Wonder what Jesus would think of Health Care?

²⁵Just then a religion scholar stood up with a question to test Jesus. “Teacher, what do I need to do to get eternal life?”

²⁶He answered, “What’s written in God’s Law? How do you interpret it?”

²⁷He said, “That you love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and muscle and intelligence—and that you love your neighbor as well as you do yourself.”

²⁸“Good answer!” said Jesus. “Do it and you’ll live.”

²⁹Looking for a loophole, he asked, “And just how would you define ‘neighbor’?”

^30-32Jesus answered by telling a story. “There was once a man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho. On the way he was attacked by robbers. They took his clothes, beat him up, and went off leaving him half-dead. Luckily, a priest was on his way down the same road, but when he saw him he angled across to the other side. Then a Levite religious man showed up; he also avoided the injured man.

^33-35“A Samaritan traveling the road came on him. When he saw the man’s condition, his heart went out to him. He gave him first aid, disinfecting and bandaging his wounds. Then he lifted him onto his donkey, led him to an inn, and made him comfortable. In the morning he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take good care of him. If it costs any more, put it on my bill—I’ll pay you on my way back.’

³⁶“What do you think? Which of the three became a neighbor to the man attacked by robbers?”

³⁷“The one who treated him kindly,” the religion scholar responded.

Jesus said, “Go and do the same.”

Campaign Tackles Urban Dogfighting | The Humane Society of the United States

Street dogfighting is rampant in our cities, perpetuating animal cruelty, violence and crime. It causes horrible animal suffering and desensitizes young people to cruelty.

In this underground world, whoever has the toughest pit bull is the winner—but the dogs and our communities are the losers.

But The HSUS is on the front lines, offering a new grassroots, preventative method for cities to tackle street dogfighting.

http://www.hsus.org/acf/news/slideshow_end_dogfighting.html

I’ll Have My Burger Petri-Dish Bred, With Extra Omega-3 | Stem Cell Research | DISCOVER Magazine

http://xrl.in/2tki

“How do you prefer your beef? Certified Angus, grass fed, or culled from a petri dish? That last option may be coming your way soon, courtesy of Jason Matheny*, a biologist at Johns Hopkins University. He is the founder of New Harvest, a loosely knit consortium of international scientists who are investigating an innovative new way of satisfying the world’s craving for meat. They plan to grow it in a lab—no animals required.”

“To a certain extent, in vitro meat has already been produced hundreds of times in labs around the world, as stem cell researchers crank out bits of artificial muscle and connective tissue, hoping to mend weak hearts or reverse muscular dystrophy. But only a brave few have engineered tissues expressly for the purpose of making hamburger. In 2000 NASA engineered a bit of goldfish meat as a possible food for astronauts on marathon journeys,”

Feeding Your Demons | Tricycle Magazine

http://www.tricycle.com/-practice/feeding-your-demons

Five steps to transforming your obstacles—your addictions, anxieties, and fears—into tranquility and wisdom, from Tsultrim Allione.

1.  Step one: Find the Demon

2. Step two: Personify the Demon and Ask It What It Needs

3. Step three: Become the Demon

4. Step four: Feed the Demon and Meet the Ally

5. Step five: Rest in Awareness

Video: Vajra Yogini Mudra

Video: Vajra Yogini Mudra |

This hatha yoga practice strongly clears all the energy channels in the body, and by activating the solar and lunar channels, awakens the third, central channel, sushumna, characterized by the equal flow of breath in both nostrils.

Shared via AddThis

Yoga DVD Channel – Jason Crandell: Morning Sequence

Yoga DVD Channel – Jason Crandell: Morning Sequence.

Self and No Self

“No self” becomes apparent when we are not caught thinking of past or future, says author and teacher Sean Murphy. In this experience, there is no sense of identity, no time or space, no subject or object. This pure meditation is not esoteric, but can only be realized when we truly learn to let go of all projections. from Upaya Dharma Podcasts.

http://xrl.in/2rwa

Jewish Settlements Squeeze Bedouin Enclave : NPR

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106886754

I am very careful writing about this, and to be honest I tend to stay away from this whole sorry mess because it is so loaded – and frankly there are no innocent parties anymore.

But this just blows the mind – because it is not necessary and just punitive.

Peace occurs when war is not longer economically viable – we need to disengage from this mess and let it resolve itself.

“Yehiel Greniman with Rabbis for Human Rights says someone — he suspects someone from one of the settlements on the hills above — alerted the Israeli authorities to the new buildings, and they were quickly declared illegal.

“I don’t see the logic of why we need to move the Bedouin from here and why we can’t just work to make their lives better. If anything, this is something the Palestinian Authority and Israel should cooperate. Instead, they get kind of the runaround, bureaucratic runaround,” he says.

Greniman says all the residents here have been given either a notice that their dwelling is illegal or a demolition order — and that goes for the new school buildings as well.

Rabbis for Human Rights has also been involved with another group of 2,000 Bedouin from the same tribe who used to live where the Maale Adumim settlement now stands. Greniman says they were shifted to the outskirts of a nearby Arab town, next to the municipal dump.

“It’s clear to me that the Bedouin here need a solution, and putting them in a slum next to the city dump isn’t a solution. And I think that it’s a crime that after so long, now that they’re not really nomadic anymore — they’ve been here 40 years — they don’t have running water, they don’t have basic, basic facilities, and it’s time that they did,” he says.”

“Mohammed Jahalin, head of the Bedouin Cooperative Committee, says many of the Palestinian families living here were displaced from the Negev Desert during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Until recently, they sent their children to schools in nearby towns. But then the problems started — sometimes monetary, sometimes political.

“The buses were being told by the Israeli authority not to come to us. The taxis were being told and harassed by the Israeli authorities not to come to us. We were left alone here. And therefore, we decided to build, out of material that is not costly, with the cooperation of an Italian NGO,” he says.”

Side-by-Side Comparison of Major Health Care Reform Proposals – Kaiser Family Foundation

http://www.kff.org/healthreform/sidebyside.cfm

One of, if not THE best place to find data driven info on health care, reform, cost and how the whole mess actually “works.”

“This interactive side-by-side compares the leading comprehensive reform proposals across a number of key characteristics and plan components. Included in this side-by-side are proposals for moving toward universal coverage that have been put forward by the President and Members of Congress.”

American health care, like America, is innovative and wasteful. – By Jacob Weisberg – Slate Magazine

It is time to get employers out of health care and retirement savings.

American health care, like America, is innovative and wasteful. – By Jacob Weisberg – Slate Magazine.

“America’s system has become wildly unfair and expensive. In fixing it, Reid says, we should follow other countries where health care is fairer, cheaper, and produces better results. He’s right that we can learn much from practices elsewhere—why, for instance, can’t we have those nifty smart cards the French use instead of paper records?”

“But we also need to recognize that we’re getting a crazy-bad deal by spending so much on health care and leaving so many people out. Our society and government are threatened by runaway medical inflation, which saps business profits and undermines fiscal responsibility. On this score, the $1 trillion bills working their way through the House and Senate, which lack incentives to hold down spending, rate poorly. The Congressional Budget Office says they will make a bad situation worse.”

It is on the sociological level, though, that we’re missing the boat most completely by sticking doggedly with a workplace-based system that no longer makes sense. America has always been a mobile society with a labor market that grows more fluid over time. Once, the norm was to work for a single employer for one’s entire career. Today, people change jobs an average of 11 times before they reach 40. Fear of losing health coverage keeps people in jobs they would otherwise leave, creating a drag on economic efficiency. As the Senate’s smartest health care wonk, Ron Wyden of Oregon, says: “A big part of the reform challenge is to look at how the culture of the American workforce has changed since the basic structure of American health care was put in place. Today’s culture is all about flexibility.”

“The premise of Wyden’s bipartisan bill is that we should move away from job-based insurance. It would do this by converting the tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance into a tax credit and requiring that individuals use it to buy insurance. Wyden’s bill would achieve universal coverage, apply meaningful cost controls, and, according to the Congressional Budget Office, pay for itself within a few years. It’s going nowhere. Instead, Democrats are poised to pass legislation that spends an additional $1 trillion, fails to restrain spending, and shores up an anachronistic employer-based system. I guess you could call it a uniquely American solution.”