of expanding on something I posted. It's probably better to read it than much of what I said below. He does philosophy a lot better than I do. You lose a lot of reading time having to practice your scales and other exercises. I doubt most music majors could really count as intellectuals considering how much time playing an instrument takes. Though that did a lot for my typing.
I'm looking forward to Advent.
if they want to produce a really well written book. Harper Lee worked on To Kill a Mockingbird with Tay Hohoff, her editor, for more than two years to polish what apparently was a quite rough stone into the jewel that that book was. When its precursor, Go Set A Watchman was published with Lee's permission but without much of her participation, a lot of people noted that it would have been a far better novel if it had undergone the same kind of editing process.
I've been trying to do some translation work on a book by an author I have the highest respect for and am finding that this particular book - not one of his most well known but one which I think is uniquely valuable - could have used some rigorous editing, as well. I've realized that my virtually clause by clause notes which I've taken on it broke down many of his extremely long complex sentences into separate sentences and have wondered if translating my notes might not be both easier for me to do and to publish online - I'm sure it would violate America's absurd copyright laws but I might do it anonymously in several places so someone might profit from it. The author will be long dead by the time I get around to doing that so I don't feel any moral compunctions against doing it. I don't much give a damn about the American copyright laws as they've been expanded to absurd lengths to maximize profits well past the death of the original author or their children's lives.
As I've said to you guys before - this is an answer to yet another trolling about the quality of my writing - if you notice a marked rise in the quality of the writing here, such things as the words that unintentionally get deleted in my revisions remaining where they were, you'll know I've hit the numbers and can hire someone to edit me. Till then you get it quick and dirty, just like I write it.
A MEMBER OF MY FAMILY, close but not immediate, has died, uninsured, of a matter that could have been likely cured by a dose of antibiotics. He deferred treatment for the simple reason that he couldn't afford to go to the doctor another time this year. He was middle aged with two children and others who are devastated by his death. He had hidden his condition from everyone as he tried to treat it himself, he didn't want to burden his family with even that significant but relatively modest cost.
I used to babysit him when he was a child. He was an ornery little kid but adulthood improved him enormously. He was a good father and son to his parents and brother to his siblings.
His sudden death has affected me deeply but I can see that there is someone to blame for it, it's the goddamned Republicans who, first in the Roberts Court weakened the Affordable Care Act through his declaration that the Medicaid expansion requirement on the states was unconstitutional. The Republican ruled state he lived in didn't do much of anything in that direction. His inability to pay was a direct consequence of that decision by John Roberts who has to bear responsibility for such deaths that his choice caused. Though the original weakening of the Act, itself, so that Barack Obama could try to, unsuccessfully coax Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe to vote for it so he could declare it was "bipartisan" and Rahm Emanuel's deal with big Pharma to keep their profits up played a role, too. If he had lived in Canada, cost would have been no issue at all.
I remember when the debate over the ACA was going on, a Canadian commented that the original Canadian healthcare law was only a few pages long whereas, catering to private insurance and hospital corporations in the typical American way the ACA was close to a thousand pages long. Our Constitutional system, especially as distorted by the Supreme Court in things like its "corporate person-hood" bullshit gets us killed at an earlier age, sometimes of horrific, agonizing conditions that are routinely cured in other countries. There is a reason that in healthcare, the rich get top level care, most of us get something closer to what the poor can get in developing countries. Lots of us get to die prematurely.
And the Republican's most recent destruction of it haven't kicked in yet.
