We Are Being Fleeced

How do you get a retired person dependent on social security to vote for a candidate who wants to do away with it?
How is it possible that an otherwise intelligent person can get so worked up and confused  by a well funded campaign of lies and misinformation as to stand up in front of national media and say "Keep government out of my medicare"?
How do you get rationale middle class conservative America to seriously consider doing away with the minimum wage, public schools, fire departments, police, and government oversight?
I don't know. All I know is the movement is well funded and supported by renegade media such as Fox "News" and not seriously challenged by 'mainstream' media. Who is behind this? A major clue may be found in asking  who is to benefit by it. Corporate big money interests - not the people supporting it.
I also know that if this continues many of these same people will wake up one morning and realize they no longer have social security, medicare or schools for their grand children to go to. Millions will not be able to obtain even the bare minimum of a living wage and will not have the tools available to them or their children to ever do so. Their food water air and land will have no protection or oversight. What will follow will be suffering , disenfranchisement and eventually civil unrest on a massive scale.

It's a Beautiful, Amazing Universe

                                             Aurora Borealis from space

 

Aurora Borealis from the ground

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Chris Dudely - Attacking the Minimum Wage

Can you imagine going after the minimum wage as a political candidate with a straight face? Especially if you yourself are wealthy? Chris Dudley can. Oregon enjoys one of the highest minimum wages in the country. But even at that, full time comes to ~ $17,000/year or $5000 less than the poverty line for a family of four. Where exactly will the corporate greed and the contempt for those less fortunate end? In the last 20 years Chris Dudley has gone from 16 years of being highly paid in the NBA, to Vice President of M Financial Wealth Management to partnering with Filigree Advisors in managing wealth. Mr. Dudley manages ultra-wealth - his and others - minimum wage earners unlikely to be his clients or apparently, even worth his compassion.

Pamela Geller - Hate, Fear, Money

Pamela Geller and her Atlas Shrugs blog.
Hate, fear, bigotry and  money.
I wonder if she ever feels like all she's done is given in to temptation.
Built into each of us is a paranoia,
an evolutionary strategy selected for survival.
Fear of the unknown, the different, the 'strange'.
Allowing our cerebral cortex to temper and contain these instincts -
to control them with humaneness and tolerance
is part of what makes us human.

It's not clever to exploit the instinct - she's just a thug.

A Small World is a Beautiful World

Published: Saturday, October 16, 2010, 10:00 AM

Letters to the editor  

Charlie Phillips

 

Whenever I could I watched the rescue of the Chilean miners live throughout the day. I was struck that no matter how long I watched I could not help but get tears in my eyes whenever a man stepped out of his rescue capsule. Amazing. Beautiful. The best of us all, the power of us all, the grace, the hope and humaneness of us all.
As I thought about it later I  realized that I had watched it all on the internet, never once turning on the TV. It was a video feed, no announcer - I felt like I was there watching and hoping and feeling the joy of those there and of the billions watching with whom I was sharing this with worldwide.
We now have the means to experience each other as fellow humans on this planet on a daily, intimate level in a way devoid of outside interpretation, bias, hate, nationalism. On the day of the rescue humanity in the billions, from all corners of the planet, experienced each other simply as humans - and it was good.

We're All Bozos On This Bus

I wrote this for my medicine colleagues - I think  it applies to so much in life

We need to balance our need for overwhelming clinical evidence with the need to proceed as best we can in all that we do in the ICU - or we'd do precious little indeed
But we also must resist the urge to apply 'common sense' dogmatically - which as Einstein has told us is just really our lifetime cumulative bias
We must also resist the urge to always "know" what to do
Please see attached link
 
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20502866

I'm struck that even nutritional strategies can potentially cause harm
But I'm even more struck by the sheer volume of conflicting data
And ultimately at how little we really know

Some People

I can't tell if some people are intelligent or not because they're such dumb-asses.