[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]
Attached is a photo of an Eastern Screech owl's protective coloring that was in today's paper: "Nature photographer has the patience to capture award-winning shots." The photographer is Graham McGeorge taken in the Okefenokee Swamp.
The Carteret Islanders of Papua New Guinea have become the world's first entire community to be displaced by climate change. They're the first official refugees of global warming--and they're packing up their lives to move out of the way of ever-rising waters that threaten to overtake their homes and crops. The island they call home will be completely underwater by 2015.
In a real life example of how Obamacare is changing everything, our local (Mena, Arkansas) newspaper ran an article about the closing of the 9th Street Ministry Medical Clinic: "Obamacare Headline in Rural Arkansas." Excerpt:
The 9th Street Ministry Medical Clinic...will be concluding their medical clinic mission, which had been ongoing monthly to offer free medical services to those in need since first starting in 1998.
The ministry has been operating once a month for years to give people healthcare on a first come, first served basis. This care was provided by volunteers. My mother actually volunteered at the clinic and they would see as many as 300 a day. Many of these people would wait all day for the chance to see a doctor. Most of the patients were people who could not afford to see a doctor, but were not eligible for medicaid or medicare. Why would they close this clinic down?
"We’ve gone from seeing around 300 people a month on a regular basis, but as people were enrolling in Obamacare, the numbers we were seeing have dropped. We were down to 80 people that came through the medical clinic in February, all the way down to three people at the medical clinic in March. Our services won’t be needed anymore, and this will conclude our mission.”
We live in one of the most conservative places in Arkansas. The Repubs want to tell those people that once a month waiting all day for a chance to see a doctor was good enough....
It came as a revelation when Piketty and his colleagues showed that incomes of the now famous “one percent,” and of even narrower groups, are actually the big story in rising inequality. And this discovery came with a second revelation: talk of a second Gilded Age, which might have seemed like hyperbole, was nothing of the kind. In America in particular the share of national income going to the top one percent has followed a great U-shaped arc. Before World War I the one percent received around a fifth of total income in both Britain and the United States. By 1950 that share had been cut by more than half. But since 1980 the one percent has seen its income share surge again—and in the United States it’s back to what it was a century ago.
We do not denounce the Koch brothers because their wealth of more than $50 billion exceeds the combined wealth of the bottom 40 percent of all the citizens of the United States, or because they run and own one of the largest petrochemical businesses in the world, or because of their right-wing views. If Americans obey the law and play by the rules, they're entitled to their wealth and to their opinions.
But the Koch brothers are using their vast wealth to alter those laws and rules to their advantage.
They've established a political front group, Americans for Prosperity, and are building their own permanent political machine, including hundreds of full-time staff in at least 32 states. They are pouring money into federal and state races.
The Koch brothers are thereby using their vast wealth to undermine and corrupt our democracy — a shameful betrayal of our nation for which they deserve to be widely denounced.
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While there's no "typical" creative type, there are some tell-tale characteristics and behaviors of highly creative people. Here is one of 18 things they do differently.
They turn life's obstacles around.
Many of the most iconic stories and songs of all time have been inspired by gut-wrenching pain and heartbreak – and the silver lining of these challenges is that they may have been the catalyst to create great art. An emerging field of psychology called post-traumatic growth is suggesting that many people are able to use their hardships and early-life trauma for substantial creative growth. Specifically, researchers have found that trauma can help people to grow in the areas of interpersonal relationships, spirituality, appreciation of life, personal strength, and – most importantly for creativity – seeing new possibilities in life.
"A lot of people are able to use that as the fuel they need to come up with a different perspective on reality," says Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychologist at New York University who has spent years researching creativity. "What's happened is that their view of the world as a safe place, or as a certain type of place, has been shattered at some point in their life, causing them to go on the periphery and see things in a new, fresh light, and that's very conducive to creativity."
Donald Beatty told a convention of prosecutors that judges would not permit "unethical conduct, such as witness tampering, selective and retaliatory prosecutions, perjury, and suppression of evidence," prosecutors revolted, vilifying him. They're following the lead of San Diego prosecutors, who boycott judges who are too "pro-Fourth Amendment." And in Arizona, prosecutors are fighting an ethics rule that would require them to disclose "new, credible, and material evidence" of wrongful convictions.
The Los Angeles Police Department is trying to do something about its notoriously bad human rights record: it has equipped officers with belt-worn voice-recorders that feed tamper-evident uploading stations in their cruisers. Unfortunately for anyone who advocates for the basic honesty of the LAPD, these have been widely sabotaged by officers, with more than half of the receiver antennas being vandalized or removed, which sharply reduces the recorders' range. Boston cops reacted the same way when logging GPSes were added to their cars. As Washington University law prof Neil Richards notes, it's a pretty ironic turn, in that the cops apparently feel like being surveilled while going about their normal business is an unreasonable impingement on their freedom.
Stonewall Young Democrats is a community of dedicated youth passionate about political and societal issues. They strive to give voice to LGBTQ youth and take action in a grassroots manner on matters of both local and national significance like protecting the environment, civil rights, a just economy, and access to healthcare.
Stonewall Young Democrats, take very seriously the issue of lack of women serving in public office. We are proud to support courageous women like Kerri Condley.
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And I have more wonderful news to share. The National Women's Political Caucus has also endorsed Kerri!
The National Women's Political Caucus was formed in 1971 by such prominent women as Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, and Dorothy Height. Spurred by Congress's failure to pass the Equal Rights Amendment in 1970, these women believed legal, economic, and social equity would come about only when women were equally represented among the nation's political decision-makers. Their faith that women's interests would best be served by women lawmakers has been confirmed time and time again.
I went to a memorial service yesterday. It involved considerably more praying, singing, and canting than I am used to on a Sunday (or any day).
Went to a funeral this afternoon, and came home to finish the day. So, I found a time for solitude during the week. Amazing! I love all the information and observations in this blog. Especially like the picture of what sand looks like under a microscope.
My dear aunt up in the DC area died last week. No service yet. I hate that I will never see her in person again, but she really did need to go.
Here you have this amazing, charismatic, madly generous Jesus, who says that when someone asks for your coat, give him not just your coat but your cloak also. Someone sues you in the court of law, give him everything. Then he turns into God, or the Son of God, and becomes the risen Christ. Now everything changes. Because now there is a personal selfish goal to be achieved in following this faith. To get into heaven. To get into heaven.
What bothers me about that is it seems to me that what Jesus would say is you must give up your space in heaven to some poor sinner. Give it all away. So it’s kind of an inverse Jesus. Everybody’s out in their own little careerist scheme to get into heaven.
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I had gone on a skiing trip with my brother and a high school friend. My brother was 13. I was 17. And I don’t know whose car it was or what the deal was. And my uncle lived not too far from the Mammoth Mountain Ski area in Northern California. So we were all going to stay with my uncle and then spend a day skiing. After that day of skiing, for reasons which are investigated in the book but I didn’t understand at the time, we did not go straight back to LA, but slept in the car in Lone Pine. Meaning, [we] pretty much didn’t sleep. The conditions, the physiological conditions for a Plains Indians vision quest, I realized, were all in place. Sleep deprivation, probably hypoglycemia, exhaustion, physical exhaustion. And after that night in the car, I got up before the others and just started walking down the street, probably looking for a restroom. And that’s what happened, where it happened. The only kind of words I could find, the only kind of imagery after all these years is to say the world flamed into life. Everything was coming at me. I was flowing out into it. It was exhilarating and kind of terrifying....
I think there’s a series of little strange things that happened there. First when I was 13 I started having these, what I found out now are called dissociative episodes — suddenly the layer of language and associations and significance peels off the world, and you just see what’s underneath....
I began to figure out, in the last couple decades, that some people seem to have had similar experiences, but they generally framed them in religious language or in some other way that completely turned me off.
The fishes of late have gotten heavy;The limericist wrote the first two lines of that limerick while driving, then he recited them to his wife....
I need today a spot of levity –
something funny,
striped and sunny,
to make me laugh and blot out gravity.
My wife me cautioned; she wasn't asking:_______________
"Don't limerick and drive, it's multitasking."
So I wrote this one quietly,
still driving, but slyly,
trusting now there'd be no more harrassing.
Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean
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Thanks to my lovely correspondents for: Eastern Screech Owl blends in, climate change refugees, cats & dogs, Obamacare success, conservatives & liberals, the U-shaped curve of inequality, moving on the Koches, creativity, Lenny Bruce on justice, Kerri for Congress, Madison for President, guns, memorial services, tragedy of life, inverted Jesus, mystical dissociation, TWO limericks....
ReplyDeleteWas that the best looking fish you could find?
ReplyDeleteI read the Lenny Bruce story years ago, sometime in the sixties. Every road trip he took he had a briefcase that was setup like a drugstore. He was found dead in a bathroom with a needle in his arm.