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"With characteristic forthrightness, Lou has now decided to carry the banner of advocacy journalism elsewhere. We respect his decision." ~CNN President Jon Klein in a statement regarding Anchor Lou Dobbs says he's leaving CNN immediately
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...no shit...
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| User: |  nebris |
| Date: | 2009-11-11 04:40 |
| Subject: | Random Lite |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  ready for beddy |
~I have been up for only a little over two hours, but I 'took care of business' and am now going back to bed.
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~On this day in 1775, the Continental Marines were established, and this is considered the direct lineage of The United States Marine Corp.
Pictured by an unknown photographer, five U.S. Marine Corps privates with fixed bayonets under the command of their noncommissioned officer (NCO), who displays his M1859 Marine NCO sword. Navy Yard, Washington, DC, April 1864.
First Lieutenant Baldomero Lopez, USMC, leads the 3rd Platoon, Company A, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines over the seawall on the northern side of Red Beach, as the second assault wave lands, 15 September 1950, during the Inchon invasion. Wooden scaling ladders are in use to facilitate disembarkation from the LCVP that brought these men to the shore. Lt. Lopez was killed in action within a few minutes, while assaulting a North Korean bunker.
It should be noted that I have something of an 'affection' for the Marines as demonstrated in pieces like this.
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..but it sure looks exciting.
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~Today we're fucking off. In fact, I'm gonna take a nap right now.
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Dubbed by the National Review as “the most dangerous political philosopher in the West” and the New York Times as “the Elvis of cultural theory,” Slovenian philosopher and public intellectual Slavoj Žižek has written over fifty books on philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory.
In his latest book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Žižek analyzes how the United States has moved from the tragedy of 9/11 to what he calls the farce of the financial meltdown.
He spoke on that same theme at Cooper Union during a recent trip to New York.
...via ankh_f_n_khonsu
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..copy that..
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~Yesterday started off in a most unlovely fashion, with myself waking up around dawn angry and depressed, always my fav. I was able to take a nap midmorning and 'reset', but then Le-Le woke up and she was a fucking mess and needed some Love and Energy from me to help her get past that.
It's specifically about the Tax Stuff, but that is also just a trigger for the old Other Shoe Syndrome, which all three of us suffer from in one form or another. Sister Two did step up to offer support both emotionally and materially, Goddess Bless her. She is quite clearly a part of 'this thing of ours' now and that very much helped me and Le-Le on several levels.
I did speak with E just before that midmorning 'reset nap' and She addressed the Issue of Resources.
She said, ”Both of you are able to manifest when you're up against the wall. Now it's time to move beyond that and start to manifest from a place of calm focus. You both know how to do that and now you have a Sister who is a very powerful Majickal Instrument and completes The First Trikona.
This is not any that 'become rich' nonsense. This is about invoking the resources needed to build The Temple and further its goals. If that means a private jet is needed at some point – or possible a private airship – then so be it, the thing shall become available.
Really, Michael, it's not like you think small.” Then She laughed and told me to sleep, which I did and deeply.
I am up now for only a while and will nap some more shortly...though I'll still be the same height.
I am still writing, a short story about the Sisterhood Training that has novella ambitions, and an expanded Revealed Knowledge piece. Both are ultimately meant for The Explanation, so y'all will see them here when they're done.
Now I'm going to surf a bit...
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| User: | nebris |
| Date: | 2009-11-10 07:17 |
| Subject: | Phoamy Phun |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  good morning |
SEOUL, South Korea – A badly damaged North Korean patrol ship retreated in flames Tuesday after a skirmish with a South Korean naval vessel along their disputed western coast, South Korean officials said.
The first naval clash in seven years broke out just a week before President Barack Obama is due to visit Seoul, raising suspicions the North's communist regime is trying to rachet up tensions to gain a negotiating advantage.
There were no South Korean casualties, the country's Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement, and it was not immediately clear if there were any casualties on the North Korean side. Each side blamed the other for violating the sea border.
The exchange of fire occurred as U.S. officials said Obama has decided to send a special envoy to Pyongyang for rare direct talks on the communist country's nuclear weapons program. No date has been set, but the talks would be the first one-on-one negotiations since Obama took office in January.
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"Already in the western world and Japan millions of city-dwellers and suburbanites have grown accustomed to an almost hermetically sealed and sanitized pattern of living in which very little of their experience ever impinges on non-human phenomena. For those of us born to such an existence, it is all but impossible to believe that anything is any longer beyond human adjustment, domination, and improvement. That is the lesson in vanity the city teaches us every moment of every day. For on all sides we see, hear, and smell the evidence of human supremacy over nature - right down to the noise and odor and irritants that foul the air around us. Like Narcissus, modern men and women take pride in seeing themselves - their products, their planning - reflected in all that they behold. The more artifice, the more progress; the more progress, the more security. We press our technological imperialism forward against the natural environment until we reach the point at which it comes as startling and not entirely credible news to our urban masses to be told by anxious ecologists that their survival has anything whatever to do with air, water, soil, plant, or animal." ~Theodore Roszak, 1972 Where the Wasteland Ends
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Well, the House health reform bill -- known to Republicans as the Government Takeover -- finally passed after one of Congress's longer, less enlightening debates. Two stalwarts of the single-payer movement split their votes; John Conyers voted for it; Dennis Kucinich against. Kucinich was right.
Conservative rhetoric notwithstanding, the House bill is not a "government takeover." I wish it were. Instead, it enshrines and subsidizes the "takeover" by the investor-owned insurance industry that occurred after the failure of the Clinton reform effort in 1994. To be sure, the bill has a few good provisions (expansion of Medicaid, for example), but they are marginal. It also provides for some regulation of the industry (no denial of coverage because of pre-existing conditions, for example), but since it doesn't regulate premiums, the industry can respond to any regulation that threatens its profits by simply raising its rates. The bill also does very little to curb the perverse incentives that lead doctors to over-treat the well-insured. And quite apart from its content, the bill is so complicated and convoluted that it would take a staggering apparatus to administer it and try to enforce its regulations.
What does the insurance industry get out of it? Tens of millions of new customers, courtesy of the mandate and taxpayer subsidies. And not just any kind of customer, but the youngest, healthiest customers -- those least likely to use their insurance. The bill permits insurers to charge twice as much for older people as for younger ones. So older under-65's will be more likely to go without insurance, even if they have to pay fines. That's OK with the industry, since these would be among their sickest customers. (Shouldn't age be considered a pre-existing condition?)
Insurers also won't have to cover those younger people most likely to get sick, because they will tend to use the public option (which is not an "option" at all, but a program projected to cover only 6 million uninsured Americans). So instead of the public option providing competition for the insurance industry, as originally envisioned, it's been turned into a dumping ground for a small number of people whom private insurers would rather not have to cover anyway.
If a similar bill emerges from the Senate and the reconciliation process, and is ultimately passed, what will happen?
First, health costs will continue to skyrocket, even faster than they are now, as taxpayer dollars are pumped into the private sector. The response of payers -- government and employers -- will be to shrink benefits and increase deductibles and co-payments. Yes, more people will have insurance, but it will cover less and less, and be more expensive to use.
But, you say, the Congressional Budget Office has said the House bill will be a little better than budget-neutral over ten years. That may be, although the assumptions are arguable. Note, though, that the CBO is not concerned with total health costs, only with costs to the government. And it is particularly concerned with Medicare, the biggest contributor to federal deficits. The House bill would take money out of Medicare, and divert it to the private sector and, to some extent, to Medicaid. The remaining costs of the legislation would be paid for by taxes on the wealthy. But although the bill might pay for itself, it does nothing to solve the problem of runaway inflation in the system as a whole. It's a shell game in which money is moved from one part of our fragmented system to another.
Here is my program for real reform:
Recommendation #1: Drop the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 55. This should be an expansion of traditional Medicare, not a new program. Gradually, over several years, drop the age decade by decade, until everyone is covered by Medicare. Costs: Obviously, this would increase Medicare costs, but it would help decrease costs to the health system as a whole, because Medicare is so much more efficient (overhead of about 3% vs. 20% for private insurance). And it's a better program, because it ensures that everyone has access to a uniform package of benefits.
Recommendation #2: Increase Medicare fees for primary care doctors and reduce them for procedure-oriented specialists. Specialists such as cardiologists and gastroenterologists are now excessively rewarded for doing tests and procedures, many of which, in the opinion of experts, are not medically indicated. Not surprisingly, we have too many specialists, and they perform too many tests and procedures. Costs: This would greatly reduce costs to Medicare, and the reform would almost certainly be adopted throughout the wider health system.
Recommendation #3: Medicare should monitor doctors' practice patterns for evidence of excess, and gradually reduce fees of doctors who habitually order significantly more tests and procedures than the average for the specialty. Costs: Again, this would greatly reduce costs, and probably be widely adopted.
Recommendation #4: Provide generous subsidies to medical students entering primary care, with higher subsidies for those who practice in underserved areas of the country for at least two years. Costs: This initial, rather modest investment in ending our shortage of primary care doctors would have long-term benefits, in terms of both costs and quality of care.
Recommendation #5: Repeal the provision of the Medicare drug benefit that prohibits Medicare from negotiating with drug companies for lower prices. (The House bill calls for this.) That prohibition has been a bonanza for the pharmaceutical industry. For negotiations to be meaningful, there must be a list (formulary) of drugs deemed cost-effective. This is how the Veterans Affairs System obtains some of the lowest drug prices of any insurer in the country. Costs: If Medicare paid the same prices as the Veterans Affairs System, its expenditures on brand-name drugs would be a small fraction of what they are now.
Is the House bill better than nothing? I don't think so. It simply throws more money into a dysfunctional and unsustainable system, with only a few improvements at the edges, and it augments the central role of the investor-owned insurance industry. The danger is that as costs continue to rise and coverage becomes less comprehensive, people will conclude that we've tried health reform and it didn't work. But the real problem will be that we didn't really try it. I would rather see us do nothing now, and have a better chance of trying again later and then doing it right.
So, essentially, it's been a game of 'bait and switch'. The lobbyists and the GOP fund the crazies, who make a lot of psycho noise, while the actual bill is crafted to give Big Insurance and Big Pharma a huge windfall, with support from those who want real reform, but who do not see what a rip off this is because they've been largely distracted by the crazies.
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contemplative
DIAF, Lou.
ha
so nice...
calm
cynical