Archives for June 2012

Egyptian President-elect Muhammad Morsi addressed an enormous crowd in Tahrir Square on Friday, paying homage to the revolution that allowed him to come to power through the ballot box. The headline item in his speech was the following: “Dr. Muhammad Mursi . . . pledged to secure the release of all political prisoners, saying, ‘I […]

Explanation here..

Jeune Afrique (Young Africa), has a piece on social media in the Arab world. It shows that by volume of tweets, Twitter in the Middle East is dominated by the Gulf oil states, not by the mostly more populous countries of the Arab Spring. The giants of tweeting are Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, with the […]

Health care is essential, and no American should be without insurance to pay for it. But prevention of diseases and injuries is as important as treating them. Since Americans live in a big company town where their banks keep them indebted and paying debt servicing and Big Agro uses them as storage bins into which […]

Life expectancy in the United States by state (2009 statistics): Hawaii has the longest life expectancy among the states, so maybe Obama thought it isn’t normal for people to drop dead young the way they do in South Carolina. (About a fourth of South Carolinians lack health care insurance, and the local elite is committed […]

Nan Levinson writes at Tomdispatch.com: Mad, Bad, Sad  What’s Really Happened to America’s Soldiers By Nan Levinson “PTSD is going to color everything you write,” came the warning from a stepmother of a Marine, a woman who keeps track of such things.  That was in 2005, when post-traumatic stress disorder, a.k.a. PTSD, wasn’t getting much […]

Well, we dodged the bullet of looking like Zimbabwe on this issue. But we still need a single payer system. And the court exempting states from medicaid expansion could leave millions uninsured. (From this site, though I made some changes; China, e.g., at least tries to provide health care to its citizens; and Iraq is […]

As the US Supreme Court rules on the universal health care plan, it is worth considering that all of a sudden the courts are playing an outsized role in the aftermath of the fall of the dictators in the Greater Middle East. One of the concomitants of the outbreak of parliamentary democracy in the Greater […]

Well, we dodged the bullet of looking like Zimbabwe on this issue. But we still need a single payer system. And the court exempting states from medicaid expansion could leave millions uninsured. (From this site, though I made some changes; China, e.g., at least tries to provide health care to its citizens; and Iraq is […]