The calls are going out, and have been for to long, under the guise of free speech, as they have throughout our history, and carried across the modern media outlets without shame nor guilt association.
March 24, 2010 archive
Mar 24 2010
The Redemptive Power of Healing
The stress of the past few weeks has reminded me of both the benefits and the drawbacks of being an adult. Perhaps you yourself can relate. Throughout the course of my daily existence, I expend a huge amount of energy attempting to navigate the world of interpersonal communication. Often I have to take account for the frailties, neuroses, personality defects, and defense mechanisms of those with whom I regularly encounter. It can at times be overwhelming and frustrating trying to not step on toes or to minimize conflict by means of damage control mode when I inadvertently do so. And as cobble together an apology and take stock of the situation, I find myself resenting the cruelty and sadism of humanity, which gives many people ample reason to build walls around themselves by means of protection. These attitudes only complicate crucial communication and trust and keep us separate from each other.
The anger of the Tea Party devotees upsets me, but what upsets me more is the degree of hostility and bitterness that has come to typify this entire process. I recognize that expecting otherwise is probably foolish, but I mourn when our nation’s fabric is rent asunder for any reason. Though this sentiment has long sense passed into platitude, we are all Americans, and moreover we are all human beings who share the same land. I do not enjoy, nor particularly thrive in an atmosphere where a ceaseless war of words rages. To be sure, I do not shirk away from these situations when they arise, but after a time the constant back and forth proves to be toxic and noxious, not just to me, but to everyone.
I didn’t have an especially happy childhood. Even when I was a child, I wished to be an adult. Adulthood to me represented a time where I would be taken seriously and where everyone else around me would be more or less on the same page. Now I find that this is true only up to a point. Among some I am taken seriously and among other I never will be. And as for my being on the same page with all, well, that’s a matter for debate. What I have discovered that with age often comes a rapidly growing history of psychological damage, increasingly guarded personal conduct, and all of these manifestations a form of the many lingering effects of internalized pain. Anger is really only a form of hurt, after all.
Then little children were brought to Jesus for him to place his hands on them and pray for them. But the disciples rebuked those who brought them. Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”
I understand why many people enjoy working with children. They are unguarded, honest, vulnerable, and often endearingly sweet. Their basic nature stands in great contrast to the games we play as adults. When I still lived in Birmingham I would periodically take my turn to watch the children while the adults worshiped. When I did, I often found solace in the company of little ones who were largely nonjudgmental and lived only in the present moment. This isn’t to say that children can’t be just as cruel and vicious to each other as adults can, but that in conversing with them, one has less minefields to gingerly walk through and less need to plan for exit strategies.
Forgive me this question, but, friends, why must it be this complicated? What if we didn’t have to read the latest New York Times bestseller just to understand how to properly interact with each other? What if it didn’t take hours of therapy and thousands of dollars just to be able to be honest with our own pain and ourselves, to say nothing of the pain of others? What if we could bear to leave the armor down long enough to separate friend from foe? While some find it fascinating to observe and note the ways in which we are twisted and wizened, noting the unique nature of our scars, I find the combined impact deeply unfortunate and tragic. People to me are not a scientific experiment gone awry, they are individuals seeking love. And by love I don’t necessarily mean romantic love, but agape—charitable, selfless, altruistic, and unconditional love for ourselves and for others. If we are ever going to begin the slow, but necessary process of healing, we must commit ourselves to it, all the time recognizing that the best offense isn’t necessarily a good defense.
Let us resolve to be honest with that which is broken in all of us. Throw open the doors wide. Don’t automatically reach for cynicism and skepticism in all situations, nor expect the worst for fear of not attaining the best. Don’t recoil and draw back at someone else’s immaturity or hurt directed in inappropriate ways towards inappropriate targets. Consider being like little children in all the best ways. Perhaps peace of mind isn’t so elusive after all. What do we have to lose?
Mar 24 2010
Matt Bai is a moran.
Have I mentioned that recently?
Trust, Underwater
By MATT BAI, The New York Times
Published: March 18, 2010
In 2004, newly married and having decided to embark on the next phase of adulthood, my wife and I bought a house. This was back in the delirious days of multiple offers and outlandish escalation clauses, when you had to bring your checkbook with you to an open house, just in case someone else tried to buy the place while you were poking around the attic. I called a mortgage broker somewhere in Florida, and she was thrilled to hear from me, practically breathless. I felt as if I were the 10,000th customer to come through line at the Safeway, my arrival heralded by streamers and sirens and all kinds of free stuff falling from the rafters. Did we want a five-year adjustable-rate loan or maybe even rates adjusted on a monthly basis? Why not just pay just the interest rather than the principal? Did we also need a bridge loan for a few months, to hold us over from one house to the next? How about a ”second trust” – that is, two mortgages instead of one – so we could put less money down, maybe even as little as 5 percent of the purchase price while avoiding the penalty of private mortgage insurance? We might as well open a home equity line of credit on top of the mortgage, she said, so we could borrow another six-figure sum with the tear of a perforated check. Countrywide, the nation’s largest lender, would happily give us that free, and, hey, you never knew when you might decide to add a skylight over the kitchen, or maybe a stone turret.
Duh.
Welcome to the real world you privileged little prick.
Mar 24 2010
Wednesday Morning Science Supplement
Wednesday Morning Science Supplement is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Science |
1 UN body rejects protection for shark species
by Marlowe Hood, AFP
Tue Mar 23, 2:19 pm ET
| DOHA (AFP) – The UN wildlife trade body slapped down a trio of proposals Tuesday to oversee cross-border commerce for sharks threatened with extinction through overfishing, sparking anger from conservationists.
The only marine species granted protection at a meeting of the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) was the temperate zone porbeagle, a shark fished for its meat. Earlier, bids to impose a global trade ban on Atlantic bluefin tuna and to require export monitoring for seven species of precious coral both fell well short of the required two-thirds majority. |
Mar 24 2010
Muse in the Morning
Mar 24 2010
State AGs sue over Federal Mandate
No one could have ever predicted…
Minutes after health-care legislation was signed into law by President Barack Obama yesterday, Virginia made good on its promise to sue the federal government over it, joining at least 13 other states that are legally challenging the health-system overhaul.
…
Virginia is challenging the constitutionality of the new law, primarily based on the argument that the “commerce clause” of the U.S. Constitution cannot be used by Congress to mandate that individuals purchase health insurance as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
“It has never been held that the ‘commerce clause,’ even when aided by the ‘necessary and proper clause,’ can be used to require citizens to buy goods and services,” Cuccinelli asserts in the seven-page complaint.The federal law is unconstitutional because “the individual mandate exceeds the enumerated powers conferred upon Congress,” the complaint states.
Congress has the power under the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution to regulate Interstate Commerce, that is, Commerce between and among the individual states. However, the AGs argue that Commerce Clause does not extend that Congressional authority to health insurance transactions that occur solely within a single state (intrastate), and so an Act authorizing a Federal mandate which forces individuals residing in those states to buy private health insurance within that state is unconstitutional.
If the Federal Mandate is ruled unconstitutional, the question then becomes whether the Mandate is severable from the rest of the Act. If the Mandate is found to be non-severable so that removal would change the fundamental nature of the Act itself, the President’s entire health care initiative could very well be struck down as unconstitutional.
Yet it’s not just Obamacare that is at issue in this case, the entire relationship of our Federal government to the states and citizenry is also at stake.
The complaint asserts that Virginia’s own recently enacted law — which prohibits residents from being required to purchase insurance or from being subject to fines for failure to do so — is valid over federal law. Idaho recently enacted a similar law, called the Idaho Healthcare Freedom Act, to prevent its residents from being compelled to purchase health insurance.
The ghost of Andrew Jackson just fell off his horse.
Mar 24 2010
America, Politics and the Law
During the George W. Bush administration, Republicans were working to achieve perpetual GOP dominance of our government. The Department of Justice was politicized and stocked with individuals, like Monica Goodling, willing to hire only those loyal to the GOP. Other government agency officials, like Lurita Doan, wondered how their agency could assist during elections to ensure continued dominance. But, eight years of scandals and lies by the Bush administration ended those dreams with electoral landslides in 2006 and 2008 by the Democratic Party.
The political party that ran on the slogan “Country First” has decided that they really don’t like our country, or its democracy, now that they are out of power. Republicans are blocking committee hearings from occurring in the Senate. Republican Rep. Gohmert (R-TX) is introducing a Constitutional amendment to eliminate public senatorial elections. The GOP is filibustering every piece of legislation, mandating that the Democratic party needs 60 votes to govern, then crying how it should be higher if 60 votes are garnered.
James Madison wrote in Federalist Paper 48, “They seem never to have recollected the danger from legislative usurpations, which, by assembling all power in the same hands, must lead to the same tyranny as is threatened by executive usurpations.”
Thomas Jefferson wrote in his “Notes on the state of Virginia”, “All the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judiciary, result to the legislative body. The concentrating these in the same hands, is precisely the definition of despotic government.”
Given the tactics used by the GOP in order to maintain their dominance of our government, but worse, their tactics once they hold no power, is there any doubt that their form of governing is the very definition of tyranny?
Mar 24 2010
The Morning After the Horse Left HCR, Repubs Badger Timmy For the Barn
Today is Tuesday, March 23, 2010.
2 days after the U.S. House of Representatives abdicated any responsibility in legislation, other than signing off on what the House of Lords the Senate wanted, and voted on a Sunday, no less, for the President’s Private Company Health Insurance Bailout bill, they set their eyes upon the next public asset to be dismantled and privatized.
This morning President Barack Obama signed the Senate version of the bill into law, with mandates to purchase private insurance, an excise tax on people’s insurance policies themselves, but with no Public Option and reconciliation yet pending in a Senate, with Kennedy’s son and widow watching. Let it be said for history that the President was wrong, this was not quite the version of the bill that the late Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts wanted, because his would have given people a guarantee of something for their new taxes – a Public Option of buying into Medicare or a very Medicare like program. Reid took it out of the Senate’s, Pelosi took it out of the House’s, and the President’s email chain fought against it in the trenches all summer, because they “didn’t have the votes.”
Wall Street, being always one step ahead of the hapless consumer, having witnessed this in July of 2008 :
NY Times 7/12/2008 Woes at Loan Agencies and Oil Price Spike Roil Markets
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07…Investors, meanwhile, snapped up debt issued by those companies, and the insurance premiums on those securities dropped sharply on the view that they would be protected by a government takeover.
Freddie Mac stock has lost 47 percent of its value in the last week alone. Fannie Mae shares have fallen 45 percent during that period. Both companies’ shares are trading at their lowest levels in nearly two decades.
Senior Bush administration officials are already considering a plan to have the government take over one or both of the companies and place them in a conservatorship if their problems worsen, according to people briefed about the plan.
Under a conservatorship, shares of Fannie and Freddie would be worth little or nothing, and any losses on mortgages they own or guarantee – which could be staggering – would be paid by taxpayers.The government officials said that the administration had also considered calling for legislation that would offer an explicit government guarantee on the $5 trillion of debt owned or guaranteed by the companies.
Doesn’t hesitate.
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