Boo-yay!

If you look at the logo for Google today (and when are they going to start putting the special event logos on the ssl page? It can't be that hard), you will see a cosmonaut looking into space.

It was fifty years ago today Yuri Gagarin took man beyond, ""the surly bonds of Earth†, by flying in Vostok, in a sub orbital flight‡ that no one today would have allowed to get off the ground (they had to take parts of the system out to get the weight down. Then a booster failed to cut out. He was off course, had to bail out and was about 1125 miles from where he was supposed to land, as Patrick (see below) said, He was a badass). I Grew up with man going into space (one of my earliest memories is of the moon landing. It's fuzzy in my mind (I was really young) but it's there.

Patrick Neilsen Hayden, on Making Light pointed to a most wonderful celebration of humanity in the midst of all the other things going on.


I defy you to go, and watch that clip (you should hang out and follow the conversations too) and not be moved. I was a giggling, giddy, bleary-eyed wreck by the end of the second time (music hath to charms to soothe the savage breast, and I've had more than a few things which music has shaped, colored, or fixed in my mind). The sheer wonder of what is going on in that clip... even with the affected bits at the end... You couldn't plan this, you couldn't make it up and there is no way to fake the moment... it's...

Oh hell, stop reading this and go watch it.






†Gagarin died in a manner similar to McGee's, accidents in airplanes

‡ This link goes to a play by play of Gagarin's flight, with video from the ISS. They had some technical troubles, but that's only fitting.

Pissed on, and pissed off

Recently I got a letter from the President, asking me to vote for him a year and-a-half from now. I don't figure that sending a direct response is going to do me, or the nation, much good, because it would be one citizens voice, and even it is one citizen who votes, it doesn't mean much right now, when he's looking at a billion dollars to fund his campaign, and a field with Donald Trump helping to set the terms of debate.

Today, I found out he's planning to do what Bush didn't. He's going to put Medicare, and Medicaid, on the table for cuts.

He's blinking. He's drunk the Kool-Aid of the "Centrist" wing of American politics. This kills what little of the health care reform we need, he managed to get passed. It was passed (in a terrible form) with the people who wanted more saying they voted for it so that there would be a framework to build on.

This idea isn't building. It's undercutting the entire idea. LBJ got Medicare passed because seniors were dying for lack of care. They had no care because insurers refused to cover them. It was too expensive. So, because we aren't taxing the companies who aren't paying workers enough (wages in the US are stagnant) we are told the system is so broken we can't afford to do what every other country in the Western World (and a lot who aren't, Venezuela, Cuba, Iraq) manage to do... provide health care for our citizens.

The richest country in the world (as I keep being told) can't do what the not-so-rich manage.

This isn't going to fix a thing. The Republicans don't want to "trim the fat" they want to kill it dead. The way to trim the fat is to admit that some things (infrastructure) aren't run well on a for profit basis. Healthcare is, perhaps, the most obvious example of this. Places with a national healthcare, manage to provide more bang for the buck, a lot more.

There are no, "death panels" in England. England paid for Steven Hawking (a nobody at the time) when he was diagnosed with an illness that costs millions, in a lifetime to ameliorate (it's not curable). Blue Shield would have let him hit his lifetime cap for catastrophic coverage (if he had any) and said, "Sorry...."

I don't know what chunk of every dollar goes into the pockets of the executives, but I know that some has to go to the corporate bureaucrats who decide if the procedures are going to be approved, and others who decided who to bill (and then track the billing) and others who review records to see if they can cancel a policy; that doesn't cover the people who have to chase all of that down in the doctors' offices.

That's what doing it for profit costs. Corporate death panels; not based on need/outcome, but based on cost.

I have an open letter to him in the works. I need to finish it, but if he does this, my qualified support just got weaker, and any challenge to him, from inside the progressive tent, who chooses to run under a Democratic flag, is going to get my attention. If that person is like Edwards, or Dean, that candidate will get my money. Might even get me going door to door. I didn't elect Obama because I wanted Bush Lite. I voted for him because he proposed a different way of doing things.

He needs to shit, or get off the pot.