In search of the Tran family, somewhere in America

I just love this. I hope you are with the people you consider family and who consider you family back. Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving

Yes, it’s corny, but yes. I’m thankful you found your way here. May your day be spent doing precisely what you want to do with precisely the people you love best.

Are you rich?

Go here, type in your income, and see where you fall globally.

I guess this is a pretty good exercise on Thanksgiving Eve. Using this calculator, I made it into the 1 percent and maybe I need to find new things to whine about.

They’re baaaaack…

The annual atheists’ holiday billboards are back. You can read more about American Atheists here.

And thanks, Mike the Heathen, for the link.

The U.S. health system is lacking

The 34-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has released a report that says, in part, that Americans pay more than $7,900 per person for healthcare each year — two and a half times more than the average OECD country — but still die earlier than their peers in the industrialized world.

You can read the report here. You can read how the U.S. fared here.

And thanks, DickG., for the link.

Oregon governor halts executions

Gov. John Kitzhaber has stopped executions in his state.

In a prepared statement, the Democrat said his state had a “long and turbulent history with capital punishment.” Gov. Kitzhaber, who has presided over two executions as governor, said:

I do not believe that those executions made us safer; and certainly they did not make us nobler as a society. And I simply cannot participate once again in something I believe to be morally wrong.

In making this decision, the governor halted the scheduled Dec. 6 execution of two-time convicted killer Gary Haugen.

Here in Connecticut, eyes are on a New Haven court room, where jurors are to watch the videotaped testimony of the daugher of Joshua Komisarjevsky, who could face the death penalty for his role in a 2007 home invasion in Cheshire where a woman and her daughters were assaulted, and killed. Komisarjevsky’s accomplice, Steven Hayes, is already on death row.

A little something about pepper spray

From Deborah Blum, at Scientific American. She writes:

…we’ve taken to calling it pepper spray, I think, because that makes it sound so much more benign than it really is, like something just a grade or so above what we might mix up in a home kitchen. The description hints maybe at that eye-stinging effect that the cook occasionally experiences when making something like a jalapeno-based salsa, a little burn, nothing too serious.

Until you look it up on the Scoville scale and remember, as toxicologists love to point out, that the dose makes the poison.  That we’re not talking about cookery but a potent blast of chemistry.  So that if OC spray is the U.S. police response of choice  – and certainly, it’s been used with dismaying enthusiasm during the Occupy protests nationwide, as documented in this excellent Atlantic roundup -  it may be time to demand a more serious look at the risks involved.

And thanks, JoAnne, for the link.

So? How are YOU spending Black Friday?

I find it’s always good to have a plan of attack, and here is mine. I shall Occupy Christmas. We have built into the holiday season this mania to shop, to bow to the altar of consumerism. We make lists, check them twice, and then twist ourselves into a ragged frenzy to fulfill this consumer-fueled Christmas Ideal.

Only it’s not Ideal. It’s ignorant. And so, we can make the decision to stop. Just stop. Put down the shopping list and pick up the baking pan. Write a poem. Draw a picture. Give a hug. It lasts longer.

Or, alternately (and I know I’m getting preachy and I’m stop now):

Keep smiling

Oh, really? Bite me.

You’ll have to watch all the way to the 5:08 mark and no women, don’t find it difficult to compete with men for journalism jobs.

But thanks, Bob and Sherry, for the clip.