...And I go what the bleeding HELL happened.

O_O

Yes, more about US politics, I'm afraid.

The Republicans have been trying their hardest to cut funding for all the things they hate. I mean, at least they've been seen to be trying; for some of it, you can only guess that they know they'll fail, but they can proudly point to the fact that they tried, and it will make the people who voted for them very, very happy. The degree to which this is merely cynical manipulation of the electorate is left to the reader's imagination.

Some of it I can understand, if one were to accept the Republican viewpoint as valid. Take the House vote to defund Planned Parenthood a couple of weeks ago, for example. I mean, Planned Parenthood provide sex education, support for pregnant single women, and worst of all abortions; since sex education (beyond "abstinence only") seems to be generally frowned on, single mothers are obviously the downfall of society, and abortions are obviously evil (<--sarcasm, here, folks), then it makes absolute sense that PP are bad and should not have any Federal support. Nevermind the fact that abortions are less than 3% of what they do, their low-cost contraception, prenatal wellness and cancer screening for poor women takes up far more of their time and effort and money, and they fill a healthcare gap for poor women where there is no other service in existence which covers this area in the US; and nevermind that they already keep Federal funds strictly sequestered for non-abortion healthcare. Abortion=bad="PP should not get support" (let's face it, healthcare for poor women was never a Republican priority under the best of circumstances).

But then we get to their vote to kill the funding for Poison Control Centers.

...What?

The American Association of Poison Control Centers takes over 4 million calls per year. Each call costs in the region of $30-$40. An ER visit will inevitably -- MUST inevitably -- cost far more than that, and in the case of the many uninsured, will cost the government and other taxpayers. The majority of Poison Control Center calls actually result in the case NOT having to go to the ER. As the NY Times article points out, "A study in the Journal of Medical Toxicology estimated that the poison centers saved the State of Arizona alone $33 million a year."

(And as a healthcare worker has pointed out elsewhere, sorry don't have the link to hand, even ER technicians make use of Poisone Control Center expertise!)

And it's not like only poor kids of single mums get poisoned.

So what, exactly, is the rationale, here? "We have too many people, let's get rid of a few on a random basis"? And nevermind the increased cost in all the states, when overburdened ERs get hit with this new double-whammy?

It beggars belief, it frankly does.

Yes, a tough budget means tough choices, but this is not sensible under any particular way that I can stretch that word.



....That's leaving aside Obama's massive betrayal of his electorate in his decision to defund Energy Assistance for the elderly poor, something the Republicans didn't even ask for, and all the other ways in which the budget overall looks like a war against women, children and the poor, because as everyone knows, the best way to get the country out of a deep recession and avoid depression is to let the poor keep getting poorer. But hey; at least the military is still able to spend millions sponsoring NASCAR. It's a good thing that they know what's important, right?

.

RABBITS! Rabbit, rabbit, white rabbit!

Or, really, bunnies.





Seriously, if you don't die from cute over this, there is something wrong with you.

Two of the reasons why the US has unions at all.

1. Near closing time on Saturday afternoon, March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the top floors of the Asch Building in the Triangle Waist Company. ... By the time the fire was over, 146 of the 500 employees had died.

2. In the years from 1884-1912, (28 years), 42,898 coal miners were killed in mine accidents in the U.S. Of these, 1,708 were killed in Colorado mines. Miners died in Colorado coal mines at over twice the national average..., while hand-picked coroner's juries absolved the coal companies of responsibility almost without exception.

I've been hearing a lot of people say that "the time for unions is past" in the US. Why? Because we trust that neither corporate interests nor governments would go back to abusing workers as much as they could get away with? What, in history, would lead anyone to believe that?

Have an orrery.

http://dd.dynamicdiagrams.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/orrery_2006.swf

If you click on "Tychonian" down at the bottom, you can see how people thought the geocentric system worked, too.


...Currently, politics in the US is just depressing me, what with the current effort to drag the country back to the 19th C., and politics in the Middle East is just amazing me and is probably beyond my ability to discuss cogently at this point. So instead, I offer this cycle of planets. Have fun.

Holy.....where DOES time go?

Oh, wait; let's see, trying to get a graduate degree "part time" on top of a full-time day job in a now-horrendously-understaffed department. Yeah, that'd be where.


Next week I will be starting to do metabolic modelling. I will try to catch up with my friends before this point.

This post, by xanath.

Originally posted by neo_prodigy at Spirit Day

My note:

I also understand, oh believe me I do!, that girls are bullied just as badly as these boys have been. No-one is immune. But these are the deaths in the news right now, and have thus become the rallying point. Let us all hope that the deaths of lesbians from bullying are not out there in just as great a frequency, but just ignored. Let us all hope that we do not "gain" any public deaths of girls from bullying to add to this sad total, either. Let this kind of vicious, petty nastiness simply become unacceptable, to anyone, ever.

Just warning people:

Due to various and assorted circumstances, I'm going to blitz this journal in a few days.

I am keeping everything in backup (it's backed up already, including all the comments). And I will be retaining a few of the posts. And the rest of it will be starting over.

Last night, I dreamed that I was wandering through what looked like a large meteor crater in the New Mexico desert, until I stumbled on a convention of angels. And by "convention of angels", I mean "function rooms in a cheap hotel, with seminars going on and keynote speakers and a buffet of little triangle-cut sandwiches laid on for lunch." I wandered in and parked myself in the middle of the audience for one of the speakers -- yes, they were all angels, wings & surpassing beauty and everything -- and started heckling. For some reason they didn't stop me (actually, the angel sitting to my right seemed to be giggling softly and egging me on), until the speaker gave up in despair and left to get drunk on vodka. Then I remember following this drunk angel around listening for him to say weird shit. At one point I had to persuade him not to steal a bus.

He let me have a sip out of his bottle of vodka, though, as we were sitting in the bus I had just persuaded him not to steal, and it was really kick-ass good stuff.

Unfortunately, my alarm clock went off just as he was starting to say something about Einstein and the necessity of hedgehogs.



...Right, I leave what this says about me open to interpretation....