tuning out

Every once and a while i do a piece on connecting.  i usually detail some method we can all use to get closer to nature, get closer to each other or something we can use to try to get along.  i like to talk about how some do it naturally while others have to work hard at slowing down and tuning in.  i write about others lucky like me who realize most of the time they are connected and only notice the other world when something happens to disturb the tranquility.

Well this week my neighbor has been bulldozing a new driveway access.  The contractor brought up two heavy bulldozers that are either hard at work or idling during down time all day long, starting at the crack of dawn.  The neighbor was kind enough to warn us ahead of time that they would be working and that they hoped it wasn't going to be too much of a bother.  All of us neighbors said no problem, we understand, we won't cause any problems without really comprehending what the distraction would mean in real terms.

Noisy is not an apt description to describe the top of the hills new reality.  The heavy equipment squeaks, squeals, sounds like grating metal with high pitched chalk board sounds and it blocks out any other natural sound with its overly loud engine roar. To say it has disturbed the wild life and myself and the rest of the neighborhood is the least of it.

For over a week now every time the driver spends some down time thinking about the job or just taking a break we all breath a sigh of relief.  Everything gets a little quieter, you can hear the birds, hear the wind, and listen to the pleasant roar of the ocean over the idling engine.

When he gets back to work the dogs give me this long lingering look as if to say, "What!  Its not over yet, you mean we still have to suffer through this excruciating noise, can't you stop it."  i try to tell them with my eyes that when four o'clock rolls around all will go quiet and peace will reign, but they don't believe me.

The reality of this noise has added another dimension to our lives and to thinking about people who live with noise on a daily basis.   How in the world do they cope?

Living in the islands we are blessed with a fairly noise free environment.  It isn't something we contemplate too often unless our day to day living is impacted, like it is now.  But if you live in a city or an urban environment that is heavily populated long lasting noise can have harmful affects on your health.  It can endanger ones life, destroy the ability to hear, and add levels of stress that can create disease.

Noise comes at us from all directions, road traffic, airline noise, indoor and outdoor neighborhood noise and of course natural noise that can also cause problems.  Scientists studying the effect of noise have realized problems with your heart, tinnitus, hearing loss, cognitive impairment, general annoyance and sleep disturbance can be directly linked to high levels of noise.

One study has shown that noise distraction can be more harmful to introverted students than to extroverted students when it comes to study time. Introverted students can experience more difficulty understanding what they are reading in a noisy environment, making failure a real outcome.  Sometimes we don't realize how much background noise can affect our performance in general.

At work, open offices have been shown in two recent studies to clearly show that loud speech distraction is rated by employees as the No. 1 problem that affects their satisfaction and productivity. The two most prominent office acoustical problems are excess speech noise distraction, and a lack of protection for confidential conversations in private offices.  Noise makes workers very unhappy and less productive.

Believe it or not there is a society called the Noise Abatement Society in England that raises awareness and finds solutions to protect, improve and respect the aural landscape for the public benefit, wildlife and marine life.  Now celebrating its 50th year, the Society was established in 1959 by John Connell OBE who successfully lobbied the Noise Abatement Act through Parliament in 1960, establishing noise as a statutory nuisance for the first time.

Luckily, i may only have to suffer through the noise for another week.  If i had to live with a steady stream of traffic noise, sirens, loud music from cars etc. and a whole host of other noises i would definitely go bonkers.

This past week has made me think that maybe some hearing loss is not such a bad thing when bombarded on a daily basis.  Imagine how satisfying life could be if while being blasted with any kind of excruciating noise you could just reach up to your hearing aid and turn it off.




Spend some time listening, tune in to the noise in your life and see how you might reduce it, it could make you healthy.

sources

Last week some questioned whether the bible actually talks about the breath of life.  Here are a few quotes for those wanting sources.

Genesis 2 "7": And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

Ezekiel Ch. 37 "5": Thus saith the Lord GOD unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live:

Job Ch. 33 "4": The Spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty hath given me life.

Psalms 33 "6": By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.

Psalms 150 "6": Let every thing that hath breath praise the LORD. Praise ye the LORD.

Isaiah Ch. 42 "5": Thus saith God the LORD, he that created the heavens, and stretched them out; he that spread forth the earth, and that which cometh out of it; he that giveth breath unto the people upon it, and spirit to them that walk therein:

                               
Any of you reading here know that i'm in favor of a single payer health delivery system.  The landmark legislation that was signed into law this week is a baby step towards that eventual goal,  even baby steps are something we can all rejoice over.

So in the spirit of rejoicing the next six months should see these ten things becoming part and parcel of our health care delivery system.

   1.  No more rescission--You can't lose your insurance because you get sick.

   2.  Children under 19 can not be excluded for pre-existing conditions

   3.  Lifetime or annual caps on coverage are banned

   4.  Adult children may remain as dependents on their parents' policy until their 27th birthday

   5.   Small businesses are entitled to a tax credit for 2009 and 2010, of up to 50% of what they pay for employees' health insurance.

   6.  Adults with pre-existing conditions can buy into a national high-risk pool until the Health insurance exchanges are running. While probably not cheap, they are an improvement over no access and create a bit of a pool of insureds for cost savings.

   7.  Free preventative care --new private plans must cover preventive care services without co-payments and with those services being exempt from deductibles. Free preventive care rules apply to all existing plans by 2018.

   8.  The "donut hole" is smaller but not completely gone yet for Medicare patients, making prescription medications more affordable.

   9.  All insurers are required to publicly post balance sheets and disclose all administrative costs, executive compensation packages, and benefit payments.

  10.  Accelerated funding of community health centers in all 50 states to provide primary care as well as, dental and vision services to people based on a sliding scale based on ability to pay.

And by next January 80 to 85 percent of the money the plans get Must be spent for Health care, not on excessive compensation or operating costs.

Alan Grayson a Democratic Congressman with b**ls who represents Florida already has 80 signed on to a three and a half page bill that allows anyone to buy into Medicare.  Grayson, along with loads of us believe that a public option offers not just another choice but a new kind of choice.
If you are interested in reading the bill you can find it here http://grayson.house.gov/UploadedFiles/Public_Option_Act.pdf

Republicans are already talking about repealing the law.  They are gearing up for a fight that is pea-brained on the face of it.  How in the world is a minority in Congress going to get enough legislators to repeal a piece of legislation that the President in office signed?  Did they forget that he must sign their repeal too?   These legislators are promising to waste your taxpayer money and their time in Washington to do the most ineffectual, impotent, symbolic "work" imaginable.  But I guess their base likes pandering too.  Please, please, pretty please... end the 35% tax credit for small business to ... help...buy...health insurance. 

Really makes you wonder doesn't it.

As more and more of the population wake up to the advantages of this legislation those fighting against it are going to appear more and more ridiculous.

There used to be a bumper sticker that i'll close with.

It will be a good day when sick people get all the care they need, and the government has to hold a bake sale to buy bombs.

love the sin, hate the sinner

Today i had thought i would write about the term “love the sinner, hate the sin.”  i started out by going to numerous web sites collecting information about the various approaches to sin in the worlds religions (some define sin and others don’t believe in sin).  i had been having a back and forth e-mail exchange about what taking away the right to choose to have an abortion meant in broader terms.  The person i was in communication with admitted to being conflicted but was very religious.  One response ended the piece with the above statement which turned our writing away from abortion and towards sin.

i digress a bit here.  i have a friend that married a man who had already given birth to a child that was adversely impacted by the mans genetic makeup.  The birth of this child destroyed his first marriage and the child has spent his whole life in an institution.  The man had a gene that when transmitted to an egg had an end result that left the child a vegetable, needing twenty four hour care.  He had decided he would not father again in order to spare another human the incredible suffering he watched his son endure. 

My friend wanted a child so they consulted with physicians and geneticists to learn more about the chances for a normal child being conceived.  The odds of having a normal child were about 60/40 against.  The man said he would only consider a pregnancy if after the genetic test came back she would abort if the child would be born like the first son.  They agonized over it for years.  She was getting older and wanted to try.  He finally relented, for he loved her and understood her need for a child, but only after she agreed to the abortion should the test come back negative.  She got pregnant waited until she was far enough along to have the amniocentesis and unfortunately the test was bad.

But that wasn’t the worst part of this story.  The worst is yet to come.  She traveled out of town because no one there did abortions.  Her husband went with her to the clinic and as they were approaching it on foot they were bombarded with right to lifers screaming baby killers at them as they walked down the path.  One woman tried to hold her back.  These righteous people had no idea why she was going for an abortion but they knew she was aborting a “living breathing human being” not a horribly defective fetus.  My friend had already made one of the most agonizing decisions any woman could make and those righteous folk just knew better than she that it was a bad one.  They tortured a woman who was already tortured.  She was not a sinner.

i have a mantra i repeat when confronted with that line "love the sinner, hate the sin."  It goes "love the bigot, hate the bigotry" or "love the rapist, hate the rape" or love the "hypocrite, hate the hypocrisy" or...you get what i mean.

Regardless of what the law is affluent women will always find a way to have a safe abortion regardless of whether they have insurance or not, and regardless of what the law says.  They will just fly to wherever they need to go.  This was the case before Roe v Wade and it will be the case if we loose the right to choose.  The ones that will suffer will be the poor while  the molester-enabling, coathanger-selling, health-shattering, woman-hating, forced-pregnancy campaign will be in full force if choice is taken away.

i am in favor of choice.  Its probably pretty obvious if you have read this far.  We have no business second guessing why anyone is having an abortion and our taxes may even be saving a real live “living breathing human being” when the woman’s life is in danger.  It is not our place to decide or to make laws outlawing abortion.  We aren’t God.  The bible has no law outlawing abortion and even states that life doesn’t start until the baby takes its first breath.  You are not a human being until you can breathe on your own according to the bible.

Our job is to make sure abortion happens rarely.  To make sure teenage boys and girls are given enough information to make logical decisions.  Information includes talks about abstinence, condoms, birth control, std’s, AIDS, etc.  If teenagers are informed and can talk openly with their parents about their sexuality, be it homosexuality or heterosexuality the outcomes will benefit society as a whole. 

Telling a teenager to abstain from sex until marriage then throwing them out in the world to battle their natural urges is child abuse in my book.  Give them the tools to make informed decisions and help to reduce the need for abortion but don’t take away a woman’s right to choose.

Remember it is our job to make sure abortion happens rarely, but it is not our job to outlaw it for we are not in a position to know all the details.

On a side note i came across a website that is called “Do something good day”

http://www.dosomethinggoodday.com/

 The Giving Card is marketed by them and tracked by them.  When given the card you are requested to do something good.  Of course you have to buy the card to pass along then you can write in what your good deed was on the website and pass the card along to someone else, which starts a chain of doing good.  It is a nice idea but we can all “Do something good” without having to pass a card along to motivate us.

So if any of this moves you…go out and do something good today.

ideas

In a continual effort to wage peace i would first like to thank all of you  for reading here and ask you to visit change.org and vote to establish a US Department of Peace.  If we took just 2% of the money that goes to wage our wars we could start germinating more peaceful solutions for our quest to spread freedom and democracy.  If the button doesn't say voted after you clicked keep trying until it does.  You will have to sign in.  Go now and then come back and finish reading this piece. http://www.change.org/ideas/view/establish_a_us_department_of_peace

Karen Armstrong started early adulthood in a Catholic nunnery at the age of eighteen.  She remained there until quitting while in graduate school seven years later.  One of her many books details the difficulties she encountered in trying to establish herself outside the nunnery, another with her failure to fit in while inside the nunnery and the rest deal with her unending passion for creating a venue for human understanding

Although she started out devoting herself to God today we find her devoting herself to helping others understand the commonalities of all religions.  She tries to help us understand that all religions give us tools to use to cope with day to day life.

Her most recent work called the "Case for God" is just one of many that "cautions us that religion was never supposed to provide answers that lie within the competence of human reason; that, she says, is the role of logos. The task of religion is "to help us live creatively, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there are no easy explanations." She emphasizes, too, that religion will not work automatically. It is, she says, a practical discipline: its insights are derived not from abstract speculation but from "dedicated intellectual endeavor" and a "compassionate lifestyle that enables us to break out of the prism of selfhood."

In 2008 Ms. Armstrong was invited by TED to give an eighteen minute talk that would then later be voted on.  If you have never been to their site it is a wonderland of highly informed speakers on any topic imaginable  http://www.ted.com/ TED invites speakers from around the world to discourse on their passions for change. She, along with two others, won that year, was awarded $100,000 and asked what she wanted to see happen.  Her goal, she stated, was to establish a "Charter for Compassion". 

In November of 2009 the Charter for Compassion was launched.  i've reproduced the Charter here and if so moved after reading it please go to the web site and sign your name. http://charterforcompassion.org/ i read somewhere that it only takes 10,000 people to get the ball rolling and implement new ideas.  The site has over 40,000 signatures from people you will recognize and those you won't.

Charter for Compassion
The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.

It is also necessary in both public and private life to refrain consistently and empathically from inflicting pain. To act or speak violently out of spite, chauvinism, or self-interest, to impoverish, exploit or deny basic rights to anybody, and to incite hatred by denigrating others—even our enemies—is a denial of our common humanity. We acknowledge that we have failed to live compassionately and that some have even increased the sum of human misery in the name of religion.

We therefore call upon all men and women ~ to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion ~ to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate ~ to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures ~ to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity ~ to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings—even those regarded as enemies.

We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world. Rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries. Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensible to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community.

Please go to the web site and sign your name.
http://charterforcompassion.org/

free market

Why do we convince ourselves that there is some profound truth in the words "free market"?

We are a conglomeration of laws that work for and against the idea of a "free market".  Purists believe that without regulation the market will sort itself out.  Certainly economic entities will sort themselves out but is it in a manner that is conducive to actually doing business that will positively impact the bulk of society and our nation as a whole? That will "raise" everyone up?

Or will greed rule?  Will we have whole levels of society relegated to slave wages because a "free market" will seek out the lowest payment for services rendered.

Today we have a managed economy not a "free market" because without regulations the greedy would ride roughshod over all of us.  Coercion would rule.  They would manipulate things in their favor and create environments for sucking out every bit of profit available. 

Our failure, over the past decade, to monitor the unregulated in our financial markets is a direct result of a belief in the myth of "free markets".  Recently the natural checks and balances of a "free market" failed to materialize until a catastrophe of unimagined proportions descended upon the worlds intertwined economies.
All governments around the world had to intervene to prevent total collapse of the "free market".

Is there such a thing as a "free market"? 

The closest you can get to a "free market" is what we have today and understand as a "managed market" or a "mixed economy".  Not a socialized economy.  For government doesn't run all aspects of the economy.

Most conservatives believe Adam Smith's strong support for the "Free Market" implied that Smith wanted no regulation. The reverse is true. Smith felt that, to have a functional Free Market, a great deal of regulation was required. Caps on interest rates and a complete separation from government are amongst his most oft-repeated necessities for his Market.  But the myth of the Adam Smith "free market" that goes unregulated lives on.

Conservatives support unregulated markets based on a misunderstanding of Smith.  Adam Smith was a staunch supporter of the regulation of corporations and felt that they should be excluded from political participation entirely.  (Unfortunately our Supreme Court Justices just recently voted in favor of giving corporations free reign in our political process).  Today we can look forward to political manipulation by corporations interested in controlling their market environments and increasing their profits.  For a free reign in the political process means votes and corporations owe no allegiance to any nation.  If you think this is a country devoted to "We the people" get over it.

There is a term in the study of economics called the Pareto efficiency which states that in an economic system the "inefficient implies that a certain change in allocation of goods (for example) may result in some individuals being made "better off" with no individual being made worse off, and therefore can be made more Pareto efficient through a Pareto improvement." Wikipedia

A Pareto improvement is compensation made to balance the imbalance when there are only some individuals being made "better off".  (Ex. Infusion of government money into the economy to stimulate jobs.)

In an ideal "free market", of which there is none and can never be one, the Pareto efficient should work to raise all participants in the economy.  In reality it has been demonstrated mathematically that, in the absence of perfect information or complete markets,(how can anyone have perfect information?) outcomes will generically be Pareto inefficient meaning some will be better off but most not.

Today we see this with our high levels of executive compensation, homeless, the unemployed, our stagnating wages, and lack of jobs.  "Free markets" require government intervention when they have "failed". Why?

 "Because no national economy in existence fully manifests the ideal of a free market as theorized by economists, some critics of the concept consider it to be a fantasy - outside of the bounds of reality in a complex system with opposing interests and different distributions of wealth." Wikipedia

What do you think...is the term "free market" a fantasy?

According to Lenny Flank "We now live in a global corporate planet—World, Incorporated. “Nations” are merely wholly-owned subsidiaries."