The New York Times has recently been talking a lot about the Singapore health system. Most recently here. However, in all the discussion about the amazing cost/benefit of the Singaporean system what’s lost is any consideration of a major Singaporean health initiative. Singapore’s “individual mandate,” if you will, is the enforced physical fitness of roughly 40% of […]
Category: Politics
I recently listened to the Strong Towns podcast with Chuck Marohn and Scott Beyer (https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/8/30/podcast-a-conversation-about-market-urbanism) two of the most influential urban policy advocates/bloggers. In it, the principals “take on a contentious conversation about government regulations, zoning and housing—and how incremental development may or may not work in American cities.” I was struck that each takes a […]
The Republican Party is making this country more ignorant, bigoted, and intolerant every day. Their adamant refusal to compromise, their denial of evidence regarding our climate, and their blatant pandering to the evangelicals is hurting our country. Our political system hit a nadir last week when, during a nationally televised debate, GOP frontrunner Donald Trump bragged […]
Increasingly, when laws restrict Christians from imposing their childish beliefs upon others, or practicing their bigotry, they claim to be persecuted. Recently this cultivated whining was in the spotlight, when Kim Davis was jailed for actually persecuting gays when she refused to sign their marriage licenses. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee even tweeted at the time that her jailing was […]
The Republican Party is overtly anti-science. The current group of candidates for President of the United States is comprised of people who reject reason and evidence in favor of detrimental myths and superstition. Our Founding Fathers deliberately made the United States a secular nation—something that was unprecedented at the time—and yet today’s Republicans pander to the lowest common denominator of our […]
Today, Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee will travel to Kentucky to support Kim Davis at an “#ImWithKim Liberty Rally”. His support of a woman who refused to sign marriage licenses for same-sex couples (due to her belief in a homophobic deity) shows that once again, Huckabee and the Christian right have gotten it all wrong.
A year after he robbed a store and then assaulted a police officer, Michael Brown has a permanent plaque in Ferguson, Missouri. While police brutality is a serious issue, the fact is that there is absolutely no evidence that Brown’s killing had anything to do with race, or with overzealous law enforcement…
Yesterday, yet another tragic attack left four Marines and a Navy sailor dead in Chattanooga, Tennessee. A 24 year-old Kuwaiti named Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez fired more than a dozen rounds at a Marine Corps recruiting center, wounding a Marine. Abdulazeez then drove seven miles to a Navy Operations Support Center, where he rammed his car through a […]
Unsurprisingly, the hateful Westboro Baptist Church is upset about the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to be married. The Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) is comprised largely of the family of its now-dead founder, Fred Phelps. This group of people pickets controversial funerals, holding up signs that say […]
In the wake of the Charleston, S.C. shooting, people have been quick to point the finger at many different culprits in order to try to make some sense of yet another senseless tragedy to add to the litany of senseless mass murders perpetrated against innocent civilians in the United States. At a luncheon last Thursday, Presidential hopeful […]