Tragedy and hope

Hope, Arkansas to Hope, Albania: naivete and idealism to reality and tragedy.

The wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo were perpretrated by a radical nationalist Serbian cultural political consciousness that the American cultural political consciousness and leadership had difficulty responding to and understanding. There is a great cultural divide between a 'pathology' in Serbian culture, Milosević's radical nationalism, and a humane 'naivete' in American cultural consciou...

The tragedy of the sustained growth rate formula continues into 2014: is there hope for repeal?

A recent health care policy article describes the sustained growth rate (SGR) as a mythical sword of Damocles hanging over the physicians (1). The SGR formula is an approach to restrain the growth of Medicare spending on physician services. It threatens to impose a 24.4% decrease in the Medicare physician fee schedule on April 1, 2014, if not fixed. The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013 (2), which ...

Sex, death and tragedy.

The population consequences of sexual conflict are relatively unexplored. In a recent paper, Le Galliard et al. now show that males of the common lizard Lacerta vivipara cause such damage to females that male-biased populations decrease in size, posing a real risk to the persistence of local lizard populations. Their study reveals surprising parallels between sexual conflict and the tragedy of ...

Pediatric Tragedy

Hope against Hope

In the penultimate chapter of the Bible, in the opening statement of the very last speech God makes in the whole of the Christian Scriptures, God says: "Behold I am making all things new" (Rev 21:5). The prophet sees the old heavens and the old earth the universe as it now is passing away, and new heavens and a new earth, God's new creation of all things, coming into being. It is not that God r...