Mark Provost at TruthOut describes another type of border-crossing "caravan" you may not have heard about: the thousands of Americans who cross the border into Mexico every day to get dental care. About a quarter of Americans have no dental insurance, and the rest of us very likely don't have good dental insurance, and the town of Los Algodones, for example, is chock-full of dentists who have low labor costs and no malpractice insurance, to be sure, but no student debt, either. It's a bit of a stretch to call them "people currently fleeing the US’s health care system," since they're all coming back once they get their care, but it's also shameful that the richest nation on Earth can't provide such care for all its citizens.
Adam Johnson at FAIR describes "The Media's Profitable -- and Indefensible -- Addiction to Mugshots." If you've never had your mugshot in the paper, you may not know that it can get you fired, publicly shamed, and unemployable, and if that still seems like it's not that big a deal, consider that mugshots literally always depict people who have been accused, not convicted of a crime. Things like public shaming and loss of livelihood should only happen to the guilty, right? Or do we still inhabit a world where we "just know" who's guilty? Because that would most certainly not be a law-and-order world.
David Wong at Cracked suggests that "Violent Video Games Might Be Screwing With Your Brain" -- but not exactly in the way you might think. Long story short: video games don't "teach violence," but rather they "teach us that obstacles should be easy to eliminate," and if you take that attitude into the real world, where obstacles are actually difficult to eliminate, you'll get frustrated and lash out a lot more. Worse, we've "gamified" our social lives, with likes and upvotes and downvotes and blocks and bad online reviews, such that we've become "so impatient with problems that instead of seeing them through to a resolution, we are satisfied with solutions that make them merely disappear from our screens." I don't know if I'd attribute very much of our current political anger to this phenomenon, but Mr. Wong is definitely onto something here.
Measles outbreak leads to public health emergency in "anti-vax hotspot" nearly Portland, Oregon. Folks who won't get their children vaccinated because of bogus fears of autism or contamination aren't just putting their own children at risk but everyone else's, too, but let's not forget that this all began with an unscrupulous scientific researcher trying to help win a lawsuit and an American celebrity who studied vaccines at the University of Google.
Finally, seven million Americans have lost their health insurance since our current President took office. It's been a few years since that number went up, and our President said you'd have great health care, the best! If you're tempted to blame Democrats for this, recall that Democrats had literally no way of stopping Republicans from enacting whatever health care "reform" they liked, and Republicans failed -- and that our Administration has succeeded in making both the Affordable Care Act exchanges and the Medicaid expansion more difficult for good Americans to access. (I'll confess I was a bit floored by polling suggesting that close to one out of three Americans either think the Republicans successfully repealed the Affordable Care Act or aren't sure if they did.)
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