Here’s some good links for your consideration:

• Cloaking technology: Their Deepest, Darkest Discovery
• He writes real good: Another short but elegant essay at Sippican Cootage: Infinite Calculus. Read it just for the shear pleasure of beautiful writing.
• Your health insurance company has your best interest at heart — no, really!:

  California Insurers Canceling Policies

  The City Attorney … is also opening a criminal investigation into Health Net \'s practice of ‘paying employee bonuses based in part on canceling policies of people who have submitted substantial medical claims.’

  Of course, they’re now scrambling to address the PR disaster: Health Insurers Address Issue Of Nixed Policies

• Here we go again: Screening for cancer is an appealing idea, but fraught with difficulties, as I explained here.

  Researchers at Yale School of Medicine have developed a blood test with enough sensitivity and specificity to detect early stage ovarian cancer with 99 percent accuracy.

  There’s a lot unsaid here: how many people without cancer had a positive test? How much does the test cost? Is every cancer so diagnosed significant? What’s the cost of diagnostic procedures and surgeries done for a false positive test (i.e., positive test but no cancer present). Etc. Etc.

• Negotiations, diplomacy, and economics will surely end all wars: Richard John Neuhaus:
  

  Carnegie was a great believer in what he viewed as the sacred bonds of commerce, joined to the force of religion, in advancing human progress. The purpose of the Church Peace Union was the abolition of war.

  On February 11, 1914, Carnegie gave the organization $2 million, a great deal of money at the time, and addressed a letter to the trustees, a copy of which I kept posted in my office. In that letter, Carnegie said: “After the arbitration of international disputes is established and war abolished, as it certainly will be some day, and that sooner than expected, probably by the Teutonic nations, Germany, Britain, and the United States first deciding to act in unison, other powers joining later, the Trustees will divert the revenues of this fund to relieve the deserving poor and afflicted in their distress.”

  Needless to say, the deserving poor and afflicted are still waiting for their share of the endowment. The first big international project of the Church Peace Union was a conference aimed at the abolition of war to be held on the shores of Lake Constance in southern Germany on August 1, 1914. That week, Mr. Fukuyama \'s “more durable and productive” basis of rational interests gave way to the war to end wars. The conference was cancelled. Or, as the organizers said, postponed to a more propitious time. For that, too, the world is still waiting.

• David Warren: His essays on the conflict between postmodern, secular society and religion are always excellent. This one’s no exception: Science v. wisdom

That’s all for now, God bless, back soon.