Meteors

Two comments from a thread on FireDogLake discussing hunger in America and the Leonid meteor shower currently taking place:

Crystal clear here in central Texas. Much ambient light makes it about 2 visible meteors every 5 minutes. Still very cool...

For us household income is down by more than half in the last 5 years. Both of us are under-employed and now, because of age, that is irreversible. Health insurance costs forced a choice late this year and now one of us is uninsured. Both of us are well and have between us seen a doctor only 3 times in the last 2 years. Insurance declined to pay for the office visits because the provider billed the clinic as a hospital. So in spite of being payed over $26,000.00 over the 2.5 years of the policy they would not pay the only $400.00 ever submitted for payment. Great system.

The bottom line is this; a once solid middle class family is on the brink of ruin as a result of economic mismanagement begun under Reagan and relentlessly carried on by every administration since. The saddest and most disturbing thing is, we are not an anomaly. We are average.

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I could go out and star-gaze for a bit, but I don’t think it’s strong enough medicine to make me forget. I haven’t had a job in nearly two years, have had cancer and been dropped by the good folks at Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield. Yet I am one of the lucky ones, I am not “food insecure”. Thank You Bill Clinton for NAFTA, and Blue Dog Democrats for voting with Republicans during the Bush years; thus contributing to our current state of affairs that allows for 1% of the population to control 95% of the wealth. And thanks to this current crop of do-nothings for raising my hopes only to leave me with one of the biggest let downs of my life. This situation calls for a jug of rum and some Xanax.

It's a sunny day in the Twin Cities. I am updating my 2004 Wiscon speech on "Writing Science Fiction during the Third World War," which was a somewhat grim look at contemporary world conditions. I have been collecting new data for the essay and posting much of it on my blog, so I don't lose track of it. This explains a lot of somewhat grim blog entries.

Taken all in all, I am in a good mood. Congress and the Administration are looking at another stimulus package, which is very good news.