The Progressive Politics of Happiness

Here of some examples of the kind of policies we should promote:

Paid family leave. Only the United States, Swaziland, Liberia and Papua New Guinea don’t guarantee at least paid maternity leave. Most wealthy countries also offer paid leave for fathers.

Paid sick days. Only a handful of desperately poor countries and the United States, don’t guaranteed paid leave when you’re sick. 86 percent of food service workers get no paid sick days and they come to work sick and get you sick—they can be fired if they don’t.

Paid vacation time. Only the United States, Guyana, Suriname, Nepal and Burma don’t guarantee at least some paid vacation time. Every European gets at least four weeks off with pay a year. We should support the Paid Vacation Act of 2009, sponsored in Congress by a true progressive, Representative Alan Grayson of Florida. It’s a very modest proposal, but a step in the right direction.

Here’s another idea: the choice of shorter work-time. In the Netherlands and some other European countries, workers have a legal right to reduce their hours without losing their jobs. They keep the same hourly pay, pro-rated benefits and full health care. This is an enormous expansion of personal freedom—the right to choose time over money, to select shorter hours of work without losing one’s livelihood.

Each of these policy reforms is essential to good health. Indeed, our lack of these rights is part of the reason Americans have the worst health in the industrial world, despite paying twice as much as everyone else does for healthcare. We are almost twice as likely to suffer chronic illness in old age as Europeans are, for example. Workplace stress in America is a killer, the “new tobacco” in the words of one cardiologist.

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Fake Mars Mission: 'Real World' Meets Space Travel

A fake mission to Mars is getting under way at a research institute in Moscow, where six men will spend the next year and a half inside a mock spaceship.

The international "crew" includes two men from Europe, one from China and three from Russia. They'll spend the next 520 days living inside just a few bus-sized modules at Russia's Institute for Biomedical Problems.

The team will have to put up with endless astronaut food, the grind of exercise and maintenance work, science experiments, fake emergencies — plus extreme isolation from the outside world.

"We get to see what happens to them over the course of an awful long time, and that's not been done before," says Nick Kanas, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco who worked on a 105-day pilot study leading up to this new Mars simulation.

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No Longer a fan of Rachel Maddow!

Tonight I tuned into her show, which I rarely do anymore since she became a mouthpiece for republican jerks using her to spread their talking points. Tonight was the last straw. There is a ridiculously stupid saying in liberal blog land, iokiyr, which mean these weak kneed "liberals" and "progressives" believe the thugs can do as they please with impunity. Retarded, that's putting it mildly. How can you be an opposition party and believe such a counterproductive thing? To add insult to injury Maddow said, "iokiyr always and forever" I was boiling mad, and refuse to watch her show again. It's never okay, forever we must fight them, prove them wrong. Always. Sadly the transformation to corporate drone is now complete. Only Keith Olbermann still defends progressive values, although that is will no doubt change if MSNBC happens to read this post. Americans better wake up to the media monopolies who now brainwash them on all stations at all times, radio and the printed press are not better and sometimes much worse. God bless America and the independent thinkers that made her great.