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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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Where is Education on the Campaign Trail?

The United States is not doing so well when it comes to the state of education — in terms of world ranking, it is absolutely abysmal — barely scoring 500 out of 1000 points in such crucial subjects as math, reading, and science. You would therefore think that in this election year, candidates and the current President up for re-election would have at least some focus on education, stressing what they are planning on doing to fix our badly ailing school systems and to bring the students in the United States to a higher level of educational accomplishment.

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