As NRO notes:
Texas Republican Rep. Kevin Brady says in a release that committee analysts actually couldn’t fit everything in: “This portrays only about one-third of the complexity of the final bill. It’s actually worse than this.”
I have some quibbles about the graphic itself — primarily, I wish it were interactive, so you could choose which aspects of the tangle to concentrate on — but the reality they represent is horrific.
Things to looks at:
Red circles with dark orange interiors are “Rationing Potentials”.
Orange circles with light blue interiors are “Involvements with the health insurance market”.
Note that the Patient, lower right hand corner, is not directly connected to the Physician, lower left hand corner. I suspect, I hope, I pray, that this is a fault in the chart, not a true representation. If it is true, this means that I, cash in hand, cannot go to my doctor, pay him, and be examined and treated without getting some kind of government approval. [update]OK, close examination of the chart shows that the lines are actually labeled with the section number of the Obamacare act establishing that connection. Unless Obamacare breaks the existing patient-doctor connection, no wonder it does not appear on the chart.
One more charting quibble: I’d like to be able to click on one entity and see all the other entities it connects to, and how.
My title asks if you trust the Post Office. This chart shows that you have to trust several non-health-care related agencies, including the IRS, which has a history of being openly hostile to citizens. Other agencies include Justice, Homeland Security, Labor, and Treasury.
Praise be!
Obama’s InJustice Department orders doctors to accept federal price fixing, or go to jail for private price fixing.
And no whining amongst themselves, either. That would be conspiracy.
So, it’s ok for SEIU or Teacher’s Unions or any other labor entity to strike, threaten to strike, or get the Obama government to do their dirty work (take over GM, toss investors to the curb and hand over an equity share to the Union), but if a doctor says “hey, I’m not going to accept any more Medicare/Workers Comp/Blue Cross patients” that doctor is engaging in criminal behavior and, by golly, Barry will have none of it!
…
Oh, yeah. Take out student loans of $100,000 or more to become a doctor and become a second-class citizen.Yeah, that’s going improve both the quantity and quality of future physicians.
I have to wonder: is BO’s plan to make it illegal for doctors to retire, or is he just trying to drive medical care into back alleys?
Andrew Wakefield, who pushed the idea that childhood vaccinations cause autism, resulting in many children being crippled or killed, has lost his British medical license. (He was never licensed to practice in the U.S.)
Rogue Medic is blunt, as is appropriate:
…[Anti-vaccinationists] claim that this is some sort of global conspiracy, the reality is much more simple. Andrew Wakefield was caught taking hundreds of thousands of pounds from lawyers to create evidence that would help the lawyers to sue vaccine companies for billions of pounds.
Andrew Wakefield’s defense?
He claims that his research – research that nobody else has been able to reproduce – is legitimate. When research cannot be reproduced there are two possibilities. Researcher error and researcher fraud.
The interpretation that is favorable to Andrew Wakefield is that he is just incompetent, since he is not able to recognize where he screwed up. The interpretation that is unfavorable is that he intentionally lied.
…
Andrew Wakefield lied.Andrew Wakefield was paid a lot of money to lie.
Andrew Wakefield mistreated the children he used as research subjects.
Andrew Wakefield was trying to sell a vaccine to compete with the vaccine he was telling lies about.
Real doctors have recognized this fraud and had Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent research retracted.
Real doctors have recognized this fraud and had Andrew Wakefield’s medical license revoked.
[bold in original]
The autism from vaccinations myth is life and death for your children, people. Read Grunt Doc’s take-down as if your children’s lives depended on it.
The dextrosphere has been sneering and sputtering at New York State Assemblyman Felix Ortiz (Commie-Dem Brooklyn), who wants to pass a law forbidding restaurants to add salt to their food. Of course, Ortiz is an ignorant arrogant jack boot who wants to run everyone’s life down to the tiniest detail, and therefore deserves every word of ridicule he gets. (Although for some reason, the ignorant putzes in Brooklyn keep returning him to office. They deserve whatever they get. We don’t.)
The Munchkin Wrangler, however, is the first to point out exactly why Ortiz is so dangerous, and what he means for the national scene:
Here’s a question for my progressive liberal friends:
Is this the kind of future you want? One where omnipotent busybodies keep passing laws forcing people to eat well, get enough sleep, don’t do dangerous sports, don’t use hurtful language?
And if you think this nonsense isn’t going to increase tenfold once we have some sort of public health care system, think again. Taxpayer-funded or –subsidized healthcare is a universal adapter for stupid nanny state legislation. Listen to Assemblyman Felix Ortiz:
“It’s time for us to take a giant step,” Ortiz said yesterday. “We need to talk about two ingredients of salt: health care costs and deaths.”
Once the public pays for your doctor’s visits, people like Assemblyman Ortiz are going to see it as their natural and primary responsibility to make sure you’re living well, because the argument will be “We’re all paying for it, after all”. (Politicians will be under constant pressure to keep the tab down, so they’ll issue a never-ending stream of legislative proposals related to having you use those public health services as little as possible.) It’s exactly the lever needed to force everyone to do what has been decreed to be best for them. After all, there’s no aspect of life that isn’t related to physical well-being. Do you really want to give up your autonomy for “free” health care?
Read the whole thing, of course; Wrangler deserves the traffic. But that’s the nut of the thing, the poison pit in the rotting peach of mandated health care.
Instead, wear T-Shirts celebrating kind, decent friends of the people like Che, Marx, Lenin, and even Stalin.
Not a “text book sociopath” like Ayn Rand.
There’s something deeply unsettling about living in a country where millions of people froth at the mouth at the idea of giving health care to the tens of millions of Americans who don’t have it, or who take pleasure at the thought of privatizing and slashing bedrock social programs like Social Security or Medicare. It might not be as hard to stomach if other Western countries also had a large, vocal chunk of the population who thought like this, but the US is seemingly the only place where right-wing elites can openly share their distaste for the working poor. Where do they find their philosophical justification for this kind of attitude?
It turns out, you can trace much of this thinking back to Ayn Rand, a popular cult-philosopher who exerts a huge influence over much of the right-wing and libertarian crowd, but whose influence is only starting to spread out of the US.
One reason why most countries don’t find the time to embrace her thinking is that Ayn Rand is a textbook sociopath. Literally a sociopath: Ayn Rand, in her notebooks, worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of “ideal man” that Rand promoted in her more famous books — ideas which were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half decade, including the key architects of America’s most recent economic catastrophe — former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox — along with other notable right-wing Republicans such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.
The loudest of all the Republicans, right-wing attack-dog pundits and the Teabagger mobs fighting to kill health care reform and eviscerate “entitlement programs” increasingly hold up Ayn Rand as their guru. Sales of her books have soared in the past couple of years; one poll ranked “Atlas Shrugged” as the second most influential book of the 20th century, after The Bible.
Does the author of this piece, Mark Ames, wear T-shirts emblazoned with Che, Marx, Lenin, or Stalin? Beats the heck out of me. But it’s clear from his article that far worse, he embraces their ideas, and thus the mass murder of millions.
Even if Rand burned candles to William Edward Hickman, the man she’s accused of admiring, her ideas have caused nowhere near the slaughter that Marx and his worshippers committed, and continue to commit to this day.
Shit fire and give up matches, who’da guessed?
“Optimal Waist-to-Hip Ratios in Women Activate Neural Reward Centers in Men”
So, here’s my plan to make a million bucks: I’ll take pictures of young women with optimal waist to hip ratios (0.7), possibly wearing skimpy clothing (the women, not me), post ‘em on the intertubes, and….
PROFIT!!!
Secondary sexual characteristics convey information about reproductive potential. In the same way that facial symmetry and masculinity, and shoulder-to-hip ratio convey information about reproductive/genetic quality in males, waist-to-hip-ratio (WHR) is a phenotypic cue to fertility, fecundity, neurodevelopmental resources in offspring, and overall health, and is indicative of “good genes” in women. Here, using fMRI, we found that males show activation in brain reward centers in response to naked female bodies when surgically altered to express an optimal (~0.7) WHR with redistributed body fat, but relatively unaffected body mass index (BMI).
Jeez, women let themselves get cut on to make men happy? Holy crap. Who knew?
[I have only briefly glanced at this material as yet; this post is basically a sticky note to myself for future reference.]
The Washington Post puts up the presentation slides for a talk on issues facing Muslims in the U.S. military that Major Nidal Hasan gave to his fellow doctors.
Barry Rubin does a point by point analysis.
How do we know that the attack at Fort Hood was an act of Islamist terrorism? Simple, Major Nidal Hassan told us so. You’ve seen reports of a long list of things he did and said along these lines. But what’s most amazing of all is this:Hassan is the first terrorist in history to give an academic lecture explaining why he was about to attack. Yet that still isn’t enough for too many people—including the president of the United States–to understand that the murderous assault at Fort Hood was a Jihad attack.
It was reported that the audience was shocked and frightened by his lecture. He was supposed to speak on some medical topic yet instead talked on the topic: “The Koranic World View as it Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military.” All you have to do is look at the 50 Power Point slides and they tell you everything you need to know.
It is quite a good talk. He’s logical and presents his evidence. This is clearly not the work of a mad man or a fool, though there’s still a note of ambiguity in it. He’s still working out what to do in his own mind and is trying to figure out if he has a way out other than in effect deserting the U.S. army and becoming a Jihad warrior. Ultimately, he concluded that he could not be a proper Muslim without killing American soldiers. Obviously, other Muslims could reach different conclusions but Hassan strongly grounds himself in Islamic texts.
In a sense, Hassan’s lecture was a cry for help: Can anyone show me another way out? Can anyone refute my interpretation of Islam? One Muslim in the audience reportedly tried to do so. But unless these issues are openly discussed and debated–rather than swept under the rug–more people will die.
In fact, I’d recommend that teachers use this lecture in teaching classes on both Islam and Islamist politics.
Follow along with me and you’ll understand everything.
So follow along, already. At first glance, his analysis seems thorough. Pro-jihadists, please feel free to respond in similar detail.
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