Archive for the ‘society’ Category

The truth about economic austerity

Thursday, April 19th, 2012

I get really steamed when I hear Herr Harper and his cronies spouting the neo-con line about deficit reduction and making government more efficient. If he really wanted to reduce the deficit, he’d kill the F-35 purchase and start slashing MP’s gold-plated pensions. This article from the Daily Kos tells it like it is.

When right wing politicians talk about deficits you can be certain that they’re waging class warfare. When right wing politicians pursue economic austerity you can be certain that they’rewaging class warfare. If right wing politicians truly cared about fiscal responsibility, they would raise taxes on those who can most afford to pay more taxes and they would end corporate handouts, whether they be direct subsidies or the indirect enabling that is having the public foot the bill for environmental and other public harms incurred as part of corporate profit making. If politicians cared about balanced books they would do what’s best to grow the economy and rectify social and economic imbalances. Prosperity does not trickle down. If given the chance, it can blossom up.In the United States, the only honest fiscal solution is to end the Bush tax cuts, end foreign military adventurism, stop pretending that it’s necessary to spend more on military and ostensible national security hardware than the rest of the world combined, and end all forms of corporate subsidies. If a corporation cannot survive on its own it deserves to die. If a corporation’s survival serves some vital social or security need and it cannot survive on its own, then it should be socialized rather than publicly subsidized. After all, public subsidies to privately held corporations already are a form of socialism, it’s just that much of the money goes into private pockets rather than serving the public good.

On Costs and Cancer in America

Wednesday, April 18th, 2012

BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin has used Storify to collect some truly heartbreaking and terrifying stories of people whose lives have been destroyed by cancer and the costs of paying for treatment under America’s barbaric healthcare system. Read it and weep for a country that can’t take care of its own citizens while it spends trillions on weapons systems that don’t work.

Sacking the City of God

Sunday, April 15th, 2012

The Global Atheist Conference is this weekend in Melbourne, Australia. The guest speaker, PZ Myers, posted the text of his address, titled Sacking the City of God. Since it’s Sunday (and Greek Orthodox Easter at that), I couldn’t resist posting about it here.

If a scientist saw a cataclysm coming, say a meteor on collision course for earth in 2050, we wouldn’t be saying, “Hallelujah, physics is true, bring it on! Our faith in mathematics is strengthened!” We’d be trying to stop it. Which makes the Christian reaction puzzling. If I actually believed Jesus was coming to end the world, I’d be preparing by stocking up on timber and nails. They were pretty effective last time.

Now wait, there might be some people saying (not anyone here, of course) that that’s no fair. Maybe you’re a liberal Christian, and I’m picking on the extremists (although, when we’re talking about roughly half the United States being evolution-denying, drill-baby-drill, apocalypse-loving christians, it’s more accurate to say I’m describing a representative sample). Perhaps you’re a moderate, you support good science, education, and the environment, you just love Jesus or Mohammed, too.

I’m sorry, but I don’t like you. I’ll concede that you are doing less direct harm, and I will thank you for your support of shared causes, and I’ll also happily work alongside you in those causes, but I also think you are still doing indirect harm to foundational principles of a rational society. You believe in some outrageous bullshit; the christian myths of a virgin giving birth to a god who dies are illogical lunacy, and the Christian doctrines of original sin and redemption through blood sacrifice by proxy are crippling psychopathological abominations. You promote unreason by telling people that it is OK to believe in some things without evidence, and even in contradiction to evidence and reason. You are cafeteria realists, and you undermine the essential goal of bringing the whole of humanity out of the darkness of ignorance and into the light of the real world.

I tell such people that the universe is clearly lacking in gods and supernatural forces, so grow up and set all that nonsense aside. Join us and become a good atheist — you’ll be much happier and will waste less time in pointless just-pretend foolishness.

So, what does it mean to be a good atheist in the 21st century? How do you live as a good atheist? What should our values be?

We’re a diverse group, and we never agree on everything, so I’ll give you just a few: truth, autonomy, community.

Are Dollar Stores Really a Bargain?

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012

We all shop at them, even if we don’t admit it to our friends, the ubiquitous dollar store. They’re the tail end of the retail chain, the last stop before the landfill. But sometimes you can get a deal, as this article from Forbes points out.

Disposable Items
Paper plates, napkins, party decorations and greeting cards can be found at significant savings. Dollar stores have an abundance of these items in many themes and they are $1 or less. If you’re buying items for a child’s birthday party, graduation party or any other “get-together” where you need paper products, the dollar store is going to have your best value.

No vaccination – no health insurance

Saturday, March 24th, 2012

I’ve been reading Kim Letterman’s Nothing Special blog for a while. Most of the posts are about photography, but every once in a while he posts on other subjects, and today’s post is about the ignorant, foolish, dangerous idiots who refuse vaccinations.

WTF? EXEMPTIONS? OPT OUT? Now we have public health organizations run by idiots too? In the last decade, religious exemptions in Oregon are up from 2% to 5.6%. Soon, that alone will be the cause of the next major outbreak and children will start dying.

The human animal is obviously just that … an animal. All brawn and no brain. How sad for us that even problems we have already solved are being systematically destroyed by the USA’s shift from away from being a secular nation. And that when the vast majority of other nations are seemingly going in the opposite direction. The separation of church and state is supposed to guarantee that important policies and decisions are not subject to interference in this way.

Simple solution. No vaccination, no health insurance coverage for you. Of course, that might not work as well in the U.S., where a lot of people aren’t covered even by private plans. I’d almost be tempted to refuse medical treatment as well, but that’d run the risk of getting more people sick.

Maybe quarante them with the terrorist suspects in Guantanamo? Except it’s probably not big enough.

And while we’re at it, let’s deny health insurance to any politician who votes for a bill that mandates exemptions for vaccinations on religious or political grounds.

Long walk of a short pier

Friday, March 23rd, 2012

A Michigan resident who wasn’t paying attention to where she was going walked off the end of a pier into Lake Michigan. It’s a perfect example of why you shouldn’t text while driving, or even walking. I have been run into by inattentive texters several times in the last year or two, both in the hallways at work, in the PATH network, and on downtown sidewalks. It’s annoying and could be really dangerous both to the texter and the person hit.

Bonnie Miller ran into some technical difficulties on Monday. While she was returning a text, the Benton Harbor resident accidentally plunged into Lake Michigan. She had reportedly been walking along the South Pier with her husband and 15-year-old son around 9:30 pm Monday when she became distracted with returning a text and walked clear off the end of the pier. “I had set an appointment for the wrong time and so I sent about three words,” Miller described. “Next thing you know it was the water.”