This is one of the things I've been worrying about. Dumping Will Kill Us
If we aren't careful, we're gonna get a reform law that simply sets us up to fail. Either the public option leads to a system that transfers enormous amounts of money from taxpayers to insurance companies; or it strips out the quaality of care from private plans because it applies so much pricing pressure; or it kills the insurance industry outright; or, or, or, etc.
I think the one thing that's obvious is that this is gonna get painful.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Just The Way You Are
Dove started this a few years ago, and it seemed like a great idea. Real women depicted in a real way. Haven't heard much about it lately; I'm hoping they stick with it.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Cluster Fox
The Rupert Street Journal may have let one slip by.
The token librul, Thomas Franks somehow got this past 'em.
"But no journalistic operation is better prepared to sing the tragedy of its own martyrdom than Fox News. To all the usual journalistic instincts it adds its grand narrative of Middle America's disrespectful treatment by the liberal elite. Persecution fantasy is Fox News's lifeblood; give it the faintest whiff of the real thing and look out for a gale-force hissy fit."
Live To Work vs Work To Live
By way of The Agonist, here's a post from a guy named Joe Bageant.
"America looks like one big workhouse, "under God, indivisible, with time off to shit, shower and shop." A country whose citizens have been reduced to "human assets" of a vast and relentless economic machine, moving human parts oiled by commodities and kept in motion by the edict, "produce or die." Where employment and a job dominates all other aspects of life, and the loss of which spells the loss of everything."
"But you won't hear anyone complaining. America doesn't like whiners. A whiner or a cynic is about the worst thing you can be in the land of gunpoint optimism. Foreigners often remark on the upbeat American personality. I assure them that our American corpocracy has its ways of pistol whipping or sedating its human assets into the appropriate level of cheeriness."
"America looks like one big workhouse, "under God, indivisible, with time off to shit, shower and shop." A country whose citizens have been reduced to "human assets" of a vast and relentless economic machine, moving human parts oiled by commodities and kept in motion by the edict, "produce or die." Where employment and a job dominates all other aspects of life, and the loss of which spells the loss of everything."
"But you won't hear anyone complaining. America doesn't like whiners. A whiner or a cynic is about the worst thing you can be in the land of gunpoint optimism. Foreigners often remark on the upbeat American personality. I assure them that our American corpocracy has its ways of pistol whipping or sedating its human assets into the appropriate level of cheeriness."
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Afghanistan
From an Op-Ed piece by Scott Corey as posted on Juan Cole's Informed Comment.
"Today, power is so diffuse that empire and isolation are equally dead. Control of information, money, natural resources, and ideological persuasiveness all move parts of the political world. Still, all of it hangs on a framework of formal authority residing in a collection of states that wield force, legitimacy, representation, and diplomacy.
Terrorism prospers in the complexity of this political world. Political identity is no longer simple and fixed, so friend and enemy are hard to know. If I hit you, we fight, because the enmity is clear. If I coerce you with weapons, you might be intimidated or you might defy me, but the choice is clear. However, if I kill someone else in a spectacular manner, you need to know why before you can react. My cause might be just. My enemy might be your enemy. Or I might be coming for you and yours if you take the wrong path."
"Today, power is so diffuse that empire and isolation are equally dead. Control of information, money, natural resources, and ideological persuasiveness all move parts of the political world. Still, all of it hangs on a framework of formal authority residing in a collection of states that wield force, legitimacy, representation, and diplomacy.
Terrorism prospers in the complexity of this political world. Political identity is no longer simple and fixed, so friend and enemy are hard to know. If I hit you, we fight, because the enmity is clear. If I coerce you with weapons, you might be intimidated or you might defy me, but the choice is clear. However, if I kill someone else in a spectacular manner, you need to know why before you can react. My cause might be just. My enemy might be your enemy. Or I might be coming for you and yours if you take the wrong path."
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Beck's Projections
Listen closely, and you can make out the subliminal message: Teach your kids to expect less. There are winners and losers in life; the people you see on TV and the people you read about in the papers are the winners, and all of you are losers. Get used to it.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Virginia Gubernatorial Race
Nick's project for his Government Class is this campaign spot - with my own humble self doing a guest shot as narrator.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Evidence-Based Reality
And the debate rages on. From an article in Wired, Amy Wallace takes a look at what's beginning to happen as a result of the "Anti-Vaccination Movement".
In May, The New England Journal of Medicine laid the blame for clusters of disease outbreaks throughout the US squarely at the feet of declining vaccination rates, while nonprofit health care provider Kaiser Permanente reported that unvaccinated children were 23 times more likely to get pertussis, a highly contagious bacterial disease that causes violent coughing and is potentially lethal to infants. In the June issue of the journal Pediatrics, Jason Glanz, an epidemiologist at Kaiser’s Institute for Health Research, revealed that the number of reported pertussis cases jumped from 1,000 in 1976 to 26,000 in 2004. A disease that vaccines made rare, in other words, is making a comeback. “This study helps dispel one of the commonly held beliefs among vaccine-refusing parents: that their children are not at risk for vaccine-preventable diseases,” Glanz says.
“I used to say that the tide would turn when children started to die. Well, children have started to die,” Offit says, frowning as he ticks off recent fatal cases of meningitis in unvaccinated children in Pennsylvania and Minnesota. “So now I’ve changed it to ‘when enough children start to die.’ Because obviously, we’re not there yet.”
In May, The New England Journal of Medicine laid the blame for clusters of disease outbreaks throughout the US squarely at the feet of declining vaccination rates, while nonprofit health care provider Kaiser Permanente reported that unvaccinated children were 23 times more likely to get pertussis, a highly contagious bacterial disease that causes violent coughing and is potentially lethal to infants. In the June issue of the journal Pediatrics, Jason Glanz, an epidemiologist at Kaiser’s Institute for Health Research, revealed that the number of reported pertussis cases jumped from 1,000 in 1976 to 26,000 in 2004. A disease that vaccines made rare, in other words, is making a comeback. “This study helps dispel one of the commonly held beliefs among vaccine-refusing parents: that their children are not at risk for vaccine-preventable diseases,” Glanz says.
“I used to say that the tide would turn when children started to die. Well, children have started to die,” Offit says, frowning as he ticks off recent fatal cases of meningitis in unvaccinated children in Pennsylvania and Minnesota. “So now I’ve changed it to ‘when enough children start to die.’ Because obviously, we’re not there yet.”
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Friday, October 23, 2009
For The Record
I caught a short glimpse of Frank Gaffney on Hardball trying to argue that a real insurgency caused problems in Germany after WWII - which somehow is supposed to mean we should stay in Iraq and Afghanistan in spite of the locals' deep desire to get us outa there.
The 'Werewolf' in Germany was mostly fiction - made up of frightened hungry teenagers and some number of die-hard Nazi buttheads. A Pentagon report listed 42 American soldiers "killed as a result of enemy action" between June and December 1945. In 1946, there were three.
Get. Out. Now.
The 'Werewolf' in Germany was mostly fiction - made up of frightened hungry teenagers and some number of die-hard Nazi buttheads. A Pentagon report listed 42 American soldiers "killed as a result of enemy action" between June and December 1945. In 1946, there were three.
Get. Out. Now.
Once An Asshole, Always An Asshole
“They’re opening them [oil fields] up to other companies all over the world … We’re entitled to it. Heck, we even lost 5,000 of our people, 65,000 injured and a trillion, five hundred billion dollars," -T. Boone Pickens, speaking to Congress about Iraq.
I have to admit, when Pickens was doing his commercials for wind energy, I tho't maybe we were seeing the beginnings of real change in how we'd go about feeding the beast - which (I'd hoped) would change the beast. Now I see it was just standard bullshit - he saw an opportunity and tried to capitalize on it. Nothin' wrong with that in itself, but pricks like T Boone Pickens feel entitled to the resources that somebody else paid for. They actually believe that my kids should fight and bleed and die in some desert shithole to make sure they have access to the enormous profits they can make by selling the oil back to the machinery being used to go to places like Iraq to secure their access to the oil supplies.
There's no soul in any of this. We've allowed Purpose and Self-Determintation to be stripped out of everything we do.
I have to admit, when Pickens was doing his commercials for wind energy, I tho't maybe we were seeing the beginnings of real change in how we'd go about feeding the beast - which (I'd hoped) would change the beast. Now I see it was just standard bullshit - he saw an opportunity and tried to capitalize on it. Nothin' wrong with that in itself, but pricks like T Boone Pickens feel entitled to the resources that somebody else paid for. They actually believe that my kids should fight and bleed and die in some desert shithole to make sure they have access to the enormous profits they can make by selling the oil back to the machinery being used to go to places like Iraq to secure their access to the oil supplies.
There's no soul in any of this. We've allowed Purpose and Self-Determintation to be stripped out of everything we do.
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