where you gonna go, if they come for you? will there be someone left to sing your blues?

Ok. Disclaimer! Something more intelligent than baby pandas will appear out of my brain later. But until those brilliant thoughts do emerge, all I really have to say, is:

Baby Panda makes Debut in Austria

Other headlines for this could've been:

Austria is shut down from uncontrolled serge of CUTENESS.

or

Doesn't this baby panda look like an automaton? Doesn't it look completely fake? Like a midget or small child in the panda suit is gonna pop out and go: "Kidding! I'm totally not real."



Alright. Two actual news stories, briefly, because I have work in 20min, but honestly if I don't put something vaguely intellectual in here it'll be embarassing.

Pictures from Mars surprise scientists.

Are the pictures from Mars that great? No, not really. To me, to an untrained scientists, they mostly look like pictures of rocks. Well, I mean they are, but they look like normal rocks. The reason I think this story is interesting has a lot to do with the headline:

"Pictures from Mars Surprise Scientists"

I'm always thrilled when I read that something unexpected has arisen in a world where we try to predict everything. It means that no, we actually DON'T have everything figured out yet. Even the best minds of our time, with every formula, chemical, and tool available to them, were still taken aback by a new discovery that they hadn't predicted. That, to me, is more exciting than whatever they discovered on Mars (which happens to be a weird spider-like volcano). We haven't figured out the world to the extent our immodesty would like us to believe, and that's very relieving to me.

In politics (because what else could possibly be news right now), Surprisingly, Clinton is closer to Mitt Romney than to Obama in Healthcare.

For those not following the primaries/for those who live in America and have somehow dropped off the face of the Earth, John Edwards just dropped out of the race, as did Kucinich (not that he was ever really in the running. He was kind of just presidential-hopeful glitter). So the Democratic nom is down to Obama and Clinton, which is pretty ironic in a way. I've been saying that in the end, it'll be an Obama-Edwards ticket, but anything can happen...

Anyhow, health-care is a really big issue in both this primary, and in this election. And in our lives, especially. Although I am majoring in medicine/public-health/social change (among many things, ha ha), I don't just think healthcare is a big deal because it's my concentration -- its a big deal because our next president is going to shape the way this country deals with some major flaws within our infrastructure in how healthcare deals with women, minorities, immigrants... I'm talking about major marginilized groups, and what kind of access they have to legitimate and safe medicine. TBH, there isn't any way of knowing whether Obama or Clinton will follow through on their promises.
But I will say this -- in my opinion, the purpose of a fair, democratic, and mostly centralized government is not to force its citizens to pay for social policy which it should be providing anyway.
And frankly, Clinton's position is only feasible if the government first manages to make sure healthcare is affordable for every citizen in this country. Making health insurance mandatory before assuring that health insurance is affordable is one of the most anti-thetical authoritarian pieces of nonsense I've ever heard. Clinton advocates have compared this plan to mandatory car insurance. Most states require drivers to be insuraed, and we all (mostly) willingly pay for car insurance already, so how far a stretch is mandatory health insurance?

Alright, I'll follow that. Car insurance is analagous to health insurance.

Well, if you don't want to pay for car insurance, you don't drive. So it would follow that if you don't want to pay for mandatory health insurance ... you ... don't live?

Right.

So end of my political rant for today...

Except for this: If you don't know what's going on in Kenya right now, go to Google News, or CNN, or the BBC, and look it up.

I wish I could end with another cute panda video, but life isn't always about cute pandas, unnnnnnfortunately.