The Still, Small Voice Inside My Head

Deep inside my head there's a notion stirring, something very, very scary.

I don't know when it started, but it seems that it's been with me a while now. Maybe it started with the birth of my daughter. I don't know. That's just conjecture, a bit of pop psychology, back-of-the-cereal-packet stuff. Truth is, I don't know.

I'd guess it was also born from the observation that the vast majority of people in the western world now seem resigned to the steady degrading of Standards of Anything. The rest of the world always seemed to think that the current Standard of Everything in the west was a bad idea and the sooner we got back to the stone age the better, but the current crop of Clever Young Things seems to have accepted that Things Will Get Worse and that the correct response is to just sit back, watch the TV and accept it, and the Venal Old Things with the power are only too happy to play along.

The voice in my head is whispering that I may be living in what unimaginably far future generations will regard as the Golden Age of Everything, the apex of What Was.

How utterly [Terrifying | Depressing].

Delete as appropriate.

Way To Go, US Govt

The Canadians have a joke that goes like this:

Today there's good news and bad news. The bad news is that our national debt is now 600 billion dollars. The good news is that it is all in Canadian dollars!

There's something to be said for a national siff-upper-lippedness that can make fun of a currency widely regarded as worthless even by it's own users.

I only mention it because I read in the New York Daily News that yesterday the US dollar hit parity with the Canadian dollar (down from about a dollar sixty four a year or so ago). When I mentioned this to a colleague he pointed out that a US dollar only got you around 48 UK pence these days too.

Thirty years ago the same thing happened, a period characterised these days as the height of the worst recession in recent history.

Tell me again how strong our economy is, Mr President, then explain how you can draw that conclusion when nobody values our goods, our people or even our money.

Wond'rin' Aloud

Question the First: If the USA has the best health care system in the world, why are American insurance companies shipping American patients to India to have surgery?

Question the Second: If it is ethical, good, right and safe to ship patients outside the USA for medical treatment (where they presumably get foreign drugs and medications), why is it unethical, bad, wrong and unsafe to get my Lipitor from Canada?

Richard the Third: What good is a health care system that no-one can afford to use?