Author Archives: jpeacott

I’m From the Government—I’m Here to Heal You

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A couple of months ago, I was sitting in a webinar about coding for outpatient medical and nursing procedures billed to Medicare.  As I was led through the maze of arcane formulas and requirements, I got to thinking about how much Medicare has inflated the costs of health care.  Here I was, being paid $40 an hour, as were seven or eight of my nurse colleagues, to listen to consultants (who were surely getting paid way more than I), quote from other consultants (more $$$) about how to fill out papers to maximize the amount of reimbursement the hospital I work for can receive from Medicare.  And this is all because the people who work for Medicare ($$$) issue coding guidelines that are vague and open to interpretation, so that bills are constantly bounced back to providers for more processing ($$$) to justify or explain the charges so they can be rebilled.  What a ridiculously expensive and inefficient process. Continue reading →

What’s the matter with kids today?

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What’s a parent to do?  PSAs broadcast on radio throughout the day tell listeners that every kid is constantly on the verge of smoking dope and thus ruining their life.  Parents are encouraged to scrutinize their kids’ internet use since they are in imminent danger of abduction by a sexual predator or intimidation by a cyberbully.  The medical and political authorities warn us about the dangers of HIV, occasional exposure to sidestream tobacco smoke, riding a bike without a helmet, contaminated lettuce, and now the scourge of unsafe bridges.  Continue reading →

The Violent Hypocrites

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This piece was written by Jo Labadie after World War I.  I [ed.] have changed some spelling, corrected some grammar, and eliminated a couple of obscure references, but the piece otherwise remains as originally written.

All of this talk and legislation against the use of force and violence as means of changing sociological conditions is hypocrisy on the part of exploiters.  Force and violence are at the bottom of exploitation.  Government itself is force and violence.  Tell me, some of you governmentalists who are so averse to the use of force and violence, not only here in American but the world over, how did you become possessed of the land on which the native races earned their living? Continue reading →

Alaska Notes

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 Smoking ban in Anchorage

 Come next summer it will be illegal to smoke tobacco in any bar in Anchorage.  The prohibitionists claim that banning smoking is necessary to protect the health of workers and patrons in these businesses.  They fail to acknowledge there is a much simpler, and entirely voluntary, method of avoiding the risks, both real and perceived, of inhaling smoke from others’ cigarettes.  That is staying out of bars, bingo halls, and the small number of other places where people are still allowed to smoke. Continue reading →

An Unholy Alliance

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One of the things that supposedly distinguish the western style secular democracies from the more authoritarian regimes found in much of the world is freedom of religion.  If the official positions of the governments of countries like the united states were to be taken at face value, one would have to assume that not only are people in these nations free to hold and practice whatever religious beliefs they like, but the state is barred from interfering in matters of religion.  This is, however, not at all the case. Continue reading →

Lesser Evil?

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While it is certainly tempting to take pleasure in the defeat of the republicans in congress, it would be incorrect to imagine that something actually important happened November 7, when supporters of the united states government went to the polls.  The conventional wisdom may be that there is a real difference between having one party or another as our rulers, but the democrats are just as vicious, acquisitive, authoritarian, and hypocritical as the republicans and have no more interest in individual liberty than those they will replace. Continue reading →

Plants, animals, and climate change: Some ruminations on the environment

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A number of years ago I wrote a couple of pamphlets about the politics of AIDS.  At the time there was a vast amount of mis- and disinformation about AIDS, its causes, its methods of transmission, and the risks it posed to individuals being peddled as science and fact.  I argued that many scientists, much of the AIDS activist movement, and most of the mainstream media either ignored data that was inconvenient to their analysis or circulated “facts” that were simply untrue in order to scare people into supporting one political agenda or another.  Now that global warming has replaced AIDS as the current threat to the existence of humanity, if not the world, I see similar politicking, suppression of debate, misunderstanding, and manipulation of the scientific data being used to deceive and frighten people.

Such fear-mongering, however, would not be effective unless there was a large group ready and willing to be convinced that, this time and at long last, the sky really is falling.  Despite the fact that neither a sudden ice age, genital herpes, acid rain, AIDS, SARS, nor any one of the other disasters we have been warned about in the last 20 years or so has lived up to the hype, lots of people are worrying that this time the experts and news media are right. Continue reading →