On Obama, 1.25 years later

Well, Obama’s been in office for about a year and a quarter, and in that time, I’ve seen Hope and Change flood down the tube pretty rapidly.  Really, the guy made a lot of campaign promises, and he’s lived up to a lot of them on the aggregate, but only if you take every individual policy separately and break them down– and even then, many of them he’s only technically done.

So, we got our “historic” health-care reform bill.  No single-payer system, no public option, nothing except a mandate to make everyone buy into the same crappy insurance we’ve already got.  And boy is it crappy.  I had better when I was on my father’s military insurance, and the policies there were draconian, to say the least.  Instead, I get to buy into an insurance plan that won’t cover my needs, because almost no policy exists that covers my personal needs.

On The Importance of Agriculture

The original reason for making a new blog here was inspired in part by a paper I had to write this past May for my Global Studies class.  We were to write on a topic of global importance related to public health.  The first thing that came to my mind was Agriculture, and while my professor agreed that the topic certainly fit the criteria, I don’t think most people would have thought about it, especially those of us who live in the U.S.

It came to mind, though, because it’s been a topic of discussion between me and my mother.  She is an avid consumer of information regarding the Community Sustainable Agriculture movement, and in our talks over these matters, I become more and more aware and interested in questions that surround the food supply, both here and abroad.  In a very real sense, it’s a major frontier for future policy consideration; however, the topic is not as widely discussed as other issues facing the world, though it is no less important.