Mon 30 Apr 2007
Following the massacre at Virgina Tech, the conventional wisdom was that the shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, had “slipped through the cracks.”
This weekend’s horrific murder on Laurel Street shows that the so called “crack” in our society’s mental health care system is larger than we would like to admit. (more…)
Fri 27 Apr 2007
A few months ago, a friend scolded me for my bumpersticker that suggests that Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz get elected to office in 2006, or that they receive MVP awards, depending on your political persuasion, I suppose. I’ve held a grudge ever since because it’s totally bullshit that I be asked to scoff at baseball and their fans because it is commercial and the players get more in a year than I may in a lifetime. It is commercial, and I cannot argue that, but I can still enjoy it. Gotta have some vice in this world, and there’s certainly worse ones out there.
Today I was able to find another reason to defend my baseball bumpersticker (besides claiming that the sport helps me keep on my math skills). Pitcher Curt Schilling, on his blog 38 Pitches, challenges the media. Correction: Schilling, despite his right-wing leanings, proves he can rip people a new one with more than just his throwing arm. (more…)
Fri 27 Apr 2007
We have a minimum wage law, why not a maximum wage law? Read about
hedge fund managers making way too much money doing stuff even some economists don’t understand and see what you think. Is it too much to ask someone to live on a salary in the low seven figures? After buying the third vacation home and the 100-foot yacht, the Lamberlinguini and the private jet, maybe it’s time to say “Enough”.
Thu 26 Apr 2007
When I went to college I was surprised to find out that the majority of the nation wasn’t Catholic. Virtually everyone I had known up until then had at the very least been trotted through the motions of baptism/first communion/confirmation.
I’m also pretty familiar with how Catholics like to put their beliefs and their medical care in a tumbler and shake that cocktail till it’s good and frothy. My grandmother was horrified at the thought of ending up in an emergency room other than St. Francis’. This was even after her sister was paralyzed there in the immediate post-war period from a botched epidural. I was told that according to my grandmother and her mother, medical malpractice was fine for secular doctors, but You Do Not Sue Priests and Nuns. For any reason, ever.
Perhaps sitting snug in this infallibility for decades can explain how stunned CT Bishops seem that their hospitals might have to be accountable to the public for some things after all. (more…)
Thu 26 Apr 2007
I sent a letter yesterday to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia demanding that he prosecute the Attorney General of United States for perjury and other crimes. (more…)
Wed 25 Apr 2007
I no longer recognize this place I call home. It is not the people who live here that I don’t recognize, it is the way we act towards one another that I fail to recognize. The horror of Virginia Tech and the death of nine GI’s today in Iraq and the killing of hundreds of Iraqi civilians make me feel as if we all suffer from what is known as facial aphasia. That is the failure to recognize the human face. As the Buddhist say, sangha, the community is the foundation of humanity. As we destroy the social contract that supports us all we risk losing our humanity.
That social contract is what ensures that we provide for each other. The public schools have been slowly dismantled by the corporate ethics that reward market segmentation and Wall Street greed. We do not need a $90,000 a yr corporate money chaser. We do not need consultants who take the money and run. We do not need public relations officers who serve as gate keepers to keep the people away from the superintendent. The teachers, para’s, secretaries, guidance, facilites and security officers are the grunts who make everything work. I am so happy to hear that several teachers at HPHS are so enraptured that the school has one of the rarest telescopes and workable planetarium that they have offered to help get it ready to be part of a science curriculum. Talk about a rising star for Hartford. (more…)
Wed 25 Apr 2007
The media assert their bias every time they decide what is and is not front page news. The gruesome, sensational coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings is news, but the conversations that get to the root of our culture of violence are not news. The bickering in Congress is news, but again, getting to the root of American-led violence abroad doesn’t count.
And then there is this. Yeltsin’s body hasn’t even gone cold yet, and suddenly, there is talk of connecting Russia and Alaska via an undersea tunnel. Besides the toil, wastefulness and impracticality of this idea, noone seems to have considered the massive environmental degradation that would follow such a large-scale screwing with the planet. Why show any value for life (human, animal, and plant) when there’s always the possibility of a back-up plan(et)?
Rather than contemplating ways we can have more convenient (to us) access to fossil fuels, wouldn’t it make more sense to have the discussions that get to the root of our real problem here– pride, envy, sloth, lust, anger, gluttony and greed?
Tue 24 Apr 2007
Let’s face it. If we don’t get our asses in gear pretty soon, we’re screwed. There’s only so much oil left in the ground and no new dinosaurs rotting into crude sludge. There’s also little political will at the federal level to take any serious pro-environment, pro-future-of-humanity steps to stave off what appears will be a vicious withdrawal process from our oil addiction. Hartford and other municipalities should be more proactive in their own future, and the future of the species. (more…)
Mon 23 Apr 2007
Alberto Gonzalez is one of President Bush’s best friends. Gonzalez was Bush’s first White House Counsel, where he argued that the United States should arrest American and foreign citizens without warrants, then to secretly detain and torture them. After the 2004 election, Bush nominated Gonzalez to become the United States of America’s first Latino attorney general. This grandson of undocumented Mexican immigrants now pays his rent by using the mostly fascist PATRIOT Act to tear families apart through unprecedented deportation raids all over the country. Under Gonzalez’s leadership, the Justice Department has also been censured for using “National Security Letters” - a way for the government to secretly search your home/business without a warrant, and keep you from talking about it - at least 20% more often than they really needed to.
Shockingly, all the above wasn’t enough for the senators to worry about this guy’s competence. But no one, NO ONE, tells US Senators they shouldn’t have opinions. (more…)
Mon 23 Apr 2007
Awhile ago, Hannah wrote about the looming FDA approval of cloned animals as food. Today, the Washington Post reports that the Food and Drug Administration knew about “contamination problems at a Georgia peanut butter plant and on California spinach farms.”
If there is anyone considering forming a powerful, independent alternative to the flawed FDA, now is the time!
Until that happens, there are a few easy ways to determine food safety:
-Was the food (or animal treated as food) produced in a large factory that would allow for “mistakes to be made” and not corrected for some time?
-Do the producers of said food believe in technology before humanity?
-Do the producers pay their workers so little that having pride in one’s work is impossible?