[GAC, part 0]

I read this stuff so you don’t have to, but you can dive into the 82-page PDF too if you like. Or here’s the earlier version, it’s only 39 pages.

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In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

On waking from an opium-induced sleep, so the story goes, Coleridge hurried to capture on paper the fantastical world he had dreamed [or hallucinated, depending on who you ask]. He was rudely interrupted while at this task, and when he returned to it, all was gone but the fragment we have today.  Read more 

There I was, merrily surfing the intertoobz, looking up contact information for my delegates so that I could try to convince them to lobby for putting HR 676 into the Democratic Party platform, when I got a wild idea and decided to try [once again] to convince my Representative to endorse HR 676. He’s a Republican, but he’s supposed to represent ME too, so I went to look up his contact informtion [having forgotten it] and lo! what did I find?

A poll: Do you support drilling in the Gulf of Mexico for oil and natural gas?  Read more 

because you did ask …

2007 commemoration of Bloody Sunday at Brown Chapel AME Church, in Selma, Alabama

update: i deleted the photo from this post

single-payer national health insurance?  Read more 

War, dreadful war, and Tiber flood
I see incarnadined with blood.
— the Sibyl

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.
— Enoch Powell

Whether Powell was just a racist dickhead or some dude with ears licked clean by the temple snakes, he and many others were, are, and always will be justifiably afraid of the consequences of smashing established social institutions.  Read more 

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others

Hamsters being a prominent theme at the moment, here’s a thought you might want to think on [or not] — for a couple of generations now we’ve all been guinea pigs in a huge medical experiment. Having [cough] borrowed the graphic from YES! Magazine, I’ll go ahead and lift the opening paragrapghs of the accompanying article as well.

Should the United States implement a more inclusive, publicly funded health care system? That’s a big debate throughout the country. But even as it rages, most Americans are unaware that the United States is the only country in the developed world that doesn’t already have a fundamentally public—that is, tax-supported—health care system.

That means that the United States has been the unwitting control subject in a 30-year, worldwide experiment comparing the merits of private versus public health care funding. For the people living in the United States, the results of this experiment with privately funded health care have been grim. The United States now has the most expensive health care system on earth and, despite remarkable technology, the general health of the U.S. population is lower than in most industrialized countries. Worse, Americans’ mortality rates—both general and infant—are shockingly high.  Read more