Keeping Up With My Medicine

Doctors only see in part. Just like the rest ofus. Why did I think it any different?


My experience with physicians has been broadening these past three years. In that time I've been to see
one general practice physician, two Physicians Assistants, four oncologists, one radiation oncologist, two orthopedic specialists
and three surgeons. That's not all the medical professionals I've encountered, but they are the people most likely to
prescribe drugs for me, and that's the point of this post.


At least in part.

I'm dealing with slight pain today - a little more than usual. When the Wee One trends on my right shoulder that slight pain
becomes a sharp pain.

Before I left the hospital the surgeon's nurse assured me that if I needed additional pain medication I should call his office.
Two weeks ago, when last I saw the orthopedic surgeon, he urged me to stop using Lortab as soon as possible. When I last saw
Kelsey Swisher she talked to me about the Insurance company's demand that we check on my Lortab use regularly - no refills without
calling the office. And then there's my oncologist who shrugs his shoulders and says of pain meds - not my job man.


This isn't an attempt to get more pain medication, or to justify my Lortab use. It is to say that I need to remember that
my doctors are each only seeing a part of the totality of my illnesses and treatments. So I have to keep on top of the total picture
including managing my pain. The one who doesn't understand that?

My insurance provider.

Epistemological Politics

The South Carolina AG announced, some time ago, that he absolutely, positively and without a shred of doubt KNEW that there were hundreds of people who voted dead in South Carolina. The Columbia Free Times reported:

S.C. GOP Attorney General Alan Wilson saying things like, “We know for a fact that there are deceased people whose identities are being used in elections in South Carolina.” - See more at: http://www.free-times.com/blogs/18-months-later-sc-law-enforcement-closes-case-on-zombie-voters-finds-no#sthash.z8MoGQJs.dpuf

The appropriate SC office - with the great name SLED - investigated. Did not find zombie voters.

My question is, in this case, what does it mean to "know" in a case like this. Can you "know" something that isn't the case? Is all knowledge subjective? If the objective "facts" turn out to not be the case that you asserted you "knew," did you not know what you said you knew? Does KNOWING require that you do something more than assert what you believe to be the case.

And if what you insisted you "knew" changes - i.e., you "knew" the mechanics of an evolutionary process and then someone else discovered that what you knew, what everyone knew, was not what was the case.

What does it mean to "know" something. And how do you come to know anything?

Follow up on the Magic Staircase

I was totally punked on this one. I shouldn't have been. I've been watching Brain Games enough that I should have smelt that something was up - but I took the video producers at their word. Mike Rodriquez had the goods and sent them along. Here's how the magic staircase works - actually it doesn't.

One of the things I should learn from this is to never let the skeptigard down. I won't, however. It's fun to be fooled every once in a while. Here the fooling came because the students sold the idea so well and I believed what I saw. I believed it because I wanted to believe that there was someone this clever at one of the institutes of technology dotting the U.S.

Bad on me. But good on Mike!

The Magic Stairwell

I do not know how this works. It is a total mystery to me - but this is the coolest stairway I've ever seen.

The Magic Stairwell

What Will the World Say?

Last night I was watching RT television, the Russian station for English speakers. I saw a story that shocked and amazed me.

We haven't closed Guantanamo Bay. I knew that. I knew that the President had signed an executive order, but Congress refused to expend funds to transfer prisoners. I knew that there was a high security prison sitting empty that could receive any dangerous prisoners, but paranoid conservatism has used the boogie man of terrorists as a way of stopping progress.

Here's what I didn't know:

Half the prisoners at Gitmo have been cleared for release, but for some reason have not been released.

The prisoners at Gitmo have been at that prison for eleven years many without charges.

Amy Goodman's column in the Guardian details the potential stain to the Obama Presidency represented by the deterioration of conditions at Gitmo. What Goodman doesn't mention is that there have been suicides related to this indefinite detention. What Goodman doesn't mention is how this is playing in the world press.

RT did a story on it. Aljazeera has a story on Gitmo's shame. Interpress. Foreign Policy. World wide stories about the problems and the administration's denial that we are detaining indefinitely, when, in fact we are. The 89 who should be released and haven't been - what is that about?

What will it take before we stop this? Will the hunger strikers have to die, or will we strap them to hospital gurneys and shove hoses up their noses and force feed them, as we are doing with Tariq Ba Odah. Daily we tie him down and force feed him, and we've been doing this for six years. If shamed before the world will we close the camp or will we, as we have on so many other things, noisily and angrily deny that there is any problem?

Need a New Newspaper?

LNR's Facebook Presence

Lindsborg News Record is circling the bowl.

Years of poor reportage, ignoring both interesting and important stories in favor of running press releases - policies that aren't explained to readers and advertizers, nor enforced evenly (the big one is "Buy an ad get coverage of your event") - and a generally aging readership of American newspapers mean that the Lindsborg News Record has a limited future in the best of circumstances. With the current owner alienating readership, the demise is being hastened.

The problem for Lindsborg is that it has no other news outlet.

I don't have the capital, but replacing the LNR with a mildly progressive and genuinely multi-media news outlet for Lindsborg could be a retirement project for me, just as Hemslojd was for Ken Sjogren. I'd envision it as primarily a web based product - with video, and maybe web radio connected.

How would we pay for it? Who would report? Who'd advertise and how would we establish rates?

I don't know. I just know that Lindsborg News Record is circling the bowl and the town needs something else in place before the vortex sends our poor little paper to the treatment plant.

Why China is Going to Lead

China on Ice, photo by Jonathan Isaacson

Despite American xenophobic insistence that we are the greatest nation in the world, we are about to be overrun by China in great nation status. Not just over taken, but overrun.

It isn’t the conservative meme of China owning American debt that will mean that China will own our lunch. The Chinese ownership of our debt at the low interest rate is actually a good thing. China will need us and our money for a long time to come, and the debt is at such a low interest rate that it is like refinancing a home – it makes sense to own money at 2% if you can make money at 6%.

No, what will allow the Chinese to overrun us is their willingness to do what needs to be done, and their strategic relationships with nations we are either treating as victims – or as enemies.

China is developing Maglev trains. Super fast public transportation is starting to be a norm in China, while in America we can’t even talk about public transportation as part of the solution to urban crowding, dependence upon foreign oil, and long distance travel. China has terrible environmental standards – but they are working on them. We’re not even willing to admit there is a problem.

China treats African nations as potential trading partners, worthy of their own news programs, worthy of attention as both consumers and producers. We treat the whole of Africa as a problem. North Africa is full of Muslim terrorists and sub-Saharan Africa is poverty who should get our free tee-shirts dumped on them for their own good. Pakistanis are now learning Mandarin as part of their elementary and secondary school program. The Pakistani middle class is preparing to go to University in China. They see China as a friend. We look at Pakistan as harborer of terrorists and Muslim radicals.

For all these reasons and so many more the second largest world economy will surpass us. Probably soon. And the young adults who I teach won’t even notice until Chinese owners show up in the boxes at NBA games.

i Phone U

It struck me yesterday that the world is passing the younger generation by, and they think they’re fully connected. I was at the town talent show, serving as house manager. That meant I didn’t get to see the whole of the show, but stayed outside to keep the door from slamming and keep the folks who needed to get in and out in and out safely. I was blown away by the fact that so many people couldn’t stay for the whole show. Some left as sourpusses – I came to see my kid, so why should I donate anything to the program? A few left in great hurry. One woman dashed out of the auditorium and off to the gym. One child in one program and another in a second? I don’t know and couldn’t say.

Late in the program Denise Peterson came out to check on the cash. She was followed by her daughter who came out of the live performance and into the hallway to plug in her iPhone. Couldn’t wait until she got home, had to charge before so that she could, I guess, text – facebook – foursquare – instagram or whatever during the ten minutes from the Middle School to home.

Then two of the High School performers, hanging in the hallway with one other high school girls, was encouraged to go backstage to take a final bow. It was difficult to get them to go, but they finally did agree to go. My assignment was to capture and hold a particular boy of interest to the three girls. He was a ginger, they told me – so that made him easy to spot – and he had promised to be here in just a few minutes. The girls were interested in this boy. Did I mention that? I don’t know what the interest was, but they were interested in him in the way that High School girls can be interested in High School Boys.

He arrived. I had him sit and wait. Two of the three girls arrived and gushed.

And then they checked messages on the phone. They checked messages on the phone!

I get this in class. I joke about it with class members. “You’re the best connected generation with the least to say,” I regularly tell my introductory classes. But this was different and maybe that’s what struck me. The texting and facebooking and whatever was going on at every moment when a child or young adult might have to either be bored or engage in thought, reflection or day dreaming.

I wonder if we’re about to have a generation that will know nature as a digital photograph and vacation as a video file, and human relations as interchanges on an iPhone.

I Want Out of Modern Marketing

Sears credit card accused me of being late on two months payment when I paid off the card. They got payment of the almost the whole balance a day after the due date. That left a small balance – and I thought I had a zero balance. They charged me late fees for both months. I protested. They fixed it and ended up giving me money back.

I tried to close the account, but it was such a hassle I just decided to let it go. But I haven’t shopped at either Sears or Kmart since, and I don’t intend to. It’s the only way I can protest what I see as unjust financial policies that only benefit the company, never the consumer.

Somehow, and I confess I don’t remember how, I ended up in a situation where I had to sign up for a trial copy of Cooks magazine in order to get something I wanted on the web. I was already subscribing to one of the publications, but thought, what the heck, a one copy trial, no big deal. Ever since then I’ve been getting demands for payment for a year’s subscription. Today I got the third notice. Probably going to turn me over to a collection agency next.

I’m tired of companies assuming that I’m a patsy. I’m tired of companies assuming that I will pay bills I haven’t made for products I don’t want. I’m tired of companies making it difficult for me to close accounts, drop out, drop them off my screens – both mental and computer.

I want out of modern marketing!

A questionable hermeneutic

There was a Senior chapel talk the Friday before Thanksgiving break.

It was a fine talk by a fine young woman with a sensitive conscience. She worried that she was not the kind of Christian she believed God and Jesus wanted her to be. She thought about how her life was shaped by faith and how faith guided her choices. I think that’s what she was saying. I was distracted by her hermeneutic – combined with what I had just heard in a debate over the ability of Christian theology to guide thinking about sustainability.

Her hermeneutic was a common one for students at our college. It begins with the assumption that every word in the bible, in its various translations (though more often than not in either the Authorized Version or one of its conservative iterations such as the NIV), is pure word of God, and every word of the bible is “scripture” and “all scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for training in righteousness.”

In this hermeneutic the Christian scriptures are a rich mine filled with nuggets of wisdom that can and should be drawn up to solve problems, end debate and close minds. “God said it, I believe it, that settles it for me” is the simplistic version of an evangelical hermeneutic adopted by many of our students, and probably not a few of our faculty.

Given the zeitgeist of fundamental apocalypticism that is not uncommon in many Kansas, Texas, Nebraska churches, that quote mining hermeneutic is sometimes combined with a view of creation that sees creation as coming to a sudden and catastrophic end.

That point of view had been demonstrated in Argumentation class that same Friday. Debating the issue of the sufficiency of Christian faith for developing a sustainable view of human interaction with creation, the negative argued that God was going to do away with the earth sooner or later and therefore there was no need to develop a theological affirmation of sustainability. Even sadder: the Affirmative, having opportunity to refute, didn’t even confront the bad theology.

We offer no challenge to this impoverishing hermeneutic. We don’t challenge our students to see the Christian scripture in historical context, to see scripture through a historical critical hermeneutic, to view it through a Christo-centric hermeneutic, or any sophisticated hermeneutic.

Our contemporary Lutheran understanding of Scripture gets almost no hearing anywhere on the campus. I certainly wouldn’t advocate that we attempt to proselytize for a Lutheran understanding of the Christian scriptures. I would advocate that we need to present that resource to students more directly, more fully and unapologetically. FCA and other evangelical groups who use a quote mining hermeneutic operate without any alternative understanding of the scriptures of Christendom. One of the reasons that kids use the interpretive tools offer by evangelical churches is that they aren’t offered anything else, anything more critical and in some sense more aware of the intellectual difficulties of being religious in our post-modern world.

Our spiritual challenges are partly non-academic. Developing as a faithful and thoughtful advocate of any religious position, (or of agnosticism or even atheism) is in some sense a personal journey and not an academic one. But it is also an academic journey.

The tools that have been developed for the critical study of the Judeo-Christian scriptures are not new. These are ideas and concepts that have been developed since the 1850’s, and are well known in the seminaries, even the most conservative evangelical seminaries. They are disparaged there while they are encouraged in the seminaries of the Presbyterian, Methodist, Anglican and ELCA Lutheran churches.

I first encountered these tools in New Testament studies as a sophomore at Augustana College. They were enlightening and empowering. They enabled me to take a clearer look at the Bible. They gave me a terrific boost in an attempt to understand the world science was describing – even the world literature was describing – and the ancient texts that I felt were normative for my life. I don’t think the tools of contemporary scholarship would do anything less for our students. Somehow we need to make those tools more available to the student body if we are going to do something more than just create a warm fuzzy sense of spiritual development. I like warm fuzzy spiritually fulfilling objectives, but I don’t think that warm fuzzies alone are worthy of us as an institution of higher education.