amendment...
Stop Beating Your Wife
Probably the biggest lie in this package is the frequently-repeated insistence that this poll is for "guidance" and without good data from it, "our agenda will be incomplete and our ability to spread the message... will be dramatically weakened." How do I know that that's a lie? Because of the way the questions are phrased. Here's just a small sample:
Should the Democrats' so-called Stimulus Bill with its wasteful pork-barrel spending be repealed?
Do you oppose government-sanctioned euthanasia?
If Barack Obama tries to gut the USA PATRIOT Act and other important laws that promote the safety and security of all Americans, should Republicans in Congress fight back?
Oh, no, I'm for wasteful spending, euthanasia and gutting the safety of all. Come on, this is about as much a "poll" as the North Korean elections have a "ballot." Do you want Kim Jung Il, yes or yes? If the RNC bothers to tally the responses they are wasting their party's money even more egregiously than they did by sending this piffle to me.
I'm going to mark it carefully "No" in all columns and send it back, not because I think they'll actually count any of the votes, but simply because it will cost them postage on the Business Reply Envelope they provided.
Wolfram|Alpha is now open for business. It has lofty aims:
Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.
So I thought I'd throw a few questions at it that reflect some of my current or recent interests. It failed almost completely. Here are the questions. Except when otherwise noted, every one of these questions produces the response "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input."
compare salaries paid to males to salaries paid to females
do men earn more than women
salaries of doctors (this gets a graph of doctor salaries)
salaries of male doctors
how much do female doctors earn
salaries of doctors by gender
Salaries of nurses (this gets a graph of nurse salaries)
amount nurses earn
OK, it isn't up to speed on gender-income issues. And it can't translate "amount X earn" into "income of X". Ask Jeeves it ain't. How about more general sociological stats? I asked it
life expectancy in different countries
It didn't know what to do with that input, but it did suggest I ask it about "life expectancy" so I did. And got—a truncated list by country (what I'd asked for in the first place) but omitting the US and other middle-ranked places. By contrast, wikipedia lists all countries twice, first as sourced from the CIA fact book and second from a UN list. It looks as if Wolfram|Alpha has used the CIA list, as it has Macau at the top, which it is with the CIA but not the UN list. Wikipedia then gives an exhaustive link-list to rankings of countries by dozens of other metrics.
Then I asked it
Rate of infant mortality by nation
Easily cribbed from the CIA factbook but it didn't know.
Cost of health insurance
This produced a short list of insurance companies headed by Costco!
graph heart disease by age
heart disease versus age
No result for either of these. Turning to astronomy, I asked,
tell about interstellar dust grains
cosmic dust
Wolfram knew nothing. N.B. Wikipedia redirects "interstellar dust" to "cosmic dust" and has an interesting article.
nearest stars with planets
It offered "nearest stars" as a suggestion and this produced a plain-text list of star names without distances or other data. The list ended in an ellipsis and the message "Computation timed out." Note that Wikipedia has an exhaustive list of the 100 nearest stars with distance, stellar class, R.A. and Dec., and noting which are known to have planets.
extrasolar planets
This gave a list of exactly 3 (more than 100 are known), 55 Cancri d, e, and f, and again "Computation timed out." Under the same heading wikipedia has a lengthy article with a discussion of discovery methods and a table of interesting discoveries.
In short, Wolfram|Alpha is not simply distant from its lofty goals, it is ridiculously, laughably distant from them. Perhaps it answers questions in some domains adequately. Perhaps for some areas of knowledge it actually offers more than you can get by entering the same string in the Wikipedia search box. But I haven't seen any.
Yesterday Marian re-checked the online listing of charges against the now-closed card. It included a $79 charge dated 5/11, the day after the card was cancelled!
A hasty call to Citicard security produced the not-very-reassuring explanation that the charge had been "pending" when the account was closed. Great. So cancelling a card doesn't automatically cancel any charges pending against it?
Today she went over it again to finally sort out the real (through 5/8) and the bogus charges, and one on 5/9 stood out: a $36.95 purchase from ticketsnow.com. All the other bogus charges were placed the morning of May 10.
So I called ticketsnow and inquired. Yes, they had processed an order for a single ticket to see Joel Ostine in Minneapolis on 5/29. It was on its way to me now, fed-ex.
Joel Ostine! He's a (gag, ptui!) revival minister!
I'm still baffled as to the purpose of any of this. Some person unknown, the night of 5/9 and the morning of 5/10, placed a bunch (now nearly 20) of small orders for a wide variety of products with a wide range of legitimate online retailers. There was no particular pattern to the purchases, other than not one of them was anything that I would ever, ever consider buying: quack and fringe health or beauty products, get-rich-quick schemes, and (gag, ptui!) Joel Ostine.
They used my credit card, my name, my correct email, my correct address. So there was no attempt to disguise the purchase from me or delay my finding out about it. And the types of stuff bought were not (thank goodness) the kind of thing that could destroy a reputation. Just small quantities of useless junk.
There is no way that anybody could have benefited financially from doing this. The only practical effect was to cause minor irritation and a few hours of wasted time cleaning up.
So why was it done? If it was a prank, it was pretty pointless. If it was an inept fraudster debugging some kind of automated stolen-card testing script, he was a really bad programmer. It's all just strange.
Yesterday I took the time to check all the vendors that had acknowledged the fake orders. Neighbor Thane had earlier suggested they were related because at least two of the domains had been registered using the same domain "anonymizer" service.
(That's a service that blocks people from using a "whois" query to learn the name and address of the party who registered a domain name. For Mac users, you can perform a Whois using the Network Utility.)
However when I checked the full list of 14 vendors, I found only those two had a domain service in common. Some of the others had their administrative name and address in the clear, a few used other anonymizer services.
The vendors were located in all different parts of the USA, plus one in Canada and one in Singapore. While Marian spotted similar boiler-plate language on a couple of sites, the others were quite various in design and layout. At least one has a very pleasant customer service operator as noted yesterday. Another actually called me to "welcome" me to their clientele. Although the caller was pretty clearly working from a call center in Mumbai, this was much more than I'd expect from a quick-buck shell company.
After getting mailing addresses for 11 vendors, I wrote up a letter informing them of the fraudulent order, stating no charge related to it would be paid, and demanding not to be on their mailing list or to have my name sold. Prepared envelopes and trudged off to the P.O. to send off 11 return-receipt-requested letters. $50 bucks in postage; maybe wasted money, but some of these vendors (like stay at home millionaire, about whom there are many complaints online) are very persistent once you express an interest.
Neighbor Michael thinks,
It looks to me like you have ordered something from a website whose computer has been hacked. The hacker then wholesales credit information to distributors (there's his or her money), who in turn re-package it and sell it tax exempt to users. In your case it looks like the user was testing the water. Was the card good? Did the cardholder have an alarm in place? etc. Having set off no alarm bells, he/she could then proceed to start ordering stuff big-time
Maybe. I've heard of people testing a stolen card number with a small purchase. However, this was more than a dozen purchases, which would surely be overkill. Plus, almost all sent confirmation emails (the Citicard fraud guy read me one transaction which hasn't shown up as email). Since I had never dealt with any of them, they didn't have my email address in their customer files, prior to the fraudster's order. So the fraudster had to have included my proper email with each fake order.
Seems to me, if I wanted to test a stolen card, one, I'd use an email address that came to me, not to the victim, and two, as soon as two orders cleared, I'd start ordering the 50-inch tvs. Not wait around for 10 more.
I can think of two other possible explanations. One, it's like Michael said, except that the fraudster was just getting into the game and testing his scripts. And had a bug in them, so he was running the same card over and over trying to get the code right.
Two, it is barely possible that the perpetrator didn't actually want to profit from the deal but only wanted to harrass me, personally. I am not aware of having any cyber-enemies like that... and if it was a case of cyber-harrassment, the orders would probably have included some porn. Thank goodness they didn't!
At 8:24 this morning (Sunday May 10), an email landed in my inbox, thanking me for my order for $5.69 worth of "Revatrol" at Renaissance Health Publishing.
By sheer good luck I was looking at my email while waiting for my wife to get ready to leave the house. "What?!?" said I, "I didn't order anything like that!"
I started poking around trying to find out about it when another email appeared, and another:
8:24, "Your credit card has been charged $5.95... In 30 days (and every 30 days thereafter), we'll send you 1 more month's supply and charge $36.95."
8:44 (but arrived around 8:33), an unspecified amount for an ebay starter kit to esellerslounge.com
8:34, for $9.95 I am now a customer of IQ Derma at glow.com
8:40, I've spent $5.95 for NU U products at skinnyboost.com.
Many of these emails had my correct name and shipping address and home phone number! Around 8:26 I had totally freaked, yelled at Marian, who went to her computer and logged in to both credit card accounts and said none of these transactions had shown up yet. "Probably just spam," she thought.
The transactions all said they were charging to a credit card but didn't say what the card number was. I called Chase customer service on our more important card, the one we do not use online ever, and got a run-around, no help at all except that I could start a $7.99/month security alert and when my "welcome kit" arrived in "one to two weeks," it would have a security alert form on which I could check off the kinds of transactions to watch out for, and send it back. Thank you soooo much for your prompt service, Chase.
However, the last, 8:40 am transaction had what none of the preceding emails contained: the last four digits of the card number! That told me that the card involved was the one we use for online transactions. I called Citi and was immediately connected to the fraud line, where "Brian" was very helpful. He checked the account and read the last two transactions which were also small amounts for junk healthcare products -- but not one of the ones we'd had emails for.
Citi was happy to cancel the card, expedite shipping of a new one, and took note that no transactions in the last 24 hours were valid. I urged him to go further, clearly the scammers were at work right now and maybe could be traced? He was vague about that. Anyway, that was that; but tons of questions remain.
All the product websites that I checked look legit (junk products, but legit merchants) and the two whose phone numbers I dialed had phone menu systems ("please listen closely as our menu has recently changed"!). So, the big question, how is the scam supposed to work?
Are the various e-tailers all phony shell companies? Is the idea to make a bunch of charges under $10, collect from the card company, and vanish?
Maybe, but if the companies are phonies set up for this scam, then why make the simulation so elaborate? And above all, why go to the length of sending acknowledgement emails, which alert the victim to the fake charges even while they are happening?
But if the companies are real, then who benefits from this flurry of fake charges? Assuming my card was not the only one being hit this morning, real merchants are going to be hit with a shit-storm of complaints, and many if not all of the fraudulent charges will eventually be cancelled by the credit card companies. Real merchants would suffer almost as much pain as the victims.
In short, how was this scam supposed to work?
Monday update: there's been a sharp up-tick in the amount of spam I'm getting; fortunately Google mail filters it all. However, two more order-acknowledgement emails came in this morning,
Consumersdicountrx.com -- unknown amount, but I've joined their "best buy affiliate family."
Ultra Green Products (http://ultragreenproducts.com/).
The latter had a "confirmation number" and a customer service number which I called, and immediately reached a very pleasant rep who seemed sincerely dismayed to hear that the order was fraudulent. It was for a small amount, she said, $5.69, and had already been processed. I told her the credit card company would be taking that back as fraudulent.
The point here is, Ultra Green looks and acts like a legitimate business, not a front or a shell. At least, if it's a front, they've gone to a great deal of trouble to simulate a real business.
Had I been born in another time and place, there are gods I could have believed in. In ancient Greece, I'm sure I would have been a devotee of Great Athena, and gone often to the beautiful temple on the Acropolis to worship.
Had I been born in India before 1800, I probably would have prayed often to Ganesh, the elephant-headed god of wit and wisdom. Born to a Native American tribe before the coming of the whites, I'd have felt close affiliation with Coyote, the trickster and storyteller.
In fact I had the great good fortune to be born in a Western culture after the Enlightenment, and that placed a lower limit on the size of my God.
Geology
The Enlightenment was a great sea-change in the way people thought about themselves and the world. I hold it really began with the geologists. People have been looking at rocks, and digging mines for gold and coal, forever, but the first people who really studied, and drew, and measured the shape of the land and thought about how it could come to be—the first real geologists—worked around 1800, plus or minus 50 years.
What the geologists did was to show, based on careful measurement of things like the rate at which a stream could erode a slope, that the Earth simply had to be very old, millions of years at least.
Understand that before this time, nobody anywhere had a clue how old the earth was. The only numeric estimate anyone even attempted was when Bishop Ussher around 1650 added up the ages of every person mentioned in the Bible. From that he worked out that the date of creation must have been the 27th of October, 4004 BC. That's when God made the Garden of Eden, and so forth. Based on his careful examination of the Bible, the earth was a little under 6000 years old.
People paid attention to this because they pretty much accepted the Bible as factual history. Some people today still think it is; in fact my parents thought so when I was growing up. I don't remember ever discussing it with them, but they would probably have thought Bishop Ussher's estimate had something going for it, despite their both holding BA degrees.
The geologists of the 1800s destroyed that idea, not by arguing, but by taking measurements of the real world. And their evidence-based picture of millions of years of history for the earth just blew the minds of educated people of the day. Suddenly the earth had a huge past, vastly deeper than anything in recorded human history.
Paleontology
The geologists worked back and forth with the Paleontologists, who also got started in the 1800s. Of course, people had collected fossils for centuries. It was common for rich people to have collections of fossils along with other "curiosities." But it was in the 1800s that people began to study fossils in a professional way: measuring, drawing, and comparing them, and putting them together in sequences; publishing and sharing information from one university and museum to another.
This is tedious, painstaking work, comparing bone shapes and measuring. But the paleontologists soon worked out that fossils had to be the remains of living things that were now extinct, yet related to species alive today. They began to put together a rough tree of life, in which most of the species that ever lived, are long gone.
The paleontologists traded data with the geologists to get the relative ages of different animals. Based on the rock strata that the geologists had dated, they could date fossils found in the strata. Then they could date new strata by the fossils found in them, and back and forth.
The Book of Earth's History
Together, the two sciences produced a picture of a vast ancient history of the earth. Today we know the Earth is 4.5 billion years old -- that's 4, 5 and 8 zeros. Imagine that the history of the Earth is a fat book with 450 pages, with 10 million years on each page. In that book, the entire recorded history of human kind—from the first clay tablets from ancient Sumer, about 4000 BC, to right now—all human history occupies the last word, of the last sentence, on the last page of that book. 449 pages of history with no people. On the last page Homo Sapiens, our species, gets one short paragraph—we've been around a million years, a tenth of a page of this book—and the last word of that last paragraph is "Civilization."
Astronomy
There was one more key piece to the Enlightenment: Astronomy. In the late 1700s people learned how to make decent telescopes and started really looking into the sky, again taking careful measurements and sharing what they saw. It was William Herschel around 1800 who first proved by measurement the distance to a few other stars, and that the solar system of the sun and earth were moving through space among the stars.
Before this, as with the age of the earth, nobody had a clue about the nature of the starry sky. The best guess, based on common sense and some Bible passages, was that the sky was a fixed, hollow shell called the "firmament." The stars were little lights on the inner surface of this solid shell. Or maybe they were pinholes and the light of heaven was shining in through them. Until the 1600s, everybody just assumed that the Earth was the exact center of the universe, and everything rotated around it under the shell of the firmament.
Copernicus in 1540 pointed out that a lot of observations would make more sense if the Sun was at the center and the Earth moved around it, but nobody paid much attention until Galileo pushed the idea in 1650. He got in hot water for that, and the Church made him publicly recant, because to move the earth away from the center of the universe would create a conflict with some bible passages.
Now, a century later, Herschel could prove by measurement that some stars were at distances we could calculate, and those distances were huge, billions of kilometers. And the new telescopes also revealed millions more stars than people had ever been able to see with the naked eye. The universe suddenly went from cozy and comprehensible to inconceivably huge, and not only were we not at the center of it, but our sun was just another star floating through emptiness like one snowflake in a blizzard.
The Book of Universal History
Today we know that the observable universe, the part we can see, is about 14 billion years old. Remember the book of the history of the earth, 450 pages, 10 million years to a page? The book of the history of the universe is 1370 pages long. In the first two-thirds of it, although it tells of millions of galaxies containing billions of stars each, our solar system just doesn't exist: no sun, no planets. Around page 900, a cloud of gas at one corner of one average galaxy condenses under its own gravity to make a star. Around page 925, that star starts to shine and planets have condensed around it—including one that is at the right distance for water to be liquid most of the time.
Now riffle the pages to the end, page 1370: there we are, Homo Sap. is the last paragraph, and all of recorded history, Greeks and Romans and the middle ages and kings and queens and wars and all: the last word on the last page of this fat tome.
Being Enlightened
When thinking people began to grasp this vision of deep time and huge space, full of stars and animals and beauty and complexity but no people—a wonderful universe just perking along fine without us—it kicked off changes of mind and heart that created the civilization we live in.
Even today with all our education it is sometimes easy to forget the almost-inconceivable grandeur of a universe that we know to be 73 billion light years across. If you want a visual aid, take a few minutes to watch this video on the Hubble Space telescope's Deep Field images:
"Over 10,000 galaxies are in this picture... and each one... has millions of stars... each one with the possibility of a civilization..."
The Enlightenment still happens again and again in the minds of individuals, each time one person starts to get it, as I started to get it when I was around eleven or twelve. When it sinks in, two things have to change in your head.
The first is a change in the way you think about people. You realize that people, including yourself, are just not that important in the big picture. You come to feel, first, some humility, and second some perspective, and finally more patience with your fellow man. We're all just beginners. The bees and the ants have had millions of years to work out the right way to live as a community, and we've done better than they in just a few millenia. And, we humans are just babies, we are only starting out. We have done amazing, wonderful things, we've learned so much in just a few centuries, but that's no time at all. We talk as if we are at the end of history, that our society is the climax of wonderfulness. But in fact history has only just started. What we do today is going to seem tiny compared to what our descendants do.
The Too-Small God
One other thing that must change is: your conception of what a God must be. If the universe has a creator, a prime mover as Aristotle said, that thing, whatever it might be, has to be larger and older than the universe. Older than 14 billion years, and in some sense larger than its 78 billion light-year diameter.
I frankly have no idea of what the nature of such a thing, such a being, would be. What could it be like, a thing older than the universe and bigger? I'll tell you this: even as a boy of eleven or twelve, I knew for certain that the God I was being told about in Sunday School, the Bible God, was nowhere near big enough.
Compared to the vastness of space and time, the Bible God is a trivial thing. It is a being that feels jealousy and rage; a being that could without a qualm drown millions of living things that it had made, because they disappointed it; a being who would knock down the tower of Babel and confuse people's minds because it didn't want them to learn anything; a being who took sides between one tribe and another; a being who couldn't figure out how to be merciful until his son committed suicide in front of him to change his mind. (That's what the new testament message comes down to, if you think it through.)
I was not able to put these thoughts in fine words then, but I knew that the God I was being told about could not possibly be the creator of the universe that science showed me. So what do you call a book that tells you a dramatic story that cannot possibly be true? You call it a fantasy. I was familiar with fantasies, I read lots of them. It was obvious that the Bible was just another fantasy novel, and the God of Christianity was a made-up fiction character. Out of respect for my parents I went to church every sunday until I left home, but there was no time that I believed in what I heard.
And since then, I have never heard or read any description of a God that matches up to the size and scale of this magnificent universe. And I've never seen an explanation how a God who did match up to that scale and size, could have the slightest interest in being worshiped, or indeed could have the slightest concern about what I thought about it or anything else.
