Life is for the Birds 06

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All These Things Shall Give Thee Experience

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Two Jehovah's Witnesses came to our door this afternoon. The gentleman at the door (I believe the other person with him was his wife) did most of the talking. He somehow knew that our last name was Valencic and thought perhaps we spoke Croatian. I explained that my ancestors came from present-day Slovenia but most of them spoke Polish. However, my parents and my grandparents spoke only English, except for a few words and phrases in Polish. Abandoning his attempts at speaking Croatian and connecting with us that way, he asked me if I felt like the Hurricane Dorian is God's fault. I told them that I do not blame God for natural disasters and they responded by pointing out that insurance companies call them "acts of God." I observed that there are many archaic terms that we still use but that doesn't change the fact that God is not to be blamed for weather patterns. (If anything, people are, but that gets us into a different topic altogether.) He quickly moved on...
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Is Civil Discourse Too Much To Ask For?

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As I am pretty certain everyone reading this blog knows, I am an active participant on several different blogs, many of them related to religion, politics, education, and social issues. In a recent blog post at By Common Consent, a Mormon blog, about immigration, a nugget was posted by a (to the best of my knowledge) drive-by commenter, ranting and raving about "illegals" ruining our nation. Here is the verbatim post: Do illegals pay social security? Millions of dollars are sent back to Mexico to their families. And their are jobs besides farm jobs that that citizens haven’t done because wages have been depressed by importing them at a cheaper rate. A condition of higher unemployment means that any race, Irish etal takes opportunities from those who first deserve them. Eventually, the citizen would take any job to survive if they hadn’t already been taken by then. If no citizen needed that job, then I wouldn’t care about that aspect of it. But their is a coverup of statistic...
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Health Insurance

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I have been without health insurance since July 2007. Crazy, I know. I was also without health insurance from about January 2005 until January 2007. The only reason I had insurance in between was because I went to Australia for a semester and had coverage as an overseas student. Gretch and I have been trying to arrange health insurance through a somewhat local provider (actually in Mattoon), but we seem to have had trouble contacting the man possibly handling our potential account. Yeah, real specific and certain, I know. Anyway, in the midst of all this, there is of course the supposed debate about health care reform going on in America. I called it a supposed debate because, honestly, I am not hearing much actual debate. What I hear is the President telling Congress to pass the reform that he wants. The Republicans are saying that the proposed plan is bad, but they have as of yet to offer a viable alternative. The Democrats are saying that whatever President Obama wants, President O...
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