The Trouble with Tuesday in the Gaza Strip

The Gaza Strip is exactly what it sounds - a very small strip of land called Gaza. It's an issue of geography as much as anything else. Not 139 square miles in size, about 25 miles long, and as little as four miles wide. The southwest end of the box abuts Egypt, the North West side the deep, azure Mediterranean Sea, and everywhere else, Israel. Smaller than Barbados, bigger than Grenada, more isolated than any island.

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The Angry and Forgotten of Conservative America

If we accept for the moment the ideological premise that free markets and dramatically limited government are the ideal economic basis for freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, how do we then reconcile the very real human effects of those theories? This question is best exemplified by the current struggle in the US over healthcare.

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Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner versus The People. It is a sad spectacle. After elbowing their way onto the House Oversight Committee, its insanely wealthy and powerful members grabbed their fifteen minutes of fame, held it close, and rubbed their faces all over it. Mugging for the cameras and battling each other for that viral YouTube manna, the sorry kabuki affair is appalling. What has America become?

Read more: Leave Timothy F. Geithner Alone

Iran is building "the bomb". Iran will be the fifth power in the region to possess the bomb, and is certainly the first of what will soon be a rapid escalation of regional states with the wealth and wherewithal to acquire the bomb. In addition, this proliferation of bomb owning states is a function of economics, and as such, is inevitable, its containment improbable by any rational measure. Finally, the "bomb" itself is nothing more than a bargaining chip amongst established bomb owning states to advance their own self interests, those self interests all hinging around... oil.

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America Will Never Have Universal Health Care

America will never have a universal health care system. It will always be alone in the industrialized world with a complex, multi tiered, class based system that leaves the most in need isolated and ignored. The collective needs of the people will always suffer in ways such as this for as long as Americans define freedom as the triumph of the individual over that of the public good - or anything else for that matter. It has never been a debate, as much as a debacle.

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Glenn Beck is insane.

If Fox news was a respectable news organization, you would have to feel sorry for them. But of course, they're not. Fox News is an entertainment organization whose continued operation depends on the less educated of us agreeing that they are "fair and balanced" news reporters. They report, we decide. So it is just simple kismet that the decision to hire a fringe radio and YouTube quack named Glenn Beck is becoming a daily nightmare for the organization.

Read more: Fox News Glenn Beck is Insane: Exhibit Two

Towards the end of the 1969 counter culture classic "Easy Rider", Wyatt and Billy rent a couple of prostitutes in New Orleans, head to one of those creepy above ground cemeteries, gobble down a handful of acid, and experience a memorable freak out and a string of frightening and oddly shot and cut scenes. A bizarre kaleidoscope of horror, sin, pleasure, and debauchery in every direction.

Swine flu is an influenza, a virus particular to pigs, but common to all mammals and birds. There are many different strains of influenza, and once they pass to the human population they are coded, catalogued, and studied.

Common characteristics of the influenza viruses include incubation periods of varying degrees, symptoms that include coughing and sneezing, high fever, muscle pains, sore throat, weakness and fatigue as well as debilitating headaches. All are transmitted the same way - through human social contact in the form of airborne body fluids - through coughing, sneezing, and generally projecting the virus from one person to the next.

The "Great Influenza" of 1918 is recognized as the worst in modern times, killing an estimated 50 millions across the globe in just a single year. The virus strain was a virulent and cruel version called H151, or more infamously, the "Spanish Flu". Most now believe that it started during the closing months of World War 1, and was rapidly transmitted by the close and squalid ranks of millions in trenches across Europe. It crossed to America in troop ships, ravaged camps of densely packed new recruits in the heartland, and engulfed America from there.

The same H151 strain from 1918 has now returned, in a yet unknown form as Mexican Swine Flu.

The following video was produced by the Johns Hopkins Centre for Civilian Biodefence Studies. It was developed to answer the question "what would happen in a bio-weapon attack on America?", but uses the backdrop of the 1918 influenza as a guide. Notable are the early newspaper headlines from the period, which echo those of today and the conclusion, which is not that settling at all

The most comprehensive - and readable - book on The Great Influenza remains The Great Influenza: The story of the deadliest pandemic in history by john M Barry. In it, Barry traces the cause through the pandemic to its end in a day by day account of what really was a very short span of time. The book remains as good a blueprint for the future as anything else we have today, once the pandemic takes hold.

It's fortunate for America, that after having stuffed the intelligent, independent Michelle Obama into a jar, the classy, stylish, graceful Michelle has survived. After only one hundred days, the First Lady of Grace is well on her way to banishing the "Jackie O" mystique to the history books.