America

Sarah Palin Is Unhappy

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Suffer and roar, Sarah Palin:

Oh yes, freedom was snuffed out in America at precisely 10.08AM ET, when the US Supreme Court released their ruling in favour of ObamaCare. No more freedom anymore, only slavery and socialism. Right.

Actually, no. Agree with ObamaCare or not, nothing has really died in America today apart from the things that Sarah Palin has been busy killing since she first rose to prominence – no more nuance or context, just black & white, right & wrong, hysterical overreaction, mean-spiritedness and all of the other heartwarming traits that we can reliably expect from the former governor of Alaska and Vice-Presidential candidate.

Sarah “Death Panel” Palin’s opposition was almost reason enough on its own to support the Affordable Care Act.

Suffer and roar.

ObamaCare Survives The Supreme Court

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Breaking News – the United States supreme court has upheld the contested parts of the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), ruling it constitutional, in a blow to Republicans who had tried to characterise the bill as a grossly unconstitutional overreach of government power.

I haven’t had a chance yet to see the ruling, but it is hard to see this as anything other than a huge victory for the Obama administration in this election year, given the fact that the health care law is widely viewed as his signature domestic achievement and the fact that so many commentators – including many of those on the left – had predicted that large parts of the bill would be struck down.

My full reaction and thoughts on this developing story will follow in due course.

A Milestone Passed

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The Telegraph reports today on a scientific and technological milestone about to be passed by the human race – Voyager 1, the NASA space probe launched in 1977, is due to become the first man-made object to leave our solar system, the Milky Way:

Scientists launched Voyager 1 in 1977 on what was meant to be a five-year mission to Jupiter and Saturn, however 30 years later the vessel has continued towards the boundary of our solar system 11 billion miles from Earth.

Once the spaceship crosses this border it will enter interstellar space – the void between our solar system and the rest of the universe – becoming the first man-made object to venture beyond our solar “bubble”.

In the newspaper’s own comments section, many readers have been responding with the sentiments either of nostalgia (look what we could do as a species when we put our mind to it in that era) or with happiness (how nice to see a positive story in these difficult times, etc.). One reader, identified only as Hardeep_Singh, summed it up best for me:

“Extraordinary a glimpse of when anything was possible compare that to today’s mindset, ‘fairness’, protest, ‘lessons must be learnt’, etc.”

I know that I am in a small and diminishing minority of those who believe that even in these recession-hit, austere times, we should continue to dream grand dreams, and implement the ambitious programmes to make them possible. But it is my view that our societies cannot be built of just hospitals and schools and roads and bridges and the utilitarian things that bind us to the present; there must be room also for the arts, for medical research, scientific exploits and human-inspired voyages that perhaps don’t have a pre-determined goal in sight (Voyager 1’s mission after Titan was made up on the fly, the craft was not expected to remain functional for so long) but which generate new knowledge and bring back riches for us all nonetheless. I hope that our leaders will remember this, and that it will not fall exclusively to China and the developing world to explore these new frontiers and pass these milestones.

On a much more lowly, terrestrial scale, this article also happens to represent a small milestone in itself – the 100th piece that I have uploaded to this blog. Many thanks to you all, frequent and occasional readers alike, for your time, your comments and your support.

And God speed Voyager 1 on its journey.

Love In A Nursing Home

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

A thoughtful and well-written piece from NPR about the complications and considerations arising when nursing home patients – particularly those suffering from dementia – try to maintain existing or form new romantic relationships:

[Gerontologist William H.] Thomas said that we need to see a shift in our society’s understanding of aging. “We need to normalize the idea that older people are human beings,” he says. “They have the same needs and same desires they had before. Age changes those needs and desires, but they are still there.”

He recommends that adult children talk about the issue of sexuality with their aging parents in nursing homes. “They never thought that Mom would have a boyfriend at the nursing home, but it’s true,” he says. “As we become an older society, this is something that we need to learn to better address.”

I quite agree that these important matters should be discussed between care homes and their patients or those with power of attorney as part of the process for selecting the right care home – it is vital that the staff know how to handle such situations and how to respect the wishes of the patient.

Somehow, I also know that just as the end-of-life care discussion morphed into “death panels”, any discussion of this topic in the US will immediately be hijacked by today’s GOP and mischaracterised as “mandatory orgies for grandma” or something else of the like.

Come Dine With Me, Says Obama

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I wrote yesterday partly about cults of personality, with relation to some of Vladimir Putin’s recent shenanigans. I thought no more of it until I saw this tweet from President Obama’s Twitter feed:

This gushing quote led to this article from the Obama-Biden campaign website, in which a firefighter known only as “Jim” gushes about his excitement at winning a competition to have dinner with the president, and about how “normal” a guy Obama is. Some exerpts:

After walking to the restaurant, says Jim, “There was a lot of excitement. I felt like we were in the middle of the universe. Think about it: You’re in this restaurant, and you know nobody is coming in, you’re not going anywhere, there’s a lot of protection, and it’s for one guy who’s coming to have a meal with you. It’s a wild feeling. Our nerves were still kicking in—but I kept telling everyone, ‘It’s a good nervous.’ I wasn’t so much worried about what I would say to him, because I’ve watched him over the last few months and I knew deep down inside he was going to be a normal guy.”

And this:

“But then, he caught me off guard because he started asking me about being a firefighter! I wanted to know so much about him, but he was such a normal guy who just wanted to have a conversation. He turned to me and said, ‘You’re a firefighter, right? How long have you known you wanted to do that?’ I told him I have a picture of me as a little boy wanting to be a firefighter, and he said ‘Oh, so you’re one of those guys!’ He wanted to know all kinds of things, like how many fires I go into, how many guys do we have at your station, and I thought ‘Here’s the President of the United States, and he’s asking me about my job—this is just so cool.’ He really wanted to know!”

And finally this:

“Thankfully, he was exactly the way I imagined he would be. Like I said, I’ve been watching him, and he just seems so normal, and that’s exactly what he was. I wish I could have sat there for four hours and talked to him—he was just a good guy, normal. You’d never guess you were sitting there with the President.”

I’m pretty sure that he isn’t that normal (average Joe doesn’t typically ascend to the highest office in the land) and that I would guess that I was sitting there with the president if I had been in Jim’s place.

Now maybe I got out of bed on the wrong side today, and I certainly don’t want to pour any scorn on Jim the Firefighter’s evident joy and excitement to have met the president, I think that it is a wonderful thing. But given the fact that political opponents and a lot of more-or-less impartial observers tend to recoil a little at Obama’s tendency to make things about himself, about his taking credit where credit should perhaps be shared, his frequent use of the word “I” in speeches and so on, I’m wondering how wise it is to set up a competition to have dinner with the president, and then publish glowing testimonials from the winners in which they reveal how spellbound they were by his brilliance and normal guy charm.

So is this just a harmless way of re-enthusing the base about Obama’s likeability (given the fact that few people other than committed supporters are likely to see it), or is it part of a faux-pas which plays into a Republican narrative about the president’s ego and supposed cult of personality? I’m not quite sure myself, but if I were Obama’s campaign manager I might look to tone down this particular avenue of promotion. Neither he or Romney are ever likely to be seen as the guy you want to have a beer with (and a good thing too – I would want the leader of the most powerful country in the world to perhaps be a bit too busy and intelligent to want to entertain me over a pint), and I see little point in trying to change perceptions on this front.

Not that it is anywhere near as bad as similar online efforts in less fortunate countries, such as Vladimir Putin’s website for children, discussed in this old article from BBC News online:

On this new website, you can visit Mr Putin’s office – there you’ll find a virtual Vladimir sitting with his back to you – click the cup of tea on his desk, and he’ll answer some important questions.

No, not things like “Does democracy in Russia have a future?” or “When will the conflict in Chechnya finally end?”

Questions like these:

“Are you allowed to touch the President with your hands?” The answer – “no”.

Or “Who’s more important, the President or your mother?” Answer – “your mother”.

And “What should you do if you love the president too much?” Answer – “just calm down.”

Mind you, for those Russian schoolchildren who may already love their president a little “too much”, this site is bound to be a hit.

I think the “Come Dine With Obama” promotion is a little tacky, and that it will ultimately be a futile attempt to make the president seem more in touch with the common man, but at least it’s not like this Kremlin scheme, much as some on the right would like us to believe that Obama is attempting to recreate Soviet Russia in Washington DC.

On a lighter note, I was also reminded of this rather more humorous riff on the same subject from The Onion, this time about former president George W. Bush.