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Showing posts from 2015

What's Harder Than Riding a Moose?

Reforming health care? Teddy Roosevelt was the first president to come out as a proponent for universal health care coverage.  Roosevelt, running as a third party candidate, announced his support for this during a time of Progressivism in American politics (great reading, the history around the late 1920’s and 30’s, by the way). Given the mood of the country, this idea had HUGE likelihood to actually be enacted when Roosevelt was elected. In fact, the American Medical Association was supportive of it as well as many influential lawmakers. It wasn’t partisan politics that led to its demise. It was the ultimate bummer, World War I that was one of the primary reasons for universal health care to be scuttled.  Roosevelt had actually borrowed the idea from Germany, whose head of state Otto Von Bismarck had actually enacted this type of coverage in Germany. However, the United States’ mood towards Germany even before its entrance into  the war made it quite unp...

Survival and Change #1

It was most certainly anti-climactic to emerge from the woods on a cool Sunday morning and walk into a well-appointed campground bustling with car campers making breakfast over Coleman grills and disheveled children wrapped in Disney character blankets, quietly playing with IPads. In that moment of familiarity and habit I almost forgot what I had been doing for the past few days as I picked at the continental breakfast laid out by our instructor to welcome us back to civilization. I wanted a shower, a change of clothes and much more than a grocery store muffin (which I ate anyway). I wanted my foods: the nut butters and trendy high protein "superfoods" I am so used to and have come to expect.   Three days before, I was skinning a garter snake, awkwardly and squeamishly removing its guts, cutting it into one bite-sized piece for each of my classmates and adding it as the main part of a stew made up of pond water, wild garlic, a handful of tadpoles, a slug, a cricket, multipl...