We all live in the House of Insanity to one degree or another. It’s not a real house — its walls, built from mistaken beliefs, can topple in a heartbeat. And it’s a little different for each of us. How free we each are from these delusions affects our peace of mind and our actions — a big deal — but in the end we’re all in the same soup together. I won’t make it, whatever that means, if you don’t too.

You can probably help me with some of my false beliefs. We can all use a little of that kind of help. But I’m hoping I can help some of you, who may be ingesting “the news” without background information or a sense of irony. I’m eager for more of my brothers and sisters to look behind the curtain at the even-more-insane-than-we-are folks trying to pull our puppet strings.

Two examples from today’s paper will give you an idea of what to look for.

First, the easy one: a beauty contest in Israel for Holocaust survivors, has been entered by 300 women. Beauty contests are ridiculous to begin with, but beauty contest/Holocaust. How did anyone ever come up with such an insane conjunction? The Israeli government must be really desperate for propaganda to support its agenda…using innocent people (who’ve suffered enough) and being sexist to boot.

The second one’s a little more complicated. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled Obama’s “health care” act constitutional, claiming that it’s okay to financially penalize people who don’t want to buy health insurance. They’re calling it a tax, something the government has a right to do, completely ignoring the fact that never before have U.S. citizens been forced to buy a particular product from a private company whether they want it or not. Now, unless you’re old enough to be on Medicare or qualify for Medicaid, you’re going to be financially penalized either way. (And the Court’s ruling on another aspect of the bill ensures that fewer people will qualify for Medicaid.)

This isn’t health care, or an improvement on the previous system. It’s highway robbery for the benefit of the insurance and drug industries, and obviously not constitutional. (Where’s the “freedom of the marketplace”?)

We shouldn’t expect anything else from a government dominated and run by the corporate elite for their own benefit. This isn’t a “liberal” decision on the part of the court, nor is the legislation “liberal,” whatever that word’s come to mean. It’s conservative, in the sense of benefiting the rich and penalizing workers and other ordinary folk. And the “conservative” side? They’re so mean they don’t even want folks to have that much! They’re for kicking sick people who don’t have the huge amounts of money they do to pay for health care to the curb for real. There might be a dollar or two of government money spent on the new scheme, and God forbid that should happen.

Health “insurance” is about profit for a few, not health care, and it has no place in a real health care system. Why should anybody be profiting from (preying on) people’s ill health? All that’s needed is for high-income folks to pay their fair share of taxes, so that we can have a single-payer, government-provided health care system like the ones in most other industrialized countries. You pay your taxes, and your doctor visits, hospitalizations, prescriptions, and ambulance rides are free — along with other “services” like education, libraries, etc. Equality — the same for everyone. Some of the countries with this kind of system — and much better health statistics than ours — are much poorer than ours. Our statistics, like our infant mortality rate, are lousy. And they’re not going to get any better with this “new” system.

But you won’t get a clear analysis of any of this in a mainstream newspaper or on the TV news — just the confusion of all the folks so smugly (and deludedly) hanging out in the House of Insanity, plus an extra dollop more to make sure you don’t see through their game.

I may sound mad about all this, but I’m not. What good would that do? As I said earlier, none of it’s a surprise — this is the kind of thing you get in a system like ours, run by the profit motive over all. It’ll change as soon as enough of us get hip to what’s going on and decide we want something different. Hopefully, the offerings on this site are a step in that direction.