Just some stuff

First -- and not just "stuff" -- is a very recent post from Josh Marshall which has interesting implications.

... I've heard of several major national corporations planning to dramatically scale back the health care coverage they offer employees starting this fall. Mainly in the amount they subsidize, but in other cases the level of care they offer access to. I figure there must be a number of middle management and HR folks out there reading. So if you've heard of similar stuff where you work, drop me a line. Anonymity guaranteed.

What's going on?
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Now to the New York Times'  article on the lead-up to Ted Kennedy's death, "After Diagnosis, Determined to Make a 'Good Ending'".  Really what it's all about is what we all should do to prepare for death.  Cut out all this you-know-what about "death panels" and make your death easier on yourself and your family and eat ice cream right up to the end, as Kennedy did with his family. 

Senator Kennedy, from the first moments, arranged things in a way that his passing would be easier for others, including his colleagues.

Mr. Kennedy deputized Dr. Horowitz, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, to research all treatment options before deciding on an intensive regimen of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation — hardly a clear-cut choice with an almost inevitably lethal disease and a patient of Mr. Kennedy’s age. Some physicians assembled at Massachusetts General Hospital considered his tumor inoperable — and measured his likely survival time between six weeks and a few months.

Before he traveled by private plane from Cape Cod to Duke University Medical Center for his surgery in June 2008, Mr. Kennedy made sure to put his affairs in order — his will, his medical directives and even his legislative instructions, family members say.

On the way to the airport, he called two Democratic colleagues: Mr. Dodd, telling him to take over a mental health bill he had been working on, and Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, instructing her to take over a higher education bill he had been shepherding.

Where I part company with Kennedy is ...  the casket.  I suppose he had to do that.  If you're going to "lie in state" for several days, I guess ashes in a little container are insufficient.  But still.  My own preference is getting hauled up to the top of a hill and letting the buzzards finish the job.  It seems revolting at first look, but think of spreading your recycled self far and wide as fertilizer and/or even as gigantic plops on the windshields of Republican gas gulpers.

The resurrection "myth" goes way, way back.  In fact, if you follow comparative religions scholar Karen Armstrong's writings, you begin to understand that what a lot of people accept as "Christian" goes right back to the Stone Age.  There really is a big question -- and not just in small ads at the back of weird magazines -- about whether Jesus existed.  What the Bible has of his personal history is very, very close to the stories of mythical creatures in stories which predate the bible, all that stuff about loaves and fishes and walking on water,  and the 40 days.

So humans tend to be a little obsessed with the notion of not really dying when you die.  The prospect that death isn't lasting is a good enough reason to avoid caskets.  Not a pleasant place to wake up.   Though perhaps cryogenics, cremation, or vultures wouldn't be all that neat either.

What would happen to the American political scene if a) we woke up to headlines in MSM that proof positive had been found Jesus never existed, and b) there was a cheerful knocking sound from the bier at the Kennedy Library on Saturday.  I know this is going to lose me the huge right wing contingent that depends on this blog, but I'd like to wake up tomorrow morning and find that a hale and hearty and well-rested Ted Kennedy is back with us and Jesus, if he existed at all,  is given the place of admirable moral philosopher, definitely worth rational discussion.

Yesterday it surprised me to see, in this traditionally Republican part of Texas, some new deism bumper stickers.   There still aren't as many deism bumper stickers as there are "Nobama" bumper stickers.  Not yet.  But who knows... Some day reason may be resurrected in the US.