Senator Tom Harkin reminded those at the meeting that while it’s easy to get caught up in the debate over numbers and policy details, it’s ultimately about making progress to help ordinary folks across the country struggling under today’s broken system. Senator Harkin said, “I keep thinking we have got to bring it back home to what this is all about. We all have our stories. I got a letter yesterday from a farmer in Iowa that really encapsulates it. [He said] ‘I’m a 57-year-old Iowa farmer. I’m writing to voice my concern regarding my family’s rapidly escalating health care costs. On Saturday, February 20th, I received a noticeinforming me that our health insurance premium will be increasing $193.90 per month to a monthly total of $1,516.20. This is a 14.6% increase.'”
rePost :: National Juries :: Overcoming Bias
Read the whole thing by clicking through the overcoming bias blog!!!
Would something like this work for the Philippines? No as long as the Education System is in shambles we cannot do anything as radical as this.
National Juries
The reason so many bad policies are good politics is that so many people vote. … Ignorant voters … are biased towards particular errors. …
The best way to improve modern politics? … The number of voters should be drastically reduced so that each voter realizes that his vote will matter. Something like 12 voters per district … selected at random from the electorate. With 535 districts in Congress … there would be 6,420 voters nationally. A random selection would deliver a proportional representation of sexes, ages, races and income groups. This would improve on the current system, in which the voting population is skewed … the old vote more than the young, the rich vote more than the poor, and so on.
To safeguard against the possibility of abuse, these 6,420 voters would not know that they had been selected at random until the moment when the polling officers arrived at their house. They would then be spirited away to a place where they will spend a week locked away with the candidates, attending a series of speeches, debates and question-and-answer sessions before voting on the final day. All of these events should be filmed and broadcast, so that everyone could make sure that nothing dodgy was going on.
More here. This logic is simple and strong enough for most folks to both understand and accept. Yet most would still prefer our current system – why?
via Overcoming Bias : National Juries.
Elink 8 :: Who's Paying The Politicians??
pointer from here: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2010/02/25/what-you-see-is-what-they-buy/
this is nice , hope we advance enough to be able to do this!! Manny Villar (Vista Land) , Noynoy Aquino (ABS-CBN, Ayala Group of Companies), Gilbert Teodoro (Government???), Eddie Villanueva ( His followers?) , Jamby (Meron ba?)
Musing on Philippine Politics and Healthcare 2010 02 26
People who follow the politics in the USA knows host stupid the people in the system can be.
I’m watching Citizen Tube here http://www.youtube.com/citizentube?feature=ticker on the Healthcare summit. I’m seriously envious of them right now. When we have senators who are hitting each other with personal snide remarks. When most of the questions that are being asked in Presidential forums are not up to snuff, Simply put I have no Idea who has the policy-fu down pat. Who knows basic economics, basic public policy etc. Damn. and you have self styled pundit who really know nothing.
Elink Video :: Tim Wise: On White Privilege (Clip)
Watch this video.
http://www.MediaEd.org From the DVD: The Pathology of Privilege Racism, White Denial & the Costs of Inequality For years, acclaimed author and speaker Tim Wise has been electrifying audiences on…
http://www.MediaEd.org
From the DVD:
The Pathology of Privilege
Racism, White Denial & the Costs of Inequality
From the DVD:
The Pathology of Privilege
Racism, White Denial & the Costs of Inequality
from Experimental Theology
For years, acclaimed author and speaker Tim Wise has been electrifying audiences on the college lecture circuit with his deeply personal take on whiteness and white privilege. In this spellbinding lecture, the author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son offers a unique, inside-out view of race and racism in America. Expertly overcoming the defensiveness that often surrounds these issues, Wise provides a non-confrontational explanation of white privilege and the damage it does not only to people of color, but to white people as well. This is an invaluable classroom resource: an ideal introduction to the social construction of racial identities, and a critical new tool for exploring the often invoked – but seldom explained – concept of white privilege.
rePost:Coffee Heart Risk Gene???: Orszag Budgets for Caffeine Genetic Marker – ScienceInsider
Wish I’m negative for this gene. I consume about 1-3L of coffee a day, and I measure coffee by the table spoon not teaspoon so this would be ncie to know!!!!
The Office of Managament and Budget said that Orszag was traveling today and couldn’t provide additional details-including whether he’d learned anything about his genetic predisposition to other diseases. But ScienceInsider guesses that he was referring to a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) called rs762551 that modulates a caffeine metabolizing enzyme in the liver. Those with a “slow” metabolizing version who drink a few cups of coffee a day are at a higher risk of heart attacks.
via The Latest Buzz: Orszag Budgets for Caffeine Genetic Marker – ScienceInsider.
rePost::How Paul Krugman found politics : The New Yorker
Reading this I was hit by a desire to do something. We are in the midst of what probably is the few times we can do great and original work. It is as if FB and other distractions are the ways we are being controlled to not do useful stuff. sorry for the minor rant. It’s just that we must able to look at each day in the context of a lifetime and the context of birth to that day is the lifetime.
But it’s been a long time—years now—since he did any serious research. Could he, still? “I’d like to get back to it,” he says. “I’m craving the chance to do some deep thinking, and I haven’t been doing a lot of that. I guess doing the really creative academic work does require a state of mind that’s hard to maintain throughout your whole life. Even Paul Samuelson—the bulk of the stuff you read from him is before he was fifty. There was an intensity of focus that I had when I was twenty-six that I won’t be able to recapture at fifty-six. You develop your habits of mind, and to a point that’s a good thing, because you learn ways to work, but it does mean that you’re less likely to come up with something really innovative. Even if I weren’t doing all this other stuff, I don’t think I’d be producing a lot of breakthrough papers. There’s crude stuff: if I do have some brilliant academic insight, what are they going to do, give me a Nobel Prize? . . . When I was younger, when I figured something out there was this sense of the heavens parting and the choirs singing that I don’t get now. And that’s life.”
For someone else, this loss might be a devastation, but even though for thirty years thinking deeply about economics was all Krugman really cared about, he has let it pass out of his life without regret. “I think he’s happy,” his friend Craig Murphy says. “A much happier person now than when we first met him. He feels like he’s done good things, and they’re greater than what he expected when he was young. If there is sadness in him at all, I think it is a tiny core of profound sadness of the kind that the Buddha understood—that we probably can’t use human rationality to make the world all better, and it would be really nice if we were able to.” ♦
via How Paul Krugman found politics : The New Yorker.
rePost::Life With Food Stamps as Your Only Income : Casaubon's Book
This was a reaction to this article: Alternet, a good piece on what it really means to be one of the six million Americans with no income at all save food stamps:
Hope you can read both the linked sites.
We are teetering on a basic question, I think – what is government for? In the present situation, we don’t have the luxury of doing everything we’d like – of funding every project, of engaging in every kind of research or investing in every area of life that we’d like. We have to make choices. So we come to the question – as more and more citizens are impoverished and desperate, and we invest more and more money in propping up an economy that is still failing, still falling, what should governments do? What choices should we make? Is the mission of our society to preserve an economy at all costs? To preserve an imperialist enterprise? Or to preserve the people?via Life With Food Stamps as Your Only Income : Casaubon’s Book.
rePost::Don't Call Us, We’ll Call … Well, No, Actually We Probably Won’t… | Psychology Today
My introvert side is really affected by phone calls. I really don’t like it most of the time. I especially don’t like how the phone intrudes when you least want it.
But I hate the phone. Hate it. Hate. It.
I can let the phone ring without picking up. I own a cell phone but don't give out the number. The only people I willingly talk with on the phone are far-flung friends, and only because I know it's necessary to keep those friendships healthy. Even so, as these friends can tell you, I can be difficult to reach, and return their phone calls in my own sweet time, when I feel up to the exertion the phone requires for me.
via Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call … Well, No, Actually We Probably Won’t… | Psychology Today.
rePost::New law lets Coast Guard stop ships from sailing – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos
This new law is washed from the blood of all those who have died to the GREED of ship operators and the carelessness/greed of officials. In some ways I have a feeling that laws are not enough for people can and will still be bribed. This is a small but important step for the transportation industry of an archipelago of 7100 islands.
New law lets Coast Guard stop ships from sailing
MANILA, Philippines — President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has signed a new law giving the Philippine Coast Guard increased law enforcement powers, including the authority to detain and prevent from sailing substandard passenger and cargo vessels plying the country’s waters.
Known as the “Philippine Coast Guard Act of 2009” or Republic Act 9993, the new law aims to further enhance maritime safety and prevent sea tragedies.
Investigations into some of the worst disasters in maritime history that occurred in Philippine waters showed there was need to pinpoint clearer responsibility for the enforcement of maritime safety regulations.
Eight years in the legislative mill, the new law strengthens the arm of the Coast Guard to issue and enforce rules and regulations covering the “promotion of safety of life and property at sea on all maritime-related activities,” as well as promote marine environmental protection.
Transportation Secretary Leandro Mendoza called the Philippine Coast Guard Act of 2009 a measure that “has long been awaited by the maritime industry and the riding public.”
via New law lets Coast Guard stop ships from sailing – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos.