https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/john-oliver-buys-15-million-of-medical-debt-for-60/

 

CITIZENSHIP

John Oliver buys $15 million of medical debt for $60,000 and forgives it all, because he could

By Travis W. Lyon| June 6, 2016

“Debt. It’s the reason Nicolas Cage has made so many great choices in recent years…”

From the second John Oliver started his segment about debt buyers in the United States last night, everyone knew it was going to be a good one, but as regular viewers of Last Week Tonight know, nobody could guess how it would end.

Near the end of the segment, which provided a damning portrait of the debt buying industry, Oliver claimed that “Any idiot can get into it, and I can prove that to you, because I’m an idiot and I started a debt buying company and it was disturbingly easy.”

Read More: How You Can Attend the Global Citizen Festival: Rihanna, Kendrick Lamar, and More

Oliver then proceeded to detail how with $50 and knowledge of the law he was able to successfully apply online to create a debt buying company named “Central Asset Recovery Professionals”, or as Oliver put it, “CARP” named after “a bottom-feeding fish.”

After setting up a rudimentary website for CARP, the satirical, but still real company was offered a $15 million package of medical debt for $60,000.

Oliver explained that the debt was out of statute, which means it is the kind of debt that a collector can only continue to collect, but not sue the debtor for.

Then, instead of chasing down the 9,000 debtors in the debt package as a normal collection agency would, Oliver decided to stage the largest one-time giveaway in television history and work with the nonprofit RIP Medical Debt to forgive the $15 million with no consequences for the debtors.

Oliver’s actions last night continue his penchant for big-moment activism.

When he was taking on the topic of tax-exempt organizations and televangelists, Oliver and his team started a tax-exempt church called “Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption”.

Simone Weil on Attention and Grace

Simone Weil on Attention and Grace

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

How To Write Whether You Feel Like it Or Not

“3. Take a deep breath. If that doesn’t work, take a walk.

If you’re stuck in the middle of a writing project, you may be just need to reset your brain. Try closing your eyes and taking several deep breaths.

If that doesn’t work, grab a notebook and a pen (or your iPhone with Evernote) and take a walk. This will clear your head and get your subconscious working to solve your creative blocks. Plus, you probably need the exercise!”

Read more at http://thesaurus.yourdictionary.com/reckon#f8I6HffM8fjl35vK.99

There’s no accounting for taste.
There’s no accounting for waste.
How did you figure that out?
How did your figure get out?
Do you reckon I am wrong?
If you but beckon, I am summoned.
No, but you are quite calculating at times.
No, but you are quietly evaporating at times
I can’t account for my behavior at all.
I can’t get a discount for my behavior at all?
I can’t get a discount for my behavior in your hall?
The configuration of the participating was accurate enough.
That is a very weird sentence.
That is not a sentence at all.
Well, you can have your head cut off instead.
Well, you can have  your  shed cut out  in bed
I reckon you are mad.
I reckon I’ve been bad.
I beckoned  that bad lad
Compared to whom or at whom?
Compared to tombs or coombes?
I ‘ve  got you all figured out.
I’ve got you all jiggered about
How about my psyche?
How about me, crikey!
Sorry, this is a  recycling shop.
Worry! This is a retirement coup!
I didn’t even know it was a shop at all.
I didn’t even glow in a shop at all
What did you think it was?
What did you think ink was?
A doctor’s surgery.
A doctor’s  perjury.
Well, stone the crows and count your blessings.
Simultaneously?
Don’t mention algebra!
Don’t mention our zebra!
Don’t sanction our Barbara
How about horology?
How about topology?
Goodbye
Good sigh

Children don’t always sort meta­phors out correctly.
Father: “We are all going to fly to Rome to see your  the Pope.”
Child: “But Dad, I don’t know how to fly!”

Daughter: That chap looks rather hot to me
Mother: Well it is 90 degrees in the shade.

http://www.abstractmath.org/MM/MMImagesMetaphors.htm

Metaphors

We know by direct physical experience what it means to be warm or cold. We use these words as metaphors in many ways:

• We refer to a person as having a warm or cold personality. This has nothing to do with their body temperature.
• When someone is on a treasure hunt we may tell them they are “getting warm”, even if they are hunting outside in the snow.
• Children don’t always sort meta­phors out correctly. Father: “We are all going to fly to Saint Paul to see your cousin Petunia.” Child: “But Dad, I don’t know how to fly!”

How 7 Historic Figures Overcame Depression without Doctors

William James (1842-1910)

One of America’s greatest psychologists and philosophers, James suffered periods of depression during which he contemplated suicide for months on end. John McDermott, editor of The Writings of William James, reports that “James spent a good part of life rationalizing his decision not to commit suicide.” In The Thought and Character of William James, Ralph Barton Perry’s classic biography on his teacher, in the chapter “Depression and Recovery,” we learn that at age 27, James went through a period that Perry describes as an “ebbing of the will to live . . . a personal crisis that could only be relieved by philosophical insight.”

James’s Antidotes: James’s transformative insight about his personal depression also contributed to his philosophical writings about pragmatism, as James came quite pragmatically to “believe in belief.” He continued to maintain that one cannot choose to believe in whatever one wants (one cannot choose to believe that 2 + 2 = 5 for example); however, he concluded that there is a range of human experience in which one can choose beliefs. He came to understand that, “Faith in a fact can help create the fact.” So, for example, a belief that one has a significant contribution to make to the world can keep one from committing suicide during a period of deep despair, and remaining alive makes it possible to in fact make a significant contribution. James ultimately let go of his dallying with suicide, remained a tough-minded thinker with scientific loyalty to the facts, but also came to “believe in my individual reality and creative power” and developed faith that “Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.”

http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/it+figures

1. Demokratia, the ultimate origin of our word ‘democracy’, is a portmanteau abstract noun (feminine) in ancient Greek, combining the two words Demos and Kratos. Kratos meant Power, Might, Strength, Grip. (In modern Greek it is the word for ‘state’, as in ‘the nation-state of Hellas’.) Demos is a very ancient Greek word, attested as far back as the second millennium BCE among the ‘Linear B’ archival clay tablets produced by the bureaucracy of the – very much not democratic – Late Bronze Age/Mycenaean kingdoms of mainland Greece and Crete. There it meant village, a local designation that persisted into classical Greek, but already in the epic poems of Homer (c. 700 BCE) it had come to mean also ‘people’.

2. However, demos in that sense of ‘people’ is ambiguous and therefore ambivalent, since it could be taken to mean either i. (All) the People or ii. the Masses (the majority, specifically the poor majority) of the People. So, to use deliberately anachronistic modern analogies,demokratia might be translated/interpreted as either i. ‘government of the people by the people for the people’ (Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, 1863) or ii. ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (Karl Marx followed by V.I. Ulyanov, a.k.a. Lenin). In that ambivalence lies the explanation for the class-conscious struggles in antiquity to define and implement (or oppose) demokratia: who is/are the demos that holds and wields the kratos, and over what or whom is the kratos being held and wielded?

My cat got run over and he was not even in the road, [some loon drove across the lawn]; my husband died and I fell downstairs and broke my  twinkles
But look at it this way-I am getting a rest.I   saved money by having Xmas dinner in hospital and I had a good excuse not to send any cards.
Next year, what will I do to evade buying Xmas presents?
Commit a crime? It will have to be serious; otherwise, I’ll get bail.I  can’t think of a crime that won’t hurt somebody else nor spoil Xmas for them.Unless I commit suicide.But that’s murder, which is evil.And somebody may be sad.
I’ll just have to grit my teeth and save some money.Sell myself to the highest bidder.Not the devil, I hope.Will I recognize him?

Writing about your emotional pain could make you feel worse, unless you do it with “self-compassion”

“How does self-compassionate introspection fare against simple distraction? In a second study, 152 undergraduates (107 female) took the compassion and rumination tests and endured the “negative mood induction” of Prokofiev and terrible slides.  After a five-minute breather “to let your mind wander,” half did the self-compassionate writing exercise and half watched letters appear on a computer screen and responded when they saw “X”— this was the “distraction”.

In the mood-measurements, the participants in both groups experienced a similar reduction in “negative affect” post-exercise, so this was a tie. If you tend to think distraction is worthless, take note. However, distraction didn’t increase “positive affect” whereas self-compassion did, so it can be said to have won the contest. There’s also hope for brooders/ruminators. They had more “negative affect” hanging over from the Prokofiev, but they also experienced more change.

Clinicians might learn from these results that introspective approaches are dangerous for ruminators without a lot of stress on compassion. The risk is significant since rumination is linked to depression and significant procrastination. Pouring out painful feelings could turn into a binge-and-purge experience, which leaves you in a bad way and becomes a habit.

Ruminators, many say, need better forms of distraction. But the research literature on distraction is murky, the authors note, with many studies lumping all kinds of distraction together. They’d like to see research comparing a variety of distraction tasks with emotion regulation tasks like the self-compassion exercise. I’ll confess I’ve tried writing out my painful feelings and have innocently passed on that advice to others, without any instructions about compassion since I didn’t get any. I’m grateful to have read this research and next time will pass it on instead.”

_________________________________

http://www.salon.com/2016/10/31/walt-whitman-saw-donald-trump-coming-genuine-belief-seems-to-have-left-us-the-underlying-principles-of-the-states-are-not-honestly-believed-in/

Quote:“I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil,” Whitman wrote in “Democratic Vistas, “until it found and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past.” Democratic politics demand democratic culture, and without the committed cultivation of that culture, a question will forever haunt the new nation: “The people of our land may all read and write, and may all possess the right to vote — and yet the main things may be entirely lacking?”

Homogeneity is impossible in a country as diverse as America. It now seems that there are elements of American culture lacking the main things — curiosity, avidity, hospitality — while there are other elements failing and failing better as people dedicate their time, thought and labor to building a country of Whitman’s imagination; the “beloved community” of Martin Luther King’s dreams. If that project fails, as Whitman warned, “if America is eligible to downfall and ruin,” it is “eligible within herself, not without.”

Belle Lettre on the Postmodern

“Universals of the mind and the senses make poetic movements and schools possible. Universal sensibilities provide generations with solidarity around the voice of particular poets. It is the privileging of a poet’s voice that gives rise to his or her subjectivity. This subjectivity has enabled the evolution of Twentieth century free verse of the postmodern period. The magnitude of the free verse movement is a result of the order surrounding the poet’s voice. Postmodern poetry evolved into the dominant literary mode of the last half of the Twentieth century;and subsequently reflected the poet’s concern for cultural ontology. The poet’s voice in the second half of twentieth-century  American poetry depicted the abundant populace of American identities (i.e., African-American, Asian-American, Chicano, Latin@, LGBTIQ); its distinctive subjective trait now saturates the poetic experience. The subjective is now the dominant discourse, and it has become a postmodern paradox.”