Too Much Turkey

Dear Readers,

For readers in the United States, you know why I am too full, still, to even think of something to write.  For readers not in the United States, you just have to imagine what it is like to celebrate your own national holiday with feasting and joy.

I will return next week.

Malala and Texas

Last year, when then 15 year old Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head for advocating education for girls in the Taliban controlled Swat region of Pakistan, most people in the world who heard about it were outraged.  How could anyone choose to shoot a girl in the head for wanting other girls to be able to read books!  How could anyone just take aim at, basically, a child’s head, and then pull the trigger.  Fortunately, Malala survived and has become a nearly world-wide celebrity, receiving awards for her bravery in continuing her advocacy for the education of girls, even after such a horrendous experience.  I’m not an expert on the Muslim religion by any means, but I have a personal friend who is a Muslim and a medical doctor.  She is married to a medical doctor, and they have two children, a boy and a girl, and the girl is educated as well as the boy.  Obviously the Taliban is the radical right wing fringe of the religion. 

Probably many of us in this country felt rather smug because something like what happened to Malala could never happen in our country.  We are too politically sophisticated to even think of such a thing.  Right?  Wrong! 

In the United States at this time there is a concerted effort by the Republicans in both the federal and state legislatures controlled by Republicans to deny women the right to basic health care, all under the guise of preventing abortions.  As I type this, the state of Texas has closed women’s health clinics all over the state except for just three.  These clinics, and those in other states, don’t just provide abortions; they also provide, but not limited to, mammograms to detect breast cancer; they provide for cervical and other cancer screenings; they provide sex education and birth control information; diabetes detection and education.   

What these Republicans are doing in these states is basically taking aim at poor women and girls and taking away any hope they have of receiving the basic health care I have delineated above.  If anyone of these women or girls develops any one of the above diseases, does not receive health care in a timely manner, it is just the same as aiming a gun at their heads and pulling the trigger. 

The only difference between what the radical religious right is doing in this country, and what the would-be killer of Malala is, that man had the courage to at least come close enough to her to kill her.  What is happening in this country is that the men who are passing these laws from religious conviction are at a distance from the women and girls they will be killing.  The basic premise, however, is the same with both radical religious Muslim men and radical religious right Christians.  Women and girls do not have the same rights as men, in this country as well as in Pakistan.   

Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.  A radical feminist is the notion that women (and the decent men who support them) need to do something about this – now.

 

 

 

 

Thoughts on the Affordable Care Act

The Affordable Health Care Act (ACA) is the law of the land, and has been declared constitutional by the Supreme Court.  It will keep children on their parent’s health insurance until they are 26, and that is a good thing.  It prevents health insurance companies from denying someone a policy for a pre-existing condition.  It prevents said companies from putting a cap on the amount the company will pay you for your health care.  It prevents said companies from cancelling your policy the minute you get sick, or have an accident.  It prevents said companies from using any more than 20% of their profits for big bonuses for their CEO’s.  It prevents companies from selling junk policies that don’t really cover anything.  It allows the individual to shop, either on line, by phone, or in person, for the best coverage the individual can get for the price.   

So far this advantage to the individual has been called slavery, akin to Hurricane Katrina, or been told it is taking away our freedoms, and turning us into a socialist state.  I’m not sure about you, but if I have to listen to one more TV pundit talk about this ACA roll out, I will stop watching TV all together, which, of course, includes all of the commercials.  But then we don’t watch commercials anyway since we Tivo almost everything we watch so we can fast forward through those.   

Since the states that agreed to implement the ACA themselves are doing OK, and people are pretty satisfied with what they find, I wish the media would just simply start presenting news instead of pontificating ad nauseum on something that can be fixed. 

As one of our daughters told me a Buddhist saying is, “If it can be fixed, why worry?  If it can’t be fixed, why worry?”  This is something that can be fixed, so stop worrying it.  It reminds me a lot like a bored, old dog who starts licking a spot, irritates it, then keeps on licking because there is something there.  We had an old dog that did that.  Every time he went outside the deer flies started in on it as well, so my husband sprayed it with OFF to keep the flies away.  After a week or so we realized he had stopped licking that spot, and it eventually healed up. 

My advice to the pundits is, use OFF, and get on to something else that has some value.

 

Plagerize, Plagerize, Plagerize

What to write about today?  I’m sick of hearing about the Obamacare rollout mess.  So it was not done correctly.  So millions of people are frustrated that it is taking more time than they wanted.  They should have been around when the only means of communication we had were party lines for the telephones, mail, telegrams, or walking or driving to the person you wanted to communicate with.   

As for telephones, that didn’t mean we all partied on them.  It meant that up to 20 people would share one line, and when the phone rang everyone in hearing would listen for the ring tones, which in those days were a combination of long and short rings.  When your ascribed combination, two longs and a short in our case, rang, it was answered by someone in your house.  The sound coming through depended on how many people were listening in.  The more listening in, the softer the sound.  

Mail was the usual method of communication.  That was pretty reliable in the old days before Congress started messing around with requiring the Postal Service to fund retirement benefits for 75 years out.  We are supposed to run government like a business?  What business would fund its employee retirement benefits 75 years into the future.  This is a mechanism to bankrupt the Postal Service to privatize it with Fed Ex and UPS. 

No one wanted to get a telegram, since it was considered to be bad news.  And to drive to a business a long way away was not always convenient.   

 But I digress. 

I couldn’t think of what to write, so I asked one of my daughters to give me a hint, and she said Rand Paul and his plagiarism problem.  Well that seemed like a good idea, so I finished up what else I was doing, which was not much.  At that point I realized a melody from days past was flitting about in my head.  After I identified the melody, I had to find the song book it was in because that melody and the lyrics to it were perfect.  The name of the song is “Lobachevsky”, by Tom Lehrer.  It is in a song book entitled, “Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer with not enough drawings by Ronald Searle”, published by Pantheon Books in April, 1981.  “The author states that although Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (1793-1856) was a genuine, and indeed eminent, mathematician, the peccadillos attributed to him herein are not substantiated by history.”  As you read the lyrics, in your mind please substitute the word ‘politician’ for ‘mathematician’.              

  Who made me the genius I am today,

        The mathematician that others all quote,

        Who’s the professor that made me that way?

        The greatest that ever got chalk on his coat.

 

               One man deserves the credit,

               One man deserves the blame,

               And Nicolai Ivanovich Lobashevsky is his name.

               Hi!

               Nicolai Ivanovich Lobach… 

I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky.  In one word he told me secret of success in Mathematics:  Plagiarize! 

        Plagiarize,

        Let no one’s work evade your eyes,

        Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,

        So don’t shade your eyes,

        But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize …

        Only be sure always to call it please ‘research’. 

The final refrain:

                              And who deserves the credit?

               And who deserves the blame?

               Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name.

               Hi! 

The song goes on for some time and is truly one of my very favorites.  It accurately depicts the person who commits a wrong, then blames it on someone else with lots of words smearing reality.

Whenever I think of Rand Paul from here on out, I won’t think ‘thief’, for that is what a plagiarist is, a person who steals someone else’s work to aggrandize his or her own, but I will sing, “… plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize ...”, and will have nothing but contempt for Rand Paul.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Memories, Social Security and Socialism

Memories, Social Security and Socialism

As I have said on more than one occasion, I have a memory that reaches far, far back.  In fact, I can remember falling into the fireplace after tripping over my father’s foot because I was off balance after having gone to the doctor to have my hands bandaged from reaching out to the gas-fire box on the bottom of someone’s hot water heater and burning the palms of my hands pretty badly, and my mother having hysterics over the whole thing.  I was only 11 months old.  Yeah, that did happen.

But I also remember the family arguments in the 1930’s about how this new proposal by FDR (that rabid socialist) called Social Security to provide a safety net for “old” people who could no longer work, and had no family to help them out was going to destroy the soul of the people, make them dependent on government, blah, blah, blah.  I remember because parts of the argument were that this program would destroy the rest of the economy, the government would collapse, and we would all become Communists.  This was pretty scary for a little kid, so when none of this happened, needless to say I was quite relieved, but I also began to question some of my family’s more adamant pronouncements.

As an adult when Medicare was passed, I heard the same statements that this program was going to destroy the soul of the country, make people dependent on government, blah, blah, blah.  This time I was not particularly frightened, since as far as I knew after Social Security passed, the economy had not been destroyed, the government had not collapsed and we were not all Communists.  In fact, in the 1960’s, we were the greatest nation in the world. 

Needless to say, my past experiences have made me particularly skeptical about some of the more radical and extreme statements coming from the radical right about now being a nation of “takers and makers”.  I will admit that changing the language from all becoming Communists has been fairly refreshing.  Because I have this history, however, when I listen to even the pundits on MSNBC, I get fairly frantic because they seldom mention relevant facts regarding Medicare and Social Security in response to the radical rights’ assertion that these two “entitlement” programs are destroying the economy, are going to cause the government to collapse, and we will all become Socialists.  To be upfront, I receive both Social Security and Medicare.  In my opinion, these are not “entitlement” programs from the government, because I paid into them with my taxes, and I believe that if there is any entitlement connected to them, I am entitled to get my taxes back! 

Regarding Medicare, there was a tremendous amount of fraud connected with the program, but it was more from the provider side rather than the recipients defrauding the government.  Consequently, the Obama administration has cut some $650 B dollars in fraud out of Medicare, which has helped tremendously to cut our federal deficit in half in just the last 5 years.  With other changes in how it is operated, Medicare is now running quite smoothly.  And the government is running this program quite efficiently.

Social Security should not even be mentioned in the same breath as Medicare and the federal deficit because it has absolutely nothing to do with the deficit.  It has its own funding source provided by future recipients.  These funds go into the Social Security Trust Fund, which is overseen by a Board of Trustees.  The amount of the taxes going into the fund was 6.2% of income, but several years ago a cap on the top wage earners was placed at $113,700.00.  People earning over that amount were no longer required to pay into Social Security.  One of the reasons for this, and probably the most important in our present political climate, was that it amounted to taking hard earned money away from high wage earners to provide for those who earned less.  In other words, taking from the “makers” to help the “takers” out.  If this tax cap were eliminated, the problem with the Social Security Trust Fund being depleted would certainly be significantly helped out.

During the Reagan years I remember reading or hearing someone comment that in the middle class savings accounts was all of this money that the more affluent had no access to.  That needed to be changed.  For the past 30 years, the Radical Right has been trying to do just that.  And then toss in the Radical Religious Right stating categorically that this is what God wants so that people do not rely on government but rather on God, and you have an evil brew in the making. 

And why, pray tell, is it OK for the wealthy to take wealth from the middle and poor classes, but if we down here toward the bottom want some of it back, it is SOCIALISM!!!!