Word: mattering
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...other hand, they all pursue a very basic irony: Even in the worst of times, ordinary human beings solipsistically pursue their little lives. They get married, have children, pursue their paltry careers, no matter who is running things in the larger world. In investigating the intersection where mini-histories collide with mega-history, Menzel provides a valuable humanistic service. People like Jan Dítĕ are always the victims of the politicians and ideologues who would engineer the human soul. And they never quite understand why they are carelessly chosen for exile, prison or death. There's something eerie...
...minimum number of days of paid manual labor for the state, demonstrating that the poor can still give workers some measure of job security. With better organization, the report authors believe, biological problems like infectious disease can also be brought under control through social policy. Mexico has in a matter of decades consigned widespread diarrheal diseases to the history books by cleaning its water supply...
...just be political will. Any government official - or doctor, for that matter - who tries to improve population health has basically just two options. One is to push the frontiers constantly, improving basic health knowledge and medical technology. The other is to work with existing knowledge and technology, but to concentrate on allocating it efficiently. Almost all the WHO's recommendations fall into the latter category, and the commissioners are convinced that focusing on the social determinants of health will save both lives and cash in the long run. "We're wasting a lot of the money that we invest...
...bald reality is this: the public is more eager for activist government than it has been in years. American politics is moving left no matter who wins in 2008. The real question is whether Obama becomes the face of that leftward shift--which will remind Republicans why they loathe Democrats--or McCain does, in which case Republicans will increasingly loathe themselves. If McCain loses in 2008, the GOP will eventually come back and win. If he wins, on the other hand, they will lose and lose and lose...
...child's death or a spouse's cancer or a spouse's cheating or even, to some extent, of being tortured in an enemy prison, it is the adversity that moves us more than the rising above it. Making it central to your campaign is more a matter of seeking empathy than offering it. You're asking for a pity vote. Or maybe it's more ghoulish than that. Maybe politicians are now held in such utter contempt that personal suffering is the only way they can prove their humanity...