Tag Archives: OddBox

Jerusalem the eternal capital of its​ people: Palestinians

Really heartbreaking that people could be denied freedom and belonging to the city of their birth and of the forebears for thousands of years to satisfy the political desires of those who have controlled the city only since 1967!

Trump can think and say whatever he wants. He can plot and conspire. He can continue to walk his oiled path of Saudi and Israeli attempts to force their brutal, evil control over the region and its people. He can think that he can buy the PA and Mahmud Abbas with Saudi money and he can succeed in doing so.

Only a fool will miss out that Jerusalem is enlivened by people that breath it as their means of survival. The relationship between Palestinians and Jerusalem is not that of sovereignty or control. It is a relationship that is based on living itself.

It is hard to explain that to anyone who does not understand what it means to live your life striving a dream of a home. Home is your homeland.

Jerusalem is not just a city. Jerusalem is connected with its people. The stones of the city shine with the sweats of the people that built this city throughout civilizations. And somehow, conquerors came and left. We the people remained.

The fight over Jerusalem is a fight over existence.

It is a fight for life itself.

Trump and his tramps can sit up in those clouds and dream destruction and control.

We people of this city. Take it way to our hearts. To those blood vessels that connect our breath with life. Jerusalem is for its people.

And real sovereignty will always be for the people. It is not the coercive force of occupation. It is not submissive leadership that is drowning in its corruption. It is not a crazy Saudi prince believing that with his money he can destroy all enemies he perceives. It is not an arrogant American president that is racist and imperialist wishing to reclaim white supremacy with his ignorance.

Jerusalem is the cause that we truly live for, and could die for with no hesitation.

Jerusalem is the heart of every single Palestinian…. try to touch that heart.

 

 

 

An Old Killer Arises

Most everyone knows of the problems Viet vets had upon their return from the war zone….PTSD and those damn symptoms of Agent Orange….well a new killer has been discovered after all these years….

A half a century after serving in Vietnam, hundreds of veterans have a new reason to believe they may be dying from a silent bullet—test results show some men may have been infected by a slow-killing parasite while fighting in the jungles of Southeast Asia. The Department of Veterans Affairs this spring commissioned a small pilot study to look into the link between liver flukes ingested through raw or undercooked fish and a rare bile duct cancer, per the AP. It can take decades for symptoms to appear. By then, patients are often in tremendous pain, with just a few months to live. Of the 50 blood samples submitted, more than 20% came back positive or bordering positive for liver fluke antibodies, said Sung-Tae Hong, the tropical medicine specialist who carried out the tests at Seoul National University in South Korea.

“It was surprising,” he said, stressing the preliminary results could include false positives and that the research is ongoing. Though rarely found in Americans, the parasites infect an estimated 25 million people worldwide. Endemic in the rivers of Vietnam, the worms can easily be wiped out with a handful of pills early on, but left untreated they can live for decades without making their hosts sick. Over time, swelling and inflammation of the bile duct can lead to cancer. Jaundice, itchy skin, weight loss, and other symptoms appear only when the disease is in its final stages. The VA study, along with a call by Sen. Chuck Schumer for broader research into liver flukes and vets stricken with the cancer known as cholangiocarcinoma, began after the AP raised the issue last year. About 700 veterans with cholangiocarcinoma have been seen by the VA in the past 15 years.

Just great!  As if these vets did not have enough on their shoulders…..now this….

May you all have a good Sunday…..be well, be safe…..chuq

يا ستي يا ختيارة…يا زينة كل الحارة

Bless them now

جدتي …..

 

يصادف هذا الشهر الذكرى الاربعين لوفاة جدي. كل هذه الذكريات التي احملها بين طيات عقلي وفي وجداني لهذا الرجل لا تتعدى الستة. كم كانت مفاجأة ، ادراكي لقصر السنوات التي قضاها جدي في حياتي. ومع هذا لم يفارقني. وفهمت لم لا تحمل ذكراه الكثير من المعاني بالنسبة لاخواتي ، فاذا ما كنت ابلغ من عمري الستة سنوات ، فكانت التالية من اخواتي ابنة الرابعة .

كان جدي ولا يزال يجسد معنى الرجل في ابهى صوره . الوقار، القوة، العطف والكثير من السطوة.تلك السطوة التي تربينا على اهميتها . تلك الاقرب الى ان تكون سطوة ربانية لا يقترب منها احد.






وبينما يذكرني والدي منذ اشهر باقتراب يوم وفاة والده ، والحاجة لكتابة رثاء ما في الذكرى الاربعين. كنت ابتسم بداخلي واقول ، ما الذي بقي من ذاكرة لرجل لم اعرفه الا ست سنوات من عمري البعيد ؟

وجدت نفسي طوعا امام جدتي ، تلك المرأة التي ترملت وكانت ربما في مثل عمري اليوم. الا انها كانت دائما كبيرة . لا اعرف كيف تتركب الشخصيات في عقولنا ، ولكن جدتي كانت دائما كبيرة . جدتي تشبه شجرة الزيتون العتيقة . منذ صغري وانا ارى في شجرة الزيتون تجسيدا لهذه المرأة. لم تكن اي شجرة. كان هناك شجرة في بيتنا على زاوية البستان التي كانت تعتني به وجعلت منه جنانا حقيقية . كنت اتأمل تلك الزيتونة واراها من خلالها . يدها تحمل الفأس تنبش التراب وتقص الاغصان . وتنادي علينا بأعلى صوتها لنساعدها ونهرب.

في هذه المناسبة ، قررت انه من الاجدى الكتابة عن الاحياء . لماذا ننتظر الموت لنكتشف اولئك القريبون منا ؟

وجدتي هذه الذي تحملت حياتها كما الزيتونة، تأقلمت ولم تكف عن العطاء بلا كلل . تحملت ولم يكن لسان حالها الا القوة والعنفوان .

لجدتي في ذاكرتي ما يفوق الاربعين عاما من الذكريات الحقيقية . عمر كامل كانت متواجدة به . ذكريات الملمها فتملأ خزائن ذاكرتي وتتبعثر في كل الارجاء.

تبدأ ذكرياتي مع جدتي منذ ايام ميلادي الاولى ، تلك التي كانت تدهن جسدي النحيل فيها بزيت الزيتون وتشدني بقماش ابيض لكي يشتد عودي. أقرأ لها اليوم كلماتي عن هذه الذكرى ، فتعيدها في كل مرة قائلة : ” كان سيدك ينادي علينا ويقولنا تعالوا خدوها قبل ما القطة تيجي تاكلها.”

لا يزال وقع اقدامها في الشارع من بيتنا بالرام على التلة الى الشارع الرئيسي يشكل هزة انيقة في الطريق . كعب عالي اسود وساقان ملفوفتان وقوام مشدود الى الاعلى . ماسك بيدي باحدى اليدين وشنطة سوداء محمولة بأناقة في اليد الاخرى ، ووشاح رأس يلتف بخفة على اطراف الشعر. كنا نذهب الى البلدة القديمة ، نمر ببيت العائلة القديم بباب حطة ، ،نقف عند بيت عائلتها المجاور . نتوقف للحديث مع الكثير من الناس بالطريق . ” هاي صاحبتي من ايام المدرسة” ، وتلك زوجة فلان ، وهذه جارة لا اعرف من . وهنا “عيادة الدكتور امين الخطيب جبناكي لما مرضتي مرة” . وقع اقدام جدتي بطريق الالام ، وبزقاق البلدة القديمة من باب حطة لحارة السعدية ولباحات الحرم ، سريعة متوازنة ويدي متلاحمة بيدها تتراكض خطواتي معها محاولة الا افقد توازن لم اكن افهم وجوده .

محفورة تلك الذكريات بوجداني ، تخرج الى متراقصة في كل مرة تطأ قدماي عتبات البلدة القديمة. اعود لاكون تلك الطفلة التي تمسك بيدها جدتها بذلك الكعب العالي الاسود اللميع (ربما).

كان مستوى قامتي يصل الى ساقيها . فتأملت ذلك الحذاء كثيرا ، كما تأملت ساقيها الطويلتين، ولا استطيع فهم حتى هذه اللحظة كيف كانت تمشي بهذه الخفة وذلك الحذاء بطرقات تبين لي عندما كبرت بأنها اقل ما يمكن وصفها بأنها صعبة،وعرة.

ايام الجمعة والصلاة بالحرم والجلوس مع النسوة بقبة الصخرة وتركي للصلاة مع النساء. طفلة تصلي مع جدتها المتفاخرة بها : ” هاي بنت عصام ” .

وفي البيت بين البيوت الكثيرة ذكريات كثيرة مع جدتي . الرام، اريحا، واد الجوز . في كل مكان لجدتي اثر لا يترك. وتراب يتحول الى جنان . لم تكن جدتي فلاحة ، ولكن يديها كغصن تلك الزيتونة تجعل من الحب المتراكم عليها زيتا ذهبيا.

زيت الزيتون الذي تشربه كل صباح كفنجان قهوة.ودخان سجائرها المتطاير من علبة “الفريد”.

حديقتنا كالمدرجات ، في الطابق العلوي كانت البطيخة واليقطينة والفقوس والخيار تتدلى حباتهم واوراقهم على الجدران وتمتد الى اطراف الحوض. بندورة ، كوسا ، فاصولياء ، نعنع . الازهار تتوسط باشكالها الاحواض المختلفة ، ورد بألوان شتى ، قرنفل، ياسمين، عبهرة، قرن الغزال، ومجنونة. شجرة التين، البرتقال، الليمون، التوت، والاسكي دنيا .

اعود بذاكرتي الى هناك وافكر ، كيف حولت بيتا عاديا الى جنة؟

كانت تعمل بيديها ، تحاول اغراءنا ببعض المزايا اذا ما ساعدناه بحفر الارض. الا اننا كنا نتسابق على اخذ مهمة الري، فكانت الاسهل والاكثر متعة.

جدتي الجبارة ، القوية ، لا تزال هكذا وقد تعدى عمرها الثمانين .تركت “الفريد” وصارت سيجارتها المفضلة مرلبورو احمر. لا تتنازل عن سيجارتها وفنجان قهوتها كثير السكر.  انحنى ظهرها ولم تعد قدماها تحملاها كما كانت. انهزمت للزمن واستسلمت كثيرا لاحزان لم تكن لتتركها تسيطر عليها في وقت سابق من عمرها . فقدانها لابنتها بعد ايام من زفافها . دمعة فراقها لم تجف ابدا من عينيها . حزنها رسم تجاعيد على وجهها الجميل في اول عمرها ، وقاومته بقوة عجيبة. صارت الام والاب لرجال واطفال في لحظات . تحولت من زوجة مطيعة لرجل جبار ، لتصبح الام الحاكمة المرشدة، الحماة ، كبيرة العائلة. “الله يرحمه” تقول عن جدي : ” كان يرجع من مصر ويخليني اعمله كرشات “. اداعبها قائلة : ” لربما وجدنا عريس لكلينا ” . تحمر وجنتيها للحظات وترفسني بيدها قائلة : ” اول بختك، كرسي تحتك..”

 

ستي …. تلك الختيارة ، خفيفة الظل ، سليطة اللسان ، اجمل ما في هذه الدنيا من ذكريات ، تجعلها حاضرة باقية، معمرة كشجرة الزيتون. دعواتها مرهم، وحضورها تأكيد على الوجود.   

We Make Technology, Technology Makes Us

Via Flickr.

Medical imaging is responsible for some of the most powerful moments of our lives, from the first glimpse of a growing fetus to the discovery of a tumor. Since the invention of the x-ray in 1895, imaging has become a fundamental part of diagnosis and even how we understand our selfhood.

If we consider the results of imaging to be art, then philosopher Don Ihde, a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at New York’s Stony Brook University, would be one of their most prolific collectors. He is the author of over twenty books, including the 1976 Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound–the first and only phenomenological investigation of the experience of sound–and a follow-up, 2015’s Acoustic Technics.

As a phenomenologist, Ihde studies consciousness. He believes we can interpret our experiences through the confines of not only our brains, but also the audio and visual instruments that mediate them. His next book will focus on how technology and instruments are shaping the humans of the future, just as they have shaped our understanding of humans past. Over a root beer float on the Upper East Side, we talked about echolocation, Vermeer, and Lucy’s skeleton.

Daisy Alioto for Guernica

Guernica: I’m interested in how you started exploring medical imagery.

Don Ihde: A lot of the medical imagery has to do with [my own] biography. I had open heart surgery, I had knee replacements, I had a hiatal hernia, etc. Every time you go for surgery, you get a whole spectrum of imaging. Of course, I’ve been doing research in imaging technology across the board for close to twenty years. When you think about it, medical imaging is actually quite new. The first major medical image was the x-ray in 1895. That was the first time you got imaging of anything that’s in the bodily interior.

Guernica: Versus drawings.

Don Ihde: Yeah. Australian Aborigines have a style of x-ray painting. In the European tradition, you can find these images going back to the Renaissance when people started doing autopsies. But to peer inside a living body—x-rays are the earliest example of those images. Now of course, it’s absolutely amazing. I have probably a dozen CDs of my own imaging, and a couple of times I’ve used them in lectures. At Oxford, I did a presentation called “My Case.” What specialists try to do is get at least three imaging processes that are totally different from each other. Then you can run these through a computer program and make a composite image. In one scenario you suspect a brain tumor, so you image the brain tumor with PET scans, MRIs, and CT scans and create a 3D model. The doctor opens up the skull to excise the cancer, but they can’t see anything. Do you cut out what’s supposed to be in that spot or not? The current story is yes, you believe the images over what you see with your eyes.

Guernica: Is that an actual case, or is it a medical school scenario?

Don Ihde: It’s a sort of urban legend, but the notion is true.

Guernica: The trust in medical imaging is that great?

Don Ihde: Yes. There are several books on the history of diagnosis, and that’s very interesting because, gender-wise, it had long been prohibited in Asia and Europe for male doctors to touch females. So there are periods in history when they created dolls, and the woman would point to the part of the doll where the pain was. Later, post-Renaissance, that taboo disappeared. A lot of the probes were both tactile and acoustic. For example, a doctor might thump an abdomen to see if there was a tumor. You have a long history of changes in diagnosis, from no touching to touching, to assessing acoustics and visuals. But visual is a problem, because if you’re a living being you can’t see beyond the surface of the skin. Now you don’t have that problem. Laparoscopic surgery, inserting a camera into the body, is sometimes called “Nintendo surgery”—the best training for laparoscopic surgeries has actually been video games. A developing field is sonifying cancer. You can acoustically discriminate between healthy and cancerous cells by hearing them. Make the vibrations into sound, and anybody can learn to tell the difference.

Guernica: When you characterize the evolution in diagnosis from visual to tactile to acoustic and tactile, do you see imaging as a return to visual, or do you see it as hypervisual?

Don Ihde: In the eighteenth century, it was very common to think that each of the five senses was discrete and yielded very different data. That period is totally dead. A Jesuit priest named Lazzaro Spallanzani was the first to discover bat echolocation. He saw that bats could fly in the dark and catch a moth. He put wax over the bat’s eyes, but the bats could still catch the moth. If you put wax in the bat’s ears, the bats couldn’t catch anything. So I argue that science would be much richer if it were multisensory. The problem with instrumentation is that instruments, unlike our senses, can be monosensory. Since the discovery of the electromagnetic spectrum—which is really the discovery that all energy coming from something has a wave form—in theory we could image anything along that spectrum. In fact, we don’t, because only certain parts of the spectrum have been instrumentalized. But the new thing is computerization. You can take all the data, the measurement of the frequencies, and transform it into an image.

Guernica: Coming at it from the perspective of a collector or someone who appreciates art, do you foresee a scenario where people will begin to collect these images or audio samples, and they’ll be decontextualized from the medical field?

Don Ihde: When I give lectures on sonifying science, many times there will be artists in the audience who give me samples of stuff they’ve done. There are annual contests put on by some of the top science magazines for best science images. They range from regular photography to the phenomenon of the microphotography of cells. Twenty-first century imaging is largely using microscopic processes. So, for example, you can trap a single atom or a single proton. Two years ago, one of my colleagues was the fourth member of an atom trapping consortium. Unfortunately, Nobel Prizes can only be split by three, so he was the guy who was left out.

Guernica: You’ve kept all of the images from your own cases. Do you keep them because they’re useful to your work, or do you have an instinct to save them for other reasons?

Don Ihde: I originally kept them because I wanted to use them as examples in what I write. I do, a lot. It’s very interesting because we have no direct experience of our brain. I can’t experience my brain because I’m inside of it. If you’re imaging your brain, you can also find scary things. As one ages, your brain shrinks. And how much it shrinks, and where it shrinks, relates to conditions like Alzheimer’s and dementia.

Guernica: Do you think that having recordings and imagery that help us experience our own brains has a philosophical impact?

Don Ihde: It clearly has. My thesis with Philosophy of Technology: An Introduction is that we make technologies, and, in turn, technologies make us. There is a notion in design of designer intent. Why was the lead pencil invented? Well, the inventor of the lead pencil wanted it to be a marking machine. The dominant function of a pencil is writing, but I remember going to a one-room public school, where one of my bullying friends stabbed me with a lead pencil. I remember reading about a court case where a man tried to stab a judge with a pencil. There are Google pages full of similar instances around the world. It’s obvious that the pencil lends itself to precisely that kind of use. It’s not as lacking in dominance as you might think. I have an article on the fallacy of the designer intent because a lot of designers think they can design uses into technology. You can’t do that.  I use the pen, I make the mark, but the pen is also using me. The pen could be said to be allowing these kinds of marks. I can’t do just anything with the pen. That’s particularly true of imaging.

Guernica: Instruments play a big role in this.

Don Ihde:  The interrelationship is true from the simplest to the most complex. It doesn’t make any difference whether it’s art or science.

Guernica: There were artists who, even before computers, were creating their own coding systems to create analog works based on some ratio, or what we would call a program if it was in a machine. Computer art is really not that new–whether it was the Fibonacci sequence, or whatever other system.

Don Ihde: In the early 2000s, David Hockney produced a book with Charles Falco called Secret Knowledge. It’s about his discovery that many Renaissance painters used a camera obscura to construct paintings. Many in the art history community were outraged by this because they thought it cheapened the art. I happen to be a big Vermeer fan. There can be little doubt that he used a camera obscura. He’s only got something like thirty-nine paintings, and many of them show exactly the same room.

Guernica: So that’s why it was so funny to you, the uproar about the camera obscura.

Don Ihde: I never went into aesthetics. Aesthetics is what philosophers have to say about art, and a lot of them take an analytics position and raise the question, “What is an art object?” As soon as you fall into that trap, an artist is going to come along and say, “That isn’t art—it’s something else.” That’s a hopeless gig.

Guernica: But what about defining beauty? Is it harder to rewrite a definition of beauty?

Don Ihde: I don’t like definitions at all.

Guernica: So you couldn’t be a lawyer.

Don Ihde: Definitions get you into that time trap, and I’m very much more process-focused. Take Lucy, for example. Lucy is famous largely because she has almost a total skeleton. The more sophisticated we get with instruments, the more we can find out. Through CT scans of her skeleton, they now think she died falling out of a tree because of the way her bones are broken. If nineteenth and twentieth century technologies can retroactively transform our bodiment, what then do the technologies we now use do?

 

The post We Make Technology, Technology Makes Us appeared first on Guernica.

10 miles NE of Dover, Delaware

Pretty big shake for Dover!
Category: Information
Bulletin Issue Time: 2017.11.30 21:50:54 UTC
Preliminary Magnitude: 4.4(Ml)
Lat/Lon: 39.184 / -75.378
Affected Region: 10 miles NE of Dover, Delaware
Note: * There is NO tsunami danger from this earthquake.
Definition: An information statement indicates that an earthquake has occurred, but does not pose a tsunami threat, or that a tsunami warning, advisory, or watch has been issued for another section of the ocean. View bulletin

Justice League Is Banned In Lebanon Because Of Gal Gadot (Again)

Surprise, surprise, but the second DC Comics movie released this year will also be banned in our wonderful homeland because Gal Gadot is in it. Again.

Following the mini-national crisis that spilled over internationally with Lebanon becoming the first country in the world to ban Wonder Woman earlier in June because of Gal Gadot’s Israeli background, our censorship bureau is doing the same thing with Justice League, the movie in which Gal Gadot’s character is not front and center.

It seems that after being dormant for many years on Gal Gadot, Lebanon’s censorship bureau is up in full swing, banning anything related to her from being commercially available in the country. After allowing all the Fast & Furious movies she was in, and Batman v Superman (horrible as it was), she has become a persona non grata.

“Justice League” has been officially banned in Lebanon. Unless the DC cinematic universe falls apart, we won’t be seeing any Batman or Superman movie featuring Wonder Woman ever again.

— Anis Tabet (@AnisTabet23) November 29, 2017

Someone needs to tell them that in the age of the internet, her movies are available to stream/rent/download everywhere. I’m willing to bet the same people who were calling to ban Wonder Woman months ago were the first to buy the cheap bootleg DVD when it became available at their nearest pirated DVD store.

Gal Gadot will not pop up from that movie screen, strut an Israeli flag, tell you about her country, and then sing their national anthem. Gal Gadot’s existence in a movie is not a propaganda to her state. She has already gotten paid for the movie, has already made millions off of it, and will be making millions more with the sequel to Wonder Woman, the sequel to Justice League, and other movies that feature her, which will also be banned in Lebanon, of course. This ban is not an opposition to Israel. Israel doesn’t give a rat’s ass about a movie featuring one of its citizens being banned in a small market in a country it’s at war with.

Censorship is not okay in any form. It removes our semblance of a choice because someone decided something is not good for us. It hasn’t been a year since Annabelle was banned because a priest didn’t like something about Christianity in it. Call Me By Your Name, a masterpiece of a movie about a queer boy’s first love, is also banned (of course) from being released in cinemas in Lebanon, and the list goes on. By the looks of it, we will never reach a time when a slice of our population won’t be triggered enough by some form of media not to call for it to be banned for everyone else.

It’s ridiculous that an actor’s background, regardless of what that background is, is grounds enough to ban a movie for everyone in the country. You are horrified by Gal Gadot’s existence? You have the choice to boycott whatever she’s in, and leave others the choice to do so or not. We should not be minions, under the auspices of governmental organizations who dictate what we should be exposed to or not, just because some groups in this country’s defiance struts the hypocritical lines of principles more frequently than the amount of times I’ll be called a traitor after publishing this.

When I wrote about Wonder Woman and some of their people wanted to hang me for treason, I wondered why Gal Gadot is so easy for them to ban, while getting rid of other Israel-affiliated items in their lives is not. The answer was: we boycott what we can. A movie won’t matter. Something with components researched and developed in Israel being banned is a nuisance – such as their iPhone. Let’s stop pretending this is about priorities or principles. This is about PR. With Gal Gadot, Lebanon’s BDS have found an easy target to score small “victories” and call themselves triumphant.

Where do we draw the line at what should be banned in this country because of its association with Israel? Or are we going to keep on cherry picking at battles without knowing the relevance of said battle? How the hell is a movie normalization? It’s because it’s so simple to ban and fight.

Priests, homophobes, backward religious laws, BDS, sheikhs, annoyed politicians, etc… the list of lines any entity in this country has to maneuver to exist is becoming ridiculous, with banning decisions that are always made on the week of a movie (or some other entity) being released. Justice League was supposed to be screened this week. Wonder Woman was banned on the day it was released, dealing huge losses to its distributor in the country, a Lebanese company who was counting on the blockbuster to make a summer profit.

Resist what? At this point, nobody really knows what these bans are resisting exactly. Justice League is a fun movie – it’s sad the Lebanese populace will be missing out, until it’s available for a 1,000LL pirated DVD.

Filed under: Lebanon, Movies Tagged: ban, BDS, Gal Gadot, Justice League, Lebanon

“I moved to Havana after September 11th. I opened up the first…

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“I moved to Havana after September 11th. I opened up the first English language bookstore. It’s been great, but living there has been a major challenge to my introversion. When I lived in New York, I could choose to not interact with people. But that’s not really an option in Cuba. Introversion isn’t really ‘a thing.’ If you’re alone, then something must be wrong. Birthdays are the worst. My friends make me have a party every year. I’ve got to have one slice of cake before I’m allowed to go home. And I have this 86-year-old neighbor named Terasita that always assumes I’m lonely and brings me fritters. I resisted at first because I really value my alone time. I’d lock the doors. I’d turn off the lights. But resistance is futile. They’re so persistent.”

I’ve developed gestational diabetes. And this is why Obamacare…

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I’ve developed gestational diabetes. And this is why Obamacare is important. I have a great plan I pay $97 a month for, I’ve had a high-risk pregnancy with complications, and met my deductible, and now my co-pays are $0. I could not afford this prescription without it. Even with the co-pay, it’s $15.

That’s my insulin. It’s not something I (or my twins) should go without. But the “pro-life” party is cool with that, as long as their donors get tax breaks for their jets. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Affordable Care Act has saved my ass twice in 3 years. Once when I was on Nevada Medicaid, and now, on my Anthem plan. Unfortunately, I have to switch off it because GOP brinkmanship spooked Anthem off the Nevada state exchange. However, I’ve already found a similar plan.

Take away the mandate though, and it all becomes unaffordable. The next person who’s 7 months into a high-risk pregnancy with twins and develops diabetes may not be so lucky.

“Every morning I wake up at 4:45AM just to get to work…

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“Every morning I wake up at 4:45AM just to get to work here in Amsterdam. I’m from the North of the country and I’m actually a carpenter not a construction worker but since to financial crisis it’s hard to get a contract so I take any job I can get. I make long heavy days, I spend a lot of time in traffic but honestly I’m just glad that I have a job.”