IN CONGRESS. July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

WHEN in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.

WE hold the Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness – That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that when any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security. Such has been the patient Sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the Necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The History of the present King of Great-Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public Good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing Importance, unless suspended in their Operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the Accommodation of large Districts of People, unless those People would relinquish the Rights of Representation in the Legislature, a Right inestimable to them, and formidable to Tyrants only.

He has called together Legislative Bodies at Places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the Depository of their public Records, for the sole Purpose of fatiguing them into Compliance with his Measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly Firmness his Invasions on the Rights of the People.

He has refused for a long Time, after such Dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the Dangers of Invasion from without, and Convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the Tenure of their Offices, and the Amount and Payment of their Salaries.

He has erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their Substance.

He has kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies, without the consent of our Legislatures.

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a Jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our Laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from Punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all Parts of the World:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us, in many Cases, of the Benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended Offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an arbitrary Government, and enlarging its Boundaries, so as to render it at once an Example and fit Instrument for introducing the same absolute Rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with Power to legislate for us in all Cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our Seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our Towns, and destroyed the Lives of our People.

He is, at this Time, transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the Works of Death, Desolation, and Tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and Perfidy, scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous Ages, and totally unworthy of the Head of a civilized Nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the Executioners of their Friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic Insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions we have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble Terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated Injury. A Prince, whose Character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the Ruler of a free People.

Nor have we been wanting in Attentions to our British Brethren. We have warned them from Time to Time of Attempts by their Legislature to extend an unwarrantable Jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the Circumstances of our Emigration and Settlement here. We have appealed to their native Justice and Magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the Ties of our common Kindred to disavow these Usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our Connections and Correspondence. They too have been deaf to the Voice of Justice and of Consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the Necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of Mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace, Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the Rectitude of our Intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly Publish and Declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that they are absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political Connection between them and the State of Great-Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which INDEPENDENT STATES may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

Happy Anniversary to me

No, nothing so important as a wedding, just my presence here.

I let my anniversary here pass without comment. It’s been just over 1 year of somewhat irregular blogging. Note the two weeks since the last entry. I started this as a way to let people come and check on my status on their own time. So this has been a blog of mostly medical history and updates with some eclectic musings thrown in. With a couple of exceptions I have not posted political entries. Not that I haven’t written any, I just didn’t post them. I wanted to keep this a less intense place.

That may have led to this also being a somewhat uninteresting blog.

Now, I intend to keep posting medical info and medical status entries. I want anyone who knows me to be able to keep up to date. I also want anyone who wanders in here to see anything I can post that might help.

I also need to keep moving on with things. So, I am going to keep blogging with whatever regularity I can manage. I’ll keep the status updates going as well as medical info and also whatever else I happen to be up to. Whenever I can I’ll throw in anything interesting that I come across and fun stuff and news updates.

I have another anniversary coming up in July which I hope to use for productive ends. We’ll see.

That’s all for now. I just didn’t want the year to pass totally unremarked.

It's green

My neighborhood is turning into a jungle. It has been raining so much here that the vegetation is getting out of hand. Personally I can’t really take care of it myself anyway, but my more able-bodied neighbors are also being overwhelmed. There are green things everywhere.

It’s actually kind of nice, but boy is there a lot of stuff growing out there. And is it ever wet.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go make sure there are no triffids.

I’m tired of the games

The Following Is a Political Rant on Health Care – consider yourself warned

I don’t want to hear anyone – President, administration personnel or member of either chamber of Congress – say anything about health care reform unless they are saying that the bill they are proposing guarantees health care for every citizen of the United States.

That’s it. No convoluted plans, no compromises. Every person in this country deserves health care as a fundamental right. It’s embarrassing that we have the most expensive but least effective coverage of the world’s leading industrialized countries (and some of the poorest counltries). Think about it: a foreign army threatens, sure we’ll save you; your house is burning down, sure we’ll put it out; someone is burgling your house, the police will be right there; you’re dying of a curable disease but can’t afford the treatment, sorry, maybe we’ll send flowers. Who does that make sense to?

I want the minimum level of care tied to what members of Congress get (which is paid for by our tax dollars). In other words, no member of Congress or their family can have better coverage than the lowest level of coverage available to an average citizen. Guaranteed, birth to death.

If we must maintain the for-profit health insurance model, then every American should get a subsidy to pay for insurance. I don’t give a damn if insurance company executives can’t make millions, we are talking about peoples’ lives here. This affects health and emotional and financial security. The fact that any citizen of the United States must choose between food and prescriptions, or rent and a doctor visit, is obscene.

Don’t bother telling me that we can’t afford to have a government bureaucrat making decisions about our health care. For one thing, it seems to be fine to have this done for people on Medicare or Medicaid and for veterans – you know, the people who put their lives on the line for us. For another, I have insurance company bureaucrats who personally profit from denying benefits making those decisions now so how would it be worse?

And stop throwing out lame ideas like taxing benefits or taxing sugar and tobacco to pay for this. Raise the marginal rates on income over $500,000. Tax stock transactions, say $0.25 per transfer, to pay for the bailouts to recover that money. Fuck the hedge fund managers and tax their income as income, not as capital gains. Why someone earning billions pays 15% tax and someone earning $50k has to pay 22% is beyond me. And the effective rate on corporations in this country is 0%, how about we make that more equitable so the average citizen doesn’t have to pay for everything?

Any plan to further cut Medicare and Medicaid is also outrageous. Medicare administration has already been farmed out to private companies. That’s tax dollars from a non-profit government agency being funneled to third party administrators. An additional layer of unnecessary administration has been added whose only job is to cut benefits so they can show a profit. That is criminal.

Don’t forget, we already subsidize healthcare. For every emergency room visit that can’t be paid for, for every indigent care case, for every person without health insurance, the insurance premiums and hospital fees are pushed up to cover the loss.

Yes, I am bitter and royally pissed. Everyone in Washington is playing political games with this. This is much more than a political power play. This is a game that affects peoples’ lives. To fight against health care is to support insurance company policy that harms lives and has lead to deaths. All for the sake of profit.

Also, please remember that the network of Blue Cross/Blue Shield plans were originally not for profit, and they made tons of money and the executives made huge salaries.

All that we have now is a system of for-profit insurance that can be arbitrarily cancelled and emergency rooms nationwide that are strained to the breaking point, with many closing and leaving the community they served with no place to turn for help. To believe that this constitutes a working health care system is delusional or at best wishful thinking.

We need change – now where have I heard that hollow statement before? We need it now. This is a moral imperative. People are suffering and dying because of our collective actions. I don’t know what to do beyond this here and annoying my Congress critters, which I do routinely. Any suggestions?

One more thing: health insurance is not health care. The current conversation is focused on insurance and forgets the people who need care.

Fair warning

I started this blog so that people I know could find out what was going on with me at their convenience and not by me sending out long, boring emails. But I also wanted to use it to just get information out there in the ether so that it could be found by anyone else who had lived through a similar experience. I know the value of learning that you are not the only person to have lived through something, that you aren’t the only person to have an unusual experience, that your life being turned upside down in a spectacular way has actually happened to others – because that means that you aren’t alone even if you never meet the other person.

I have been contacted by other people because of things I have put on-line. So I am going to keep posting things about myself that are not pleasant experiences. Some of it is old stuff – nothing I’ve posted before, just not necessarily a recent experience, but I want it out there for people to see just in case it might help.

Just so you know. I’ll probably have something up in a day or two.

The hits keep coming

I just though that I’d add one last update on my car. The repair shop is only about 4 blocks from home, so it wasn’t until a couple of days after the repairs that I found out that the air conditioner wasn’t working. I hadn’t thought to ask them to check that.

Now, for me, an air conditioner is a necessity; I can’t breathe in the summer without one. If it had been October I might have let it slide for a while, but summer is just getting started. For me, with my lungs, having a car without a/c is like not having a car.

So, ka-ching! I got me a new compressor. Oh well, them’s the breaks. My other bills can just wait. At least I have a working vehicle again to take the strain off of the other car.

The penguin is gone

Or in other words, there’s nothing on the telly.

My TV is no longer useful. It works just fine, but there’s nothing left to watch. I have a Sony Watchman that I received as a gift more than 20 years ago. It’s a clunky little thing with a 1.5 inch black and white image and I’ve always thought it was pretty cool. Oh, it was surpassed in functionality as the technological times rolled on, but when it came out in the 80s it was leading edge in consumer electronics.

I was always amazed when I would take it out over the years and find that it was still working. I didn’t use it much, more recently for the fun of it and because of the impending loss of signal, but it was nice to have around. It was a neat gadget.

Now I can’t use it anymore. There are a few low power stations still broadcasting in analog in the area, but the only one of those that I can really get a decent image and sound on is a shopping channel.

Well, it was fun while it lasted. I’m just sad that the TV still works but the times have passed it by. Profit has overwhelmed technology. Everybody with a voice in the matter wanted broadcast TV to go digital and so it did. Now I have a relic. At least I’ll save on the batteries.

Maybe I’ll add a new, digital, color TV to my wish list. After all, you have to have something to use to sit outside and watch the game on. OK, the 1.5 inch projected Watchman image was not really good for watching a game (I used it for news and weather mostly) but I can go for an upgrade, can’t I?