You Aught to Remember

Here's something I've been enjoying lately: You Aught to Remember, a blog that purports to count down the 100 most influential things/people/trends of the past decade ("the Aughts"),  It's interesting to realize how many things happened this decade that actually feel like they've been in the collective consciousness for ages.  Updates once a day until 2010, but since it's down to the last week, there is plenty in the archives to help pass the time.

Healthcare reform is giving me a headache

So before everyone jumps at me for even mentioning healthcare, this isn't as much of an opinion of what should be done over healthcare (although honestly, I am not happy with the bill because of the lack of things that it accomplishes) as a response to how ridiculous the process of passing anything at all has gotten.  To start off the collection of links that I've assembled that constitutes my "research" about all of this, here's my favorite so far from the Washington Post.  This article gets to the heart of the matter, in my opinion:  we have reached the point where the minority party in the government can prevent any sort of effective governance from the majority.  Moving along the same logic as the Post article, the minority party now believes that they have both the power and motivation to stop the majority from being able to implement any type of policy whatsoever.

And so now we have almost half of the government determined to make the other half fail at anything they attempt,  and individuals with the power to stop the entire legislative process for no reason other than to assure a large benefit for themselves.  Hopefully the public will wake up at some point and realize that the hyper-polarization of the country has made progress impossible (so long as the Democrats also turn to the brand of politics that the Republicans are playing with when they regain the majority, whenever that may be), and made a supermajority both a prerequisite to legislative success as well as a weapon for any individual with a desire for gain.

Unfortunately, my opinion on the bill ends up like that of Howard Dean by the end of the debate, making it clear to me that the burdens of the current legislative process are leading to less results and slower progress for the country.

Time for a new direction

So while the idea of basing this on world travels was interesting in theory, I had some issues letting it actually work out in practice, between losing some of the details to the inexorable progression of time, not having enough time to keep up with the updates while I was in school, and other various excuses. And while I like the idea of having a theme to a blog so that I actually keep updating, and so that there is a difference in purpose between this and my LJ, I'm not really sure what that theme would be. So for now, it'll probably end up being somewhere between random postings of things I find entertaining (like this PSA from Swiss firefighters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcHsyatfDhc) and political commentary based on my vague notion that my opinion might be worth writing down.

So here's to more consistent updates.