Temporary Suspending Blog Posts

Due to back problems that make it hard to do research and writing, I am temporarily suspending my blog posts, but I occasionally post a Tweet to my Twitter under the username of PointJude (the name of my favorite sailboat).

Lord, You Must Be So Disappointed in Us

Physicists are now in general agreement that our Universe must have been designed; there are too many critical forces and relationships that are necessary for its creation and continued existence for it to have been an accident. Our Universe, our Solar System and our Planet contain many wonders, but for billions of years there was no-one to observe these wonders and contemplate them until the arrival of humans.

Still, at the present time, most other scientists profess to believe that life and its development was through a series of accidents. Increasingly, as the genomes of different life-forms are studied, this position becomes more and more untenable, but the scientific establishment continues strenuously to suppress all challenges, by threats, intimidation and ridicule.

Not until the Cambrian explosion were there creatures with eyes to see and brains to register the wonders of our surroundings, but it took the development of mankind for there to be life-forms that could realize, study and appreciate our world. That so many people still consider it all to be accidental must be a great disappointment to God, because it may be undoing the main reason for our presence here. Still, our concept of time is different from His.

From page 148-9 of the book, “Why Us?”, by James Le Fanu, Pantheon Books, New York, NY, 2009. This is definitely a book worth reading and re-reading.

“The strangest thing about the universe of which we are part is that there should be 'something rather than nothing'. The second strangest, that we humans are the only beings (as far as we can tell) to know both that it does exist, and the extraordinary events that brought it into being. Without that human presence, 'This moving and sublime spectacle of nature would be sad and mute: observed the eighteenth¬century French philosopher Denis Diderot. 'Everything would be a vast solitude, a phenomenon taking place obscurely, unobserved.'

This uniquely human capacity to know the universe exists is predicated on three separate events, each by itself almost as remarkable as the fact of there being 'something rather than nothing'. The first event was the emergence of 'life 3,500 million years ago, touched on in the preceding chapter, where the simplest of single-celled organisms is both an astonishingly complex chemical factory and an encyclopaedia of genetic information transmitting the necessary instructions for those chemical reactions from one generation to the next. The second event was the arrival of the earliest marine creatures, such as the trilobite, six hundred million years ago, with the capacity to see, and so be aware of the external world - thanks to the twin and simultaneous 'innovations' of both the seeing eye and a brain capable of interpreting the image that falls upon it.

That brain would, over time, become enormously more sophisticated and complex, but the universe would still not become 'knowable' till the third and final event, the emergence of humans, with the faculty of language that permits them to think, and then to think about those thoughts and discuss their significance by inserting them into the minds of others gathered around the campfire. Thus, the arrival of our species, witnessed so eloquently by the wondrous art and technology of our earliest ancestors, introduces a radically new element into the universe that had never existed before - the thoughts, values and understanding of what it might all mean.

And it does not end there, for that self-reflective human brain comprehends the world from the perspective of the individual to whom it belongs - so that brain must also acquire the sense of that inner person we know our¬selves to be, and to whom those thoughts belong. And further, that now reflective self must be free to prefer one thought over another, to argue one interpretation over another and recognise the sovereignty of some 'higher court' than its own immediate impressions: the notion of 'the truth', on which all discourse (whether around the campfire or in the university seminar room) depends - where agreeing with another individual is to acknowledge the truth of his argu¬ment, and to disagree is to reject it.

There is more, but the gist is clear enough. The privilege of our species in having a larger brain is by itself not sufficient to 'know' the universe. Man must also possess that perception of himself as an 'autonomous self, free to choose' - or, as the eighteenth-century philosopher Adam Smith put it, 'the impartial and well informed spectator' of himself and his thoughts:

When I endeavour to examine my own conduct. . . I divide myself as it were into two persons; and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from the other I, the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of. The first is the spectator. . . the second is the agent, a person who I properly call myself, and on whose conduct I was endeavouring to form some opinion.

That sense of the autonomous self is more than just a property of the non-material mind, but has a distinctive character whose beliefs and attitudes may change over time but whose personality remains resolutely the same.”

“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players”

William Shakespeare

Some Images Reflecting Current Events

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The Most Surprising Editorial Ever in the NY Times

Along with all of the intelligence indicating the presence of WMD, another of the several stated reasons for our incursion into Iraq was to establish a democracy model in the midst of the Islamic countries of the Middle East – which were all run by dictators. It may be starting to pay off, although few liberal Democrats will accept this with an open mind.

A Column in the NY Times That Will Floor You

Gee Maybe Iraq DID Make a Difference

Winds of Change?

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN June 14, 2009 Op-Ed Columnist NY Times

Twenty years ago, I wrote a book about the Middle East, and recently I was thinking of updating it with a new introduction. It was going to be very simple — just one page, indeed just one line: “Nothing has changed.”

It took me two days covering the elections in Beirut to realize that I was dead wrong. No, something is going on in the Middle East today that is very new. Pull up a chair; this is going to be interesting.

What we saw in the Lebanese elections, where the pro-Western March 14 movement won a surprise victory over the pro-Iranian Hezbollah coalition, what we saw in the ferment for change exposed by the election campaign in Iran, and what we saw in the provincial elections in Iraq, where the big pro-Iranian party got trounced, is the product of four historical forces that have come together to crack open this ossified region.

First is the diffusion of technology. The Internet, blogs, YouTube and text messaging via cellphones, particularly among the young — 70 percent of Iranians are under 30 — is giving Middle Easterners cheap tools to communicate horizontally, to mobilize politically and to criticize their leaders acerbically, outside of state control. It is also enabling them to monitor vote-rigging by posting observers with cellphone cameras.

I knew something had changed when I sat down for coffee on Hamra Street in Beirut last week with my 80-year-old friend and mentor, Kemal Salibi, one of Lebanon’s greatest historians, and he told me about his Facebook group!

The evening of Lebanon’s election, I went to the Beirut home of Saad Hariri, the leader of the March 14 coalition, to interview him. In a big living room, he had a gigantic wall-size television broadcasting the results. And alongside the main TV were 16 smaller flat-screen TVs with electronic maps of Lebanon. Hariri’s own election experts were working on laptops and breaking down every vote from every religious community, village by village, and projecting them on the screens.

Second , for real politics to happen you need space. There are a million things to hate about President Bush’s costly and wrenching wars. But the fact is, in ousting Saddam in Iraq in 2003 and mobilizing the U.N. to push Syria out of Lebanon in 2005, he opened space for real democratic politics that had not existed in Iraq or Lebanon for decades. “Bush had a simple idea, that the Arabs could be democratic, and at that particular moment simple ideas were what was needed, even if he was disingenuous,” said Michael Young, the opinion editor of The Beirut Daily Star. “It was bolstered by the presence of a U.S. Army in the center of the Middle East. It created a sense that change was possible, that things did not always have to be as they were.”

When I reported from Beirut in the 1970s and 1980s, I covered coups and wars. I never once stayed up late waiting for an election result. Elections in the Arab world were a joke — literally. They used to tell this story about Syria’s president, Hafez al-Assad. After a Syrian election, an aide came in and told Assad: “Mr. President, you won 99.8 percent of the votes. It means that only two-tenths of one percent of Syrians didn’t vote for you. What more could ask for?”
Assad answered: “Their names!”

Lebanese, by contrast, just waited up all night for their election results — no one knew what they’d be.

Third , the Bush team opened a hole in the wall of Arab autocracy but did a poor job following through. In the vacuum, the parties most organized to seize power were the Islamists — Hezbollah in Lebanon; pro-Al Qaeda forces among Iraqi Sunnis, and the pro-Iranian Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and Mahdi Army among Iraqi Shiites; the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan; Hamas in Gaza.

Fortunately, each one of these Islamist groups overplayed their hand by imposing religious lifestyles or by dragging their societies into confrontations the people didn’t want. This alienated and frightened more secular, mainstream Arabs and Muslims and has triggered an “awakening” backlash among moderates from Lebanon to Pakistan to Iran. The Times’s Robert Mackey reported that in Tehran “chants of ‘Death to America’ ” at rallies for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week were answered by chants of “Death to the Taliban — in Kabul and Tehran” at a rally for his opponent, Mir Hussein Moussavi.

Finally , along came President Barack Hussein Obama. Arab and Muslim regimes found it very useful to run against George Bush. The Bush team demonized them, and they demonized the Bush team. Autocratic regimes, like Iran’s, drew energy and legitimacy from that confrontation, and it made it very easy for them to discredit anyone associated with America. Mr. Obama’s soft power has defused a lot of that. As result, “pro-American” is not such an insult anymore.

I don’t know how all this shakes out; the forces against change in this region are very powerful — see Iran — and ruthless. But for the first time in a long time, the forces for decency, democracy and pluralism have a little wind at their backs. Good for them.

Can Life Be Initiated Randomly In Nature?

Although most scientific organizations and bureaucracies have yet to recognize this, many discoveries involving DNA and gene research of the last 60 years have confirmed some of Darwin’s theories, (microevolution, all living things are related), while other aspects of Darwin’s theories have been disproved or called into serious question (macroevolution, single tree of life). My opinion of the main reason for the resistance of the scientific community is that the most recent genetic research has also shown how little we know, rather than how much we know, about where the information comes from to construct a living being. When DNA was discovered, science assumed that soon everything would become clear. Just the opposite has happened, and science doesn’t like that.

One question that Darwinists have never been able to confront, much less answer, is how life was first created. One has to laugh at the answer famously given to Ben Stein in his movie, “Expelled”, by the most prominent Darwinist of our time, Richard Dawkins, when he said a possibility was that a superior race had seeded life on earth (then where did the superior race come from?).

Can Life Be Initiated Randomly In Nature?

Dr. Zvi Shkedi, January 2009

The author is a retired aerospace engineer, with a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

A note for those who are not mathematically oriented: In this article we show large numbers using "to the power of " notation. 102 means 10 to the power of 2 which is 100. 103=1000. 109=1,000,000,000 etc. 10-3 means 1 divided by 103 which is 0.001 ; 10-6=0.000001 etc. The symbol ^ is an alternative notation which also means "to the power of ". 10^3=103=1000 etc.
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The first, most primitive, RNA or DNA sequence had to be encoded correctly with the ability to absorb food from its lifeless surroundings, metabolize it, and repeatedly reproduce itself, or else, it would not survive. Such a complicated initial encoding is not something that can happen by chance. It can also not develop and improve itself to gain this ability over time because, prior to gaining this ability, it would be nothing but lifeless organic matter. Self-replicating molecules may be able to replicate themselves through chemical reactions. Such lifeless molecules, however, do not contain the information necessary to support and reproduce life. Such molecules have been synthesized through an investment of energy and intelligence by people in the lab. They did not make themselves. No such molecules were ever found in nature.

To understand the probability of encoding survivable DNA by chance, let's look at the following example. We will not ask how long it will take a monkey with a typewriter to produce all the writings of Shakespeare. Instead, we will ask how long will it take a monkey to randomly type the first 12 letters of the ABC in the correct order. At a typing rate of one letter per second without external guidance, the probability is once in 3 billion years! And, if we want to produce all the 26 letters of the ABC in the correct order, how many monkeys will it take, and how long will it take them? Without external guidance, the probability is that 400 trillion monkeys might do it once in 400 trillion years! The orderliness in RNA and DNA is much higher than the 26 letters of the ABC. It takes hundreds or thousands of genes to encode survivable DNA. The rate of biological changes in large quantities of matter is much slower than one per second. So, the probability of getting it right, without external guidance, is many orders of magnitude lower. The wildest most imaginative theories cannot explain such a high degree of orderliness without external guidance.

Some imaginative theories propose that life was not initiated on earth. The first DNA was carried to earth on a meteorite from outer space. How exactly would such living organisms survive the glowing-white temperatures experienced by meteorites during their travel through the atmosphere?

In the 1920's and 1930's, Oparin and Haldane proposed another theory as if life in nature started in a Primordial Soup pond. According to this theory, lifeless chemicals in this pond turned into living organisms by lightning strikes or some other source of energy. This theory has been presented to students, academics, and the general public as if it were an irrefutable scientific fact. Let's calculate what is the minimum possible quantity of materials necessary to initiate a living organism in such a pond. Then, we will compare this quantity to the size of planet earth. This thought experiment is about an attempt to initiate the very first independently survivable DNA, before any other life processes have a chance to begin. It is not about an attempt to change or improve an existing form of life.

All DNA is encoded with four nucleotide bases which serve as the coding building blocks. In the following analysis we will ignore the resources required to complete the biochemical reactions necessary to compose and duplicate the nucleotide base molecules. We will also ignore the mechanisms by which nucleotide bases join other molecules in a survivable sequence to form the DNA structure. The following analysis will focus only on the probability and quantity of organic materials necessary to initiate the information contents carried by the DNA in the first living organism.

Each gene coding location contains one of the four possible bases. Each gene is composed of hundreds or thousands of such bases. The number of genes in most living organisms is between about 1000 and 40,000. Therefore, the probability of randomly composing a survivable DNA is much less than 10-1000 (less than 1 chance out of 101000 possibilities). Now let's imagine an attempt to create the minimal possible variations of genetic codes with the hope of discovering and initiating the very first one which is capable of absorbing food, metabolizing it, repeatedly reproducing itself, and surviving.

The cell-size of most independently survivable living organisms is between 1 micron and a few hundred microns. (Viruses are smaller, however they are symbiotic organisms - unable to survive on their own without a host. In the absence of live hosts, symbiotic organisms could not have been the first ones to appear. Organisms which depend on food produced by other organisms could also not have been the first ones to appear.) Let's attempt to create the smallest imaginable non-symbiotic organism at a size of 0.1 microns. This size is less than any known non-symbiotic organism in nature and less than the smallest theoretically possible size of 0.2 microns. Using this size in the calculation, will give us a lower limit of the total volume of materials necessary to find at least one survivable organism.

We can minimize the number of experimental cells by requiring only 200 nucleotide bases in the entire DNA of each cell. There are no known living organisms and there are no theories which predict the possibility of living organisms with such a small number of bases. Such a short genetic code cannot support even the most primitive form of a living organism. It is not known how many additional bases will be required before at least one of the permutations will produce a survivable living organism. This number is probably in the thousands. However, using only 200 bases in the calculation will give us a lower limit of the total number of experimental cells necessary to find at least one independently survivable organism.

200 base locations will yield 4200 possible permutations which is 10120. Multiplying 4200 by the volume of a 0.1 micron cell yields a volume of 1099 cubic meters as the lower-limit volume of materials in this over-simplified experiment. The volume of planet earth is 1021 cubic meters. Therefore, the lower-limit volume of materials necessary to randomly produce a living organism is 1078 times the volume of planet earth.

This analysis shows that even if such a short genetic code could somehow create a living organism, and even if this organism could be as small as 0.1 microns, getting it randomly initiated in nature would still need a volume of organic matter which is 78 orders of magnitude larger than the total volume of planet earth.

This experiment and all possible DNA permutations do not need to be constructed all at once. Let's investigate a hypothesis as if the attempt to randomly initiate life on planet earth lasted a period of 3 billion years, as some theories propose. If we allocate one day for each step in the experiment, and divide the lower-limit volume of necessary experimental organisms (1099 cubic meters) by the number of days in 3 billion years, we obtain a necessary daily volume of 1066 times the volume of planet earth for each step in the experiment. If we allocate just one second for each step, the volume of organisms during each such step still needs to be more than 1061 times the volume of planet earth. Some chemical reactions can occur as fast as one picosecond. If we allocate one picosecond for each step in the experiment, the lower-limit volume of experimental organisms during each such step would still be more than 1049 times the volume of planet earth. The volume of space taken up by the Milky Way galaxy is of the order of 1061 cubic meters. Therefore, the minimum necessary volume of experimental organisms during each one-picosecond step is larger than 109 times the total volume of the Milky Way galaxy.

In summary, the lower-limit quantity of organic matter needed to randomly initiate the smallest and most primitive form of life in nature, compared to the size of planet earth, demonstrates how futile such an attempt would be. It proves that random initiation of life in nature is absolutely impossible. Therefore, the Primordial Soup theory proposed by Oparin and Haldane and all other similar theories are nothing but human imagination. DNA as the carrier of genetic codes was not yet discovered at their times. Had they known about the complex structure of DNA, they would not have proposed such a theory.

The English Professor Anthony Flew was, for half a century, the world's leading authority on atheism. When he learned, in 2004, about the breaking of the genetic code in DNA, he changed his mind and announced that he believes in God as a first cause. The structure of DNA, he explained, was so awesomely complex that it could not have just evolved. It must have been designed and created by God.

Editorial Note: Anthony Flew is not the only person to be shaken by the implications of the DNA code and by the unfolding knowledge of genes. Many scientists, who were atheists, have become believers – including Dr. Francis Collins, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work in mapping the human genome. Dr. Collins famously said, “I have seen the mind of God”.

Iran’s Twitter Revolution

It’s true that most people and even 75% of Twitter members have no idea of Twitter’s power. I’ve tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to get most of my friends to join and use Twitter (a free service), but most don’t join, or else they join and don’t really use it. The problem is, it’s almost impossible to explain Twitter, because you have to join it and then you have to dig in and use some of its tools and add-ons to appreciate its power.

Iran’s Twitter Revolution

by Ross Kaminsky 06/18/2009 HumanEvents.com

What neither the U.N. nor the European Union have been able to do, what the Great Satan is too preoccupied with its finances to even try, may be accomplished by a social-networking internet site called Twitter.

Quasi-nuclear Iran, the principal sponsor of terrorism in the world, may be enjoying a revolt against the oppressive regime of the ayatollahs that is made possible by hitherto unavailable -- and convenient, cheap and nearly ublockable -- communications between protesters.

If you’re not posting to the #iranelection hashtag with your green-overlayed avatar, chances are you’re missing what is probably the single most important political use of technology in history: The Iranian “Twitter Revolution.”

For those of you who don’t know, Twitter is essentially an enormous chat room but with a few very important modifications: Users can “follow” other users, getting each “tweet” those users send out -- you don’t have to see every message from every Twitter user. Tweets are limited to 140 characters, so you never have to read long rants. You can reply or you can “retweet,” sending out a tweet you received so that your followers, who may be a different group than those you follow, can see something you think important. And, most importantly for the purposes of using Twitter as an effective informational and organizing tool, you can attach a “hashtag” (a pound sign “#” followed by letters and/or numbers) to a tweet and users can follow particular hashtags.

For example, the hashtag #tcot represents “Top Conservatives on Twitter,” a group with over 5,000 members, while #iphone and #teaparty are exactly what you think (unless you think the latter is about sitting down and drinking tea.) But the critical hashtag of the week is undoubtedly “#iranelection,” with tens of thousands of Twitter users -- most importantly in Iran -- communicating among each other and with the wider world 140 characters at a time.

Make no mistake: This is a huge threat to the Iranian regime -- a pro-liberty movement being fomented and organized in short sentences. And while we’ve talked about “mass communication” for decades, we’ve never truly seen communication for the masses until these past few days.

As I write this (Wednesday), I’m consistently seeing upwards of 40 tweets per minute coming through in the #iranelection category. Messages range from (most importantly) people in Iran reporting what’s going on in the streets (“All foreign news reporters in Iran locked down in their hotels,” “Rumors of Hamas helping Iran regime suppress dissent”), to Americans reflecting on what they’re learning (“Iran protesters, please keep it going. Help your kids!”), to tech-geek hints on how to help pro-Democracy Iranians circumvent their government’s attempts to stop them.

Another important aspect of Twitter is that its messages can be sent and received as cell phone text messages, making it an extremely powerful organizing tool. You may have heard, for example, about Twitter being used by the organizers of Tax Day Tea Parties in the U.S. But that -- and every prior use of Twitter and the internet, at least for politics -- pales in comparison to what is happening in Iran.

The impact of Twitter on events in Iran has been noticed by our usually dictator-compliant State Department, which risked insulting the ayatollahs by contacting Twitter to request they postpone a scheduled system maintenance down-time. Even al-Jazeera is commenting on the importance of technology, including Twitter, in what I hope is the Second Iranian Revolution.

Despite being old men with little exposure to leading-edge technology, Iran’s ruling Guardian Council understands the essential value of communication to freedom: If they can communicate freely, no people can be long enslaved.

The Iranian government has taken substantial steps to limit their citizens’ ability to use the internet. They have blocked most access to Facebook and other sites, have limited text messaging, and have cut the nation’s “bandwidth,” meaning the speed with which one can send information through the internet, but have stopped short of simply cutting of the nation’s internet connectivity (probably because they need it themselves.) However, with “tweets” of only 140 characters or less, bandwidth is a non-issue (as opposed to, for example, transmitting videos).

While it is impossible to prove, it appears the government is creating fictional Twitter users for their own purposes: trying to find, disrupt, and arrest pro-Democracy agitators and organizers, and trying to spread misinformation. Indeed, there is now at least one web page dedicated to weeding out and blocking “fake Iran election tweeters.” For example, Tuesday there were repeated “retweets” of a message saying the army was moving in to crush protests in Tehran. The tone of the note was suspicious, and although such an occurrence is not beyond possibility, it struck me as more likely a government agent trying to scare people away from joining the protests. News reports never confirmed the claim of the army’s movements.

But just as the Iranian regime infiltrates Twitter, users look for their own defenses, warning not to “retweet” messages from Iran and to look for confirmation before believing any claims of major importance. It’s an entirely new sort of battle, and one which the mullahs are not likely to win -- which is not to say that this battle will necessarily be decisive in Iran’s nascent revolution. For example, while the regime is busy trying to block Twitter and other sites directly, supporters of the Iranian protesters are setting up “proxies” outside Iran -- computers which Iranians can access and go through to get to Twitter and elsewhere. It’s only a matter of time until the regime finds and blocks a given proxy, but that time represents extra hours of pro-freedom communication and organizing for another ten or fifty or more courageous Iranians.

The Iranian government is reportedly stepping up their efforts to block Twitter and other forms of electronic communication. Some think the increased censorship was tied to Twitter messages to the Iranian soccer team, which was playing in Korea, urging the players to wear green wrist bands in solidarity with the protestors. Pictures of players on the field seem to show they did just that, though Photoshop makes almost any image possible to create. It was widely reported on Twitter (and then elsewhere) that the players removed the wristbands at halftime.

No wonder the mullahs are afraid of Twitter if it can not only help organize protests within their country but also stir up pro-freedom reactions thousands of miles away. It isn’t surprising that a CBS reporter says that all access to Twitter was blocked in Iran as of Wednesday morning. Well, until the young, tech-savvy population there finds a way around the mullah’s electronic muzzle.

I, like many others, was somewhat skeptical of Twitter but decided to get involved with it a few weeks ago after talking with conservative blogger Michelle Malkin. I asked her for her thoughts on the Twitter revolution in Iran: “I've tried to persuade friends for months that Twitter is much, much more than a celebrity vanity tool. The Iranian uprising has shattered that myth once and for all. In the hands of freedom-loving dissidents, the micro-blogging social network is a revolutionary samizdat -- undermining the mullah-cracy's information blockades one Tweet at a time.”

A Disaster Brewing on Healthcare

Another disaster is brewing as Obama seems to be winning the public perception battle regarding government-supplied healthcare. This is despite all the warnings about the failure of similar systems in places like Canada and England, and the absolute certainty that government healthcare will raise costs, and quickly lead to shortages of doctors and procedures, rationing and denials of treatments to certain patients. All this can be predicted, but Americans are not paying close attention.

Now we also have the model of the failure of the Massachusetts experiment in a government-mandated heathcare system to observe. Will it make any difference?

Massachusetts Miracle or Massachusetts Miserable: What the Failure of the "Massachusetts Model" Tells Us about Health Care Reform

Published on June 9, 2009 by Michael D. Tanner

Michael Tanner is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute and coauthor of Healthy Competition: What's Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It (2007).

• Although the state has reduced the number of residents without health insurance, 200,000 people remain uninsured. Moreover, the increase in the number of insured is primarily due to the state's generous subsidies, not the celebrated individual mandate.

• Health care costs continue to rise much faster than the national average. Since 2006, total state health care spending has increased by 28 percent. Insurance premiums have increased by 8–10 percent per year, nearly double the national average.
• New regulations and bureaucracy are limiting consumer choice and adding to health care costs.

• Program costs have skyrocketed. Despite tax increases, the program faces huge deficits. The state is considering caps on insurance premiums, cuts in reimbursements to providers, and even the possibility of a "global budget" on health care spending—with its attendant rationing.

• A shortage of providers, combined with increased demand, is increasing waiting times to see a physician.

With the "Massachusetts model" frequently cited as a blueprint for health care reform, it is important to recognize that giving the government greater control over our health care system will have grave consequences for taxpayers, providers, and health care consumers. That is the lesson of the Massachusetts model.

Older Americans should also take note of the many statements coming from Obama Administration members that Obamacare will largely be paid for by reducing and rationing health services and procedures to seniors on Medicare and on Medicaid. Tell your senior friends to let Congress know that we will not stand for this!