Individual Liberty—Progress—Humanity—Ethics—Rule of Law
"...if by a liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties—if that is what they mean by a "liberal," then I am proud to be a liberal."
There are two immediate questions: is it actually reform and is it finally happening. The Washington Post spread on the unveiling of the bill suggests that both are true. There will be a bill passed and it does contain reform measures. There will be almost endless commentary, but the best gauge of the bill has been rendered moot by the GOP, which would in bygone days have provided the country with an exacting analysis. Instead, the Republicans sensing that any Obama win would be a death knell to their party's hopes in the fall (and beyond) have chosen instead to dig in their heels on everything.
The notion that private for-profit health care (both insurance and medical care itself) is superior to public programs escapes me entirely. The only way the insurance companies have been able to continue their wretched existence is to have had the anti-cartel provisions of anti-trust regulations set aside. This means that insurance companies have been colluding to maintain rates high. How is that "superior" to maintaining rates lower? The difference is the profit that goes to insurance company stock-holders and upper management. Aren't you glad we have been providing aid and sustenance to these blood-suckers! Dr. Paul Krugman adds the sordid story of the illegal practices widespread in the insurance industry.
Medicine itself is a completely different situation. It costs plenty to become educated in medicine. Typically, young medical professionals in a specialty like internal medicine or pediatrics or endocrinology end up with upwards of $200,000 worth of debt before they start making the so-called "big bucks." It could be argued that it really does cost this much to teach them, provide them with internships and mentoring, and then to have something of a life for seven to ten long years. How this is accomplished in other countries at less expense should be studied, but the first place to start in the U.S. is in the public universities. I can tell you that there are too many greedy administrators there hoping to fund other projects on the backs of med students.
Then there is the pay-back system where MDs and medical PhDs earn very, very large sums for their work. A heart specialist surgeon is worth his or her weight in platinum, but should it be this way? Is there not a different payback for these people that we could install in our tax codes or elsewhere that gives them a reasonably high standard of living without breaking the rest of us? I think so. We have been dealing with the psychology of medicine men for aeons. It is time that they were allocated a reasonable station in life and no more.
It’s hard to believe, but an estimated 2.6 billion people in the developing world—nearly a third of the global population—still lack access to basic sanitation services. This presents a significant hygiene risk, especially in densely populated urban areas and slums where contaminated drinking water can spread disease rapidly. Every year, some 1.5 million children die from diarrhea caused by poor sanitation and hygiene.
It is in these crowded cities, too, that food security is weakened by the lack of clean, nutrient-rich soil as well as growing space available for local families.
But there is an inexpensive solution to both problems. A recent innovation, called the Peepoo, is a disposable bag that can be used once as a toilet and then buried in the ground. Urea crystals in the bag kill off disease-producing pathogens and break down the waste into fertilizer, simultaneously eliminating the sanitation risk and providing a benefit for urban gardens. After successful test runs in Kenya and India, the bags will be mass produced this summer and sold for U.S. 2–3 cents each, making them more accessible to those who will benefit from them the most.
In post-earthquake Haiti, where many poor and homeless residents are forced to live in garbage heaps and to relieve themselves wherever they can find privacy, SOIL/SOL, a non-profit working to improve soil and convert waste into a resource, is partnering with Oxfam GB to build indoor dry toilets for 25 families as well as four public dry toilets. The project will establish a waste composting site to convert dry waste into fertilizer and nutrient-rich soil that can then be used to grow vegetables in rooftop gardens and backyards.
In Malawi, Stacia and Kristof Nordin’s permaculture project (which Nourishing the Planet co-director Danielle Nierenberg visited during her tour of Africa) uses a composting toilet to fertilize the crops. Although these units can be expensive to purchase and install, one company, Rigel Technology, manufactures a toilet that costs just US$30 and separates solid from fluid waste, converting it into fertilizer. The Indian non-profit Sulabh International also promotes community units that convert methane from waste into biogas for cooking.
On a larger scale, wetlands outside of Calcutta, India, process some 600 million liters of raw sewage delivered from the city every day in 300 fish-producing ponds. These wetlands produce 13,000 tons of fish annually for consumption by the city’s 12 million inhabitants. They also serve as an environmentally sound waste treatment center, with hyacinths, algal blooms, and fish disposing of the waste, while also providing a home for migrating birds and an important source of local food for the population of Calcutta. (See also “Fish Production Reaches a Record.”)
Aside from cost and installation, the main obstacles to using human waste to fertilize crops are cultural and behavioral. UNICEF notes in an online case study that a government-run program in India provided 33 families in the village of Bahtarai with latrines near their houses. But the majority of villagers still preferred to use the fields as toilets, as they were accustomed to doing their whole lives. “It is not enough just to construct the toilets,” said Gaurav Dwivedi, Collector and Bilaspur District Magistrate. “We have to change the thinking of people so that they are amenable to using the toilets.”
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"Liberty is to the collective body what health is to every individual body.
Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness
can be enjoyed by society."
Henry St. John
1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678 - 1751)
English politician and philosopher
There is a debate (perhaps it is a discussion) going right now with Dr. Paul Krugman at one pole of the opinion about China and her government's monetary policies, the objectives of which are often said to be "obvious," but are not really necessarily clear.
The "discussion" includes the following recent publications by Dr. Krugman in the New York Times:
I was hooked on the discussion quickly, but felt like the commenters on the Krugman blog and Krugman himself were ignoring some important historical anthropological political economy. Namely, that China, with all its animus against the 19th century West, against anti-communism in the 20th century, against Japan since the rape of Nanking, against India because of India's claims of territory, but more because of India's population and aggressive modernization, against Russia for untold ideological and nuclear weapons reasons, and against U.S.arrogance in foreign and monetary policy, ... that China is a developing nation with a window of opportunity that leaders dare not miss.
The 1904 Mackinder Thesis is not entirely irrelevant here. Although China historically within itself has practiced a version of a "heartland" strategy of east Asian imperial hegemony—the Middle Kingdom and the Five Peoples—the point goes deeper than the movement of national borders. It goes to the almost imponderable significance of population numbers and poverty. In a nutshell, the history of the Han in China has been (except for one maritime foray to the east coast of Africa) the history of an inward focused people, content (if not perforce compelled) to focus on what is certainly the world's largest population with all that implies and connotes.
While there are many people out there who csn claim to have had an extramarital affair, 99% of them have not come under the scutiny of the main stream media and rightly so. Who cares? Except those who have been "wronged" In the case of those running for elected office the stakes are a bit higher and attention is paid, which is all well and good, except that this country treats these indiscretions as though some top secret had been breached. Most other countries look at us and sadly shake their heads when they see the amount of attention paid nd time waasted on this silliness.
I do no feel sorry for Riele Hunter. Nor do I feel sorry for John Edwards. The jury is still out on Elizabeth Edwards as there is somne sort of bizarre behavior going on there when one knows they have terminal cancer and still urges their spouse to run for the White House. All are adults. All knew what they were getting into. All had alot to lose.
Well John did not make it to the White house but he would not have been the first President to have had an illegitimate child. Warrern Harding had a child by his Mistress Nan Britton. Grover Cleveland did as well. Cleveland turned what was supposed to be a negative into a victory. This is not to say that John Edwards would have ,ade it to the White ouse, but it seems to me that the general public, even in what were considered Victorian times had a much more adult view of these things.
No, the only losers in all of this, unfortunately, are the children. They are poorly served by the adults around them, and I hope that the adults will smarten up and shut up.
And Dan Riehl's wife has done what for me?
This is not a question of the wives of any elected official or for tht matter anyone, no matter what their age, being severely hurt in an auto accident. This man should be in the same position and have someone suggest that HIS wife be euthanised. Unfortunately these people walk amongst us!
Ever since Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, the conservative movement has been having seismic convulsions over it. The bile, rage and disgusting behavior have exponentially increased and is still ongoing as the media captures it for the nation to see.
Dan Riehl's latest post about Harry's Reid's family tragedy is yet another example of that lunacy, but just another version of the same song. This one is particularly nauseating.
"You have to keep the young adventurer inside your heart alive long enough for it to someday re-emerge. It may take some coaxing and some courage, but that person is in you always -- never growing old."
Doris "Granny D" Haddock(1910-2010)
American politician and liberal political activist from the state of New Hampshire
In this article from the Saturday New York Times we learn that the current head of the Roman Catholic Church is a micro-manager, "the" chief ideologue of the Church, and yet somehow oblivious to the pedophilia taking place in the parishes of the German branch of his church, oblivious now and oblivious when it was happening under his more local nose.
We also learn that Pope Benedict XVI believes in a process he calls the "re-christianization" of Europe (and the civilizations Europeans have spawned across the face of the globe). Sitting here on the outside of his religion one wonders what exactly his point might be. Could this Ratzinger brother really believe that human beings prefer a pastoral dictator whose own moral authority is increasingly negligible?
"The spirit of liberty is not merely, as multitudes imagine,
a jealousy of our own particular rights,
but a respect for the rights of others,
and an unwillingness that any man, whether high or low,
should be wronged and trampled under foot."
William Ellery Channing (1780-1842)
The foremost Unitarian preacher in the United States in the early nineteenth century and, along with Andrews Norton, one of Unitarianism's leading theologians.
HOWARD ZINN EXPANDED OUR VIEW OF HISTORY
by Randolph T. Holhut
American Reporter Correspondent
Dummerston, Vt.
DUMMERSTON, Vt. --
"Who controls the past controls the future," George Orwell once wrote. "Who controls the present controls the past."
History, contrary to what most believe, is not static. It is constantly changing as new heroes are discovered, old heroes are debunked and past events are reinterpreted and reevaluated. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places-and there are so many-where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory." - Howard Zinn
That Orwell quote was a favorite of radical historian Howard Zinn, who died of a heart attack on Jan. 27 at the age of 87. "(It) is a very important observation that if you can control history, what people know about history, if you can decide what's in people's history and what's left out, you can order their thinking," Zinn said in a 1992 radio interview. "You can order their values. You can in effect organize their brains by controlling their knowledge. The people who can do that, who can control the past, are the people who control the present...who would dominate the media, who publish the textbooks, who decide in our culture what are the dominant ideas, what gets told and what doesn't."
I have long ranted on about how Israel seems to operate with impugnity, riding rough shod over the Palestinians, and yet, when something happens it is the Palestinians that bear the heat and take the blame. The most recent move by the Israelis, to build more housing in occupied Palestinian territory has created protest and yet they will undoubtedly continue with no consequences for their illegal behavior. This editorial from the Charleston W.VA. GAZETTE tells about this new proposed settlement. Our Secretary of State weighs in on this as well.
Again we are acting surprised that there are those who reside here who would do this country and their fellow citizens harm. Why is this such a surprise? We have had shootings galore, we have a tremendous number of disillusioned people running about, and until we solve some of the inequities in our society the problem is only bound to get worse. Here we take a look at "Jihad Jane".
I am glad this morning to hear that Landra Reid, wife of House Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is in good condition following her horrific car crash yesterday.
"Ask the first man you meet what he means by defending freedom,
and he'll tell you privately he means defending the standard of living."
Reverend Martin Niemoeller(1892-1984)
German Lutheran pastor, was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau in 1938. He was freed by the allied forces in 1945.
I sincerely hope that someday this idiot needs an attorney for something. The problem is that he will be able to get the best that money can buy...but he will have representation.
The question is do we honor what our justice system preaches, that each and every one of us, no matter the crime, deserves to be represented in court or do we simply say oh that's only if xyz applies?
Finally someone has spoken out about the ridiculousness of Glenn Beck. This time he has really taken that giant step beyond rationality...or is it, as Jim Wallis suggests just so much blather aimed unfortuinately at the lowest common denominator as a way make money? It seems the more outrageous some of these characters are the more money they generate. Limbaugh is a prime example athough he has yet to reach the depths of Beck's idiocy...I think.
So turn off FOX Noise and do nus all a favor by helping to remove Beck from the airways. No audience, no market, no money. Then maybe someone will have him committed or at least get him on some medication.
Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumour of oppression and deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,
Might never reach me more.
Bush had Carl Rove and Dick Cheney, Barack Obama has Rahm Emmanuel who has managed to create hate and discontent within the Obama administratioon. While my colleague has some very strong opinions about Emmanuel's place and influence in this administration I have reserved judgement.
Is he at the heart of the failings of Obama's first year in office or rather has the President not paid enough heed to that advice? Is he really the master of the dark arts?
Paul Harris, the UK OBSERVER'S New York correspondent has this piece. There always has to be a fall guy.
It’s hard to believe, but an estimated 2.6 billion people in the developing world—nearly a third of the global population—still lack access to basic sanitation services. This presents a significant hygiene risk, especially in densely populated urban areas and slums where contaminated drinking water can spread disease rapidly. Every year, some 1.5 million children die from diarrhea caused by poor sanitation and hygiene.
