{"id":5549,"date":"2015-07-12T20:01:38","date_gmt":"2015-07-13T01:01:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=5549"},"modified":"2015-07-12T20:07:19","modified_gmt":"2015-07-13T01:07:19","slug":"obamacare-rising-and-meditation-deflating","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=5549","title":{"rendered":"Obamacare rising? And Meditation deflating . . ."},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in November, 2014, I was discussion Obamacare<\/a>, and I cited a then-recent poll indicating that public support for Obamacare was improving, closing the excess of disapprovals over approvals down to 6%. Shortly thereafter, new polls came in showing that this poll was a fluke, and the overall disapproval margin was hovering around 10%. Well, don’t look now, but it appears that some better results<\/a> are finally coming in for the Affordable Care Act of 2010. A recent Gallup Poll showed the disapproval margin down to 1 measly percentage point, and a CBS \/ NY Times poll actually showed a 3 point favorability margin — the first positive poll since early 2013. This is a very recent trend — two polls in May showed disapproval margins of 12 and 15 percentage points. <\/p>\n

If the recent trend continues, however, then perhaps Obamacare is here with us to stay, no matter how the big 2016 election goes. I personally wish that the GOP would just stop being so pigheaded in its opposition to the ACA, and get down to proposing ways to implement more market-driven mechanisms and fewer government-managed aspects of a national health insurance system. That probably won’t happen, however, unless they win the White House in 2016. They will then propose to replace Obamacare, but in the end, when the dust settles, it will be Obamacare with a few more market-based features and a few less government control mechanisms and oversight boards. That is, if the public popularity trend continues. Stay tuned.<\/p>\n

Oh, while I’m here — one more odd topic, having nothing to do with health care. I was reading an article on the Atlantic website<\/a> about one of those recent neuroscience studies regarding the brains of Buddhist meditators, and all the wondrous things that lots of mediation can do for you (or did to them, anyway). Neuroscientist Richard Davidson Davidson <\/p>\n

ran a simple experiment on eight \u201clong-term Buddhist practitioners\u201d whose had spent an average of 34,000 hours in mental training. They asked the subjects to alternate between a meditative state and a neutral state in order to observe how the brain changed. One subject described his meditation as generating \u201ca state in which love and compassion permeate the whole mind, with no other consideration, reasoning, or discursive thoughts.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Why is it that everyone who writes about Buddhist meditators always say things like that? I meditate myself, and sure, it’s plenty easy to feel lots of love and compassion for humankind and the universe when you contentedly sit in a quiet space. But how about when you’re stuck in traffic, or have a headache and your wife or kids need your attention, or someone at work really needs your help but you have a really big meeting to get to in 2 minutes? <\/p>\n

All that love and compassion doesn’t permeate the mind so well in such moments, no matter how much you meditated yesterday. Meditation is great (and perhaps should be a part of Obamacare, if it’s not already<\/a>), but as to love and compassion . . . sorry, there’s no shortcut to it, there are no techniques to develop it. Other than just deciding to take the time and make the effort to be compassionate, especially when it doesn’t give anything back to you (not even a “glow inside” for being such a groovy person).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in November, 2014, I was discussion Obamacare, and I cited a then-recent poll indicating that public support for Obamacare was improving, closing the excess of disapprovals over approvals down to 6%. Shortly thereafter, new polls came in showing that this poll was a fluke, and the overall disapproval margin was hovering around 10%. Well, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5549"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5549"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5555,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5549\/revisions\/5555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}