Bulamuhealthcare.org

 Update to 2022

Fourth of July weekend at the Dunes

Just Back from Uganda

https://bulamuhealthcare.org/

September 2020

This morning‘s discussion with the men of Tuesday revolved 

about three integrated issues to my mind: one: there is a long

-standing and widening gap between minorities, specifically

 African-American and the college educated white.

all students, especially recent grads from college have immense

 debts that are a function of the cost of education, and our ways

 of paying for it

3: the cost of education vastly exceeded inflation for decades.

....for instance within our group of 60 to 70-year-olds the cost

 varied, even including medical school, between $1500 a year,

 and $2500 for year, and that same education today cost between

 25,000 and $70,000 per year

Four: any effort to narrow the gap between the haves

 and the have hearts has to include education for all, and

 affordable education for all. In the city of Chicago the last 

mayor, Emmanuel, made community college free for any high

 school grad from the city of Chicago schools which certainly

 addresses part of the issue, money, but of course there are 

multiple other barriers, not the least of which is single-parent

 household and the burdens that that imposes on families, issues 

that have been there forever, but much more serious now in the

 competition for meaningful livelihood.

Within that context, Ed suggested that College debt be forgiven,

 or realigned, immediately, not simply for the good of those individuals

, but for the good of society, which is built around cConsumption by

 the next generation of young families.

Five: as individuals, of course there are things we could do,

 there are early sociologist studies showed that having one 

mentor available to a child in the formative years can make

 an enormous difference in outcomes, and there is the study 

out of Flint Michigan which demonstrated an enormous difference

 from a study done more than 60 years ago, preschool education

: the study randomized 10,000 children among 40,000 eligibles 

to have preschool two hours a day I believe for 6 to 8 weeks I believe,

 but it may have been a semester. Looking at the outcomes forty years

 later, The difference in income, incarceration, success in marriage,

 were almost double for those who received receive that limited gif

t versus the control group, the other 30,000.

But this is a collective obligation, and not an option except

 in the pace of resolving this flaw......

Six: that and many other studies demonstrate that every dollar

 spent on working towards completed education is worth in an

 enormous amount, both financially, and sociologically.......and

 the ethic is based on what society owes its members.........and

 in the states that argument

 between libertarians who feel that gov only exists to protect against

 outside and to protect individuals rights, and those who recognize 

that society has an obligation. To its members often gets lost in the 

weeds, as they like to say in policy discussions.

The immediate messages obvious: whether you’re conservative or

 liberal, it is essential to get Trump out of office school is either of those,

 and to start mending the social fabric that is so fucked up in this country a present

84°F Mostly Sunny

179 Big Horn Ridge Dr NE, Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States

Andrew j Griffin, MD, FACC,FAAP

3920 N LSD

Pontifficating on the Free Market

Jefferey Sachs Pontifficating on the Free Market Comments Freakonomics

http://freakonomics.com/2013/12/19/pontiff-icating-on-the-free-market-system-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/

As a wildly fallen away Catholic I and a whole lot of people have perkedup our ears at the new pope,

and as someone who does  lot of listening to podcasts whole running the Dog,  Freakonomics is one of my favorites an this particular broadcast is one for the Winter Solstice and rethink......as one of the lucky I feel the hope for a shift in our economics, and Jeffery Sachs is doing his best, and the Pope may be another to slowly shift the direction of this ship (to extend the metaphor....think Titanic)  in a direction towards justice and sustainability....we'll see.

The sense of an ending

Today reading Julian Barnes, Sense of an ending had several thoughts:

1: the central character and his friends have a set up similar to Gatsby or the other English novels of school chums....The narrator is intentionally dull as a brick, and opaque to a fault.....If he really were this slow witted he'd be a muggle, and if he isn't that slow, the author isn't coming clean.....I have the sense that the author is working very hard at avoiding any mitigating qualities, but in so doing leaves with a why bother issue.

Adrian we get approx 20 sentences about, and trying to relate to him is either emphatically not the authors intention, or not very good  character development.

The three women are the interesting characters in the book ( I feel it is a short story pretending to be a novel) but they don't get but a few pages in the whole thing.....That leaves us with 100 pages of filler, like a movie where one sees a lot of the cars moving and airplanes flying....

The ending isn't worthy of any of the principals, with the possible exception of the narrator, who isn't a worthy type...

The finding one's way in the transition from pre adolescence to the first stages of adulthood.....settled for better or worse,  rightly or wrongly, is of intense interest to me,  and the fact that the narrator (and i think the author) are of same age with the same set of constraints as myself is a great place to start, and so to with the looking back narrative, since again the age is the same......but this vision is so colorless, that any random person from that era would be more interesting....I had a class mate in high school who had managed to find a girl friend and have a shared intimacy that was enviable. This narrator has a potentially closer relationship, and a most self possessed girl griend....so that they couldn't get any further defies reaAON...The classmate i referred to  was a more solid, slightly stolid, quiet person, but I know he was finding out a lot more about relationships than I, and it wasn't because I had higher things on my plate, it was the barriers  created by one form of shyness blocked moving to that level of sharing This narrator and the author leave us again with why are we bothering

....one of our friends from that era said of one of her male companions that he felt you couldn't really know someone unless you had slept with them...and I think she said she bought that reasoning to some extent...ie that revealing oneself is easier if you know someone that well..

In any event.....This is not his finest book, and it feels contrived in an intellectual way too much..at least for my taste

Year of the Dragon

Ok, all Foxes: Today is the first day of the Year of the Dragon. We are in Albuquerque , at this instant in a cloud of new snow....According to Eastern folk tale, and the most beautiful of Hirosinge's wood cuts, on New Year's Eve (and I presume he was talking about Chinese New Year, even though he was Japanese, The Foxes all gather . For some reason they each have a flame over their heads, sort of like the Apostles when they learned to speak in many tongues....I'm waiting for my orders, like waiting for Godot, and while the waiting is not particularly frustrating, I also forget why.....but I'll never forget this carrot.

My two recommended readings for this New Year are both stunning, not necessarily in the sense of beauty, but pointing in directions that, like a video game, I hope there is an exit not yet visible from this point in the game, but hopefully there if We can just garner some super powers....the hope is for the generations coming on some of us are close enough to the finish line we can fall or stagger across, but these two pieces encapsulate a game that feels more like musical chairs rather than the video game with progressively less possible winners as the chairs are removed

....I remember a profesor at ND discussing this with me 50+ years ago, the industrial age per se being over, and the new worlds of work being service industries. That proposition held up fairly well for the last five decades, but the going for everyone but the 1 % (probably more like15%) seems to be getting rougher..Now the question is not how we get there so much as who is left by the side of the road.

The piece about the Iphone points out the magnitude of the manufacturing forces available, basically at a days notice, to do something like reengineer and produce the IPhone in a fraction of a year......Adam Davidson in the Planet money piece describes the bottom endge workers, and their tenuous hold (if they are lucky enough to have a hold at all) on a laborers job, and the contrast across town (as opposed to the Detroit vs Silicon valley juxtaposition) in greenville where a group of super high tech workers, few and highly skilled, crank out autoparts....he pointss out that US and China produce about the same amount of manufactured goods, but that despite growth in US, number of jobs in manufacturing has govne from 18 mil to 12 mil in a decade or so.....

If you get a chance listen and read, and especially those with experience in the world of econ/busines, tell me that it will all work out!

The first reading is the article in the NYTimes, Sunday last, about IPhones.....and Steven Jobs and jobs and the scale necessary to achieve it and the reality that at present only China....the second was a broadcast, 15 minutes, on Planet Money, which is an NPR Podcast on the Industrial Revolution as mirrored in Greenville NC, epicenter of the Textile industry, now dead, and New manufacturing....and who is left standing. 

The Aurora farm and the founders

Seventy

Seventy:

My sense of the whole thing is how lucky I have been. You name the aspect of life, and I've been ridiculously fortunate. Not deserving. Lucky. There are many maybe luckier....but given the alternatives....

There is this one thing.....being a mammal.....just about the time one has managed to figure out a few things, they plan on dragging me, and not just me!, every one of the other mammals...some earlier, some later.....Strikes me as quite old testament.....if Jesus had been running the show from the start, he would have thought up a better plan......and this Heaven business does not appeal, kind of like an interminable Fassbinder movie......I liked the concept of Limbo, but they scratched it.

Albuquerque is just about a perfect retreat.....it has seasons, its pretty cheap for housing, its not to tailored, in the golden retriever type of place as opposed to a fluffy small dog or alternatively a sleep greyhound.....We have a place in Sandia at the base of the mountain about a mile from the tram in the picture, and the skiing was excellent, a little powder, no bad challenges, a view that goes on and on....

In any event, while skiing I listened to two wonderful pod casts, the first re: sound, third coast festival. This one on a great south African jazz trumpeter, and the struggles against apartheid and music....If you don't like it, I owe you lunch. If you do, you by me a coke.
The second is also improbable for  classical types like myself: all songs considered. They manage to find and play a wide very interesting weekly broadcast, no commericals, etc. I see that Ira Glass, one of the greats in radio, is the relative of Phillip Glass, and he interviews him....Highly recommended.

At any rate, back to 70...as yet I don't see the light at the end of the tunnel, white light, etc.....but I'm happy in the tunnel. As soon as an epiphany hits me I'll inflict it on this site....The one thing that seems clear is that the idea of retiring at 55 is somewhat ludicrous unless one has a second career in mind, but 70...that makes some good sense. There are a lot of things to learn before the time runs out.