The riding jacket - we bought it on e-bay and it's a bit bigger than we thought. But my daughter is happy with it and wears it for her horse shows. Here she came in fifth place, there is a small trophy plaque and a bag of lollipops in the white bag - and the ribbon, of course!

I have no idea - to tell the truth, I'm not really a believer in anything. I'm the original doubting Thomas. But I have a couple friends who are convinced they lived other lives, and I suppose it's a possibility. The thing that stumps me is the logistics - if everyone is reincarnated, how come there are so many new people being born, unless you can start just anywhere, or maybe very good ants come back as humans?
Because there were only a few humans in the beginning - and if they kept recycling themselves coming back again and again, and then others are born - - is there a hierarchy among the reincarntated, I wonder? Is there a king and queen (sort of the Adam and Eve of us all) who are the eldest? And newbies - how are they treated in the reincrnated world - poor naked souls with no past lives; how sad. And if we are reincarnated, how can we retrieve our memories? Is there a sort of waiting - sorting room 'up there' where you pause before getting shipped off into a new life - and when, exactly, does 'life' start (how annoying to get shipped off and be scraped off as an abortion - Zap - right back to the back of the line...) And can you apply for a good family? If you think about it, (and you're sitting in a house sipping coffee and staring at your computer screen) you have to realize you're incredibly lucky. You could have been assigned to be baby 122589633258AHJ-female - born in Zaire to a HIV positive woman. Yes, if reincarnation exists, we hit the jackpot this time around. What about next time? Does being a good person influence who you are next time? (If that's true, Bush's next life will be as queen of the Naked Mole Rats.)
Have I been good enough to deserve being born as a caucasian female in a civilized society in my next life? I have No idea - but the idea of a big waiting line in the sky and a hierarchy among reincarnates is intriguing. An idea for a book, maybe?

Here's one reply to an article that the NY Times will probably never print...

Cubans with their free healthcare and education don't need lessons from the US about how to take care of their own. And as far as political prisoners - can you say Guatanamo? I think the problem is that the plutarchy that constitutes the US government is deadly frightened of a system that will enable everyone to live in comfort and dignity. Cuba is the nightmare of every huge conglomerate that skims money from the poor and redistributes to the rich, every system that relies on elitism to survive (college or healthcare, anyone?), and every government that controls its people through poverty, prison, and guns.

Why does everything have to cost money? (to echo my son when he was 4...)You might know I put two boys in Kenya through secondary school. It was through a charity run by a missionary group in Canada - I know one of the missionaries. (she writes erotic romance at the same publishing company I do...) anyhow, both boys graduated - but one wants to go to the university and can't afford it.
We're trying to talk him into finding a training program. The other boy went into a computer program that was very cheap (well, it was just a six month program). But Justus wants to go to the university. He applied and was accepted, and then passed a test for a grant - and won about 2000 towards his education. But universities in Kenya are expensive, and its 4000$ a year, and he can't afford it. And neither can I, unfortunately. Secondary school for both boys only came to about 1000$ a year - and I used my royalties to pay that (so all those who have bought my books - imagine that you have contibuted to 2 fine young men being able to go to school and graduate - something they never thought would be possible. Thank you!)
I was going to makle a plea for donations, but I can't think how to work out the logistics. It's a four year universuty, and I'd want to make sure he would be able to go all four years.
I think the best thing would be that he finds a good training program and sets his sites a bit lower - we've all had to do that. Maybe he'll be able to get in next year - maybe I'll have a best seller by then!
Well, it's time for me to drive my number two son to the train station - he's got exams right now in his university. (In France, the universities are free - there is only a small fee for insurance (250$ covers all their health insurance) and a fee for the university (roughly 400$ a year). I'm sorry everyone living everywhere else, but that's what I call a civilized country. If education isn't free - you might as well live in a third world country.

(this should be required reading...)

Reagan Did It

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: May 31, 2009

“This bill is the most important legislation for financial institutions in the last 50 years. It provides a long-term solution for troubled thrift institutions. ... All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.” So declared Ronald Reagan in 1982, as he signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act.

He was, as it happened, wrong about solving the problems of the thrifts. On the contrary, the bill turned the modest-sized troubles of savings-and-loan institutions into an utter catastrophe. But he was right about the legislation’s significance. And as for that jackpot — well, it finally came more than 25 years later, in the form of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
For the more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn — the turn that made crisis inevitable — took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years.

Attacks on Reaganomics usually focus on rising inequality and fiscal irresponsibility. Indeed, Reagan ushered in an era in which a small minority grew vastly rich, while working families saw only meager gains. He also broke with longstanding rules of fiscal prudence.
On the latter point: traditionally, the U.S. government ran significant budget deficits only in times of war or economic emergency. Federal debt as a percentage of G.D.P. fell steadily from the end of World War II until 1980. But indebtedness began rising under Reagan; it fell again in the Clinton years, but resumed its rise under the Bush administration, leaving us ill prepared for the emergency now upon us.

The increase in public debt was, however, dwarfed by the rise in private debt, made possible by financial deregulation. The change in America’s financial rules was Reagan’s biggest legacy. And it’s the gift that keeps on taking.

The immediate effect of Garn-St. Germain, as I said, was to turn the thrifts from a problem into a catastrophe. The S.& L. crisis has been written out of the Reagan hagiography, but the fact is that deregulation in effect gave the industry — whose deposits were federally insured — a license to gamble with taxpayers’ money, at best, or simply to loot it, at worst. By the time the government closed the books on the affair, taxpayers had lost $130 billion, back when that was a lot of money.

But there was also a longer-term effect. Reagan-era legislative changes essentially ended New Deal restrictions on mortgage lending — restrictions that, in particular, limited the ability of families to buy homes without putting a significant amount of money down.

These restrictions were put in place in the 1930s by political leaders who had just experienced a terrible financial crisis, and were trying to prevent another. But by 1980 the memory of the Depression had faded. Government, declared Reagan, is the problem, not the solution; the magic of the marketplace must be set free. And so the precautionary rules were scrapped.

Together with looser lending standards for other kinds of consumer credit, this led to a radical change in American behavior.

We weren’t always a nation of big debts and low savings: in the 1970s Americans saved almost 10 percent of their income, slightly more than in the 1960s. It was only after the Reagan deregulation that thrift gradually disappeared from the American way of life, culminating in the near-zero savings rate that prevailed on the eve of the great crisis. Household debt was only 60 percent of income when Reagan took office, about the same as it was during the Kennedy administration. By 2007 it was up to 119 percent.

All this, we were assured, was a good thing: sure, Americans were piling up debt, and they weren’t putting aside any of their income, but their finances looked fine once you took into account the rising values of their houses and their stock portfolios. Oops.

Now, the proximate causes of today’s economic crisis lie in events that took place long after Reagan left office — in the global savings glut created by surpluses in China and elsewhere, and in the giant housing bubble that savings glut helped inflate.

But it was the explosion of debt over the previous quarter-century that made the U.S. economy so vulnerable. Overstretched borrowers were bound to start defaulting in large numbers once the housing bubble burst and unemployment began to rise.

These defaults in turn wreaked havoc with a financial system that — also mainly thanks to Reagan-era deregulation — took on too much risk with too little capital.

There’s plenty of blame to go around these days. But the prime villains behind the mess we’re in were Reagan and his circle of advisers — men who forgot the lessons of America’s last great financial crisis, and condemned the rest of us to repeat it.

I read a fascinating article about heroin dealers from Mexico who deal the US. The drug problem is of epic proportions. At first I couldn't understand why - but three things became clear -
1 - the cost of heroin is cheaper than the cost of perscription drugs for pain. (the article is not clear here - it says 'on the street' which may mean that the doctor has told the patient to stop, but he is intent on getting more pain killers illegally, and buys them from dealers on the street.)
"Investigators say that Arthur E. was not alone in switching from a prescription painkiller to heroin. It gives a similar, euphoric high at a fraction of the cost, $10 to $20 for a “balloon” — one dose, usually a gram or less — as opposed to upwards of $60 for a typical prescription pill dose on the street."

2 - and doctors seem to perscribe these pain-killers as if thery were, well, candy (in France, reports say that perscription medicine addiction is completely out of hand, for example - and yet doctors love to perscribe them. Question - do doctors get kick-backs from pharmaceutical companies?). "When Arthur E. injured his back in a car accident in 2005, he started taking prescription medication, Percocet and OxyContin, for chronic pain, under a doctor’s supervision. His brother, Rob E. said he had been taking similar medications after he broke his arm on the job as a maintenance worker at a golf course. Soon, all three brothers were acquiring OxyContin illegally and sharing it. When supplies dried up and their dealer suggested heroin, they tried it and quickly developed an addiction."

The drugs come from Mexico but the US is responsible for the rise in power of the drug cartel because... "it is American drug consumers who fuel demand and American guns smuggled into Mexico that are used by the drug gangs." (NY Times article comment)

Three years ago, the Mexican president moved to crack down on the drug cartels. Since then, 10,000 people, most of them innocent, have died in a vicious war that pits police and investigators against well-armed drug dealers.
It's a tangled web made of the cost of drugs, the facility to obtain high-powered weapons, and especially, the huge discrepency between the average salary of a Mexican and an American, a poverty ascerbated by the fact that in this day and age, everyone can turn on the TV and see the ease and comfort Americans live in. Mexicans intent on getting jobs and caring for their families in a fragile economy are easy pickings for drug cartels.

I suppose that if wages were evened out between the US and Mexico, there would be far less poverty in Mexico and less people tempted to risk life and limb to sell drugs. If gun controls were stricter, less guns would end up in the cartel's hands, and Mexican police could control the problem with more ease. If perscription drugs were cheaper, and if doctors were more careful how they perscribed them, less people would be hooked from the start, and they wouldn't turn to illegal venus to get them. And if, if, if all this were true... maybe poor Arthur E. would still be alive.