Between celebrating my fiftieth birthday and preparing for vacation, a lot of other things have gone on in the world that deserve noting.

Iran

#iranelection is still a trending topic on Twitter, although it doesn’t consistently hold the top position the way it did for the first several days after the election. My birthday, July 9th, or 18 Tir in the Persian calendar is the tenth anniversary of the brutal suppression of student led demonstrations in Tehran. The Tehran Bureau has a good background piece on the significance of 18 Tir. This year, thousand of Iranians poured into the street, partly in remembrance of ten years ago, and partly in remembrance of a few weeks ago. Time Magazine and The New York Times provide a traditional media view of the events and The Green Brief #23 and Revolutionary Road provide more raw details of what people are seeing on the street.

Efforts to keep these sources available as the Iranian government refines its filters to limit communications continue to evolve. A Google mailing list entitled the Student Information Center provide Farsi and English details of what is going on. Austin Heap who has done so much in terms of helping with proxy servers is working on a new project called Haystack. For more details read “Haystack,” Program Providing Unfiltered Internet Access in Iran to be Released.

When I get back from vacation, I’ll follow up with Austin about providing servers and bandwidth for Haystack. Until then, I’ll keep TOR up and running as much as I can.

I also read in the blog of a Chinese friend that after the Uighurs uprising the Chinese Government has started restricting Internet access more so I’m keeping TOR up for friends in China as well.

Health Care

This week I wrote two blog posts about health care in Connecticut. In The True Cost of Health Care, I look at the large premium increase that Anthem has asked for and note that the are spending some of the premium money on lobbying against providing more health care choices to the people of the United States. This became all the more striking when Gov. Rell vetoed two bills that would have greatly improved health care in Connecticut. I wrote to my State Representative about this and recounted the emails in Continuing the Health Care Debate.

Meanwhile, I read that Bob Massie has just had a liver transplant. Years ago, I went to Grace Church in Manhattan. Bob was an assistant priest at Grace Church who left to study business, ethics and Christianity at Harvard. He has grown up and lived with hemophilia. His parents wrote about book entitled Journey about the experience and later wrote a book about hemophilia in Russia in the book Nicholas and Alexandra.

I encourage everyone to stop and read a little bit of Finding God at Harvard where Bob talks about his experiences. In particular, on page 211, there is a section which talks about a cold remedy which introduced no new medical features and spent a majority of its budget on advertising, and no one objected publicly.

There is something wrong with our medical system, but too few people speak up publicly. Yes, if you are rich or well connected, we have the best medical system in the world. Yet according to the 2009 CIA World Fact book, 45 countries have lower infant mortality rates than the United States, and 49 countries have higher life expectancies at birth than the United States.

Meanwhile, Gov. Rell and some Republican State Legislators are content to take no meaningful action to address healthcare issues in our state.

The Death Penalty

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my experience attending part of the death penalty hearing for Richard Roszkowski. I wanted to make it back to the hearing to see how things were progressing; it was taking much long than people wanted or expected. Well, Wednesday there were the final arguments and the jury is now deliberating on whether or not Roszkowski should become the eleventh person on death row here in Connecticut.

I believe that the death penalty is wrong. What Roszkowski did was horrible. Yet I also believe that the death penalty is horrible. We will see how long the jury deliberates and what decision they reach.

The Rest of Life

Meanwhile, I continue to talk with people struggling with difficulties in their jobs or the loss of loved ones. It has made the week, a week of extremes. I am exhausted and look forward to sitting quietly by the sea for a little while.

I will try to keep posting daily during my vacation, but the posts are more likely to be more about vacation and less about politics, technology and related topics.

More soon.