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Trumpanization of a Nation

It seems insane that a man who has excellent government health insurance is able to lift himself from a surgeon’s table, hop a plane from Arizona to Washington, D.C. and then cast the Senate’s deciding vote opening the opportunity to strip healthcare protection from everyday citizens; but this is the world now in which we hurl, where the sky is green, and the Grim Reaper is now the Giver of Life, and facts are lies, and the truth isn’t published anywhere, and can never be known — because nothing is understandable, and everything else is just all made up to set up the next spin of a still life into a grave.

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Beware the Ides of February: Your Identity Has Been Stolen!

It’s tax season! Beware the Ides of February! Yesterday, Janna and I were disappointed to learn someone filed a tax return in our name. We discovered this identity theft when we diligently filed our 2015 taxes online via TurboTax and quickly learned our returns had not only been rejected by the IRS, but also by the New York and New Jersey tax offices! I later learned if the Feds reject your return, the States, in turn, will automatically reject your return, too. That’s good there’s some sort of communal, emergency, trigger that is in place for this homegrown brand of unsophisticated, commonplace, thievery.

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From Wrist to Hand and Back Again: Apple Hands You a Future as Your iWatch Watches You

I love it when Apple unwittingly, but always purposefully, hands us our future — for a steep admission price. Watching our new watch-centric Futureworld unwind yesterday — in the din from a bright new set of iPhone 6 twins — was a surreal and foreboding experience. Apple takes us by the hand and we lovingly follow, and play along, all while paying up — and we believe we’re all better for it in the effervescent end; but are we?

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The Wounding of Surprise and the Danger of Imagination

Surprise and imagination can be both wonderful experiences and dangerous concepts.  We’re trained early in life to find surprise in the world around us, usually juxtaposed against the wilds of nature. We are often encouraged to “think outside the box” and to reimagine reality in ways that can fundamentally change the way we view the world and our role within it. Nothing is out of reason. Everything is possible.

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Is Compassion a Melting Virtue in a Modern World?

Compassion — or the lack of it — has been a recurring theme on this blog recently, perhaps understandably as we do not shy away from topics that raise questions about the behaviour of society and in particular those who govern us.  The absence of compassion is evident worldwide — it is not confined to one country or one group of people — it is universal.

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If the Electoral College Were Abolished

The original formation of the Electoral College for the purpose of selecting the President and Vice President of the United States once every four years had very solid reasoning behind it. There was a fear that people had poor access to information and that they would perhaps be biased to vote for whomever was running for the office from their state, and so there would be a number of people representing each state and no real decision made about who should be the next president. That may have been fine for that time period, but we are living in an age of information that is readily available — even if that information is about what the housemates of Big Brother are doing at any given time.

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The Face of Medicare Fraud

I have heard over the last couple of years a number of ideas about why the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, affectionately known as Obamacare by its enemies (side note — if you hear someone refer to it as this, you can be assured that their arguments will be heavily one-sided and based more on talking points than reality) is a bad idea. Some of them include the notion that people will, out of greed, opt to pay a penalty for not having insurance and then get it when they absolutely need to do so based on knowing they will not be denied due to a pre-existing condition. Another is the argument that since Medicare is bloated and not functioning as is, introducing reform will do nothing to help it.

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