Thursday, August 30, 2012

Let them eat cake for that toothache

I have been both annoyed and amused by two dentistry ads appearing on the right side of my Facebook page recently. Those writing the ad copy are clueless about the reality of being poor in America.
 
The focus of one group's ad is that if you are avoiding the dentist because you are afraid of pain, they can help.
 
Excuse me, "let them eat cake" blind, deaf, and dumb private medical practitioner sycophants and toadies.
 
I do not avoid a dentist because I fear pain.  I avoid them because I cannot pay for their services and my nation will not help me pay for them, even in my maturity.

The other group is hawking dental implants.  They blithely write of their services costing from $500 to $40,000.  And they have an easy payment plan for you if you need it.  The only hitch is, the balance must be paid in six months.  Let's see ... $40,000 divided by 6 comes out to $6666 a month.
Gee, that's a bit more than my monthly income!

The point is, of course, that persons on modest retirement incomes who lack private insurance (because the monthly premium would be prohibitively high) are written off, abandoned, and not taken into consideration whatsoever in this nation of greed-ridden and selfish capitalists, many of whom pray and sing and cry each Sunday about Jesus' love for the blind, the halt, and the poor.

Jesus aside, either you made it in the USA playing the game in the manner prescribed, or you are hell out of luck at the upper end of your sojourn here.

Universal single payer health care should be a right of every citizen of this nation.

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

The trouble with Prince Harry

Great Britain's Prince Harry has made worldwide headlines after multiple photos surfaced of him cavorting with Las Vegas showgirls while nude and, one can assume, drunk.  Prince Harry, now 27, has been making such headlines regularly since a teen.

The trouble with Prince Harry of Great Britain is the selfsame trouble often present in those possessed of excessive wealth, privilege and entitlement throughout human society, but most especially in the capitalist West.

Whether a manipulative Wall Street baron who drew down millions annually while dishonestly inflating a housing bubble that finally burst, destroying the dreams of millions of Americans, or Britain's young Prince Harry showing his drunken and disorderly arse (literally) in a Las Vegas hotel, these people feel their entitlement allows them to play by a differing set of rules than the rest of us.

What this world needs is a thoroughgoing socialist revolution in which wealth and privilege are leveled by as drastic measures as are necessary to achieve the goal of eliminating egregious cases of excess from the human scene.

The British royal family, a constitutional monarchy that serves no useful purpose beyond pageantry anyway, should be eliminated. Their vast holdings of real estate and other wealth, as well as their excessive entitlements, should be distributed amongst their long-suffering subjects.

The world of the 21st Century has no place for kings and queens and other societal leeches whose only charge is to party hardy when young and open parliament with boring prepared speeches when old.