What Ails the United States Beyond Health Insurance Reform

According to this article from the conservative leaning National Review, the current debate needs to be much broader than health insurance. Who could possibly disagree with that? The article includes a stunning graph tracking middle-age mortality, and a even more stunning video-mapping of the increasing obesity across the US. Here's a haunting quote by the author, David French:

As Congress debated Obamacare repeal, I had lunch with a local critical-care doctor who seemed oddly indifferent to the outcome. His is a world dominated by addiction. “If it weren’t for addicts,” he says, “I wouldn’t have a job.” The intensive-care unit is overrun with people addicted to drugs, to alcohol, to food, and to tobacco. Insurance matters to the economics of the hospital, but it doesn’t matter so much to the quality of its patients’ immediate care or to their ultimate health outcome. They’re killing themselves, and the best health care and the most luxurious “Cadillac” health plans won’t stop their slide into oblivion.

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The Problems with Obamacare and the need for Single Payer.

Ryan Cooper comments at The Week: ObamaCare plays to precisely the opposite of America's strengths. Instead of being a simple,

straightforward program to hand out insurance coverage — the policy equivalent of a honking great axe — it's got complex regulations, fiddly quasi-market structures, and mandates everywhere you look — the policy equivalent of the repair box from Toy Story 2. It should be no surprise that many of those regulations do not completely fix the problems they were intended to address, or are effectively ignored. We need simpler, bigger, blunter tools, and single-payer fits the bill.

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It’s time to help raise lots of money for Melania Trump

It's stunningly clear that Melania Trump can't stand Don't Trump, yet she is still married to him. That she is extremely uncomfortable around Donald is increasingly clear from widely available photos and videos of the two of them.  And see here.  Recent revelations suggest Melania despises Donald and won't sleep with him.  Further, Melania has no intention of living in the White House even though it's a big house with a lot of room for the entire family.  So why does she stay with him?  And why won't she go public with detailed stories about Donald's misconduct and potential illegalities? When Donald Trump married Melania Knauss we know for a fact that he forced her to sign a prenuptial agreement.   That agreement is carefully hidden from public view, but we know enough about Trump's love of money and power, as well as his vindictiveness and narcissism, that we can assume that the prenup is laden with incentives to keep Melania well-behaved and quiet. But why limit the legal restrictions to a prenup? There are additional types of contracts that Trump could have foisted on Melania, before or since the wedding. Imagine that you were a psychopath like Trump?  What else would you entice Melenia to sign? How about non-disclosure agreements and non-disparagement agreements laden with penalties for whispering even a word about Donald's dirty laundry? The Donald Trump we all know would rig his agreements with Melania so that she would be financially incentivized dress up pretty, quietly stand there to look like a wife but keep her mouth shut.   Donald Trump's penalty-filled contracts with Melania, crafted by the best lawyers money can buy, would make sure that Melania would end up destitute if dishes Donald's dirt.  None of this is difficult to imagine. What do we need to do to hear Melania's front-row seat stories about Trump's double-dealing, lying, betrayals and illegalities?   What if we set up a "Free Melania!" GoFundMe page?  What if we raised enough money for Melania to share copies of the contracts Donald made her sign?  What if we raised so much money that even a gold-digger like Melania would have enough money to live on after she files the divorce papers and tells all?

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Comedian Lee Camp offers a sobering view of the state of the world

Lee Camp summarizes what is going on. He's a comedian, but it's getting ever more difficult to hide his deep concerns behind his laugh lines. I suspect that what is especially bothering Lee Camp is something that Trump and his dysfunctional friends are immunized from: Facts. In this second video, Camp and his guest, Alnoor Ladha, set for an alternative to the current U.S. priority of Banks and Tanks. Ladha is Executive Director of an organization called "The Rules":

The Rules is a worldwide network of activists, artists, writers, farmers, peasants, students, workers, designers, hackers, spiritualists and dreamers, linking up, pushing the global narrative in a new direction. We’re tired of the incremental reforms. The corrupt CEO’s. The tax havens. The esteemed economists. The development industry. The secrecy regimes. The empty promises. The cancelled futures.

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Only one space after a period!

In high school typing class (in the 1970s), I learned that there are TWO spaces after a period. Since then, I've learned and relearned from reputable sources that there should only be one space following a period, but shaking that habit has not been easy. Today, I was reminded that there is no dispute about what to do after hitting a period on a keyboard:

Felici writes that typesetters in Europe began to settle on a single space around the early 20th century. America followed soon after. Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule. It's one of the canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork and fashion designers know to put men's shirt buttons on the right and women's on the left. Every major style guide—including the Modern Language Association Style Manual and the Chicago Manual of Style—prescribes a single space after a period. (The Publications Manual of the American Psychological Association, used widely in the social sciences, allows for two spaces in draft manuscripts but recommends one space in published work.)
Let this be the day when my fingers start doing what my brain has been trying to tell them to do for decades!

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