Putting a name to a story

I work in an area of the city where there are a lot of homeless people, and a lot of people living on the edges.  Over the past few months, I have slowly become acquainted with one of them.

She is older than me, a while ago she mentioned that she is 74.  I see her outside the building where I work most days.  She is standing there with a paper cup soliciting spare change from the people waiting for the bus.  I try to always have a dollar to give her when I see her.

Unlike many of the people I see begging in the neighborhood, I never see her smoking or drinking, and she never appears intoxicated.  She is never carrying a load of possessions, so I suspect that she probably at least has a roof over her head.  There are an abundance of residential hotels in the neighborhood, so perhaps whatever social security she receives covers all or part of that.

When I arrived at my building last Thursday, she was already there.  It was before 7 o'clock in the morning.  I don't recall her ever being there so early before. When I saw her I stopped a moment, and got out my wallet, pulled out a dollar bill.  Then I walked up to her and handed her the dollar as I prepared to enter my building.

Reaching inside of her coat, she pulled out an envelope and handed it to me.  She wished me Merry Christmas and I think I thanked her, I don't remember exactly what I said.  I put the envelope into an inside pocket of my overcoat.

When I got to my desk, I pulled out the envelope.  It was a little crumpled, closed with a piece of tape.  Inside was a Christmas card.  The only thing she had written inside was to sign her name.  It was Barbara.

Maybe her name is not Barbara, and she found the card already signed.  I don't know.  But I am am pretty sure that it was me she was waiting for to give the card to,

What kind of a world have we made, where just giving someone a dollar three or four times a week is so important to them?  And what sort of a monster really believes that we should be solving our financial woes by cutting social security, and throwing more people out onto the street?

The Devil's greatest trick

My dear brothers, never forget, when you hear the progress of enlightenment vaunted, that the devil's best trick is to persuade you that he doesn't exist.

This was from a short story by the French poet Charles Baudelaire. And it was never more true than today, although not quite the way he meant it in that story.

In 1985, Rupert Murdoch became a US Citizen. He was not an immigrant in the traditional sense, coming to the United States to forge a new life for himself. There was no loyalty or patriotism involved.  This was a business decision, as US law dictated that only citizens could own television stations.

Back in 1996, Rupert Murdoch offered cable operators $11 per subscriber, to place his soon to be launched Fox News Network onto basic cable. He understood that getting his station on basic cable gave him a wider audience. Over the course of time he has also entered into contracts with hotels, trucks stops, etc, paying to have Fox News on the TV's playing behind the counter, in lobbies, wherever there was a captive audience.

So it should come as no surprise when the emails revealed that news reporters have been directed to slant the news, regardless of the facts. It does put a lie to his 'fair and balanced' slogan, and shows that the network is what many have been saying for years. It is not a news network, but a propaganda machine. Opinion, or in the case of climate change, outright lies, have become a substitute for information and news.

So the devil is revealed  for what he really is.  Fox News exists for the sole purpose of molding America into Rupert Murdoch's idea of what America should be. And no, it is not conservatism he espouses. It is feudalism.

How many times should you pay for the same thing?

Access to the Internet is not free.  Yeah, you can go to an Internet cafe or Peet's Coffee and get free WiFi, but that does not mean it is free.  That just means somebody else is paying for it.  So this is the part I never hear people talking about when they argue for Net Neutrality.

Look at the latest uproar with Comcast extorting money from Level 3 to continue carrying the Netflix streaming videos.  What does not get mentioned?  Comcast customers are already paying Comcast, to get those streaming videos!

So, do you want to pay your Internet service provider to decide what content they will deliver?  Or do you expect that having paid them, they will deliver that content to you, at the speed that you have contracted for?

So do something about it.  You could start here by telling the FCC that you believe in Net Neutrality.

Blood on who's hands?

I keep hearing that Wikileaks has 'blood on their hands'.  So let me get this straight. 

Dick Cheney outs one of our CIA agents, essentially passing a death sentence on any of the contacts she had been working with. Bush and company lie us into a war that costs Irag the lives of about a hundred thousand civilians, as well as costing the US the lives of a couple thousand soldiers, strengthens our biggest rival in the region (Iran), drives thousands of Muslims into the hands of the jihadist radicals, oh and bankrupts our country in the process, and it is Wikileaks that has blood on it's hands?

Access to information is what allows us to to see past the propaganda.  That is the job of news organizations around the world.  If a news organization is not pissing off governments and politicians, then it has become a just another propaganda machine itself.

Wikileaks is a news organization.  They did what they are supposed to do, which is publish the truth.  And the only people that are bothered by the truth being published, are those who count on lies to convince people to follow them.

Yes, there are death panels

Do you have health insurance?  Have you been taught to fear a government option because of the 'death panels' that would condemn grandma to a horrible death because it was cost effective?  Well surprise, there is a group of doctors, paid for by your insurance premium, who's sole purpose in life is to find a way to deny you care when you need it most.

Read for example the testimony before congress of Linda Peeno, in May of 1996, or that of Wendall Potter in June 2009.  Thirteen years apart they were describing the same thing.  The goal of for-profit health insurance companies is to make money, regardless of who dies in the process.

In many states, the Blue Cross companies have gone from non-profits to for-profit companies.  Think their care has gotten better?  Why do you think health care companies are such a great investment?  Yes the cost of health care has gone up, but what has gone up are the profit margins of the health insurance companies, not the amount of money being made by doctors.

There are a lot of doctors, especially primary care physicians, who years after graduating from medical school are still trying to pay off the student loans they used to become doctors.  No, I am not trying to say doctors are poor, most make more than I do, but when you go to school for as many years as they, work as hard as they do to become doctors, I do not begrudge them making a substantial living.

The raising cost of your insurance is not going to the cost of treating you, it goes into the pocket of the health insurance companies.  And denying you coverage when you are most in need of it, is the dirty little secret of the industry.

The concept of 'death panels' in a public option was based on this:  A public insurance option would negotiate with providers and drug companies to obtain the best possible prices for products and services.  The only leverage the public insurance would have to obtain a better price would be the refusal to buy certain products and services.   Therefore, they would be restricting what they covered to only those products and services that would give the agency a good deal.  In other words, a death panel is doing exactly what the insurance company that you already have is doing, using its buying power to extract concessions from vendors.

But the real death panels, attempting to find excuses to drop you from your insurance if you become sick, or to deny treatments that are in fact covered by your policy, by claiming they are not 'medically necessary', well those don't count.

What did you think it was for?

You are constantly hearing the right talking about limiting government, as though everything would be fine if only the government would just stop getting in the way of business.  So let's just look at some of those crippling regulations that business and the right fought so bitterly against.

As you walk through the supermarket, throwing  items into the shopping cart, your are checking the labels.  Your child is allergic to nuts, and you know that selecting the wrong product could be the difference between life and death.  Did you think that listing the ingredients on the labels was something the manufacturers did out of the goodness of their hearts?  They do that because the law requires it. The Fair Packaging and Labeling Act of 1966 established labeling standards that were bitterly fought by industry.

Do you work an 8 hour day?  Do you expect to be paid overtime when you work more than 8 hours a day?  Although 8 hour work days had been won in pockets throughout the country over the years, through strikes dating back to 1835, it was not until the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was enacted that the federal government got into the business of enforcing standards and working conditions.  That established a 44 hour work week for a considerable portion of the nation, a minimum wage, time and a half for overtime, and outlawed "oppressive child labor".

When you have a cold, a fever, an ache, you can reach into your medicine cabinet and find a number of non-prescription drugs to treat the symptoms.  And you can do so knowing that none of those medicines contain poison or heroin or cocaine.  That all began with the Biologic's Control Act (1902) and The Pure Food and Drug Act (1906),  These two pieces of legislation were the foundation upon which the Food and Drug Administration was eventually built.  It is because of the FDA that pharmaceutical companies actually have to prove that a new drug works, that it does not do more harm than good, and that they have to tell you when the potential side effect are.

It is cheaper to sell contaminated food and medicinal products than it is to maintain a safe and clean facility, and to monitor for contaminants.  It is cheaper to dump your toxic waste where it will contaminate the drinking water of the surrounding community, than it is to properly dispose of it.  And if a small group of manufacturers do that, then others must do the same to compete.

Who's job did you think it was to enforce that the bottle that says 'Asprin' on it contains aspirin?  Would you rather go back to the days when you might work in a factory where the air was filled with asbestos?  If you get sick, and cannot work for a week, do you still want a job when you get back?  Did you think the only purpose of the government was to invade relatively weak countries so that US companies could do things there that would be illegal here?

The purpose of our government is to protect us from those more powerful, those we cannot fight on our own.  That includes, of course, foreign governments, that's why we have a military, but also from companies that would control our lives the way mining companies that ran 'company towns' in the 1800's did.

What 'Aqua Buddha' really tells you about Rand Paul

When GeorgeW was running for the presidency, he had a stock answer for questions about his history of moronic behaviors.  They were youthful indiscretions, and they were in the past, and he would not go into that.

Yeah, that is sort of a copout.  Without acknowledging anything in particular, he admitted that when he was young and stupid he did the sort of things that young and stupid people often do.  But at least he responded to the question, where the answer actually had something to do with the question.  He did not pretend to be someone else. 

Rand Paul, however, did not take this path.  Rather than defuse the issue he became irate.  He wouldn't admit to doing anything that might be in character with the imbecilic stoner that the story seems to describe.  Here is why that is a problem for me.

Paul has an image of himself.  Fine, we all have that.  But, if something, say facts, contradict that image, even in his distant past, rather than face those facts he becomes belligerent.  It says that what he believes is much more important than what is true.

Every day in life, we face things that were not part of our plan.  There are several ways we can handle this.  Let's take a simplistic example.  We have saved our money to buy a specific car, enough to pay cash for it.  We go to the dealer, and find out that the price has gone up, and we no longer have enough.  What can we do?
We can change what we are doing, to try to adapt to the new circumstances.  Get a car that we actually can afford. We can try and change the environment itself.  Go back and save some more money, come back when we have enough.  Or we can take the approach that Rand Paul is trying to take.  You keep trying to put the money into the salesman's hand, and snatch away the keys.  Eventually you try assaulting the salesman and they call the police and you are taken away.  Because you not having enough money is just not in your view of things,so you cannot accept it.

It is not that he did stupid shit when he was a college student that is important in all this.  It is that pointing out something that does not jive with his view of himself and how he relates to the world causes such an inappropriate reaction.  And it reveals how he will react when other facts do not agree with his prejudices.  He is not interested in the truth, or what is right, he is interested in what he believes.

Unfortunately, that is a common trait of many tea bagger types.  And that is why they are not fit to hold public office.