A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Thursday, September 17, 2026 09:05
VIEWED: 757652
PAGE 31 of 73
Too bad he's not Orwell.
That guy wrote books that still hold up 70 years later.
This dude can't even write a book that holds up before it gets published.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Too bad he's not Orwell.
That guy wrote books that still hold up 70 years later.
This dude can't even write a book that holds up before it gets published.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
It used to be, Gibson had told me, that a defensive membrane divided his life from his work. He could consider the future as a professional, without picturing his own life, his kids’ lives. “I never wanted to be the guy thinking about ‘Mad Max’ world,” he said. “I had some sort of defense in place. . . . It’s denial, some kind of denial. But denial can be a lifesaving thing, in certain lives, in certain times. How on earth did you get through that? Some reliable part of you just says, It’s not happening.” The membrane, he went on, “which I very, very much miss, actually held until the morning after Trump’s election. And I woke up and it was gone, whatever it was. It was just gone, and it’s never come back.”
At dinner, Jack Womack joined us. The restaurant was loud and dimly lit, its tables and chairs artfully cheap, the specials written on mirrors in white pen. Attractive drinkers, dressed in black, raised coupe glasses. At our corner table, conversation turned to the jackpot.
“What I find most unsettling,” Gibson said, “is that the few times that I’ve tried to imagine what the mood is going to be, I can’t. Even if we have total, magical good luck, and Brexit and Trump and the rest turn out as well as they possibly can, the climate will still be happening. And as its intensity and steadiness are demonstrated, and further demonstrated—I try to imagine the mood, and my mind freezes up. It’s a really grim feeling.” He paused. “I’ve been trying to come to terms with it, personally. And I’ve started to think that maybe I won’t be able to.”
Womack nodded. “My daughter’s sixteen and a half,” he said. “Sixty years from now, she’ll be in her mid-seventies. I have absolutely no idea what the physical world will be like then. What the changes will be.”
“It’s totally new,” Gibson said. “A genuinely new thing.” He looked away from us, into the room. Another song came on the sound system. Incandescent light gilded the mirrors. A young woman in round glasses leaned back in her chair. I felt, suddenly, that we were all living in the past.
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gibson-keeps-his-sci
ence-fiction-real
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:All topics I've attempted to address in my posts. For my pains, I get called a "Russian troll", and hardly anybody wants to engage in thinking these Big Thoughts.
William Greider obituary
William Greider tackled gigantic subjects: the Federal Reserve (“Secrets of the Temple,” 1987), the evaporation of American democracy (“Who Will Tell the People,” 1992), globalization (“One World Ready or Not,” 1997), society’s deformation by the military-industrial complex (“Fortress America,” 1998), whether we can reinvent the U.S. economy (“The Soul of Capitalism,” 2003), and what to do when the people running this country seem determined to destroy it (“Come Home, America,” 2009).
Quote:YOU, SECOND, should take a lesson from him! Stop adding to the garbage tornado! TRUMP is NOT ... I repeat NOT ... the source of our problems, and getting rid of him won't solve them!
Each of these books is still completely relevant — something that almost never can be said about aging political writing. Pick up, say, “Game Change,” the bestseller by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin about the 2008 election, and you’ll find it’s now as fascinating as gossip about the Harding administration.
Greider pulled this off because he didn’t care about the daily political garbage tornado. Instead, his focus was always on the huge subterranean battles that actually determine our lives, i.e., capital vs. labor, creditors vs. debtors, marketing vs. people, and capitalism vs. democracy.
Our problems are decades in the making, rooted in our collective failure to tackle Big Thoughts and question our Big ASSumptions. What are our problems? What are our interests? How did we get here? What is right and what is wrong? How can we fix things?
How about making a New Year's resolution, SECOND? Kill that snake in your head and start thinking straight?
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:I agree with you that getting President Trump out of the W.H. will not solve our problems. Mike Pence will step in. He is Trump, without the stupid lying, lazy/disorganized management style, and the personal tax cheating.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
YOU, SECOND, should take a lesson from him! Stop adding to the garbage tornado! TRUMP is NOT ... I repeat NOT ... the source of our problems, and getting rid of him won't solve them!
Our problems are decades in the making, rooted in our collective failure to tackle Big Thoughts and question our Big ASSumptions. What are our problems? What are our interests? How did we get here? What is right and what is wrong? How can we fix things?
How about making a New Year's resolution, SECOND? Kill that snake in your head and start thinking straight?
It wasn’t Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, who turned America upside down. It was the 1.5 million who followed him. It is not Trump, or Pence, who will turn America upside down. It is the 63 million who follow him. What did Jeff Davis’ followers believe was right and true and worth fighting for? Interestingly enough, William Gibson, Science Fiction writer, brings it up in an interview about the present. Midway through his career, the inventor of “cyberspace” turned his novel-writing attention to a strange new world: the present. www.historynet.com/confederate-army
In Wytheville, people owned books like “The Lost Cause,” an encyclopedic account of the Civil War, published in 1866, which depicted slavery as benign. In his library, Gibson unfolded himself from his chair, retrieving a copy of “The Lost Cause,” which he had salvaged from Wytheville.
“In our house, there were these objects that no one ever said anything to me about,” he said. “I just found them myself, and reverse-engineered what they meant. These were being sold from the very beginning of Reconstruction, and within them—actually, there’s another one. . . .” He bent low, and picked up a smaller volume, blowing dust from its binding.
“This is the most evil object in the house,” he said. “It’s just, like, unspeakable!” He handed it to me. The book was “The Old Plantation: How We Lived in Great House and Cabin Before the War,” by James Battle Avirett.
“Check out the inscription,” he said. It was dedicated to “the old planter and his wife—the only real slaves on the old plantation.”
Gibson settled on a hard-backed chair, adjusting the cuffs of his perfectly reproduced mid-century chambray workshirt. “It’s just the foulest revisionist text,” he said. “It was given to my grandmother when, I think, she was sixteen years old, signed by the author. She took me aside, on one or two ritual occasions, to try to indoctrinate me into the crucial, central significance of the ‘War of the Northern Invasion.’ ” He grimaced. “This is why the South is still so fucked up—because this stuff never quit. It never quit! It’s the formation . . .” He trailed off.
“Of our past?” I asked.
“Of our present,” he corrected me.
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gibson-keeps-his-sci
ence-fiction-real
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
You've never answered that SECOND, even though I've posted it hundreds of times.
You seem to like history, so here's some history. In the entire history of the democratic party, they've not once altered the course of the US contribution to global warming. They've not done it when they controlled the WH, or when they've controlled one House of Congress, or both Houses of Congress, or any two out of the three, or all three together. That's their history. Based on their history, why should I expect anything different from them in the future?
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:The growing climate awareness is mainly taking place among Democrats; the Republican base is largely unmoved. And the anti-environmental extremism of conservative politicians has, if anything, become even more intense as their position has become intellectually untenable. The right used to pretend that there was a serious scientific dispute about the reality of global warming and its sources. Now Republicans, and the Trump administration in particular, have simply become hostile to science in general. Hey, aren’t scientists effectively part of the Deep State?
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
You've never answered that SECOND, even though I've posted it hundreds of times.
You seem to like history, so here's some history. In the entire history of the democratic party, they've not once altered the course of the US contribution to global warming. They've not done it when they controlled the WH, or when they've controlled one House of Congress, or both Houses of Congress, or any two out of the three, or all three together. That's their history. Based on their history, why should I expect anything different from them in the future?
Science Under Attack: How Trump Is Sidelining Researchers and Their Work
www.nytimes.com/2019/12/28/climate/trump-administration-war-on-science
.html
Political appointees have shut down government studies, reduced the influence of scientists over regulatory decisions and in some cases pressured researchers not to speak publicly. The administration has particularly challenged scientific findings related to the environment and public health opposed by industries such as oil drilling and coal mining. It has also impeded research around human-caused climate change, which President Trump has dismissed despite a global scientific consensus.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
So?
Aside from the dip at the Great Recession public opinion HASN'T CHANGED WITHIN A VERY NARROW RANGE IN OVER 30 YEARS.
So what did democrats do about global warming with all that public support - yanno, the ~ 60 - 65% who felt that the global warming threat was as important or more important than stated during those over 30 years?
And, since you yet again failed to answer the question, maybe you need to see it better, to help you focus on it.
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:There is a list of bills from Democrats that have gone to the Senate only to die very quietly. If the Democrats get control of the Senate the bills will die loudly, with much screaming as they are horribly killed by the GOP filibuster. So, I guess you are right, Congress won't get any better. It would if a Democratic Senate Majority leader kills the filibuster, but how likely do you think that would be? www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Name one - specifically. Tell me how EXACTLY that bill is going to do the job.
There is a list of bills from Democrats that have gone to the Senate only to die very quietly.
Are there - oh - increments of progress written in? Assignment of departments to calculate cost effectiveness? Granting of authority? Anything at all to indicate it's a serious bill and not just and empty position statement like the DNC platform was?
I'll wait.
And - as long as I'm here, let me just indulge in a little bit of SLOPPY snark on you.
You know, if you were able to run your life in any successful way, you'd understand that the way to bring this debate to a definitive close is to show me the democrats have DONE SOMETHING EFFECTIVE in any one of those 30+ years to address global warming,
But you're a loser in life, and you'll never be able to grasp what it means to be working from facts.
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:I will name two: A bill to regulate assault weapons, to ensure that the right to keep and bear arms is not unlimited. Read the 125 pages of text for exactly how this works. www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/s66
Originally posted by 1KIKI:Quote:Name one - specifically. Tell me how EXACTLY that bill is going to do the job.
There is a list of bills from Democrats that have gone to the Senate only to die very quietly.
The GOP will make sure it won’t pass in this session . . . or any other.
A bill to establish an improved Medicare for All national health insurance program. Read the 120 pages to see how this expands Medicare to people younger than 65 years. www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/hr1384
Not gonna happen, except over the dead bodies of Mitch McConnell and all the other GOP Senators.
But then most good ideas die because people fearfully won't try them, which has been humanity's way for hundreds of thousands of years, until certain capitalists figured out brutal, complex, and unreliable ways to get around that tendency in Congress in order to do things the way the capitalists think are best for themselves. Since those capitalists are less than 0.1% of the population, the other 99.9% will often be out of luck. The "good" idea works best for the 0.1% and isn't particularly good for anyone else.
Many health professionals support Medicare for All, including a majority of doctors and the largest nurses union in the US, as do a majority of registered voters in the US overall. But it ain't gonna happen. The GOP has stopped it dead.
www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/opinion--health-reform-in-america--
where-are-the-scientists--66884
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
What does that have to do with GLOBAL WARMING Sloppy?
FOCUS.
AND STOP LYING.
You know, if you were able to run your life in any successful way, you'd understand that the way to bring this debate to a definitive close is to show me the democrats have DONE SOMETHING EFFECTIVE in any one of those 30+ years to address global warming,
But you're a loser in life, and you'll never be able to grasp what it means to be working from facts.
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:Quote:Name one - specifically. Tell me how EXACTLY that bill is going to do the job.
There is a list of bills from Democrats that have gone to the Senate only to die very quietly.
Are there - oh - increments of progress written in? Assignment of departments to calculate cost effectiveness? Granting of authority? Anything at all to indicate it's a serious bill and not just and empty position statement like the DNC platform was?
I'll wait.
And - as long as I'm here, let me just indulge in a little bit of SLOPPY snark on you.
You know, if you were able to run your life in any successful way, you'd understand that the way to bring this debate to a definitive close is to show me the democrats have DONE SOMETHING EFFECTIVE in any one of those 30+ years to address global warming,
But you're a loser in life, and you'll never be able to grasp what it means to be working from facts.
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
If Trump was president, he'd have congressional opposition from BOTH the democrats AND the republicans.
He would literally not be able to get anything done. The idea of how dysfunctional his term would be is funny!
That's all. I didn't want to clutter up anyone else's thread.
Carry on.
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=60432
T
Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Health Care is a $7,800 Tax On Every American Family
The latest 2018 health care spending numbers for all the developed countries of the world shows the United States spends 16.9 percent of GDP on health care compared to 12.2 percent for Switzerland, the next most expensive.
US GDP was $20 trillion in 2018. If we cut back to Switzerland’s level we’d reduce health care spending by 4.7 percentage points, or about a trillion dollars. There are roughly 128 million households in the US, so that comes to a savings of $7,800 per household.
The real question at hand is: why don’t we make an effort to cut back to Swiss levels? After all, they have perfectly fine health care even with much lower spending.
The answer to that is easier: It’s because most of our outsize expense comes from paying doctors more, nurses more, medical staff more, hospitals (and their workers) more, drug companies (and their workers) more, device makers (and their workers) more, and so forth. Thus, the only way to seriously cut back our health care spending is to pay people a lot less than they’re getting now, and this can be done only slowly if at all. You can’t suddenly tell doctors and nurses that they’re all getting 30 percent pay cuts. Hell, you can’t even do that to pharmaceutical companies, as much as we might like to. Aside from being massively disruptive, it would generate massive opposition. And in a democracy, massive opposition matter.
This is why I think Elizabeth Warren was right to say that if we’re going to adopt Medicare for All, we’ll need to phase it in. I just wish she were more forthright about it. The plain reality is that it will never happen unless we agree not to slash everyone’s pay and instead just put the brakes on future pay increases. Even that will be unpopular, but it’s probably doable. It would mean that it’s a long time before we get anywhere near to Swiss levels of spending, but that’s just the way it is.
More at www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/01/health-care-is-an-8000-tax-on-e
very-american-family/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
We swing into the clubhouse dining room. Larry David seats himself at the one spot of a four-top not made up with silverware, near a huge TV showing coverage of the Trump impeachment hearings. “Oh, yeah, yeah,” he shouts sarcastically at the screen when the president appears to make a statement. “Stop lying, you asshole!” He is aware that in the wealthy precincts of the club there are sometimes other members nearby who feel differently about the administration. “I talk louder on purpose when they're around,” he says. “To me, if somebody bought Fox News, I would feel the same as I felt when the Berlin Wall came down. That feeling of euphoria, like the world was going to change.”
More at www.gq.com/story/larry-david-cover-profile-february-2020
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
We swing into the clubhouse dining room. Larry David seats himself at the one spot of a four-top not made up with silverware, near a huge TV showing coverage of the Trump impeachment hearings. “Oh, yeah, yeah,” he shouts sarcastically at the screen when the president appears to make a statement. “Stop lying, you asshole!” He is aware that in the wealthy precincts of the club there are sometimes other members nearby who feel differently about the administration. “I talk louder on purpose when they're around,” he says. “To me, if somebody bought Fox News, I would feel the same as I felt when the Berlin Wall came down. That feeling of euphoria, like the world was going to change.”
More at www.gq.com/story/larry-david-cover-profile-february-2020
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
It's owned by Liberals now. Is Larry David a secret Trump supporter, or is he just stupid?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Fox News is NOT owned by Disney. I presume Disney is the liberals you think own Fox News.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
We swing into the clubhouse dining room. Larry David seats himself at the one spot of a four-top not made up with silverware, near a huge TV showing coverage of the Trump impeachment hearings. “Oh, yeah, yeah,” he shouts sarcastically at the screen when the president appears to make a statement. “Stop lying, you asshole!” He is aware that in the wealthy precincts of the club there are sometimes other members nearby who feel differently about the administration. “I talk louder on purpose when they're around,” he says. “To me, if somebody bought Fox News, I would feel the same as I felt when the Berlin Wall came down. That feeling of euphoria, like the world was going to change.”
More at www.gq.com/story/larry-david-cover-profile-february-2020
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
It's owned by Liberals now. Is Larry David a secret Trump supporter, or is he just stupid?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
www.foxnews.com/entertainment/fox-corporation-becomes-stand-alone-comp
any-as-disney-deal-set-to-close
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Fox News is NOT owned by Disney. I presume Disney is the liberals you think own Fox News.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
We swing into the clubhouse dining room. Larry David seats himself at the one spot of a four-top not made up with silverware, near a huge TV showing coverage of the Trump impeachment hearings. “Oh, yeah, yeah,” he shouts sarcastically at the screen when the president appears to make a statement. “Stop lying, you asshole!” He is aware that in the wealthy precincts of the club there are sometimes other members nearby who feel differently about the administration. “I talk louder on purpose when they're around,” he says. “To me, if somebody bought Fox News, I would feel the same as I felt when the Berlin Wall came down. That feeling of euphoria, like the world was going to change.”
More at www.gq.com/story/larry-david-cover-profile-february-2020
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
It's owned by Liberals now. Is Larry David a secret Trump supporter, or is he just stupid?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
www.foxnews.com/entertainment/fox-corporation-becomes-stand-alone-comp
any-as-disney-deal-set-to-close
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Nope and nope.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/lachlan-murdoch-takes-c
ontrol-of-fox-corp-but-how-will-he-deal-with-president-trump/2019/03/20/abbb43d6-40ee-11e9-a0d3-1210e58a94cf_story.html
Quote:
Lachlan Murdoch takes control of Fox Corp. But how will he deal with President Trump?
Fox News is one of the only pollsters that consistently to this day say that support for Trump's impeachment outweighs support against it. Even CNN and WaPo aren't telling that lie anymore.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/public_approval_of_the_
impeachment_and_removal_of_president_trump-6957.html#polls
You should really read more than Vox and MotherJones. You might actually learn a thing or two and be able to keep up with the adult conversations in the RWED instead of always throwing temper tantrums and quoting people followed by a reply that has nothing to do with what you quoted.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Australia Shows Us the Road to Hell – the political reaction is scarier than the fires.
In a rational world, the burning of Australia would be a historical turning point. After all, it’s exactly the kind of catastrophe climate scientists long warned us to expect if we didn’t take action to limit greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, a 2008 report commissioned by the Australian government predicted that global warming would cause the nation’s fire seasons to begin earlier, end later, and be more intense — starting around 2020.
Furthermore, though it may seem callous to say it, this disaster is unusually photogenic. You don’t need to pore over charts and statistical tables; this is a horror story told by walls of fire and terrified refugees huddled on beaches.
So this should be the moment when governments finally began urgent efforts to stave off climate catastrophe.
But the world isn’t rational. The anti-environmentalist media, the Murdoch empire in particular, has gone all-out on disinformation, trying to place the blame on arsonists and “greenies” who won’t let fire services get rid of enough trees.
As late as the 1990s, Democrats and Republicans were almost equally likely to say that the effects of global warming had already begun. Since then, however, partisan views have diverged, with Democrats increasingly likely to see climate change happening, while Republicans increasingly see and hear no climate evil.
There’s substantial evidence that conservatives who are highly educated and well informed about politics are more likely than other conservatives to say things that aren’t true, probably because they are more likely to know what the conservative political elite wants them to believe. In particular, conservatives with high scientific literacy and numeracy are especially likely to be climate deniers.
But if climate denial and opposition to action are immovable even in the face of obvious catastrophe, what hope is there for avoiding the apocalypse? Let’s be honest with ourselves: Things are looking pretty grim. Scientific persuasion is running into sharply diminishing returns. Very few of the people still denying the reality of climate change or opposing doing anything about it will be moved by further accumulation of evidence, or even by a proliferation of new disasters. Any action that does take place will have to do so in the face of intractable right-wing opposition.
This means, in turn, that climate action will have to offer immediate benefits to large numbers of voters, because policies that seem to require widespread sacrifice would be viable only with the kind of political consensus we clearly aren’t going to get.
More at www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/opinion/australia-fires.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Donald Trump Jr. and Sean Hannity were among the most prominent tweeters this week of the allegation that close to 200 people in Australia have been charged with arson for deliberately lighting brushfires. In many instances, the people promoting the arson narrative are doing so to refute climate change as a driver of the fires.
Officials in the state of Victoria have refuted arson as a major cause of bushfires. “Police are aware of a number of posts circulating in relation to the current bushfire situation, however currently there is no intelligence to indicate that the fires in East Gippsland and north-east Victoria have been caused by arson or any other suspicious behaviour,” a police spokeswoman told The Age on Thursday.
“The majority of these bushfires have been generated by lightning strikes associated with weather and climate effects,” Dale Dominey-Howes, a professor of hazard and disaster risk sciences at the University of Sydney, told HuffPost.
www.vox.com/2020/1/9/21058332/australia-fires-arson-lightning-explaine
d
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Australia is burning. The Arctic is melting. Yet Trump keeps gutting climate change regulations.
Trump is delaying ratification of a treaty on hydrofluorocarbons. The climate change solutions organization Project Drawdown has found that phasing out these chemicals would be the most impactful solution to stop global warming -- more than driving electric cars or switching to renewable energy. www.drawdown.org/solutions/materials/refrigerant-management
The International agreement to limit hydrofluorocarbons gases went into effect last year, but Trump has yet to send it to the Senate to ratify it.
The treaty is called the Kigali Amendment, and it deals with a little-known but highly potent class of greenhouse gases called hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are used in refrigerators and air conditioners. The gases are sometimes called "super greenhouse gases" because of their capacity to trap huge amounts of heat in the atmosphere; they have more than 1,000 times greater warming potential than carbon dioxide.
More at www.cnn.com/2020/01/10/politics/trump-climate-change-environmental-pol
icy-rollbacks/index.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
I hope you're ready to live without A/C when the next Democrat president gets in there and ratifies it for you in 2024.
I've been doing it for years. It's not that bad, most of the time.
This will be entertaining.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:You didn't bother to click on the article, did you? There are alternatives to hydrofluorocarbons that are NOT 1,000,000 times worse greenhouse gases than CO2. Even CO2 can be used as a refrigerant for air-conditioning. But it is nice to know that as a Trump voter you gave another example of having very little useful knowledge of what you have strong opinions about. Vote Trump in 2020! He will look after you! (He sure does look after people like me, but I won't vote Trump.)
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I hope you're ready to live without A/C when the next Democrat president gets in there and ratifies it for you in 2024.
I've been doing it for years. It's not that bad, most of the time.
This will be entertaining.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
HFCs: Super Greenhouse Gases
https://eia-global.org/campaigns/Climate/what-are-hydrofluorocarbons
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are the authors of “Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope,” from which this essay is adapted.
Jan. 9, 2020
YAMHILL, Ore. — Chaos reigned daily on the No. 6 school bus, with working-class boys and girls flirting and gossiping and dreaming, brimming with mischief, bravado and optimism. Nick rode it every day in the 1970s with neighbors here in rural Oregon, neighbors like Farlan, Zealan, Rogena, Nathan and Keylan Knapp.
They were bright, rambunctious, upwardly mobile youngsters whose father had a good job installing pipes. The Knapps were thrilled to have just bought their own home, and everyone oohed and aahed when Farlan received a Ford Mustang for his 16th birthday.
Yet today about one-quarter of the children on that No. 6 bus are dead, mostly from drugs, suicide, alcohol or reckless accidents. Of the five Knapp kids who had once been so cheery, Farlan died of liver failure from drink and drugs, Zealan burned to death in a house fire while passed out drunk, Rogena died from hepatitis linked to drug use and Nathan blew himself up cooking meth. Keylan survived partly because he spent 13 years in a state penitentiary.
Among other kids on the bus, Mike died from suicide, Steve from the aftermath of a motorcycle accident, Cindy from depression and a heart attack, Jeff from a daredevil car crash, Billy from diabetes in prison, Kevin from obesity-related ailments, Tim from a construction accident, Sue from undetermined causes. And then there’s Chris, who is presumed dead after years of alcoholism and homelessness. At least one more is in prison, and another is homeless.
We Americans are locked in political combat and focused on President Trump, but there is a cancer gnawing at the nation that predates Trump and is larger than him. Suicides are at their highest rate since World War II; one child in seven is living with a parent suffering from substance abuse; a baby is born every 15 minutes after prenatal exposure to opioids; America is slipping as a great power.
We have deep structural problems that have been a half century in the making, under both political parties, and that are often transmitted from generation to generation. Only in America has life expectancy now fallen three years in a row, for the first time in a century, because of “deaths of despair.”
“The meaningfulness of the working-class life seems to have evaporated,” Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, told us. “The economy just seems to have stopped delivering for these people.” Deaton and the economist Anne Case, who is also his wife, coined the term “deaths of despair” to describe the surge of mortality from alcohol, drugs and suicide.
The kids on the No. 6 bus rode into a cataclysm as working-class communities disintegrated across America because of lost jobs, broken families, gloom — and failed policies. The suffering was invisible to affluent Americans, but the consequences are now evident to all: The survivors mostly voted for Trump, some in hopes that he would rescue them, but under him the number of children without health insurance has risen by more than 400,000.
The stock market is near record highs, but working-class Americans (often defined as those without college degrees) continue to struggle. If you’re only a high school graduate, or worse, a dropout, work no longer pays. If the federal minimum wage in 1968 had kept up with inflation and productivity, it would now be $22 an hour. Instead, it’s $7.25.
More at www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/opinion/sunday/deaths-despair-poverty.html
A $1 raise in minimum wage is associated with a drop in suicide rates of between 3.5 to 6% in people with a high school education or less. (Source: https://neurosciencenews.com/minimum-wage-suicide-15423/ )
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You didn't bother to click on the article, did you? There are alternatives to hydrofluorocarbons that are NOT 1,000,000 times worse greenhouse gases than CO2. Even CO2 can be used as a refrigerant for air-conditioning. But it is nice to know that as a Trump voter you gave another example of having very little useful knowledge of what you have strong opinions about. Vote Trump in 2020! He will look after you! (He sure does look after people like me, but I won't vote Trump.)
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I hope you're ready to live without A/C when the next Democrat president gets in there and ratifies it for you in 2024.
I've been doing it for years. It's not that bad, most of the time.
This will be entertaining.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
HFCs: Super Greenhouse Gases
https://eia-global.org/campaigns/Climate/what-are-hydrofluorocarbons
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Why would I click on the article? You consistently put articles on the board and you never once take the time to put them in quotes and it looks as though you're trying to pass them off as your own work. Not one single thing you plagiarized in your post had anything to do with alternatives. It was all "Orange Man Bad", so coming from the source I just assumed that was the gist of the article, since that's the only thing that's been on your mind for three years.
So if there's this magic stuff that works so well, why aren't we already using it. It's not Trump's fault. It's probably because it doesn't work.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:The average house air conditioner is not using the alternatives to hydrofluorocarbon refrigerants because HFCs are $1.00 cheaper per pound. In the industry I worked in for the first 30 years of my career, petrochemicals, we didn't go for cheap, we used the best. I swear to God, 6ix, you are such a simpleton with delusions about your moral superiority and your work ethic. But that makes you the same as every other Trump voter I know. Keep on believing your falsehoods, you big whinny baby. That reminds me of Trump. I'll check on him! What is he doing this hour? He is doing exactly what you do all the time: complementing himself as superior to any Democrat. What an asshole he is. Please vote for him, 6ix. I tripled my net worth in the first 3 years of Trump. If he goes 8 years, I'll be a multi-billionaire, but I sure won't vote for that creepy dummy.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Why would I click on the article? You consistently put articles on the board and you never once take the time to put them in quotes and it looks as though you're trying to pass them off as your own work. Not one single thing you plagiarized in your post had anything to do with alternatives. It was all "Orange Man Bad", so coming from the source I just assumed that was the gist of the article, since that's the only thing that's been on your mind for three years.
So if there's this magic stuff that works so well, why aren't we already using it. It's not Trump's fault. It's probably because it doesn't work.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1216365925701705730
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The average house air conditioner is not using the alternatives to hydrofluorocarbon refrigerants because HFCs are $1.00 cheaper per pound. In the industry I worked in for the first 30 years of my career, petrochemicals, we didn't go for cheap, we used the best. I swear to God, 6ix, you are such a simpleton with delusions about your moral superiority and your work ethic. But that makes you the same as every other Trump voter I know. Keep on believing your falsehoods, you big whinny baby. That reminds me of Trump. I'll checked on him. What is he doing this hour? He is doing exactly what you do all the time: complementing himself as superior to any Democrat. What an asshole he is. Please vote for him, 6ix. I tripled my net worth in the first 3 years of Trump. If he goes 8 years, I'll be a multi-billionaire, but I sure won't vote for that creepy dummy.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Why would I click on the article? You consistently put articles on the board and you never once take the time to put them in quotes and it looks as though you're trying to pass them off as your own work. Not one single thing you plagiarized in your post had anything to do with alternatives. It was all "Orange Man Bad", so coming from the source I just assumed that was the gist of the article, since that's the only thing that's been on your mind for three years.
So if there's this magic stuff that works so well, why aren't we already using it. It's not Trump's fault. It's probably because it doesn't work.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1216365925701705730
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Who's whining?
You're supposedly the richest guy on the board that's raking in millions of extra tax breaks right now and you're the biggest crybaby here.
If you hate Texas so much, fucking move already. We all know how much Nilbog hates where she lives, but she doesn't have a billion dollars to move to California where she thinks she'd be a lot happier. Supposedly, you do. Stop wasting all your time on this board and enjoy some of that money. Maybe do a few nice things for people with it so you don't have to feel so guilty that you have it.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:I love Texas! No income taxes. No rules for people like me. Republican politicians kissing my ass because I'm rich. What is not to like?
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Who's whining?
You're supposedly the richest guy on the board that's raking in millions of extra tax breaks right now and you're the biggest crybaby here.
If you hate Texas so much, fucking move already. We all know how much Nilbog hates where she lives, but she doesn't have a billion dollars to move to California where she thinks she'd be a lot happier. Supposedly, you do. Stop wasting all your time on this board and enjoy some of that money. Maybe do a few nice things for people with it so you don't have to feel so guilty that you have it.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I love Texas! No income taxes. No rules for people like me. Republican politicians kissing my ass because I'm rich. What is not to like?
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Who's whining?
You're supposedly the richest guy on the board that's raking in millions of extra tax breaks right now and you're the biggest crybaby here.
If you hate Texas so much, fucking move already. We all know how much Nilbog hates where she lives, but she doesn't have a billion dollars to move to California where she thinks she'd be a lot happier. Supposedly, you do. Stop wasting all your time on this board and enjoy some of that money. Maybe do a few nice things for people with it so you don't have to feel so guilty that you have it.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Your life sounds "amazing".
You should probably stop bitching all of the time and maybe you'll enjoy it more.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:You mistake "bitching" for not enjoying myself. I like Republicans (but only the rich ones) because we share values. I dislike Trump because he lives up to a poor person's stereotype of a rich person. He is the ultimate clown. The poor people who defend Trump are even funnier than he is. I'm laughing at their delusions about their "moral" superiority and their irreplaceable place in the Texas economy. They think they are essential. They are stupid to believe it. Stupid people aren't paid well and a very low Federal minimum wage guarantees things will stay that way for them, until they get a clue. I expect most won't support raising the minimum.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Your life sounds "amazing".
You should probably stop bitching all of the time and maybe you'll enjoy it more.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Republican Views on the Minimum Wage
www.republicanviews.org/republican-views-on-minimum-wage/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:So far repeated Republican attempts to destroy the Affordable Care Act have failed. In 2012 the Supreme Court rejected claims that the whole law was unconstitutional. In 2017 a Republican-controlled Congress narrowly failed to repeal Obamacare. And a variety of narrower efforts to undermine health reform and send insurance markets into a “death spiral” have fallen short: Markets seem to have stabilized, and one by one, states that initially rejected Medicaid expansion have been relenting.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
But you're a loser in life, and you'll never be able to grasp what it means to be working from facts.
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
The latest attempt is a lawsuit claiming that the 2017 tax cut, which reduced the penalty for not having insurance to $0, made the entire Affordable Care Act unconstitutional. The law suddenly becomes constitutional if the penalty was a penny or more. The Trump administration has joined the suit and a partisan Republican judge has indeed ruled that the A.C.A. as a whole should be struck down.
Clearly, this case is headed for the Supreme Court. But Trump doesn’t want it heard until after the election.
The Republican states on Friday agreed with Trump’s Department of Justice. “The lawfulness of the act is undoubtedly a matter of the utmost national importance, but the current petitions do not justify immediate, emergency review by the court,” said their brief, brought by the Republican attorney general of Texas and elected Republican officials in 17 other states. A group of Democratic-led states, which entered the case to defend the law, have asked the Supreme Court to rule right away. Their brief, filed last week, emphasized the major stakes of the case.
The Supreme Court could accept the case at this stage if four justices agree it is ripe for legal review. It would take a five-justice majority for the case to be considered on the “expedited basis” that would set up a ruling by the end of the court’s current session in June — before the 2020 election.
The entire case hinges on the A.C.A. being constitutional if the penalty for not having insurance is a penny or more, but unconstitutional if the penalty is $0. It is not a difficult, complex, or subtle case to decide. It doesn’t need a hundred pages of excruciatingly detailed legal reasoning to come to a conclusion, unless the Supreme Court Justices are blowing smoke in people’s faces to obscure the Court’s politics. Did a one-line change in the Tax Code of 2017 end Obamacare? Yes or No? If the one-line did end Obamacare, that really should have been mentioned when the bill was debated or else that was not what the 2017 Tax Code does.
More at www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/upshot/obamacare-lawsuit-delay-sought-trump
-republicans.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:As soon as Friday, the Supreme Court could announce that it will hear Trump v. Pennsylvania, a case examining the Trump administration’s rules allowing virtually any employer to deny birth control coverage to its employees.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
But you're a loser in life, and you'll never be able to grasp what it means to be working from facts.
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
The case reignites a legal conflict over the rights of employers who object to contraception on religious grounds. This conflict raged throughout much of the Obama administration, then briefly simmered down after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death temporarily stripped conservatives of the Supreme Court majority they needed to expand the rights of religious employers.
The Trump administration’s rules permit employers to ignore the requirement to provide birth control coverage to their employees if the employer expresses either a religious or a “moral” objection to contraception — erasing the old rule that religious objectors may not undercut the rights of people who do not share their beliefs.
More at www.vox.com/2020/1/14/21059931/supreme-court-birth-control-religious-l
iberty-pennsylvania-little-sisters
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:
If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.
T
Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You mistake "bitching" for not enjoying myself. I like Republicans (but only the rich ones) because we share values. I dislike Trump because he lives up to a poor person's stereotype of a rich person. He is the ultimate clown. The poor people who defend Trump are even funnier than he is. I'm laughing at their delusions about their "moral" superiority and their irreplaceable place in the Texas economy. They think they are essential. They are stupid to believe it. Stupid people aren't paid well and a very low Federal minimum wage guarantees things will stay that way for them, until they get a clue. I expect most won't support raising the minimum.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Your life sounds "amazing".
You should probably stop bitching all of the time and maybe you'll enjoy it more.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Republican Views on the Minimum Wage
www.republicanviews.org/republican-views-on-minimum-wage/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
That's cool. At least we know that you enjoy yourself by being an awful person.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:6ix, are you feeling discriminated against? Many Trump voters do. At least the ones not rich:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
That's cool. At least we know that you enjoy yourself by being an awful person.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Polls find that 55 percent of voters disapprove of the job he is doing, which roughly coincides with the percentage of voters who say he is ripping the country apart, and does not respect minorities. To be blunt, they think he’s a bigot and they don’t like a bigot as their president.
Nevertheless, unlike Democrats, Republicans simply don’t see Trump’s views and performance on race negatively — or maybe they refuse to confess that they see it that way because they don’t want to part ways with him. Eighty-five percent of Republicans approve or somewhat approve of his performance, with 65 percent saying they strongly approve. Tearing the country apart? No way, 68 percent of Republicans say. C’mon. They see Trump — and cheer him! — when he rips into Democrats, the media and anyone who criticizes him (such as the business leaders who quit his advisory councils). How can Trump supporters hoot and holler when Trump rips their foes and yet still claim that he is a great unifier?
One suspects that a high percentage of these Republicans know quite well how divisive Trump is, but they don’t want to think of their choice for president as someone who divides the country.
You see, a very large percentage of Republicans refuse to acknowledge Trump’s overt bigotry and divisiveness — or any other glaring character flaws. It’s not unusual for those who voted for a candidate to refuse to confess to their error or the candidate’s flaws.
When it comes to Trump, there is, however, something besides just voter denial and loyalty going on. A very large percentage of Republicans are convinced that minorities have an advantage over whites in this country. By every statistical measure, we know that is false, yet a plurality (40 percent) of Republicans, 38 percent of conservatives and 40 percent of white evangelicals are convinced that whites are the victims in society.
And that makes perfect sense. Trump’s core campaign message was about white grievance, as he sought to convince mostly working-class voters that their livelihood, their status and their cultural dominance were stolen from them by Democrats, “globalists,” elites and those who won’t say “Merry Christmas.” It’s only natural that the visceral connection that Trump made with them is hard to break. For these people, whenever Trump says or does something regarding minorities that others find horrifying, they see this as evidence that he is fighting for them and leveling the playing field (remember they think they’re the victims).
These voters are convinced that they’ve been done wrong, and it’s the fault of Democrats -- people who don’t look or live the way they do. This is identity politics run rampant, and Trump has perfected it.
www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/08/31/republicans-wont
-acknowledge-trump-is-a-really-bad-person/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, are you feeling discriminated against? Many Trump voters do. At least the ones not rich:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
That's cool. At least we know that you enjoy yourself by being an awful person.
Polls find that 55 percent of voters disapprove of the job he is doing, which roughly coincides with the percentage of voters who say he is ripping the country apart, and does not respect minorities. To be blunt, they think he’s a bigot and they don’t like a bigot as their president.
T
Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:The biggest selling point of Medicare for All is that it’s simple. Bernie and Liz should tell people that it means if they get sick, they just show their M4A card to any doctor or hospital and they get treated, full stop. And no one can take it away.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
But you're a loser in life, and you'll never be able to grasp what it means to be working from facts.
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
Amy Klobuchar’s moderate case against Medicare-for-all in two words: The Senate.
All of the Republican Senators and some Senate Democrats, including those who would lead the committees that write health care legislation, are NOT on board with single-payer. (Sanders supporters generally respond to these arguments by saying they don’t think they should be compromising on their ideal plan before a new president has even been elected. But the Senate is the place where good ideas ALWAYS die, unless either the Democrats or the Republicans have a super-majority of 67. The extra 7 votes above the 60 needed to override a filibuster allows for some stubborn old fool Senators to be ignored when passing good legislation. Thank Senator Joe Lieberman, a semi-Democrat, for no public option in Obamacare. There were only 60 Democratic Senators at the time Obamacare passed.)
Explanation of Public Option Vs. Single Payer
www.factcheck.org/2009/12/public-option-vs-single-payer/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, are you feeling discriminated against? Many Trump voters do. At least the ones not rich:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
That's cool. At least we know that you enjoy yourself by being an awful person.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Polls find that 55 percent of voters disapprove of the job he is doing, which roughly coincides with the percentage of voters who say he is ripping the country apart, and does not respect minorities. To be blunt, they think he’s a bigot and they don’t like a bigot as their president.
Uh huh.
#DemDebatesSoWhite
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:The Debates rules are biased against Wealth, not skin color; for the 7th debate, Bloomberg met polling criteria but not the fundraising criterion, as he is not currently asking for donations.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
#DemDebatesSoWhite
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Democratic_Party_presidential_debat
es#Qualification_7
Why didn’t Cory Booker catch on? It was not because he is black.
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/13/21063982/democratic-primary-
2020-cory-booker-drops-out
On Friday, I sat down with Sen. Cory Booker for 90 minutes. It was, simultaneously, one of the most inspiring and maddening interviews I’ve done with a presidential candidate. Inspiring because there is a moral radicalism and spiritual generosity to Booker’s politics that set him apart from other politicians. Maddening because when Booker turns his politics outward, they lose clarity. He shies away from drawing bright lines, his answers double back to blur out potential offense. In showing his love, he muddles his message.
There is a moral radicalism to the way Cory Booker lives out his politics. He lived for years in a housing project. He leads hunger strikes. He challenges political machines. He’s a vegan. He has a more ambitious policy vision than is often discussed, but beneath that is a far more radical ethical vision than he gets credit for.
The problem is that while he’s comfortable saying what that ethical vision demands of him, he’s very uncomfortable saying what it demands of the rest of us. In this conversation, I wanted Booker to risk my discomfort. And in his answers, I think you can hear both the remarkable promise of Booker’s politics and some of the challenges that have held back his campaign.
One exchange particularly stood out to me. I was pressing Booker on the way the current political moment rewards confrontation with attention and sharp line-drawing with support. Booker replied:
Barack Obama, God bless him, he played by the Queen’s rules, for lack of a better way of putting it. This president [Trump] is breaking norms and traditions every day to demean, distract, divide, degrade. If I’m the president of the United States, I’m not playing by the Queen’s rules. I will do things from that office people do not expect.
Okay, I asked. Like what?
Booker wouldn’t say. “I’m not going to do that because part of it is the element of surprise,” he replied. To that I reply "BULLSHIT! I'm not voting you."
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, are you feeling discriminated against? Many Trump voters do. At least the ones not rich:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
That's cool. At least we know that you enjoy yourself by being an awful person.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Polls find that 55 percent of voters disapprove of the job he is doing, which roughly coincides with the percentage of voters who say he is ripping the country apart, and does not respect minorities. To be blunt, they think he’s a bigot and they don’t like a bigot as their president.
Uh huh.
#DemDebatesSoWhite
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The Debates rules are biased against Wealth, not skin color; for the 7th debate, Bloomberg met polling criteria but not the fundraising criterion, as he is not currently asking for donations.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Uh huh.
#DemDebatesSoWhite
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Democratic_Party_presidential_debat
es#Qualification_7
Why didn’t Cory Booker catch on? It was not because he is black.
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/13/21063982/democratic-primary-
2020-cory-booker-drops-out
On Friday, I sat down with Sen. Cory Booker for 90 minutes. It was, simultaneously, one of the most inspiring and maddening interviews I’ve done with a presidential candidate. Inspiring because there is a moral radicalism and spiritual generosity to Booker’s politics that set him apart from other politicians. Maddening because when Booker turns his politics outward, they lose clarity. He shies away from drawing bright lines, his answers double back to blur out potential offense. In showing his love, he muddles his message.
There is a moral radicalism to the way Cory Booker lives out his politics. He lived for years in a housing project. He leads hunger strikes. He challenges political machines. He’s a vegan. He has a more ambitious policy vision than is often discussed, but beneath that is a far more radical ethical vision than he gets credit for.
The problem is that while he’s comfortable saying what that ethical vision demands of him, he’s very uncomfortable saying what it demands of the rest of us. In this conversation, I wanted Booker to risk my discomfort. And in his answers, I think you can hear both the remarkable promise of Booker’s politics and some of the challenges that have held back his campaign.
One exchange particularly stood out to me. I was pressing Booker on the way the current political moment rewards confrontation with attention and sharp line-drawing with support. Booker replied:
Barack Obama, God bless him, he played by the Queen’s rules, for lack of a better way of putting it. This president [Trump] is breaking norms and traditions every day to demean, distract, divide, degrade. If I’m the president of the United States, I’m not playing by the Queen’s rules. I will do things from that office people do not expect.
Okay, I asked. Like what?
Booker wouldn’t say. “I’m not going to do that because part of it is the element of surprise,” he replied. To that I reply "BULLSHIT! I'm not voting you."
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Uh huh.
#DemDebatesSoWhite
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:(Trump denies climate change and Trump added the W76-2 nuke to America's arsenal specifically for assassinating leaders in Iran and N. Korea with "Fire and Fury", Trump's trademark.}
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
But you're a loser in life, and you'll never be able to grasp what it means to be working from facts.
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
America Has Built a Global Dystopia
Scheer asks Chomsky a question on many people’s minds nowadays as a variety of human caused factors threaten humanity’s very existence. “Is this the end of time for our species?” he asks. “I reread your book, ‘Hegemony or Survival,’ and firstly, you mentioned there that the typical life of a species is 100,000 years and that we may be coming to the end of this disfavor. And secondly, it’s an open question whether being smart, as we define smart, is an important way of averting disaster and preventing the disintegration of the species.
“The reason it’s a relevant question right at this moment,” Scheer continues, “is because we had the best and the brightest, as David Halberstam had described them, who gave us the Cold War and gave us Vietnam and gave us Iraq and everything else and, you know, gave away the money from Main Street to Wall Street, and all that. And now we have somebody who people like to think of as very crude, boorish, ill-mannered, which is Donald Trump. And we have Trump-washing. Suddenly the smart, liberal people who created much of this mischief are now whitewashed, or Trump-washed, by this buffoon.”
“[‘Hegemony or Survival’] begins with the discussion by the great biologist Ernst Mayr, who [makes the point] that intelligence seems to be a kind of lethal mutation,” Chomsky explains. “If you look through what’s called biological success, what allows the species to survive and proliferate, turns out as you move up the scale of what we call intelligence, capacity to survive declines. So the species that are really very successful are beetles, for example, which have a fixed niche; they never change. Everything changes, the whole world changes, but they stick to their niche and keep reproducing and they’re fine. … As you move up to … bigger mammals—their capacity to survive declines. What about when you get to humans? Well, you could argue that … we are now proving Mayr’s thesis. Not so much for the reasons you mentioned, which are bad enough, but we are racing to destroy the possibility of organized human life. And it’s a cooperation of those who call themselves the best and the brightest, and the Trumpian boors … all racing toward disaster, perfectly consciously, a great testimonial to human intelligence. And that’s only the beginning.”
Chomsky discusses the incredible global failure to address the climate crisis, as well as the nuclear arms race, which are both leading humanity to a precipice that may be impossible to walk away from.
More at www.truthdig.com/articles/noam-chomsky-america-has-built-a-global-dyst
opia/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Every advanced country mandates some form of paid leave for new mothers, typically three or four months — every country, that is, except America, which offers no maternity leave at all.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
But you're a loser in life, and you'll never be able to grasp what it means to be working from facts.
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
Most advanced countries devote substantial sums to benefits for families with children; in Europe these benefits average between 2 and 3 percent of G.D.P. The corresponding number for the United States is 0.6 percent of G.D.P.
Even where the United States does help children, the quality of that help tends to be poor. There have been many comparisons between French and American school lunches: French schoolchildren are taught to eat healthy meals; American children are basically treated as a disposal site for farm surpluses.
What’s especially striking is the contrast between the way we treat our children and the way we treat our senior citizens. Social Security isn’t all that generous — there’s a good case for expanding it — but it doesn’t compare too badly with other countries’ retirement systems. Medicare actually spends lavishly compared with single-payer systems elsewhere.
So America’s refusal to help children isn’t part of a broad opposition to government programs; we single out children for especially harsh treatment. It’s probably too much to claim that helping children pays for itself. But it surely comes a lot closer to doing so than tax cuts for the rich.
So we should be talking a lot more about helping America’s children. Why aren’t we?
At least part of the blame rests with Bernie Sanders, who made Medicare for All both a progressive purity test and a bright shiny object chased by the news media at the expense of other policies that are far more likely to become law.
Whoever becomes the Democratic nominee, I hope he or she will give our nation’s shameful treatment of children the attention it deserves.
More at www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/opinion/children-america.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
THAT THE POOR have any rights at all in this country is largely due to the passage, in 1935, of the Social Security Act. At the time, all across America, state and local relief programs had gone bankrupt. New York City didn’t even have such a program. The 1897 City Charter forbade it.
Essentially, Roosevelt’s New Deal and Truman’s Fair Deal created two primary entitlements. First, the Social Security Act gave states access to unlimited matching federal funds. And then, in 1950, the federal government granted individuals entitlement status, depriving states and cities of the power to deny the needy.
The Social Security Act contained deep flaws. It allowed localities to establish different benefit levels, which could never be standardized by the federal government. This crazy-quilt pattern kept the U.S. from mandating welfare as a national program, the way European nations do. And the provisions for unemployment compensation — at the urging of Southern congressmen — left out blacks by exempting maids and farm workers. But for all its defects, the Social Security Act did grant poor people entitlement status. Local governments can’t simply turn them away with the explanation, “That’s all folks, the money’s run out.” If that happens, officials are obligated to raise more.
More at www.villagevoice.com/2020/01/14/republican-nation-the-new-poor-laws/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The 2020s were pretty well predicted by Octavia E. Butler and other science fiction authors. The debate over climate change, the eroding of workers’ rights, the rise of the private prison industry, and the media’s increasing refusal to talk about all of these in favor of focusing on soundbite propaganda and celebrity news.
More at https://onezero.medium.com/how-science-fiction-imagined-the-2020s-f8e9
8a5bc729
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
“What is the Most Useful Idea in Economics?”
https://angrybearblog.com/2020/01/what-is-the-most-useful-idea-in-econ
omics.html
On January 18, 1933, Arthur Dahlberg appeared before a Senate subcommittee to give testimony on the thirty-hour work week bill. A small part of his testimony:
This capitalistic economy of ours is a bargaining economy. It is the same animal whether labor return is 90 per cent of the national income or 60, and the capital return 10 or 40 per cent. (43% in 2019 www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/employment-and-growth/a-new-look-at
-the-declining-labor-share-of-income-in-the-united-states )
The injection of machinery has diverted labor effort, has generated positions which undermine the bargaining power of workers in their dickering with employers.
During the course of the 1920s, for instance, when machinery came in very rapidly, they were unable to bargain to themselves a share of the national income commensurate with that going to the employer. The employers got most of the benefits from the injection of labor-saving machinery.
I also want to point out another effect generated, slow-moving effect, generated by this injection of labor-saving machinery. The very nature of the capitalistic process is this: that the recipients of claims to wealth must pour them back either in buying commodities or in investment in plant or stock. We got unemployment and a devitalized behavior.
If I was an employer and employed 100 men, and am spending, either for commodities, whatever they are, or for new plant, if I spend immediately the system clicks along without breakdown, but if I then inject, we will say, labor-saving machinery, which permits me to lay off 50 men, those men are unemployed until I utilize my increased profit derived from the injection of that machinery in buying other commodities for myself, or in building new plants, employing men to put up more brick.
More at https://angrybearblog.com/2020/01/what-is-the-most-useful-idea-in-econ
omics.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Immunotherapy — which expanded into the market in 2015 — had only limited effects on the drop in overall cancer mortality.
Much bigger drops in US cancer mortality would come from a fairer society. The American Cancer Society estimates that, in 2014, 59% of lung-cancer deaths observed in people aged 25–74 could have been averted by eliminating socio-economic disparities.
The data do make it clear that the majority of our most effective solutions will be found outside the cabinet of cutting-edge medicines.
That means we need to create strategies to treat hypertension, end the use of tobacco products, dismantle policies that promote obesity and use of environmental carcinogens, encourage physical activity and reduce levels of carcinogens in the environment. More effective drugs and sophisticated treatments that work would be nice. But what we really need is that the person being treated did not have cancer at all.
Our public policy is a series of self-inflicted wounds. The current US administration has allowed loopholes that let the known carcinogen asbestos remain in use. It has failed to improve standards for airborne particulate pollution, clearly linked to higher rates of diseases and death. It reversed a decision to ban a pesticide, chlorpyrifos, associated with impaired childhood brain development, and atrazine, linked to leukaemia.
We, as a society, are not doing what it takes to maximize our health. We are prioritizing medications that cost US$100,000 a year or more, and at the same time are loosening restrictions on environmental pollution. Both of these policies have one thing in common: they enhance corporate profits. It will take a realignment of public policy to make sure that we pursue systems that instead prioritize health.
More at www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00116-2
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Immunotherapy — which expanded into the market in 2015 — had only limited effects on the drop in overall cancer mortality.
Much bigger drops in US cancer mortality would come from a fairer society. The American Cancer Society estimates that, in 2014, 59% of lung-cancer deaths observed in people aged 25–74 could have been averted by eliminating socio-economic disparities.
The data do make it clear that the majority of our most effective solutions will be found outside the cabinet of cutting-edge medicines.
That means we need to create strategies to treat hypertension, end the use of tobacco products, dismantle policies that promote obesity and use of environmental carcinogens, encourage physical activity and reduce levels of carcinogens in the environment. More effective drugs and sophisticated treatments that work would be nice. But what we really need is that the person being treated did not have cancer at all.
Our public policy is a series of self-inflicted wounds. The current US administration has allowed loopholes that let the known carcinogen asbestos remain in use. It has failed to improve standards for airborne particulate pollution, clearly linked to higher rates of diseases and death. It reversed a decision to ban a pesticide, chlorpyrifos, associated with impaired childhood brain development, and atrazine, linked to leukaemia.
We, as a society, are not doing what it takes to maximize our health. We are prioritizing medications that cost US$100,000 a year or more, and at the same time are loosening restrictions on environmental pollution. Both of these policies have one thing in common: they enhance corporate profits. It will take a realignment of public policy to make sure that we pursue systems that instead prioritize health.
More at www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00116-2
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
It's a nice idea, but it's never going to happen.
This article only shows the negatives on one side of the equation. It gives all the blame to those making money off of the victims and zero blame to the victims themselves.
I smoke. I enjoy smoking. I've made a life for myself where I do a lot of self destructive things. As I've gotten older, I've been doing the best that I can to slowly remove those things from my life. I can't tell you what it would be like to be gluttonous to the point that you can barely get your ass out of bed, or how it feels to constantly be broke and to have run out of friends and family to bail you out because of your crippling gambling addiction, etc... but I can empathize with them because of my own vices, past and present.
The only way to do what this article states is to make things illegal and give fines that is going to piss a whole lot of people off (and we already know doesn't work with alcohol prohibition, taxing cigarettes to the point that poor people have to take payday loans to buy them individually, and all those shiny new pot shops opening up all around the country), or to become a tyrannical government that will harshly punish people with jail time or even death for doing things that it doesn't feel are appropriate.
Anything is possible with sufficient negative stimuli.
We all know about my vices here. What are yours? What do you enjoy doing to the point of compulsion that you try your best to hide from all of those Texas Republicans you've surrounded yourself with?
If the answer is nothing, you're lying.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Immunotherapy — which expanded into the market in 2015 — had only limited effects on the drop in overall cancer mortality.
Much bigger drops in US cancer mortality would come from a fairer society. The American Cancer Society estimates that, in 2014, 59% of lung-cancer deaths observed in people aged 25–74 could have been averted by eliminating socio-economic disparities.
The data do make it clear that the majority of our most effective solutions will be found outside the cabinet of cutting-edge medicines.
That means we need to create strategies to treat hypertension, end the use of tobacco products, dismantle policies that promote obesity and use of environmental carcinogens, encourage physical activity and reduce levels of carcinogens in the environment. More effective drugs and sophisticated treatments that work would be nice. But what we really need is that the person being treated did not have cancer at all.
Our public policy is a series of self-inflicted wounds. The current US administration has allowed loopholes that let the known carcinogen asbestos remain in use. It has failed to improve standards for airborne particulate pollution, clearly linked to higher rates of diseases and death. It reversed a decision to ban a pesticide, chlorpyrifos, associated with impaired childhood brain development, and atrazine, linked to leukaemia.
We, as a society, are not doing what it takes to maximize our health. We are prioritizing medications that cost US$100,000 a year or more, and at the same time are loosening restrictions on environmental pollution. Both of these policies have one thing in common: they enhance corporate profits. It will take a realignment of public policy to make sure that we pursue systems that instead prioritize health.
More at www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00116-2
Even with lower rates, all you have to do is drive around any large municipality and you'll see just how profitable the field is overall. Many of the new hospital wings or specialty HC buildings in my area are devoted to treating and researching cancer. I'm sure a fair portion of the vast amount money raised for fighting cancer goes toward Prevention and Elimination programs, but the real money is made with Treatment. And guess what? You can't treat the disease without patients. Just saying. Do hospitals really want to end cancer? It would be very interesting to see the numbers and listen to related conversations at after work cocktail parties. They couldn't just shutter new wings, could they? It's a twisted symbiotic relationship.
However... before it gets too dark... if Treatment is good enough it is perhaps the closest we can reasonably get to eliminating it by making it a single digit % threat.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The Netherlands has universal health insurance — and it’s all private
Why the Dutch ended up with private health insurance for everybody
Democrats in the United States who support Medicare-for-all want to take a fractured and stratified health care system and make it more unified and equitable through nationalized health insurance.
The Netherlands saw the same problems in the mid-2000s, but they came up with a different fix.
Before then, the country had a two-tiered health care system: About two-thirds of the country was covered by a social health insurance program, and the remaining third was covered by private insurance. Disparities developed between the two tiers; wealthier people got better access to doctors with their private coverage.
By 2006, the two-tiered system teetered on the brink. Health care was becoming very expensive for the middle class, who faced high out-of-pocket costs. Yet private insurance was more attractive to doctors, because it paid better, than the public program that was covering people with lower incomes. And about 2 percent of the population still lacked insurance. (8.5% were uninsured in the US during 2018.
https://khn.org/news/number-of-americans-without-insurance-rises-in-20
18/ )
So the Dutch decided to overhaul their health insurance. The ruling center-right government compromised on a program to achieve universal coverage, which both sides agreed was essential, without abandoning the private market.
“There was a window of opportunity. The old system had really hit a wall,” Patrick Jeurissen, a health policy professor at Radboud University in Nijmegen, told me.
The average cost to a Dutch citizen for health insurance is about 1,400 euros, or $1,615, annually. The annual deductible is today capped at €385 ($429) . . . More precisely: In 2019, basic health insurance in the Netherlands would on average cost 1,453 euros per year per person.
More at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/17/21046874/netherlands-univers
al-health-insurance-private
=====================
I was not sure I believed those low, low costs. I looked it up. This is what I found:
Basic health insurance in the Netherlands (basisverzekering)
www.iamexpat.nl/expat-info/insurances-netherlands/dutch-health-insuran
ce
Basic health insurance costs around 100 euros per month and covers:
Appointments with your doctor (huisarts)
Stays at the hospital, surgery and emergency treatment (ziekenhuis)
Ambulance services and patient transport (ambulancevervoer)
Medicine prescriptions (medicijnen)
Blood tests (bloedonderzoek)
Dental care for children under 18 years (tandarts)
Limited dental care for adults over 18, restricted to dental surgery, dental x-rays
Mental health care (geestelijke gezondheidszorg)
Appointments with medical specialists such as dermatologists, allergists or internal specialists (medisch specialist)
Pregnancy, birth care and midwifery services (zwangerschaps- en geboortezorg)
Maternity care (kraamzorg)
Handicapped care (gehandicaptenzorg)
Aged care (ouderenzorg)
Nursing on location (wijkverpleging)
Some therapeutic services such as speech therapy, occupational therapy and diet advice
Physiotherapy (fysiotherapie) for chronic disorders, covered from the 21st treatment onwards
More at www.iamexpat.nl/expat-info/insurances-netherlands/dutch-health-insuran
ce
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Interestingly, one of those pop=up articles was about Australian health care, which is also a "mixed" system: There is universal government health care, but wealthier are encouraged to buy private insurance thru penalties. Like the Dutch system, tho, the private healthcare system is in a death-spiral: The private care, in private hospitals with private doctors, is more personalized and "nicer" but it is so much more expensive that younger healthier people are opting out, leaving older sicker people in privaye care which is becoming ever-more expensive.
In the Australian mileu, it looks as if the choice will be for public healthcare.
The article that you posted, SECOND, seems to confirm the general trend that private insurance ultimately becomes too expensive.
Quote:
Dutch patients face higher financial barriers to care than their peers in more socialized systems, and spending has accelerated in recent years, trends the critics blame on the privatized market.
Still, for now, the indicators seem undeniable...
The Dutch had to make several important adjustments in order to force the continued existence of private insurance.
The first is that everyone is absolutely mandated to buy, there's no such thing as opting out.
The second is that the public system had to disappear, since private healthcare was being outcompeted, cost-wise, by the public system. No more Medicare!
Aside from individual purchases (how would the USA force the indigent and working poor to pay for insurance premiums? Obviously the Dutch have far better safety net than we do) employers and the government also kick into the sytem.
INSURERS GENERALLY OPERATE AS NONPROFITS.
SO DO HOSPITALS (NONPROFIT).
There is according to their doctors a lot of red tape and administrative overhead. Services operate under price controls. So in reality, it's not as if "private healthcare" was saved en-masse, since both for-profit insurers and big hospital corporations would become a thing of the past. In reality, it's the doctors, specialists and nurses who're privatized.
They do one specific thing that saves money: They make housecalls.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:By design, the US Senate will not allow adjustments, neither important nor unimportant.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
The Dutch had to make several important adjustments in order to force the continued existence of private insurance.
Imagine the US switched over to the Netherlands’ healthcare system, and expenditures going from 17.7% of GNP in America to 12.9% of GNP in the Netherlands. That is a $1 trillion change. EVER YEAR FOREVER. The people who are overcharging by $1 trillion per year will fight it and win in the Senate to keep it as it is. A trillion dollars, every year, is more than enough motivation to stop anything in the Senate. As luck would have it, the Netherlands has nothing comparable to the US Senate.
In 2018, the total health expenditure made up 12.9 percent of total GDP in the Netherlands.
www.statista.com/statistics/576000/total-health-expenditure-as-share-o
f-gdp-in-the-netherlands/
U.S. health care spending grew 4.6 percent in 2018, reaching $3.6 trillion or $11,172 per person. As a share of the nation's Gross Domestic Product, health spending accounted for 17.7 percent.
www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and
-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/NationalHealthAccountsHistorical
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The Netherlands has universal health insurance — and it’s all private
Why the Dutch ended up with private health insurance for everybody
Democrats in the United States who support Medicare-for-all want to take a fractured and stratified health care system and make it more unified and equitable through nationalized health insurance.
The Netherlands saw the same problems in the mid-2000s, but they came up with a different fix.
Before then, the country had a two-tiered health care system: About two-thirds of the country was covered by a social health insurance program, and the remaining third was covered by private insurance. Disparities developed between the two tiers; wealthier people got better access to doctors with their private coverage.
By 2006, the two-tiered system teetered on the brink. Health care was becoming very expensive for the middle class, who faced high out-of-pocket costs. Yet private insurance was more attractive to doctors, because it paid better, than the public program that was covering people with lower incomes. And about 2 percent of the population still lacked insurance. (8.5% were uninsured in the US during 2018.
https://khn.org/news/number-of-americans-without-insurance-rises-in-20
18/ )
So the Dutch decided to overhaul their health insurance. The ruling center-right government compromised on a program to achieve universal coverage, which both sides agreed was essential, without abandoning the private market.
“There was a window of opportunity. The old system had really hit a wall,” Patrick Jeurissen, a health policy professor at Radboud University in Nijmegen, told me.
The average cost to a Dutch citizen for health insurance is about 1,400 euros, or $1,615, annually. The annual deductible is today capped at €385 ($429) . . . More precisely: In 2019, basic health insurance in the Netherlands would on average cost 1,453 euros per year per person.
More at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/17/21046874/netherlands-univers
al-health-insurance-private
=====================
I was not sure I believed those low, low costs. I looked it up. This is what I found:
Basic health insurance in the Netherlands (basisverzekering)
www.iamexpat.nl/expat-info/insurances-netherlands/dutch-health-insuran
ce
Basic health insurance costs around 100 euros per month and covers:
Appointments with your doctor (huisarts)
Stays at the hospital, surgery and emergency treatment (ziekenhuis)
Ambulance services and patient transport (ambulancevervoer)
Medicine prescriptions (medicijnen)
Blood tests (bloedonderzoek)
Dental care for children under 18 years (tandarts)
Limited dental care for adults over 18, restricted to dental surgery, dental x-rays
Mental health care (geestelijke gezondheidszorg)
Appointments with medical specialists such as dermatologists, allergists or internal specialists (medisch specialist)
Pregnancy, birth care and midwifery services (zwangerschaps- en geboortezorg)
Maternity care (kraamzorg)
Handicapped care (gehandicaptenzorg)
Aged care (ouderenzorg)
Nursing on location (wijkverpleging)
Some therapeutic services such as speech therapy, occupational therapy and diet advice
Physiotherapy (fysiotherapie) for chronic disorders, covered from the 21st treatment onwards
More at www.iamexpat.nl/expat-info/insurances-netherlands/dutch-health-insuran
ce
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
It's comprehensive, affordable and it makes perfect sense.
Of course, it'll never happen here with that selfish PoS in the WH and boot licking Reps ruling the senate.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Even if the President was a Democrat and the Senate was a majority Democrat, it won't happen. There will be a crooked Democratic Senator, such as Joe Lieberman, to make it fail:
Originally posted by captaincrunch:
It's comprehensive, affordable and it makes perfect sense.
Of course, it'll never happen here with that selfish PoS in the WH and boot licking Reps ruling the senate.
"Senate Democrats Drop the Public Option to Woo Lieberman, and Liberals Howl"
December 21, 2009
www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/newsletter-article/senate-democr
ats-drop-public-option-woo-lieberman-and-liberals-howl
The present healthcare system is more expensive, as a percent of GNP, than any other in the world and the Senate will insure it stays that way.
www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-spending-u-s-compa
re-countries/#item-relative-size-wealth-u-s-spends-disproportionate-amount-health
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
SECOND, you're not telling me anything I haven't already posted about.
I really appreciate the article; I find the Dutch choice- to do away with their public healthcare to prop up the private one - a curious one, but they made it workable (so far, even tho the article hints that the future may not be so rosy). I do intend to re-read the article again, to make sure that I understand what it's saying.
They seem to have retained small-business capitalism by keeping specialists as private practitioners.
But they made their system workable by doing things - like having nonprofit insurances and nonprofit hospitals (no listings on the stock exchanges for THOSE entities! No Boards of Directors, no shareholders meetings...) - which would be just as unacceptable to the healthcare industry here as Medicare for All, or even the public option.
The sense I get of the Dutch system was that it was written to be acceptable to individual doctors/practitioners there, while the ACA was written to be acceptable to corporations here. When the law was written I'm sure that every interested corporation - every insurance, every hospital corp, every pharmaceutical company, every rehab center, every laboratory- assessed how much they might make or lose on each provision of the bill, and the bill wouldn't be passed until each corporation (and its lobbyists) blessed it.
So the real reason why we have such a fucked up system (in pretty much everything, from foreign policy to food production to healthcare to banking) isn't because of Democrats or Republicans or some flaw in the construction of Congress or what-have-you, it is simply because (in essence) one dollar equals one vote, and those with the most dollars get the most votes. We are, truly, an oligarchy with only the trappings of democracy.
Anyway, I do like the idea of keeping doctors and other practitioners as competing small businesses, but the for-profit hospitals and insurances and pharmas would have to disappear if we wanted to achieve cost savings. I don't see any reason why practitioners CAN'T continue as snall businesses, and compete with each other, even if they're getting paid by the government.
One more thing to keep in mind: HMOs, even presumed non-profits like Kaiser, aren't the answer either. Kaiser has a provision in its charter that technically makes it a non-profit but in reality skews the behavior of both the doctors AND the institution as a whole: Kaiser gets it contractual per-person funding, but at the end of the year the money that it DOESN'T spend on patient care goes into the doctors' pockets.
In theory, you could say that this encourages cost-effective preventive care - spending money on diabetes medication instead of leg amputation - but IN REALITY that means tests not run, and problems ignored. I've known three people PERSONALLY whose cancer diagnoses were too-long delayed, and that's not counting our DDs medical trauma.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The VOX project EVERYBODY COVERED examines more than the Netherlands' system.
https://www.vox.com/2020/1/13/21055327/everybody-covered
It looks at
- Taiwan’s single-payer success story — and its lessons for America
- https://vox.com/health-care/2020/1/13/21028702/medicare-for-all-taiwan
-health-insurance
- Two sisters. Two different journeys through Australia’s health care system.
- https://vox.com/2020/1/15/21030568/australia-health-insurance-medicare
- The Netherlands has universal health insurance — and it’s all private
- https://vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/17/21046874/netherlands-uni
versal-health-insurance-private
- The answer to America’s health care cost problem might be in Maryland
- https://vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/22/21055118/maryland-health
-care-global-hospital-budget
and will include
- United Kingdom (coming January 24).
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
No system is perfect, though here in the US we seem to have created a system that disadvantages everybody but the corporations. That's the basic take-home message.
In the Netherlands BTW the hospitals are non-profit, the doctors' groups are cooperatives (not corporations), every participant including pharmacies is TIGHTLY regulated by government - a point made multiple times in the article - and it's the one system out of those examined where - as indicated in the article - more people have a hard time paying their bills.
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:It might be the famous checks and balances are the problem. A focused and wealthy group outside government can apply a small pressure on exactly the right spot to make the Federal government lose consciousness: the “Death Touch” or dim mak. The government has never been healthy and robust. It is sickly, almost directionless, always tending toward ineffectiveness in Congress, by Constitutional design. When the Constitution faces a very determined group that wants to stop the Federal government from functioning, we know what happens since it has happened thousands of times since the Constitution was ratified. Somebody ought to fix that. Anybody want a new Constitutional convention? Anybody?
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, you're not telling me anything I haven't already posted about.
So the real reason why we have such a fucked up system (in pretty much everything, from foreign policy to food production to healthcare to banking) isn't because of Democrats or Republicans or some flaw in the construction of Congress or what-have-you, it is simply because (in essence) one dollar equals one vote, and those with the most dollars get the most votes. We are, truly, an oligarchy with only the trappings of democracy.
www.medicaldaily.com/truth-about-pressure-points-which-ones-can-kill-y
ou-and-which-ones-are-just-myths-316528
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Long ago I was what is called a Control Systems Engineer, a CSE. CSE designs all the stuff in the Control Room of a petrochemical plant. Believe it or not, this actually has application to government. The CSE is responsible for the safety shutdown system in the chemical plant, the system that takes over if the human operators fall asleep on the job, or panic, or do exactly the wrong thing while being absolutely certain they are doing the right thing because they fundamentally misunderstand what the control room displays are telling them.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
No system is perfect, though here in the US we seem to have created a system that disadvantages everybody but the corporations. That's the basic take-home message.
In the Netherlands BTW the hospitals are non-profit, the doctors' groups are cooperatives (not corporations), every participant including pharmacies is TIGHTLY regulated by government - a point made multiple times in the article - and it's the one system out of those examined where - as indicated in the article - more people have a hard time paying their bills.
When the chemical plant is only drawings on paper, before it becomes reality in steel and concrete, we do a very formal safety review, looking for malfunctions that could explode the whole plant, spreading fire and pollution everywhere. No system is perfect, but much can be done at this safety review to make the chemical plant closer to perfect. Now for the political part:
The Founding Fathers never did a formal safety review on their design while it was only words on paper of the Constitution. Their thinking only went as far as the next election will bring in new people to extinguish the fires caused by the old people operating the government. How much can go wrong in the years between elections? A great deal can, more than the Founding Fathers imagined. And the result of never having a safety review is metaphorically, sometime literally, fires and explosions and human suffering that never burns itself out and stops, all caused by government. It would be nice if humans in control of the government always understood what they were doing wrong, like it would be nice if the operators of a chemical plant always understood what they were doing, but you can't depend on humans doing the right thing. Your design has to look into the details of human failure that extends year after year, election after election.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Here’s something I missed when it first came out a few weeks ago. It turns out that Chase Manhattan Bank was instrumental in getting the Shah of Iran admitted to the United States for medical treatment in 1979, which led directly to the Iran hostage crisis that eventually doomed Jimmy Carter’s presidency. The whole thing was called Project Eagle and was coordinated by Joseph Reed, the chief of staff to the bank’s chairman, David Rockefeller.
But that’s not all. After touching off the hostage crisis, Project Eagle was then redirected to ensuring that they didn’t get released too soon:
After the hostages were taken, the Carter administration worked desperately to try to free the captives….[But] the team around Mr. Rockefeller, a lifelong Republican with a dim view of Mr. Carter’s dovish foreign policy, collaborated closely with the Reagan campaign in its efforts to pre-empt and discourage what it derisively labeled an “October surprise” — a pre-election release of the American hostages, the papers show.
The Chase team helped the Reagan campaign gather and spread rumors about possible payoffs to win the release, a propaganda effort that Carter administration officials have said impeded talks to free the captives.
“I had given my all” to thwarting any effort by the Carter officials “to pull off the long-suspected ‘October surprise,’” Mr. Reed wrote in a letter to his family after the election, apparently referring to the Chase effort to track and discourage a hostage release deal. He was later named Mr. Reagan’s ambassador to Morocco.
This is a conspiracy theory of longstanding—namely that the Reagan campaign tried to prevent the release of the Iranian hostages before Election Day 1980. But according to notes he wrote at the time, it sure sounds like Reed worked closely with Reagan’s people on exactly that. Such patriots.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/01/reagan-and-the-hostages/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Here’s something I missed when it first came out a few weeks ago. It turns out that Chase Manhattan Bank was instrumental in getting the Shah of Iran admitted to the United States for medical treatment in 1979, which led directly to the Iran hostage crisis that eventually doomed Jimmy Carter’s presidency. The whole thing was called Project Eagle and was coordinated by Joseph Reed, the chief of staff to the bank’s chairman, David Rockefeller.
But that’s not all. After touching off the hostage crisis, Project Eagle was then redirected to ensuring that they didn’t get released too soon:
After the hostages were taken, the Carter administration worked desperately to try to free the captives….[But] the team around Mr. Rockefeller, a lifelong Republican with a dim view of Mr. Carter’s dovish foreign policy, collaborated closely with the Reagan campaign in its efforts to pre-empt and discourage what it derisively labeled an “October surprise” — a pre-election release of the American hostages, the papers show.
The Chase team helped the Reagan campaign gather and spread rumors about possible payoffs to win the release, a propaganda effort that Carter administration officials have said impeded talks to free the captives.
“I had given my all” to thwarting any effort by the Carter officials “to pull off the long-suspected ‘October surprise,’” Mr. Reed wrote in a letter to his family after the election, apparently referring to the Chase effort to track and discourage a hostage release deal. He was later named Mr. Reagan’s ambassador to Morocco.
This is a conspiracy theory of longstanding—namely that the Reagan campaign tried to prevent the release of the Iranian hostages before Election Day 1980. But according to notes he wrote at the time, it sure sounds like Reed worked closely with Reagan’s people on exactly that. Such patriots.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/01/reagan-and-the-hostages/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
This probably did happen.
I'm just wondering how you can believe that this happens, but at the same time you don't see the media manipulation against Trump on a daily basis. Or at the very least, why you don't even question it.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:I know actual GOP politicians - Senators Cruz and Cornyn. I also watch Trump give speeches and answer questions. These people are fucked up in the head. The MSM does not have to tell me this. The GOP tells me this very loudly and clearly. I also know that the people who vote for GOP, except the very richest ones who I respect their judgement, don't share my opinion. Me and the rich GOP voters perfectly understand what is seriously wrong with the GOP, it is just that the rich are bought by the money the GOP pours into their bank accounts.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
This probably did happen.
I'm just wondering how you can believe that this happens, but at the same time you don't see the media manipulation against Trump on a daily basis. Or at the very least, why you don't even question it.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Let's make it even simpler for you to understand: the richest GOP voters know that Trump is a crook, a liar, a tax cheater, a stupid man with diarrhea of the mouth. Talking about it won't make Trump change, so why would the rich bother? But they can depend on Trump looking after his own wealth and as a side effect making the rich GOP voters even richer.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I know actual GOP politicians - Senators Cruz and Cornyn. I also watch Trump give speeches and answer questions. These people are fucked up in the head. The MSM does not have to tell me this. The GOP tells me this very loudly and clearly. I also know that the people who vote for GOP, except the very richest ones who I respect their judgement, don't share my opinion. Me and the rich GOP voters perfectly understand what is seriously wrong with the GOP, it is just that the rich are bought by the money the GOP pours into their bank accounts.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
This probably did happen.
I'm just wondering how you can believe that this happens, but at the same time you don't see the media manipulation against Trump on a daily basis. Or at the very least, why you don't even question it.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Let's make it even simpler for you to understand: the richest GOP voters know that Trump is a crook, a liar, a tax cheater, a stupid man with diarrhea of the mouth. Talking about it won't make Trump change, so why would the rich bother? But they can depend on Trump looking after his own wealth and as a side effect making the rich GOP voters even richer.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
lol. Come from a biased place, much?
Seriously dude. You need to take a very long hard look into a mirror one day. You're totally fucked up.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
I think what bugs SECOND the most about Trump is that Trump is richer.
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Today, the Dilbert Comic covered approximately what I am talking about.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I know actual GOP politicians - Senators Cruz and Cornyn. I also watch Trump give speeches and answer questions. These people are fucked up in the head. The MSM does not have to tell me this. The GOP tells me this very loudly and clearly. I also know that the people who vote for GOP, except the very richest ones who I respect their judgement, don't share my opinion. Me and the rich GOP voters perfectly understand what is seriously wrong with the GOP, it is just that the rich are bought by the money the GOP pours into their bank accounts.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
This probably did happen.
I'm just wondering how you can believe that this happens, but at the same time you don't see the media manipulation against Trump on a daily basis. Or at the very least, why you don't even question it.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Let's make it even simpler for you to understand: the richest GOP voters know that Trump is a crook, a liar, a tax cheater, a stupid man with diarrhea of the mouth. Talking about it won't make Trump change, so why would the rich bother? But they can depend on Trump looking after his own wealth and as a side effect making the rich GOP voters even richer.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
lol. Come from a biased place, much?
Seriously dude. You need to take a very long hard look into a mirror one day. You're totally fucked up.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The Pointed Haired Boss said: "I donated to a few political campaigns, and coincidentally a law changed that I wanted changed. Now it's legal for us to sell drones that are armed with machine guns. I also got a tax break."
Dilbert: "I've never had less faith in my government."
https://dilbert.com/strip/2020-01-23
Thursday January 23, 2020 "Donating To Politicians"
6ix, I'm not real sure that you are worldly enough to comprehend even what Dilbert is talking about. I'm not gonna try explaining to you what precisely I'm talking about. You seem to have a learning disability, but I've seen it in EVERY TRUMP VOTER I know, except the rich ones. All the non-rich Trump voters struggle far too hard against the ordinary problems they have in life. When are they gonna get smarter and less fearful? When they come up against a tough problem, their lives end tragically, like a puppy wandering out on the highway of life at night and being run over by an 18 wheeler that never even noticed the bump as the dog is squashed on the pavement. You are that puppy. Stay off the roads if you want to live. Or at least look both ways before you cross the street.
https://dilbert.com/strip/2020-01-23
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
lol. Whatever retard. Yup. I just don't "get it" is all.
You aren't even close to my level buddy. Go whine to somebody who gives a shit.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:It might be the famous checkbook balances
SIGNY: SECOND, you're not telling me anything I haven't already posted about.
So the real reason why we have such a fucked up system (in pretty much everything, from foreign policy to food production to healthcare to banking) isn't because of Democrats or Republicans or some flaw in the construction of Congress or what-have-you, it is simply because (in essence) one dollar equals one vote, and those with the most dollars get the most votes. We are, truly, an oligarchy with only the trappings of democracy.
SECOND: It might be the famous checks and balances
Quote:Is it possible, SECOND, that you're simply not cynical ENOUGH?
are the problem. A focused and wealthy group outside government can apply a small pressure on exactly the right spot to make the Federal government lose consciousness: the “Death Touch” or dim mak. The government has never been healthy and robust. It is sickly, almost directionless, always tending toward ineffectiveness in Congress, by Constitutional design. When the Constitution faces a very determined group that wants to stop the Federal government from functioning ...
You write about the government "functioning" but you haven't asked yourself ... "function" DOING WHAT?
If you assume that the function of the government is to funnel tax money to the very wealthy, then the government is functioning spectacularly! It's not "disabled" at all!
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:If you were really a CSE then you would know about feedback loops. You would also know that you can;t control multiple processes with one control system. Take commercial heating a cooling, for example: Two systems are alwys running in opposition to each other, that is how they stay balanced.
KIKI
No system is perfect, though here in the US we seem to have created a system that disadvantages everybody but the corporations. That's the basic take-home message.
In the Netherlands BTW the hospitals are non-profit, the doctors' groups are cooperatives (not corporations), every participant including pharmacies is TIGHTLY regulated by government - a point made multiple times in the article - and it's the one system out of those examined where - as indicated in the article - more people have a hard time paying their bills.
SECOND: Long ago I was what is called a Control Systems Engineer, a CSE. CSE designs all the stuff in the Control Room of a petrochemical plant. Believe it or not, this actually has application to government. The CSE is responsible for the safety shutdown system in the chemical plant, the system that takes over if the human operators fall asleep on the job, or panic, or do exactly the wrong thing while being absolutely certain they are doing the right thing because they fundamentally misunderstand what the control room displays are telling them.
When the chemical plant is only drawings on paper, before it becomes reality in steel and concrete, we do a very formal safety review, looking for malfunctions that could explode the whole plant, spreading fire and pollution everywhere. No system is perfect, but much can be done at this safety review to make the chemical plant closer to perfect. Now for the political part:
The Founding Fathers never did a formal safety review on their design while it was only words on paper of the Constitution. Their thinking only went as far as the next election will bring in new people to extinguish the fires caused by the old people operating the government. How much can go wrong in the years between elections? A great deal can, more than the Founding Fathers imagined. And the result of never having a safety review is metaphorically, sometime literally, fires and explosions and human suffering that never burns itself out and stops, all caused by government. It would be nice if humans in control of the government always understood what they were doing wrong, like it would be nice if the operators of a chemical plant always understood what they were doing, but you can't depend on humans doing the right thing. Your design has to look into the details of human failure that extends year after year, election after election.
But let's look at government like a control system, and figure out what went wrong without trying to pin the blame on any group in particular *which you always seem to want to do. That spoils objective analysis.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:I guess you have never been in an actual control room of a chemical plant. It is a very boring place, with everything automatic. There will be coffee. There will be donuts. There will be an exercise machine so that the donuts don't make the human operator fat. The human operator (call him President) has very little to do unless a piece of machinery breaks down out in the plant and he calls maintenance. This is why Social Security checks still go out and tax money still comes in despite the human operator (keep calling him President) being an idiot. But the calmness of the control room is destroyed when the operator (or President) randomly pushes buttons, gets on the phone and calls firefighters when there are no fires, or stops and starts different parts of the chemical plant to show everybody who is really in charge.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
If you were really a CSE then you would know about feedback loops. You would also know that you can;t control multiple processes with one control system. Take commercial heating a cooling, for example: Two systems are alwys running in opposition to each other, that is how they stay balanced.
But let's look at government like a control system, and figure out what went wrong without trying to pin the blame on any group in particular *which you always seem to want to do. That spoils objective analysis.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:What bugs me about Trump and Trump voters, except wealthy Trump voters, is what they think about. Yesterday I received in the mail my Early Ballot to the Texas Primary. It had questionnaire attached. The questions show all the difference in the world between Democrats and Republicans. First the questions for the Dems:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
I think what bugs SECOND the most about Trump is that Trump is richer.
Our Texas Bill of Rights will be voted on by Texans in the Democratic Primary Election and will guide our party, our campaigns, and our movement in the 2020 election.
1.) Right to Healthcare
Should everyone in Texas have a right to quality healthcare, protected by a universally accessible Medicare-style system that saves rural hospitals, reduces the cost of prescription drugs, and guarantees access to reproductive healthcare?
2.) Right to a 21st Century Public Education
Should everyone in Texas have the right to high-quality public education from pre-k to 12th grade, and affordable college and career training without the burden of crushing student loan debt?
3.) Right to Clean Air, Safe Water, and a Responsible Climate Policy
Should everyone in Texas have the right to clean air, safe water, affordable and sustainable alternative energy sources, and a responsible climate policy that recognizes and addresses the climate crisis as a real and serious threat that impacts every aspect of life on this planet?
4.) Right to Economic Security
Should everyone in Texas have the right to economic security, where all workers have earned paid family and sick leave, training to prepare for future economies, and a living wage that respects their hard work?
More at www.texasdemocrats.org/our-party/party-resources/our-texas-bill-of-rig
hts/
Republican Primary Ballot Propositions (Do you see a difference compared to Democrats?)
1.) Texas should not restrict or prohibit prayer in public schools.
2.) Texas should reject restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms.
3.) Texas should ban the practice of taxpayer-funded lobbying, which allows your tax dollars to be spent on lobbyists who work against the taxpayer. (Translation: Ban big cities with Democratic majorities from lobbying Austin. )
4.) Texas should support the construction of a physical barrier and use existing defense-grade surveillance equipment along the entire southern border of Texas. (Translation: Build Trump’s Wall)
More at www.texasgop.org/republican-primary-ballot-propositions/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is a case study of how lawmakers make themselves richer with the bills they pass. Legislation they championed — the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — doled out nearly $150 billion in corporate tax savings last year alone. One effect: a big boost in stock prices.
Cutting tax rates for companies like Apple and hundreds of other stocks they own was one of many ways Republican lawmakers enriched themselves after they passed the tax law, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of the 186-page law and members’ financial disclosure forms. Not one Democrat voted for it.
More at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/24/21078559/republicans-tax-cut
s-congress-profits
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:been in the control room of every large power plant in the area, one large refinery, a coker, cement plant, and a bunch of smaller operations (resin plants, printing press etc) but I deserved that comment because of my unnecessary snark
SIGNY:If you were really a CSE then you would know about feedback loops. You would also know that you can;t control multiple processes with one control system. Take commercial heating a cooling, for example: Two systems are alwys running in opposition to each other, that is how they stay balanced.
But let's look at government like a control system, and figure out what went wrong without trying to pin the blame on any group in particular *which you always seem to want to do. That spoils objective analysis.
SECOND: I guess you have never been in an actual control room of a chemical plant.
So, government as a control room.
Part of the problem is that we have to decide what we want this control room TO DO. With production plants it's easy: maximize propylene, or maximize gasoline, or maximize GWH given particular feedstocks/ fuels.
But what do you want government TO DO? Some people think our government should sweep in and right all wrongs and "help" people around the world. Other people think our government should make capitalism or the banking system stronger. Some people think we should enhance international trade, or fix global warming.
So....?
What should our government's essential function be? Until you answer that question, you can't possibly start designing anything.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
So, government as a control room.
Part of the problem is that we have to decide what we want this control room TO DO. With production plants it's easy: maximize propylene, or maximize gasoline, or maximize GWH given particular feedstocks/ fuels.
But what do you want government TO DO? Some people think our government should sweep in and right all wrongs and "help" people around the world. Other people think our government should make capitalism or the banking system stronger. Some people think we should enhance international trade, or fix global warming.
So....?
What should our government's essential function be? Until you answer that question, you can't possibly start designing anything.
So, any thoughts from anyone on what they think our government's essential function(s) SHOULD be???
I mean, I read a lot of bitching about very specific things (transgeneder rights! plastic pollution!), but so far nobody has come up with anything that sounds like it should be fundamental.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Ah, the sound of silence!
Apparently nobody has ANY idea what they think our government should be doing!
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Texas Democrats picked 11 fundamental things here:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So, any thoughts from anyone on what they think our government's essential function(s) SHOULD be???
I mean, I read a lot of bitching about very specific things (transgeneder rights! plastic pollution!), but so far nobody has come up with anything that sounds like it should be fundamental.
1.) Right to Healthcare
Should everyone in Texas have a right to quality healthcare, protected by a universally accessible Medicare-style system that saves rural hospitals, reduces the cost of prescription drugs, and guarantees access to reproductive healthcare?
www.texasdemocrats.org/our-party/party-resources/our-texas-bill-of-rig
hts/
You might want to ask yourself why none of those fundamental rights will become law. There is a famous example from the past that did not become law until events violently forced a decision that did not happen in Congress: ending slavery. The decision was made on the battle field by Confederate Generals. Other countries ended slavery after discussing it rationally in their legislatures. Not the good old USA! Blood had to be spilled. Hundreds of thousands had to die before there was a decision that covered the entire nation, for all times, about slavery. Not a very effective decision making process, was it? Why couldn't Congress make the decision and save all that death and destruction of the Civil War?
Once you get an answer that you believe in to why Congress could not make up its collective mind about slavery, then you will also know why it can't decide today about health care, for example. May I point out that everywhere else in the world, at least in the rich countries, the number 1 item on the Democratic list, Right to Healthcare, has already passed into law many years ago. But not in America! There is something fundamentally wrong with how Congress can so easily delay or forever avoid making decisions. And that has been true since the first Congressional session.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
SECOND ... Jeezus. stop telling me what you think other people think!
What do YOU think? YOU were the one who brought up the "government as a control room" analogy, and posted how badly designed our government is. That implies that you have an opinion on how it could be better, which implies that you have at least some nascent function in mind.
So, what is it?
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:You know how petrochemical plants handle their control rooms? They don't let any old fool get their hands on the controls. They don't have a vote where the biggest and best liar decides for everybody how the plant will operate. And if a fool does find his way into control, he gets forced out of the control room the first time he screws up, on the day he screwed up. The business world doesn't wait 4 years for a decision.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND ... Jeezus. stop telling me what you think other people think!
What do YOU think? YOU were the one who brought up the "government as a control room" analogy, and posted how badly designed our government is. That implies that you have an opinion on how it could be better, which implies that you have at least some nascent function in mind.
So, what is it?
The board of directors, equivalent to Congress, might take 4 years to decide to build a new control room for a new chemical plant, but once it is built and gets through the startup stage where broken pumps are fixed, the plant either runs smoothly or else somebody is fired from their job for being stupid, incompetent, or not following orders from the board of directors, equivalent to Congress.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which was founded by those who worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II, and now includes 13 Nobel Laureates on the board, issued a statement on Thursday that read, "Humanity continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers—nuclear war and climate change—that are compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare, that undercuts society's ability to respond. The international security situation is dire, not just because these threats exist, but because world leaders have allowed the international political infrastructure for managing them to erode."
We share a common concern over the failure of the multilateral system to address the existential threats we face. From the US' withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and the Iran nuclear deal, to the deadlock at nuclear disarmament talks and division at the UN Security Council -- our mechanisms for collaboration are being undermined when we need them the most.
On the nuclear threat, we've seen unprecedented brinksmanship over the past 12 months by half a dozen nations, the termination of major arms control agreements, a dizzying proliferation of nuclear weapons, and an unsettling amount of loose talk about the mistaken idea that limited nuclear warfare is somehow possible or "winnable." (That is Trump and his new weapon, the W76-2 warhead www.defensenews.com/smr/nuclear-arsenal/2019/01/28/trumps-new-nuclear-
weapon-has-entered-production/ )
https://thebulletin.org/2020/01/press-release-it-is-now-100-seconds-to
-midnight/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Well, interesting, you would have (in essence) a Prime Minister selected by Congress. Who gets to be Minister for Defense, and Minister of Foreign Affairs?
SECOND ... Jeezus. stop telling me what you think other people think!
What do YOU think? YOU were the one who brought up the "government as a control room" analogy, and posted how badly designed our government is. That implies that you have an opinion on how it could be better, which implies that you have at least some nascent function in mind.
So, what is it?
SECOND: You know how petrochemical plants handle their control rooms? They don't let any old fool get their hands on the controls. They don't have a vote where the biggest and best liar decides for everybody how the plant will operate. And if a fool does find his way into control, he gets forced out of the control room the first time he screws up, on the day he screwed up. The business world doesn't wait 4 years for a decision.
The board of directors, equivalent to Congress, might take 4 years to decide to build a new control room for a new chemical plant, but once it is built and gets through the startup stage where broken pumps are fixed, the plant either runs smoothly or else somebody is fired from their job for being stupid, incompetent, or not following orders from the board of directors, equivalent to Congress.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
That wouldn't solve SECOND's problem.
Congress - as he may not have noticed - is a political body, with political motives and goals. As long as the president is keeping Congress politically happy, nothing else matters. That is the sole standard by which Congress judges a president under his scenario.
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:It seemed to me that SECOND had a flash of inspiration based on his former career about how to make government work better; and I'm hoping he'll pursue that inspiration further; I'm really curious what he has to say.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
That wouldn't solve SECOND's problem.
Congress - as he may not have noticed - is a political body, with political motives and goals. As long as the president is keeping Congress politically happy, nothing else matters. That is the sole standard by which Congress judges a president under his scenario.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
I wish you good fortune in your quest for an actual discussion with SECOND.
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
It's been three years since I've been of sound mind and paying any attention and it hasn't happened yet.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Well, I guess SECOND isn't about to break his losing streak just yet.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Seventy-five years into the nuclear era, we still haven’t come to grips with the destructive force we’ve put in the hands of Donald Trump.
Absent a nuclear attack upon the United States or our allies, no one human being should have the power to unilaterally unleash the most destructive forces ever devised by humankind. Yet under existing law, the President of the United States can start a nuclear war without provocation, without consultation, and without warning. It boggles the rational mind. I fear that, in the age of Trump, the cooler heads and strategic doctrine that we once relied upon as our last best hope against the unthinkable seem less reassuring than ever.
On Oct. 30, 2017, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on whether the president needed new congressional authorization to use military force against terrorists around the world. When his turn came to ask questions, Democratic Sen. Edward Markey asked the witnesses whether Trump could launch a nuclear first strike without consulting anyone from Congress.
At first, the witnesses, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, hesitated, calling the question “hypothetical,” but Markey wouldn’t relent, and finally, Mattis allowed that the president could order a first strike if an adversary was seen “preparing” to launch an attack.
Markey, a longtime advocate of nuclear arms treaties, knew the answer before asking the question, but some of the senators were surprised. Among them was the Republican chairman, Bob Corker. A businessman from Tennessee, Corker was deeply conservative, but he was also agitated by stories he’d been hearing about Trump’s mental state. Recently Corker had made a stir by likening the White House to an “adult day center” and warning that Trump’s reckless threats toward other countries could pave a “path to World War III.”
After the hearing, Corker told his staff that he was “riled up” by Markey’s exchange with the two secretaries and that he wanted to hold a separate hearing on the subject as soon as possible—“something real sober,” as he put it, “pointing out that the president has the power to basically destroy the world.”
The hearing was held just two weeks later, on Nov. 14, the first such hearing on the subject in 41 years. The staff assembled three witnesses—one Democrat, one Republican and one retired four-star general. The general was C. Robert Kehler, former head of U.S. Strategic Command, which is in charge of plans and policies on nuclear weapons.
Kehler testified that the president did not have a completely free hand. “The United States military does not blindly follow orders,” he said. “A presidential order to employ U.S. nuclear weapons must be legal. The basic legal principles of military necessity, distinction, and proportionality apply to nuclear weapons, just as they do to every other nuclear weapon.”
Sen. Benjamin Cardin, the ranking Democrat on the panel, asked who would decide whether the order was illegal.
“Well,” Kehler replied, “that is one of the things that would be on the plate of the commander of Strategic Command.” If he thought the order was illegal, he would be “obligated to refuse to follow it.”
But on further questioning, Kehler’s bold assurance turned wobbly. Republican Sen. Ron Johnson asked him how, as Stratcom commander, he would have gone about refusing to follow an illegal order.
Kehler replied, “I would have said, ‘I have a question about this,’ and I would have said, ‘I’m not ready to proceed.’ ”
“And then what happens?” Johnson asked.
“Well,” Kehler said. He paused, and nervous laughter flitted through the hearing room. “As I say,” he went on, with a slight grin, “I don’t know exactly. Fortunately, we’ve never—these are all hypothetical scenarios. I mean, they’re real, in terms of—”
Johnson interrupted: “We are holding a hearing on this, so—”
“Exactly,” Kehler replied. “This is the human factor in our system. The human factor kicks in.”
And that opened the door to the question of what happens to the legal
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
So, government as a control room.
Part of the problem is that we have to decide what we want this control room TO DO. With production plants it's easy: maximize propylene, or maximize gasoline, or maximize GWH given particular feedstocks/ fuels.
But what do you want government TO DO? Some people think our government should sweep in and right all wrongs and "help" people around the world. Other people think our government should make capitalism or the banking system stronger. Some people think we should enhance international trade, or fix global warming.
So....?
What should our government's essential function be? Until you answer that question, you can't possibly start designing anything.
Just, yanno, putting that essential question out there again: WHAT DO YOU WANT OUR GOVERNMENT TO DO? WHAT ARE IT'S ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS?
Until you can figure that out, you can't possibly fix anything.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by Oonjerah:
I'm an actual, registered Democrat.
But I'm not sure what the topic is. Democrats can post in here,
and talk about themselves ... about why they are democrats ...
or what democrats believe in?
My parents were Republicans.
I was an adult in my 40's before I found out I was a democrat.
I didn't really know what the 2 parties stood for, so I asked a
friend who loves politics what I was.
Republicans tend to be conservative. Democrats tend to be liberal.
Can I even say what those words mean? Not very well.
Conservatives stand for law & order. i.e., Authority.
Democrats believe in human rights and equality. i.e., Freedom.
Anarchists believe in every man for himself?
... oooOO}{OOooo ...
T
Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:
Originally posted by Oonjerah:
I'm an actual, registered Democrat.
But I'm not sure what the topic is. Democrats can post in here,
and talk about themselves ... about why they are democrats ...
or what democrats believe in?
My parents were Republicans.
I was an adult in my 40's before I found out I was a democrat.
I didn't really know what the 2 parties stood for, so I asked a
friend who loves politics what I was.
Republicans tend to be conservative. Democrats tend to be liberal.
Can I even say what those words mean? Not very well.
Conservatives stand for law & order. i.e., Authority.
Democrats believe in human rights and equality. i.e., Freedom.
Anarchists believe in every man for himself?
... oooOO}{OOooo ...
T
Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.
All due respect to OONJ, but that is not a legitimate assessment of what Democrats and Republicans are in 2020 by a long shot. It certainly wasn't ever a legitimate assessment of what an Anarchist is.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
T
Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals. 
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Trump on Coal
The International Monetary Fund makes regular estimates of worldwide subsidies to fossil fuels — subsidies that partly take the form of tax breaks and outright cash grants, but mainly involve not holding the industry accountable for the indirect costs it imposes. In 2017 it put these subsidies at $5.2 trillion; yes, that’s trillion with a “T.” For the U.S., the subsidies amounted to $649 billion, which is about $3 million for every worker employed in the extraction of coal, oil and gas.
Without these subsidies, it’s hard to imagine that anyone would still be investing in fossil fuels.
I still often find people — both right-wingers and climate activists — asserting that sharply reducing emissions would require a big decline in G.D.P. Everything we know, however, says that this is wrong, that we can decarbonize while continuing to achieve robust growth.
Given all this, however, why are people like Mnuchin and his boss Trump so adamantly pro-fossil fuel and anti-environmentalist?
Part of the answer, I believe, is that conservatives don’t want to admit that government action is ever justified. Once you concede that the government can do good by protecting the environment, people might start thinking that it can guarantee affordable health care, too.
The bigger issue, however, is sheer greed.
Given the scale of subsidies we give to fossil fuels, the industry as a whole should be regarded as a gigantic grift. It makes money by ripping off everyone else, to some extent through direct taxpayer subsidies, to a greater extent by shunting the true costs of its operations off onto innocent bystanders.
And let’s be clear: Many of those “costs” take the form of sickness and death, because that’s what local air pollution causes. Other costs take the form of “natural” disasters like the burning of Australia, which increasingly bear the signature of climate change.
In a sane world we’d be trying to shut this grift down. But the grifters — which overwhelmingly means corporations and investors, since little of that $3-million-per-worker subsidy trickles down to the workers themselves — have bought themselves a lot of political influence.
More at www.nytimes.com/2020/01/27/opinion/greta-thunberg-mnuchin.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Why We’re Polarized
People have always disagreed about politics, passionately and sometimes even violently. But in certain historical moments these disagreements were distributed without strong correlations, so that any one political party would contain a variety of views. In a representative democracy, that kind of distribution makes it easier to accomplish things. In contrast, today we see strong political polarization: members of any one party tend to line up with each other on a range of issues, and correspondingly view the other party with deep distrust. Political commentator Ezra Klein has seen this shift in action, and has studied it carefully in his new book Why We’re Polarized (out Jan. 28). We talk about the extent to which the apparent polarization is real, how we can trace its causes, and whether there’s anything we can do about it.
Polarization was not as high in the ’60s, in part that’s because, well, if you were a kind of moderate Democrat looking at the Republican Party, you saw a lot of people like yourself in it. Richard Nixon, domestically at least, did a lot of quite moderate and, even now looking back, liberal things. And conversely, Bill Clinton did some quite conservative things. But now, you look at the other side and they’re much more different from you demographically, they’re much more different than you ideologically. And so, the threat they pose to you and to your view of the good life is much more severe.
Some examples from many: The Republic Party’s overwhelmingly Christian. It used to be that both parties were. Now, the single largest religious group in the Democratic Party is people who are religiously unaffiliated. The Democratic Party is a coalition of a lot of different religious groups, liberal Christians, Buddhists, atheists, etc. On race, the Democratic Party is, I believe it is 44% non-white, at least in its 2016 primary vote, or in its 2016 vote. The Republican Party is over 90% white. You don’t have a ton of union members who are Republicans, you don’t have a ton of rural Southerners who are Democrats. And so, as that happens, and there’s a lot of evidence on this from outside of politics too, when you begin to stack identities the nature of disagreement becomes much deeper, it becomes much more threatening.
My background is in policy reporting, and so I have a lot of models for what happens when Congress starts working on a bill, and why it always collapses into total omni-shambles, but I didn’t have a model about why politics had seemingly gone off the rails in the way it had. And so this book was an opportunity for me to try to rebuild my understanding of politics from the ground up in a way that could help explain what was happening for me, and then hopefully for an audience.
More about Polarization, Politics, and Identity at
www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/01/27/81-ezra-klein-on-polar
ization-politics-and-identity/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:No health care system can say yes to every desired treatment, in every context, at any price. All systems have to tell somebody no: Either providers cannot charge what they want, or patients cannot have what they want, or taxes are going to be much higher than anyone wants.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Just, yanno, putting that essential question out there again: WHAT DO YOU WANT OUR GOVERNMENT TO DO? WHAT ARE IT'S ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS?
Until you can figure that out, you can't possibly fix anything.
The American health care system is uniquely cruel in its approach to saying no. It says no through prices — but not, as in most other countries, by limiting the prices pharmaceutical companies and hospitals can charge for treatments. Rather, it says no by letting them charge whatever prices they want and denying care to those who can’t afford the cost.
The paradox of the American health system, then, is that it poses as a system with no limits — there is no centralized authority rationing care or negotiating treatments — even as it turns tens of millions of people away from services they need. But the system works quite well for those who can afford all that it has to offer. They can be mobilized by the health industry. When reformers threaten the profitable status quo, the health industry blankets airwaves with ads warning that under a different system, there will be someone who says no to you.
The US health care system has been designed as if, with enormous intelligence and intent, it was to be as resistant to cost control as possible.
The UK is the opposite of the US in how it says no. It has embraced the idea Americans fear most: rationing. There is, in the UK, a government agency that decides which treatments are worth covering, and for whom. It is an agency that has even decided, from the government’s perspective, how much a life is worth in hard currency. It has made the UK system uniquely centralized, transparent, and equitable. But it is built on a faith in government, and a political and social solidarity, that is hard to imagine in the US.
More at www.vox.com/2020/1/28/21074386/health-care-rationing-britain-nhs-nice-
medicare-for-all
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality
The traditional concepts of the common law of property were created for and by the ruling classes at a time when the bulk of their capital was land. Nowadays the great wealth lies in stocks, shares, bonds and the like, and is not just movable but mobile, crossing oceans at the touch of a key-pad…. In terms of legal theory and technique, however, there has been a profound if little discussed evolution by which the concepts originally devised for real property have been detached from their original object, only to survive and flourish as a means of handling abstract value. The feudal calculus lives and breeds, but its habitat is wealth, not land.
The enduring entanglement of modern property law with this original “feudal calculus” is a thread running throughout Pistor’s book. Most importantly, it informs her skepticism about the alignment that is commonly assumed in liberal grand narratives among progress, property rights, and the rule of law (understood in the sense of the universal applicability of general rules, such that no one class received preferential treatment by the state). There have been revolutionary moments, Pistor concedes, in which property owners did line up behind the demand for general rights—the American and French Revolutions being cases in point. But once their property was established, owners became, like their feudal predecessors, defenders of privilege. They have advocated not universal binding rules, but what Max Weber called a “modern particularism,” finding ways around the law when it suited their interests.
In the twenty-first century, examples of this modern particularism are rife. Pistor describes, for instance, the exceptions from general bankruptcy rules negotiated by the derivatives industry. In normal bankruptcy cases, secured creditors can claim access to their collateral first, and unsecured creditors have to divide what remains of the company or estate. For fast-moving financial transactions, that procedure is too cumbersome, so the collateral pledged in derivatives deals is granted an exemption from the usual queue of claims. In cases of bankruptcy, it is transferred directly to the counterparty, leaving unsecured creditors empty-handed. Another example would be the right claimed by foreign investors to challenge the normal operation of national courts in their host countries. Or the deals negotiated annually with the authorities by large taxpayers over what their tax bill will actually be. Or the haggling between regulators and banks over whether they meet the criteria laid down by the Dodd-Frank legislation of 2010.
The result is a legal order that is relentlessly insistent on the priority of rights, and of property rights above all, and yet shot through with special exceptions and reservations.
More at www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/02/13/how-big-law-makes-big-money/
The Code of Capital by Katharina Pistor PDF
https://1337x.to/search/The+Code+of+Capital/1/
https://1337x.to/torrent/4211386/The-Code-of-Capital-by-Katharina-Pist
or-PDF/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Does it matter who the Democrats choose for President?
It’s still far from clear who will come out on top in the primary, but it’s enough to think about what would happen if either of the two current front-runners, Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden, were to become president — and also have strong enough coattails to produce a Democratic Senate, because otherwise nothing will happen.
Sanders has a hugely ambitious agenda; Medicare for All is just part of it. Paying for that agenda would be difficult — so turning Sanders’s vision into reality would require large tax increases, not just on the wealthy, but on the middle class; without those tax increases it would be highly inflationary.
But not to worry: it won’t happen. Even if he made it to the White House, Sanders would have to deal with a Congress (and a public) considerably less radical than he is, and would be obliged to settle for a more modest progressive agenda.
It’s true that Sanders enthusiasts believe that they can rally a hidden majority of Americans around an aggressively populist agenda, and in so doing also push Congress into going along. But we had a test in the midterm elections: Progressives ran a number of candidates in Trump districts, and if even one of them had won they would have claimed vindication for their faith in transformative populism. But none did; the sweeping Democratic victory came entirely from moderates running conventional campaigns.
The usual take on this progressive setback is that it raises questions about Sanders’s electability. But it also has a very different implication: Moderates worried about a radical presidency should cool it. A President Sanders wouldn’t be especially radical in practice.
What about Joe Biden? The Sanders campaign has claimed that Biden endorsed Paul Ryan’s plans for sharp cuts in Social Security and Medicare; that claim is false. What is true is that in the past Biden has often gone along with the Beltway consensus that we need “adjustments” — a euphemism for at least modest cuts — in Social Security.
But the Democratic Party as a whole has moved left on these issues, and Biden has moved with it. Even if he has a lingering desire to strike a Grand Bargain with Republicans — which I doubt — he would face such a huge intraparty backlash that he would be forced to back off.
So in terms of policy, here’s what I think would happen if Sanders wins: we’ll get a significant but not gigantic expansion of the social safety net, paid for by significant new taxes on the rich. On the other hand, if Biden wins, we’ll get a significant but not gigantic expansion of the social safety net, paid for by significant new taxes on the rich.
More at www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/opinion/does-it-matter-who-the-democrats-ch
oose.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Does it matter who the Democrats choose for President?
Nope. They're not going to win either way.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:The Dems can show Trump voters that they have been used and betrayed by Trump. The Dems would be wise not to focus on their candidate but instead pour money into negative advertising, shaming Trump for making promises that he knew he wouldn’t deliver on: Hillary has not been prosecuted; Mexico has paid for no wall; great manufacturing jobs are not going to Ohioans; there are more suicides, drug overdose deaths, and grieving families. Negative advertising will increase the likelihood that these folks stay home on Election Day and not vote for Trump.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Does it matter who the Democrats choose for President?
Nope. They're not going to win either way.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The Dems can show Trump voters that they have been used and betrayed by Trump. The Dems would be wise not to focus on their candidate but instead pour money into negative advertising, shaming Trump for making promises that he knew he wouldn’t deliver on: Hillary has not been prosecuted; Mexico has paid for no wall; great manufacturing jobs are not going to Ohioans; there are more suicides, drug overdose deaths, and grieving families. Negative advertising will increase the likelihood that these folks stay home on Election Day and not vote for Trump.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Does it matter who the Democrats choose for President?
Nope. They're not going to win either way.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
That's all you got left.
Negativity. The heart and soul of the Democrat.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:The Dems could praise V.P. Mike Pence as calm, thoughtful, intelligent, truthful, pays his taxes, never bribed hookers, never bankrupt, never been sued then forced to pay millions in compensation. Vote for Vice President Pence because if Trump dies America will need someone who is the complete opposite of the President.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
That's all you got left.
Negativity. The heart and soul of the Democrat.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The Dems could praise V.P. Mike Pence as calm, thoughtful, intelligent, truthful, pays his taxes, never bribed hookers, never bankrupt, never been sued then forced to pay millions in compensation. Vote for Vice President Pence because if Trump dies America will need someone who is the complete opposite of the President.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
That's all you got left.
Negativity. The heart and soul of the Democrat.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Or they could just do nothing. Because if Trump dies then America gets President Pence.
Are you huffing glue on Saturday or something?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:6ix, you can get all the same Trump policy from President Pence, but without the mental instability. Pence won't nuke N Korea or Iran, but Trump might in his second term, out of frustration that he can't get either to shutdown their nuclear weapons program.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The Dems could praise V.P. Mike Pence as calm, thoughtful, intelligent, truthful, pays his taxes, never bribed hookers, never bankrupt, never been sued then forced to pay millions in compensation. Vote for Vice President Pence because if Trump dies America will need someone who is the complete opposite of the President.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
That's all you got left.
Negativity. The heart and soul of the Democrat.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Or they could just do nothing. Because if Trump dies then America gets President Pence.
Are you huffing glue on Saturday or something?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
There Is No Check on Trump's Rage Going Nuclear - His aggressive boorishness, entitlement, and belief that he can do whatever he wants, Trump has absolute authority to launch nuclear weapons—without anyone's permission.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/05/22/theres-no-check-on-trumps-rage-go
ing-nuclear/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Your Piece of the American Pie
If a pie represented the estimated $98 trillion of household wealth in the United States, nine pieces, or 90% of the pie, would go to the wealthiest 20% in the country, according to a National Bureau Of Economic Research study of household wealth trends in the United States from 1962 to 2016. Out of those nine slices, four would go to just the top 1%.
The upper middle class and the middle class would share one piece, or about 10%, and the lower middle class would get .3% of the pie. The poorest Americans, people in the bottom 20%, wouldn't get any. On average, they are more than $6,000 in debt.
www.cbsnews.com/news/income-inequality-in-america-how-98-trillion-of-h
ousehold-wealth-is-distributed/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, you can get all the same Trump policy from President Pence, but without the mental instability. Pence won't nuke N Korea or Iran, but Trump might in his second term, out of frustration that he can't get either to shutdown their nuclear weapons program.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The Dems could praise V.P. Mike Pence as calm, thoughtful, intelligent, truthful, pays his taxes, never bribed hookers, never bankrupt, never been sued then forced to pay millions in compensation. Vote for Vice President Pence because if Trump dies America will need someone who is the complete opposite of the President.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
That's all you got left.
Negativity. The heart and soul of the Democrat.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Or they could just do nothing. Because if Trump dies then America gets President Pence.
Are you huffing glue on Saturday or something?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
There Is No Check on Trump's Rage Going Nuclear - His aggressive boorishness, entitlement, and belief that he can do whatever he wants, Trump has absolute authority to launch nuclear weapons—without anyone's permission.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/05/22/theres-no-check-on-trumps-rage-go
ing-nuclear/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Pence is an unknown variable. You don't know anything about Pence.
But more importantly, Pence isn't running for President.
So, once again, I'm left here wondering what the hell is going on in that twisted mind of yours before you type out your incoherent thoughts.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME