In today’s issue: Violent bigotry in Israel that doesn’t have to do with Palestinians, the fears of old people, and there’s a tad more ice in the Northwest Passage this year.
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In an incident that is being described as “criminal, rather than nationalistic”, a gunman opened fire on a support club in Tel Aviv, Israel, that is frequented by under-age members of the gay community in that city. Two people were killed in the rampage with at least another eight hurt. The city went into lockdown mode after the shooting, something usually reserved for terrorist attacks.
Citing witnesses, Israeli television said a black-clad, masked gunman stormed into the Tel Aviv Gay and Lesbian Association building and opened fire in a basement room where teenage homosexuals were holding a weekly support group.
Most of the casualties were minors, the police spokesman said, adding that the assailant was believed to have used an automatic weapon such as an M-16 rifle.
“This is an unprecedented event for Israel and for the community,” association director May Pamel told Channel 10 TV.
“We have joined the roster of ‘civilized’ countries where hatred is the standard.”
With all due respect to the mayor of Tel Aviv, Israel has been on that roster for quite some time. That said, what is more accurate here is that the bigoted hatred directed against the homosexual community around the world knows no borders, boundaries, limits, cultures, races, or religions. To varying extents in different places, the hatred exists, and only dialog will help it along in the future. Until then, though, things like this can and will happen.
Or to put it in another short, blunt way: chalk another one up for religious ignorance.
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During the month upcoming, there will be many vicious attacks on the concept of government run health care in this country – even though we already have such coverage for seniors. The attacks will be severely lacking in logic and will easily be able to be debunked with fact. Those attacking, pretty much entirely coming from conservatives, will try to spread the most audacious rumors possible to plant the worst doubts in peoples’ minds – hoping that such things will create a groundswell of pro-status-quo support that will kill this legislation when Congress comes back from their break in a few weeks.
The most popular attack so far? The government is going to kill granny. No, really:
A campaign on conservative talk radio, fueled by President Obama’s calls to control exorbitant medical bills, has sparked fear among senior citizens that the health-care bill moving through Congress will lead to end-of-life “rationing” and even “euthanasia.”The controversy stems from a proposal to pay physicians who counsel elderly or terminally ill patients about what medical interventions they would prefer near the end of life and how to prepare instructions such as living wills. Under the plan, Medicare would reimburse doctors for one session every five years to confer with a patient about his or her wishes and how to ensure those preferences are followed. The counseling sessions would be voluntary.
But on right-leaning radio programs, religious e-mail lists and Internet blogs, the proposal has been described as “guiding you in how to die,” “an ORDER from the Government to end your life,” promoting “death care” and, in the words of antiabortion leader Randall Terry, an attempt to “kill Granny.”
What is really needed in this country is an honest, useful debate on serious healthcare reform that is desperately needed. What we look to see, instead, is making the debate as useless and straw-man as possible, to the point where it might destroy chances at real and actual reform. It’s not about the 300 million people, of course, it’s only about scoring political points for the next electoral cycle.
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The summer here in the Great Lakes continues to be rather cool. The Atlantic hurricane season has yet to begin, despite it being the beginning of August. In general it seems a bit cooler – at least in this part of the world (heat waves on the west coast notwithstanding). With that mind, this from the Canadian Arctic might seem a bit more plausible:
Despite predictions from a top U.S. polar institute that the Arctic Ocean’s overall ice cover is headed for another “extreme” meltdown by mid-September, the Environment Canada agency monitoring our northern waters says an unusual combination of factors is making navigation more difficult in the Northwest Passage this year after two straight summers of virtually clear sailing.
In both the wider, deep-water northern corridor and the narrower, shallower southern branches of the passage, the Canadian Ice Service says pockets of more extensive winter freezing and concentrations of thicker, older ice at several key “choke points” are complicating ship travel.
It’s a little scary to realize that with just two ice-free summers in the books along the Northwest Passage shipping companies are already getting used to the available route, even more so that shipping interests (along with a whole host of others, just ask Russia) are just waiting to exploit the newly-free Arctic ocean for whatever it might have – it being one of the last untapped areas of the world. Right now the news and notes about the area only seem to deal with shipping and the Northwest Passage, but if this trend continues it will be very likely we will live to see a new ‘land’ rush – claims of the Arctic seabed for resources that might be there. That is a potential conflict that will pit resource-hungry America in direct competition with the European Union and Russia, with a Canada in the background that might feel used and abused of its natural resources in a couple of decades.
