01.17.06
Posted in Rants at 1:09 am by Thomas
If you want to measure how advanced a civilization is, you should check on how the weak members of society are treated. Are the poor taken care of? Are the elderly living without fear and in comfort?
These are the really important questions, because every single one of us aspires to become part of the senior citizen’s club.
Every one of us wants to become old and we all worry about what it will be like. We all hope to be healthy, but we’ll all need more medications than when we were 20 or 30 years old. And those medications are more important, too – gone are the muscle toners and breath refreshers, and in are the heart medication and the anti-seizure medicine. Important stuff, whithout which one could die instantly.
It sounds reasonable to assume that a civilized government would not screw around with the medications for its old people…
…and then there are people like the Republicans in the US Congress.
In what can only be called a blatant example of government corruption, the Republican majority passed Medicare Part D late in 2005. This new law leads to many changes in the drug distribution for the elderly as of the beginning of 2006 and the first two weeks have already shown that this will go down as a major disaster in the history of the US.
In California alone in the first two weeks, more than 200,000 elderly citizens have gone without their necessary medications. Already in twelve states, a Medical State of Emergency has been declared, and others are sure to follow.
Low-income older people are now suddenly looking at monthly one hundred or more dollars in additional medical expenses and many of these people will have to make a very simple decision at the end of each month for the rest of their lifes:
Medicine or Dinner.
These are the people who have made the United States great. They fought and won the Second World War. They worked hard through the 1950s and 60s. They literally flew to the moon.
And now as a final gesture, a mindless, heartless and thankless government is destroying their lifes, one pill at a time.
The new drug plans are so complicated that even many nurses and pharmacists do not know how to sign up for their elderly patients. Some of the new plans require trips to pharmacies further away, while others work in local pharmacies but do not offer all the drugs that the patient requires. What are these people supposed to do? Go with their walker on a Greyhound bus? Skip their heart medication?
Some cheaper drug classes like barbiturates have been excluded from the new plans completely and replacements may only come in new and expensive brand name drugs, if at all.
This is a scandal that will go unnoticed until the day we start hearing about all the dead old people the police is suddenly pulling out of apartments all over the country.
This new law has direct and ultimate impact on many lifes in this country and the Republicans forced this measure through to enrich the pharma industry without a second thought for the senior citizens who will have to deal with this mess.
This is the Republican world of small government, of free markets and no social safety net.
This is the world where you are ok if you are a millionaire and you’ve paid off your politicians.
The rest of us can go to hell.
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01.10.06
Posted in Good Stuff at 1:07 am by thomas
On average every ten days a person jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge and dies.
From its early days onwards the Golden Gate Bridge has attracted more than thirteenhundred people who jumped from its edge to a death in the waters of the Bay. It is at the same time incomprehensible, shocking, and maybe also a little bit understandable why this bridge, why here.
The fluted steel arches painted in that dull shade of red called International Orange have something very dramatic and gothic about them, standing tall in the bluest of skies, an echo of the shapes used in cathedrals.
Its location is a spot of such unique natural beauty that it will take your breath away when you see it for the first time and it will still enthrall you even after seeing it for every day of your life.
It is a powerful monument to the will of human beings and at the same time a graceful reminder of the beauty of the nature that it frames.
It is beautiful and dangerous.
Several years ago a friend of mine jumped and died.
For decades there were discussions in San Francisco about what to do with the bridge. The original railing is only about four feet high, and multiple proposals for higher barriers have been made over the years, often rejected because of aesthetic reasons, and more recently always for financial ones.
Currently, the financial situation is so dire that not even a study to find a solution can be funded without cutting money somewhere else in the tight budget of the bridge and its maintenance. A physical barrier to prevent people from leaping from the edge is probably further away than ever before.
And now a new solution has appeared: Instead of a hard, cold, physical barrier to prevent the body from going over the edge, why not try something different. Something not to save the body, but to save the soul that it houses.
Clearly, it is that soul and the troubled mind of the potential suicide victim that needs our attention. Several survivors of attempted suicides at the bridge have reported later that just a little bit of human attention, a little sliver of hope at the right time would have been enough to stop them from jumping.
The idea is to create small pieces of art that will be fixed to the current railing. These art pieces could be small plaques as well as maybe other forms that can be added to the bridge without being intrusive or safety hazards. These signs will hold phrases that will speak to every person walking across the bridge, inspiring the casual visitors and giving hope to people in need.
References to nature. Quotations about life and beauty. Children’s paintings. Philosophical thoughts. A march of ideas and thoughts, all along the bridge walkway.
It may sound simplistic, but walking across the bridge takes time and effort. It is a long uphill climb to the center of the bridge, not something a potential jumper is able to do fast or without at least looking. They will see the messages in regular intervals, and maybe find something that will hold their mind for a moment. Give them sustenance in their spiritual wilderness. Guide them home.
This is such a fantastic idea since it will not substract from the beauty of the bridge, but actually add to it. It will add another dimension to every walk across the bridge, adding the beauty of the human mind to the beauties of nature and engineering.
Oh – and it’s cheap, too. It should not be a problem in a city where private money has just built an amazing new art museum to find funding for such a project. This is something that we can start to do now, not in a few years and another hundred suicides later.
Check out sparkletack for a great and touching podcast about this project and The Fluent Self for the project page and a much better explanation of the ideas behind this project.
This one’s for you, Mark.
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01.02.06
Posted in Rants at 1:26 pm by thomas
The New Scientist has an article up with 13 Things That Do Not Make Sense. In this article the author is listing thirteen scientific problems that point at large gaps in our understanding of the basic principles that are the foundation of our being.
Do read the article, it is very well written and you are bound to learn something just from its description of the problems, but here is a short list:
The placebo effect – How do medicines actually work in our body if even just the anticipation of the effect can create the same results?
The horizon problem – Why does the universe look the same in places beyond the reach of the Speed of Light?
Ultra-energetic cosmic rays – How can they exist and where do they come from?
Belfast homeopathy results – Do ultra-diluted chemicals effect our body?
Dark matter – Does it exist or is our understanding of the basic laws of physics wrong?
Viking’s methane – Have we already found life on Mars but don’t recognize it?
Tetraneutrons – Again the basic laws of physics… still no clue?
The Pioneer anomaly – Why is the unpowered Pioneer space craft speeding up?
Dark energy – See dark matter.
The Kuiper cliff – Is there a large tenth planet in our solar system?
The Wow signal – Have the aliens already sent us a signal and we just don’t get it?
Not-so-constant constants – Is the Speed of Light not as constant as we’d like it to be?
Cold fusion – Does it work after all?
Every single one of these problems could probably be solved with one or two billion dollars each, with unmeasurable effects on our lives and our future. New medicines, unlimited energy sources, an understanding of how we come to be here and if we are alone. Everything from new philosophical insights to practical advancements is locked up in these problems and all of them are solvable.
All it takes is the money and the will to Do Good.
Let’s say it takes two billion US dollars each to solve all of these problems in the next couple of years. That’s 26 billion, or the amount of money the United States is currently spending on the Iraq war in less than three months.
For three years now this country has been wasting lifes, unreplaceable resources and money on an unethical war based on lies and deception.
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