as soon as I got to the part where Stephanie disdained me because I liked Little Miss Sunshine. It's one thing to have your own opinion, Stephanie, but subscribers go away when you blow snot all over them.

is that total war is total war. That means that every way that one group can hurt or destroy the other group will be used (as in, atomic bombs). When the Allies won the war, they decided that they had also won a moral victory, and we have been subject to propaganda about that ever since the end of the war. But each of the Allies used the cruelties they had at hand--the British firebombed Dresden, et al, the Russians laid waste to the eastern areas and systematically raped German women, and the Americans dropped A bombs. I'm glad the Allies won the war, but I never thought that they were morally pure or that the victory did not exact a terrible cost that has to be reckoned up by each person on his or her own. The leaders of the Allies made a choice after the war to add to their victory with public relations. Everything is always more complex than public relations makes it out to be.

yesterday, and it is truly truly truly an absurdity. There is nothing to be learned here. What a waste of time for JA.

the only actual solution is a revolution.

That the good old Us of A was born out of TWO genocides, not one. That's why white guys get so edgy when they feel any little loss of power. Something could come back to haunt them.

It sounds as though you have been a saint, and that you have learned things about life that are valuable and rare. You rose the the occasion--I'm not sure I could have, and I honor you!

It also seems clear, as a general rule, that interests of the medical industrial complex are NOT the individual's best interests. I remember when I was pregnant, I made up my mind that if the child was very premature, I would simply not go to the hospital. I would give birth on my own, in the old fashioned way, and let nature take its course. It never came to that, thank goodness, but nothing I've ever read about doctors and hospitals has ever made me want to put myself voluntarily into the system. I feel that same way now about terminal illness. CAncer? I plan to smoke dope and pass on.

please ignore Bulls***t the R*****tion. Having never thought an actual thought about anything, he has nothing to say worth saying.

something that has appeared on the Huffington Post that is actually harmful (aside from the autism/vaccine debate, which the Huffpo did not originate). I read the Huffpo all the time, but I never believe a word of the health articles. A lot of what they recommend has an effect because people believe it will--same with a lot of what doctors say (let's talk about those stents that were all the rage eight or ten years ago, and were installed in lots of hearts before the doctors thought better of it). Most of Huffpo advice is about cleaning up or thinking good thoughts, and is not invasive. Not so with the medical establishment (see the New York Times article by Gina Kolata about expensive injections of her own blood into her hamstring). What the Huffpo expresses is that much of health is about belief. That's true of regular medicine,too,but doctors don't like to admit it. Besides, don't you think that much of the flight to alternative medicine has to do with lack of trust for American doctors, who order test after test, procedure after procedure (how I remember my dermatologist giving up his regular practice in favor of botox injections), and still can't offer good public health?

Did you read the article about health care rationing in the NYT magazine a week or so ago? We have rationed health care right now, because everyone who can afford it goes on asking the healthcare system to solve more and more serious problems that were once insoluble and resulted in death. This is a sort of lottery, and for some people it has worked out--they have had wonderful lives full of meaning in spite of grave difficulties. But for others, the lottery has not worked out. The serious condition cannot really be rectified by the healthcare system, and, eventually, the system gives up and kicks the sufferer out, and the sufferer and his or her relatives and friends deal with things as best they can, and they get some sort of meaning out of it, or they don't. But with 6 billion people in the world and counting, with global warming getting worse and the capacity of societies to survive getting more iffy, this lottery is a luxury. The whole abortion debate is a luxury. Eventually, even in spoiled rotten America, abortion will be seen (correctly)as the lesser of many evils, which will include (as they always have) infanticide, abandonment of young and old, withholding of medical care, murder, genocide, forced labor, starvation, you name it. You guys can go on and on declaring that every life is precious, but in fact, every life is not precious--its value depends on scarcity and whether it can support itself. Malthus was actually right, and so was Marx--the world works according to a labor theory of value, and so does the Catholic Church--the more parishioners tithing, the more money for the Pope. THe fact that lots of rightwing Americans prescribe carrying every child to term, and then executing the ones who don't fit in, is perfectly logical in this context, but it's the cruelest way for now. The crueller ways are for later.