Snacks

A couple of news items caught my eye. Neither has anything to do with that voice of the people, Ralph Nader, but both are interesting nonetheless.

The first involves a disturbing trend where companies limit the kind of snacks their employees may consume on the job. They say it's about your health, but really they just want to keep their health insurance costs down. Even if heftyness caused early death, why would a company care -- if you drop dead at 60, they don't have to pay you a pension or post-retirement health care. Fortunately, I do a lot of work from home, so I don't have Big Corporate Brother telling me how to live. A real national health-care system would extend this benefit to all Americans.

The other article I noticed is from Arkansas, a place I've never been. There, a prisoner is suing the state because the meager rations he is given have caused him to lose 100 pounds while in jail. Admittedly, he's still rotund, but this seems like a torture more fit for Guantanamo Bay than for the USA. Not that he's likely to win his suit, since the Republicans restricted prisoners' rights so much in the past ten years. More than the torture, this illustrates my belief that the whole prison system is corrupt and wrong. Better bloggards than I have railed against this ridiculous way of fighting crime. Think about it: putting criminals together in a confined, unfree space is going to get them to act right? Then, when you release them in to society they're even less able to get jobs, exacerbating the poverty-crime cycle.

Better to abolish prisons altogether. But if we must have them, we ought to at least keep the unfree people inside them from starving to death.

Faux-gressives

Today, my home state of Pennsylvania is holding its primaries. As readers of this blog will no doubt remember, I am registered to vote here in Washington, so I can take no part in this election. I'm kind of thankful for that, really. I'd have a hard time choosing between those two corporate shills, Obama and Clinton.

I mean, look at their health care plans: both want to expand health insurance to uninsured people. So, their plan for helping the poor is to give the insurance companies more customers, whom they will promptly deny coverage whenever they need it. That is one hecka lame excuse for a health care system. There's only one candidate who will take those fat cat insurance companies completely out of the picture and have the government insure all Americans directly and for free -- Ralph Nader.

Hillary and Barack are just corporate clones -- if Pennsylvania Democrats want a real social democrat, they're just wasting their time in those voting booths today.

Nader's Raiders

Great news out of the Nader camp today -- Ralph is polling at 10% in Michigan! And Zogby puts him at 5% nationwide! I was worried for a while about the allure of that corporate democrat, Obama, but I'm hecka heartened to see that true progressives know when they're being sold a bill of goods from the two-party duopoly.

Blake, my new friend from down the hall, is slowly being converted to the Nader camp. If Ralph comes out for a free Tibet, which I'm sure he will, Blake will climb on-board the Nader train for good. If only he could be convinced of other things so easily...

Om

I've gotten a bit more political lately. Not on purpose, but I've had more time to think about these things. Someone stole the wheels off my Segway, so I've been hanging around the apartment a lot more. In doing so, I kept running into that guy up the hall who I mentioned in the last post, the one who's all about Free Tibet. He's a decent looking fellow, blond hair, clear skin, deep blue eyes you could get lost all day in...you know the type. Anyway, we've been talking more, and now I'm a big fan of the Dalai Lama.

Hecka big fan.