We're Communicating II

OK, so I spend a lot of time cruising the Dark Side, inserting a little Truth into the Stupid End of the Intertubes. I admit that. They're frequently either ignorant, mistaken, or completely batshit, head-buried-deeply-in-their-anus insane, and I insist on throwing water on their fire, kicking sand in their faces, and injecting reality directly into their veins.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that this is most often a complete waste of time. I find that the Fargone Right tends to be unwilling to listen to any messages that don't come from the vibrations in their fillings, and they tend to have more interest in their agenda than in actuality.

But, for some unknown reason, I keep doing it. It's led to some fascinating discussions, both in the various shadowy corners where I find myself, and occasionally in the Comments section here, when one of them follows me home like some kind of weirdly masochistic, three-legged street mongrel hoping to bite me on the ankle while my back is turned or something.

Now, to be entirely honest, I don't mind batting around the odd idiot. It keeps me off the streets, at least. (Admittedly, I end up feeling like a bully at times, since some of these winners aren't overly burdened by an abundance of common sense. But if I have to be the one to take one for the team, I guess I'll shoulder that burden and bravely move on...)

Of course, then my irony gland kicks in, and I describe the drooling masses of teabaggers and deathers in terms like above, and get called names like "arrogant," or find myself with commenters like the anonymous guy who felt that repeating the phrase "YOU DON’T LISTEN OR ADMIT ANY WRONG. YOU’RE NEVER WRONG" eighteen times was a viable argument.

(It's weird. I have a mental image of that guy actually typing out each line, not cutting and pasting it. I don't know why, but it would fit the rest of his spittle-flecked rant.)

And really, when I write stuff like... well, like everything that's precedes these words... now that I slow down and think about it... when I write stuff like that, I might very well deserve the label "arrogant." But you know, when they make it so easy to feel superior, I'm not sure why I should hold back. It's like some kind of intellectual Darwinianism.

The weird thing is, there's so damned many of these gibbering Neanderthals wandering the landscape these days, you have to wonder whether Cro-magnon could have survived if he was simply overwhelmed and beaten to death by broken tree branches, despite his superior flint spearhead.

Is this our fate (to openly switch metaphors in midstream), some sort of dystopian, zombie-infested landscape, where the Glenn Becks of the future infect our populace with some odd cephalophagian virus, leaving them to shamble over the horizon with blank eyes, muttering "ssssooooooocccciiallismmmmm"?

...

(Wow, where did that rant come from? Boy, I'm glad I'm not introspective. I'd have to wonder about myself after that...)

Anyway, today we speak of a different kind of "communication." Perhaps one that's even more important that grabbing the mental midgets and using them like bowling balls.

(Stop it! Stop it! You're done with that!)

First, I just finished emailing our "friends" in the White House. (OK, admittedly that isn't the primary contact address for the White House. But that happens to be where I was, and I figured "what the fuck, right?" And sometimes, you've just got to say... aaahh, forget it...)

I'm curious. When are you guys going to get serious about getting universal health care? The insurance companies and the healthcare industry is spending millions to defeat it, the GOP is positioning themselves as roadblocks in the hope that a major loss will discredit Pres. Obama and make him a lame duck less than a year into his first term, and you're trying to be bipartisan?

The Blue Dogs are busy trying to appease constituents who would never vote for them anyway; the GOP is going to block whatever goes through, once they're done with all the stalling tactics they can dream up in committee, and they're going to filibuster when it hits the floor. You know this in advance - the Republicans have been trying to destroy Medicare since it was passed, they aren't going to support this.

Back before the Ignorant Unwashed got brainwashed by the "death panels" and similar garbage, 70% of them wanted a public option (and most of the rest didn't know what one was).

We've entered a post-bipartisan era. You can't keep using a failing tactic over and over, because the result is always going to be the same.

It 's time to bring together a coalition of Democrats, serve a few beers, slap some backs, promise funding for their district, and put together a functional healthcare system using the British or Canadian systems that the right wing is so scared of, fund it using the rolled-back Bush tax cuts, and move on. The GOP will scream and cry and stamp their little feet - let them.

At that point, they're going to try to sabotage it any way they can - cutting funding, passing ignorant bills under the guise of "preventing abortions" or "assisting the small insurance businessman" or whatever, so it might be best if somebody specifically keeps an eye on the program during the initial set-up and beyond. It won't even need to be another "Tzar" position - just a special assistant to Ms Sebelius.

I don’t see any chance of anything else working. The GOP has already stated that they will oppose any program that comes out. So it’s time to use your majority and just push it through.

Please. America needs this.

OK, so maybe the message was a little sappy. Well, practice makes perfect, right? So I sent out the following message two days ago.

Senator Bingaman,

As a member of the Senate Finance Committee, you were selected, along with five other Senators, to craft the Healthcare legislation. Unfortunately, you don’t seem to be having much luck doing that little task. This concerns me.

This is probably the most important piece of legislation currently before Congress. We lose 18,000 Americans every year who can’t get healthcare – that’s as if 9/11 happened once every two months. We need the public option.

And the Republicans, simply because they can’t stand the thought of President Obama "succeeding," have chosen this issue (admittedly, along with every other issue before Congress, but particularly this one) to make their stand. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has already referred to healthcare as the President’s "Waterloo," and a significant number of GOP Congressmembers agree with him.

In your "Gang of Six" alone, Senator Grassley has referred to the House effort as "the Pelosi bill," saying that Pelosi and Obama are "intellectually dishonest" for saying that old people won’t be ground up and made into crackers; he also said that even if he agrees on a bill, he won't vote for it unless the rest of the GOP does the same (as if that’s going to happen).

Mike Enzi has stated that he has no plans to compromise on the bill, he’s just there to see what he can "get them to leave out."

Olympia Snowe, who, like most other Senators, has taken significant amounts of money from the healthcare industry, at least seems reasonable on the issue.

Kent Conrad’s reliance on "co-ops" (an unproved concept which has failed almost every time that it’s been tried) might be a useful diversion, but it's no solution.

And Max Baucus is a Blue Dog who hasn’t been willing to take a stand, preferring to pander to conservative constituents who aren't going to vote for him anyway.

The only good news coming from your committee was last week, when you admitted that budget reconciliation was a viable method of passing health care reform. As the Republicans have shown no interest in negotiating in good faith, it’s time to move on. Craft a bill that a majority of Democrats will support, ensure the public option is included, and push it through. Too much time has been wasted trying to compromise with Republicans who have no intention of agreeing to anything.

As Letterman put it, "Congress has been agonizing over health care for months now. Squabbling, fighting, the town hall meetings going crazy. Meanwhile, while they're arguing about health care, we're stuck in two wars that were rubber-stamped in about 10 minutes. What? How does that make any sense when you think about it?"

This is why I voted for you, Senator Bingaman. Somebody has to lead on that committee, and it might as well be you. Push the public option through. It’s what America needs, despite any lies the Republicans and the insurance companies try to peddle. If Senator Kennedy isn’t going to be around any more to protect the average American, somebody needs to take over at least part of the job.

Make us proud of you, Senator.

Still treading dangerously close to proposing optimism as an alternative, but I think I'm happy with it.

Now, it's your turn. Contact the White House. Contact your Senator or Representative. They get enough block-capital letters scrawled in crayon. Let them hear from the sane side of the populace for once, while we're still a majority. Even if a less-vocal majority.

Now, if you'll excuse me, there's more zombies out there to kill.

Random Musings

As I mentioned in the comments section, I've recently gotten on Facebook. (Hey, when your son is stationed in Hawaii, you do whatever you can to make things easier for him to communicate. Not that Luke has ever been the most communicative of people - he'll talk to you if you're in front of him, but will he pick up a phone and call his parents? Oi, it's a shandeh!)

(Yeah, I know. My yiddish accent is a shandeh un a charpeh. But what can you do?)

And thumbing around the internet this weekend, I came across a “Boycott Whole Foods” group in Facebook. (For anybody who may not be aware, the owner of Whole Foods, John Mackey, a millionaire who makes enough money that he won’t be thrown into bankruptcy the first time he gets sick, wrote an editorial saying that universal health care was a bad idea.)

So anyway, like I said, I found the "Boycott Whole Foods" group in Facebook. And on the first page, I noted that among its almost 28,000 members was a friend of mine named Melissa. So, on a whim, I joined. Apparently, I’m now boycotting Whole Foods.

Now, here’s the thing. This won’t be a particularly arduous boycott for me, because I never shop there (I just don’t see the sense in paying twice as much, or more, for an apple just because somebody slapped an “organic” label on it – and since “organic” really doesn’t mean much, I’m just as happy paying less at a standard grocery store). However, since Melissa, as far as I know, shops almost exclusively at Whole Foods, maybe the excessive amount of inconvenience that she’s dealing with, makes up for my lackadaisical boycott.

(For the record, I also boycott veal. Since I never bought it anyway, this is another boycott that isn’t exactly causing me excessive pain. So in the end, when I do the right thing in a completely passive manner like this, does it increase my chances of going to heaven? Do I get a couple of points in the “nice” column on Santa’s list or anything?)
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My wife, being on a low-protein diet, has extremely fine hair. This did not, however, prevent me from removing a hair clump the size of a vole from our bathtub drain yesterday. (It was too small to be an ordinary mouse, so “vole” seemed appropriate. But it’s a descriptor that nobody uses, at least here in the USA, so I’m happy to throw it in there.)
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It shames me to admit it, but I’m not the biggest opera fan in the world. However, after years of forced association, I find that I can stomach it to a limited extent (and I’m actually a big fan of Amici Forever, despite the fact that they’re in contention for the stupidest band name ever). And, if you happen to be in the Albuquerque area on a Friday night, and you happen to be an opera fan (and statistically, these two occurrences aren’t likely to converge to any great extent), quite probably the best place to go is a coffee bar called the Roasted Bean Café, down by Old Town, where the three best singers in Albuquerque (and whoever else shows up) spend the evening singing operatic arias, art songs, and the occasional Broadway number (over the strenuous objections of Erskine, the baritone). It is, in fact, called “Opera and Broadway Open Mike Night,” and it starts at 8:00 p.m.

This has been an entirely unpaid advertisement, neither requested nor approved by the singers, the venue, or the owner of the Roasted Bean. I apologize if anyone is offended. (I also feel compelled to apologize for including that link to the Roasted Bean; they have great coffee, but a butt-ugly website.)
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We have a company which provides health screens to go along with our health insurance; it’s a different company than the one I bitched about last year. So I just registered with them, and I noticed the following statements in the middle of this long, three-page “Participant Notice and Consent.” Let’s see if you can spot the part that took me aback, just a little.

This program is being offered to help you become a healthier and happier you. Participation in this program is voluntary and is not considered part of your work-related duties and responsibilities. A health screening will be done at the beginning of the program to assess your current health status...

In consideration of your participation in the Bravo Wellness and Know Your Number programs, you hereby accept all risk to your health and any injury or death that may result from such participation and you hereby release your employer, Bravo Wellness, BioSignia, Hooper Holmes, Heritage Labs, and their respective officers, directors, employees, agents, successors and assigns from any and all liability to you, your personal representatives, estate, heirs, next of kin and assigns, from any and all claims and causes of actions for all illness or injury to your person resulting from your participation in the Bravo Wellness and Know Your Number programs, including, without limitation, your death, any medical problems or any health issues, whether caused by the negligence of your employer, Bravo Wellness, BioSignia, Hooper Holmes, Heritage Labs, or any of their respective officers, directors, employees, agents, successors and assigns.

What the hell kind of “wellness program” are they running here?

That looks a hell of a lot more like the "death panels" that Sarah Palin is whining about than anything that’s come out of the White House.

Healthcare - the debate continues

I've noticed a huge oversight here. You see, my wife has this weird fixation on having something she calls "a life" I don't really understand it, but it makes her happy, so I go along with it. As a consequence, though, I tend to take notes and comment on other people's blogs in the evening, and blog on the weekend.

As a result, sometimes I'll have pages of notes by the time the weekend comes around, and, reading back, I see that I've left out some points in favor of others, and some of them are relatively important. Thus, this entry. It may be a little more fragmented than most, but since I have some new fans, I think I should just throw it out there and let them at it.

There's a lot of weird claims out there:

The government can't even run a post office/the DMV/(insert random program here)! How can they run healthcare?
I don't hear a lot of seniors shouting that they want to give up their Medicare; in fact, recently, when Rep Anthony Weiner put forward a bill to end Medicare, not one single congresscritter voted for it. And that's government-run healthcare. Really. It is. (Those same congresscritters are also refusing to give up their own government-run healthcare plan - why is that?)

Universal healthcare will stifle innovation!
You know, funny thing there. A lot of the innovation going on in America doesn't happen at bottom-line-focused, pay-to-play corporations, but at universities around the country. Like the latest innovations in joint surgery out of UW Medical Center.

In fact, if you look through the Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research, you'll find that most advances occur in two places: American universities, and foreign countries where they have universal health care (or very often, both, working together).

The country can't afford to give everybody healthcare! We'll go bankrupt!
Well, that's been answered often enough by other people, let's let one of them handle it.

The truth: We need health care reform now in order to prevent bankruptcy—to control spiraling costs that affect individuals, families, small businesses, and the American economy. Right now, we spend more than $2 trillion dollars a year on health care. The average family premium is projected to rise to over $22,000 in the next decade—and each year, nearly a million people face bankruptcy because of medical expenses. Reform, with an affordable, high-quality public option that can spur competition, is necessary to bring down skyrocketing costs. Also, President Obama's reform plans would be fully paid for over 10 years and not add a penny to the deficit.

But let's add to that.

The Bush tax cuts for the rich didn't seem to help the economy much, now, did they? On the other hand, they helped the richest people quite a bit. To be exact, they helped the top 0.1% of the richest people in America, without doing a damned thing for the rest of us. (In fact, there are even coalitions of rich people, like "Wealth for the Common Good" and "Responsible Wealth" offering to pay their fair share.)

So, would rolling back the Bush tax cuts pay for part of the healthcare reform they're touting? Well, Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize=winning columnist already explained that last month.

OK, so the CBO score for the 3-committee House health care plan is in: $1 trillion over the next decade for 97 percent coverage of legal residents.

That’s a bargain: the catastrophe of being ill without insurance, the fear of losing insurance, all ended — for much less than the Bush administration’s useless $1.35 trillion first tax cut, quickly followed by another $350 billion.

Or let's look at what other people have put together on the subject:

What are the costs of not achieving universal health care?
In a landmark six-part series on the uninsured, the Institute of Medicine compiled an extensive report on the "hidden" costs of uninsurance.

• Fewer years of participation in the workforce: The annual cost of diminished health and shorter life spans of Americans without insurance is $65-$130 billion. People who do not live as long do not work and contribute to the economy as long.

• Developmental losses for children: children who are uninsured are more likely to suffer delays in development because of poor health, thus affecting their future earning capacity.

• Cost to public programs: Medicare, Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), and the criminal justice system have higher costs than they would if there were universal coverage. For Medicare, the reason is that people who are uninsured have poorer health, and this poorer health translates into higher expenses once they become enrolled in Medicare. A similar effect exists for SSDI and the criminal justice system, although to a smaller degree because most people do not end up using these programs whereas the vast majority ultimately enroll in Medicare at age 65.

The Institute of Medicine also studied the cost of high rates of uninsurance to communities.

• Lower health care delivery capacity: Communities with high levels of uninsurance tend to have a lower health care delivery capacity, as providers burdened by the costs of uncompensated care reduce staff, relocate, or close.

• Impaired access to emergency departments: Access to ER’s is impaired for both uninsured and insured individuals in communities with high rates of uninsurance. The reason is twofold: emergency departments burdened by uncompensated care costs close down or reduce capacity, and uninsured individuals who have nowhere else to turn to for primary care overcrowd ER’s.

• Weakened local economy: A high rate of uninsurance and the corresponding burden of uncompensated care costs weakens a community’s health infrastructure (e.g. closing or downsizing of local hospitals). Since health care is an important part of a community’s economic base, communities suffer economically.

• Adverse effects on public health: Communities with high rates of uninsurance have less effective control of communicable disease (e.g. less vaccinations, less surveillance of TB) and an overall greater disease burden in general. Furthermore, public health agencies may have budgetary problems if the local government has to siphon dollars away to pay for safety net services for the uninsured.

In addition to the costs delineated by the Institute of Medicine, there are several other areas of economic inefficiency because of the lack of universal health care in America:

• Unnecessary use of the ER: the ER is an expensive place to receive care. An average visit to an emergency room costs $383, whereas the average physician’s office visit costs $60. It is estimated that 10.7% of ER visits in 2000 were for non-emergencies, costing the system billions of dollars.

• Lack of preventive care and adequate care of chronic diseases: Because the uninsured do not get the preventive and chronic disease care they need, they are more likely to develop complications and advanced stage disease, both of which are expensive to treat. The magnitude of this cost is difficult to estimate, but it is significant.

• "Job lock": Job lock refers to the idea that people stay with their jobs when they would rather work elsewhere because their current job offers health insurance. For example, many individuals opt to stay with their job instead of starting their own business because they are unsure of whether they can get health insurance on the individual market, which has higher premiums and often denies people with pre-existing conditions. Although the number of people who would be self-employed if there were universal health care is controversial, one study from 2001 put the number at 3.8 million Americans. This loss of entrepreneurship is a real economic cost in a society that is relying on start-ups to offset the loss of jobs that are moving offshore.

The above are the costs of not achieving universal health care in America by any solution. There is a specific subset of costs that would remain if the solution chosen to achieve universal health care builds on the current system of employer-based insurance (e.g. if the solution is not a comprehensive reform that moves to a centralized insurance scheme, like single payer or social insurance).

• Strain on businesses: The employer-based insurance system in America constitutes a tremendous drain on businesses, as skyrocketing health insurance premiums dig further into profit margins and undermine the ability of businesses to invest in expansion. Health insurance premiums in 2005 grew approximately 2-3 times the rate of overall inflation (3.5%) and wage increases (2.7%).

• Loss of global competitiveness: Health insurance costs are built into the prices of American products. Because businesses in other industrialized countries are not responsible for shouldering most of the costs of employee health insurance, American companies are at a competitive disadvantage globally. General Motors reports that every car it makes is $1,500 more expensive because of health care costs, far more than what Japanese and German automakers have to pay

Now, there's nothing new going on with these arguments. They've been made so many times before that it starts to get old after a while. I mean, let's be real. Everybody from the most blatant capitalist job site to the Green Party can connect these dots.

So where is the opposition to Universal Health Care coming from? Well, obviously, it comes from the healthcare industry, who don't want to lose the multi-billion dollar profits that they're making. I mean, really, this shouldn't be surprising. Corporate Healthcare still haven't been willing to answer the US Senate's question regarding how much of the premiums that their customers pay go to profits for their company, instead of healthcare.

A quick explanation of our new trolls

I'm starting to notice a pattern in my dealings with the rabidly right-wing blogs. On the rare occasions when they do want to discuss an issue, if you make too many arguments that they can't respond to, you get banned from their blog. And then, all too often, they continue to post responses on yours.

Is it just me, or does that behavior have the rich, nutty stink of hypocrisy?

I saw it very briefly from Robert Pavich, who didn't appreciate the fact that his hatred of homosexuals was not supported by the Bible.

More recently (and to a significantly greater extent), I saw it from Eric Graff (eMan) (no relation to the Eighties superhero).

I'm not clear as to my relationship with the boys over at K.O.O.K.s Manifesto - I just gave up on Andy because he likes to change the rules in the middle of the game, and it just wasn't worth my time. The K.O.O.K. recently commented here, and I don't know that I've been banned there (although Andy declared me a "non-commenter" or something like that), but that's how that stands.

(KOOK, if you're still around, welcome to the party. If you're the last one out, turn off the lights and lock the door, OK?)

Well, now, it seems that the kids over at Robinson Talking Points got tired of being unable to respond with anything resembling logic, and they're moderating their posts.

Down at the bottom of that last link - after getting a dismissive "Consider yourself moderated. Go have fun on your own blog" from Bud-D, he actually did post the response I fired off. Which is way more than I expect from people like him (so, y'know, kudos on that...)

And it's not like they don't have plenty of material for humor: Obama will make all of America socialist if we get universal health care (y'know, they never have answered why they believe that...), all liberals are Nazi's because the Nazi's supported environmentalism early on (that's from that last link I gave you, in fact), Ronald Reagan is a god (uh... yeah, you guys do know that he raised taxes twice after his first two years, because his "supply-side" tax cuts had produced massive annual deficits; in fact, by the time he left office, Reagan equaled the entire debt burden produced by the previous 200 years of American history, and started the deregulation cycle that led to Enron and this current mess).

However, I see no reason to try debating somebody when I have no guarantee that my responses will ever see the light of day. I don't bet on loaded dice, and I don't play when I know the game is rigged against me. When they don't like my response (the "silliness" that Bud-D decries) or don't have an answer, it just won't appear. I've seen that way too often, and it's a waste of my time to bother.

See, that's another pattern I find in right-wing blogs. They claim to be avid supporters of the Constitution, but more often than not, they either disallow comments or moderate them so heavily that nobody is heard who might possibly have a different viewpoint (or a firmer command of the facts). So that whole First Amendment thingy is completely ignored.

Of course, despite their big words, the average Right Winger isn't a big fan of any of the Amendments outside of the Second. The Fourth (unreasonable search and seizure, warrants) goes largely ignored with regards to either the Telecom issue or the prisoners in Guantanamo; in fact, the Fifth through Eighth fall by the wayside whenever "them Mooslim terrorists" get mentioned (particularly the Eighth, where they mention "cruel and unusual punishment"). And let's not even mention the Sixteenth (where they established income tax).

But their viewpoint on commenting is really just an aspect of their more authoritarian viewpoint of the world. They don't want to hear dissenting views. Remember "America: love it or leave it"? Or more recently, questioning your patriotism if you point out where the government is doing anything wrong? (Well, OK, that one only applied before Obama got elected...)

It's their nature: you don't have an answer? Go ad hominem right away. (You'll see multiple examples of that in both of my dealings with these Robinson kids.)

It's sad, but it's reality. (Oh, by the way, guys, two things. First, that motto? Docere et Vagire You do know that the closest translation is "to teach and to cry like a baby", right?)

(And the second thing: ToeJamm? Do yourself a favor and take a better picture. Seriously, dude. It looks like your buttplug is shorting out.)

Anyway. Tomorrow, more about health care.
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Update (8/17): Ooh, made a new friend! OK, in the near(ish) future, more about health care.

This Week's Lunatic Claim

The latest idiocy from the unhinged Right can actually be traced back to a single source: the somewhat ridiculous John Cornyn (R-What Else?). If there's an earlier source, feel free to correct me, but Cornyn seems to be winning the award as the Partisan Tool of the Week ®.

See, what happened is, the White House, rather than sitting meekly and allowing the GOP to continue to spread ridiculous rumors about the healthcare plan, decided to combat them. And in order to get as many of these rumors as quickly as possible, they released a request to the American people:

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

Simple, right? Kind of like the "Fight the Smears" website they set up during the campaign.

Well, you would think that John Cornyn would be relieved that, under Obama's proposed health plan, hydrocephally related to inbreeding would no longer be considered a "pre-existing condition." But sadly, he decided to start immediately lying about the intentions of the President.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) sent a letter to President Obama on Wednesday to express his concern about "a new White House program to monitor American citizens' speech opposing your health care policies"...

Cornyn wrote that he could think of no other incident of a president asking American citizens to report on their fellow citizens' political speech. He said that "citizen engagement must not be chilled by fear of government monitoring the exercise of free speech rights."

Furthermore, Cornyn wrote, the collection of e-mails could amount to the White House amassing various forms of personally identifiable information.

"By requesting that citizens send 'fishy' emails to the White House, it is inevitable that the names, email addresses, IP addresses, and private speech of U.S. citizens will be reported to the White House," he wrote. "You should not be surprised that these actions taken by your White House staff raise the specter of a data collection program."

Now, let me see if I've got this straight. In 2005, when Cornyn was told about Bush's domestic wiretapping program and he said it didn't matter, that was nothing to worry about. But when Obama fights back against liars and smear merchants, and Cornyn makes up crap about "he's gathering ISP's!", that's cause for alarm?

So real spying is OK, as long as it's done by a Republican? But imaginary spying is something to worry about, if it's imagined that it will be done by a Democrat?

How many "forward this to twelve friends" spams do you fall for?

"Ah," but our GOP friends try to claim, "there's a big difference between intercepting international communications to catch terrorists, and trying to compile an enemies list!" (Trust me, they claim this. I've talked to a lot of them this week.)

There are actually two parts to my reply here. First, Bush's wiretapping program was huge and unprecedented, and it was, in fact, the type of massive government conspiracy that the GOP is trying to promote here. Unlike the imaginary one that Cornyn are trying to claim. And no, Bush's program wasn't just intercepting overseas communications:

President Bush and his aides have confirmed that the NSA, beginning in late 2001, monitored electronic communications between the United States and overseas without warrants in cases in which one of the parties was believed to be affiliated with al-Qaeda. But administration officials have recently acknowledged that the NSA program was broader, and intelligence sources inside and outside the government have described a vast effort to collect and analyze telephone and e-mail communications that were later scrutinized by the government for desired information.

See? That's the kind of thing that people should have been upset about, if they'd been paying attention two years ago.

Now, just for giggles, let's try to consider this whole scenario logically. You are the President of the United States. You have the full weight of the United States government to call upon: the NSA, CIA, FBI, all of it. And the best way you can think of to compile an "enemies list" is to ask people to send anti-healthcare-reform emails to the White House? Not only are you going to openly place yourself right in the middle of a clandestine intelligence-gathering operation, but you're asking people to send you 600,000 copies of the same seven emails from FreedomWorks (Dick Armey's group) and "Americans for Prosperity" (which as been industry-funded from the beginning, and is currently chaired by billionaire David Koch). Both groups, incidentally, also orchestrated the "tea parties" earlier this year; if you don't know that you're being manipulated by the healthcare industry, maybe you should do your rearch.

(Oh, and let's not forget "Conservatives for Patients Rights," the ironically-named group organized by Richard Scott to fight against universal health care. Funny thing about that. The group claiming that government-run healthcare will ruin America is being run by the former frontman for HCA, which was fined $1.7 billion dollars for defrauding Medicare - which makes them an enduring symbol of everything that's wrong with American healthcare.)

I mean, right off the top of my head, I can come up with dozens of different ways to compile the dreaded "enemies list" (which, incidentally, is something Obama isn't doing - that's just a fevered fantasy from the stunted imagination of John Cornyn). For example, you have the voting records - why don't you just pull out all the Republicans?

Too many? Cross-check them with the tax records, and pull out all the rich Republicans.

Still too much of a random search for you? Fine. Conservatives for Patients Rights, Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks are all registered with the US government. That means you have access to their payroll information. And you have the NSA: hack into their computers, and get copies of their mailing lists. Hell, while you're at it, take over a few conservative websites like Free Republic and National Review, and get their membership and mailing lists, too.

Or you could just "mine" a bunch of conservative websites and backtrace the commenters.

Any of these ideas would be considerably more efficient than going through the same lying emails to try and tease out personal information one person at a time.

It's time for reality, folks. Or to take your medication and shuffle back to your padded cell. Your choice.

The Antichrist is Among Us! (And His Name is Possibly Rabbi Dan Ehrenkrantz)

OK, so in the course of researching the Deathers (yes, I do research, even when there's only one real point to the whole thing), I came across the next meme the unhinged Right is trying to push. Obama is the Antichrist!

(cue scary music)

Yes, they're still at it. And it looks like this.



(This is the updated version, by the way, which even tries to incorporate the second of the three "minor problems" below. But fails.)

But since I get into stupid, geeky language arguments like this, I started looking into it. Only to discover that somebody already went there. So, from Mark Chu-Carroll:

In general, I find arguments like this to be extremely silly. This is, basically, like playing with gematria - only instead of doing real gematria (which can be quite silly enough), it's like our friend "Gotcha" - mixing systems and screwing things up until you get the results you want.

Lots of the particularly crazy strain of Christians really, desperately want to believe that Barack Obama is the antichrist. They want an explanation for how this black man with a muslim name could possible have actually been elected - they don't believe it could possibly have happened honestly. And their doctrine requires the antichrist to come soon. Combine those two, and you've got what, for them, is a sort of perfect storm.

Which gives us things like this. For more mockery, see beneath the fold.

According to the video, if you take a phrase from the new testament that supposedly talks about the antichrist, and then you translate it to english, you'll get the phrase "lightning from above". If you then take the word lightning, and translate it to a third language, hebrew, you get "xarak". If you then take the word "above", and translate it, you get "bamah" or "bimah" (depending on conjugation). If you put those words together, hebrew requires a prefix on the "bamah" part, which our oh-so-brilliant video author claims would be "O-". So, according to this fundie nutcase, if you translate a line from the new testament into hebrew (using English as an intermediate), you'll get "Barak O-Bamah".

There are a few oh-so-minor problems with this.

1. The phrase in greek is actually "lightning from heaven". "Lightning from above" is a clear, blatant mistranslation. But hey, what's a minor mistranslation if it produces the results you want?

2. The correct conjugation in hebrew would use the prefix "U-" not "O-", and either prefix would cause the initial consonant to be shifted to the "V" form. So the phrase in hebrew wouldn't be "Barak Obamah" but "Barak Uvamah"

3. The name "Barack" in the case of the president of the US, is not the same as the Hebrew name "Barak". Our presidents name is arabic - the corresponding hebrew name isn't Barak, but "Baruch". The two words are quite different in Hebrew - Baruch means "Blessed"; "Barak" means lightning. They're different words, pronounced differently. (Barak ends with a hard-K sound; Baruch ends with an aspirate-H. The K and the CH are written with different characters - BRK versus BRC.)

So... If you mis-translate greek to english, and then translate the english to hebrew making a conjugation error, you get something which sounds (to an english speaker) kind-of like the name of the current president of the US. Therefore, he's the antichrist.

I'll just point out (in an attempt to work in something vaguely on-topic) that mathematically, this really isn't surprising at all. It's basically exactly the same as my usual critique of gematria-type stuff. There are a finite number of phonemes in human languages. Almost any combination of phonemes that you can imagine is a word in some language. If you're willing to search a bit, and be flexible in your translations, you can find almost any kind of pattern or correspondence that you want.

Looking at this, it looks unlikely. The number of phonemes is fixed, but it's big enough that the number of combinations is pretty staggering. For instance, english has somewhere around 40 distinct phonemes. It's a whole lot. Even if you're willing to cheat, what are the odds that even a mistranslation of a passage would produce a result like this?

And for that, we go back to the bible codes. You're not working forwards, looking for what's there. You've got a result that you want, and you're working backwards from it. You've got a name, like "Barak Obama", and you want to make an argument that he's the antichrist. So you try to find some way that you could translate something close to those phonemes into something from the texts that purport to speak about the antichrist. It would be surprising if you couldn't. There's no shortage of passages in the bible, and for many of the fundies, they see a huge number of them as being, in some way, about the antichrist.

Let me show you an example. I'm going to "prove" that I am the antichrist.

Let's start with my first name, "Mark". The name "Mark" has several possible histories to it. One connects it to the god Mars; another one to the babylonian god "Marduk". Some christian sects associate Marduk with the devil, because among other things, he was the god of magic.

Now, let's look at with my pre-marriage last name. One way of transliterating it into hebrew gives us the word for "melody".

"Chu" has no direct translation to hebrew, because hebrew has no "Ch" sound. But the closest thing I can come up with is a hebrew prefix which translates as "the".

So my name could be (stretching, but stretching no more than this Barak Obama" thing) translated as "The melody of the devil".

So, the things that I'm saying to you are the melody of the devil. Sure sounds like I'm the antichrist, doesn't it?

Damn it. Now I have to find something else to blog on.

So, How Was Your Weekend?

So, last night my wife decided to cut her finger off. You know how some people get an idea into their heads and you can’t convince them otherwise? (Women - what are you going to do?)

Technically, she wasn’t really trying to cut off her finger: she was trying to chop up some vegetables. And it wasn’t the whole finger, just a little skin (and the barest edge of the nail) from the tip. Nice clean slice – she’s always been good at things like that.

It’s probably best that she was cutting snow peas at the time. Onions might have stung a little. (They were supposed to be vegetarian wontons. I guess she figured they'd be better with put a little meat in them.)

She was using a brand new knife: it was, in fact, one of those chef’s knives that Albertson’s gives away for free if you give them a whole wad of stamps. So, if they need a testimonial, I’m available – those suckers are sharp. Good steel.

Not a huge, horrible wound or anything, but we couldn’t convince the bleeding to stop. So it was off to the Emergency Room. With Annette, of course, complaining that I was speeding. ("See the red spray on the windshield, officer? I was kind of hoping we could get that stopped sometime soon...") I'm not sure I entirely understand the logic there: "OK, I may just bleed to death on the way, but make sure you obey the speed limit." What the hell? Wouldn't that be kind of embarrassing if there's an afterlife?

"So, how'd you die?"
"I cut my finger and bled to death, because I wouldn't let my husband... oh, never mind..."

The ER wasn’t jam-packed or anything, so we were in and out relatively quickly, and I took Annette home and tucked her in for some nice technicolor Vicodin dreams. And now she has this huge honking bandage on her index finger covered in bright pink tape. Sadly, it doesn't bend well, so when she tries to flip me off (usually for making remarks like those above), it turns into one of those British reverse-V things. (If it had been on her thumb, it would have made hitchhiking a breeze.)

So, do I trust my wife with sharp objects from now on? Well, to be honest, I’m not sure I did before, so overall, nothing has really changed.

Anyway, that was my weekend.

Sinking Deeper Into Madness

You know, I said a few weeks ago that the GOP has been tying up sacrifices on the Altar of Insanity, and Michele Bachmann is their drooling, gibbering High Priestess. And things are only getting worse.

And a week or so ago, I spent some time poking the Birthers with sticks. A hobby which has its own pleasures, but, like the old stereotype of Chinese food, leaves you hungry again an hour later, because they're such easy targets, riddled with easy-to-debunk delusions. But now we have a new level of wild-eyed lunacy running naked through the ranks of the unhinged right-wing, giggling madly and making the GOP look even less relevant than it already does.

In the larger sense, the Republican Party, before they were taken over by theocrats, closet fascisti and the clinically insane, had some good ideas. They were the yang to the Democratic yin, balancing the good and wholesome with the cold and clinical; and really, we need both as a society. But as Bill Maher said recently, "We don't have a Left and a Right party in this country anymore. We have a center-Right party and a crazy party. And over the last thirty-odd years, Democrats have moved to the Right, and the Right has moved into a mental hospital."

Now, in support of the "lunatic fringe" argument, we find, for example, that right-wing activists opposing health care or clean energy reform are being told to to be disruptive ("Artificially Inflate Your Numbers... Be Disruptive Early And Often... Try To 'Rattle Him,' Not Have An Intelligent Debate"), because they already know that if they start debating, they've lost, whether on logical or emotional grounds.

But there's also an entirely new movement rearing its beady-eyed head. They're called "Deathers," and they have a simple claim:

The United States government is planning to kill off old people!

Now, this is a claim that isn't just ignorant, it's completely batshit insane. There are no words that can really express the depths of the idiocy that it would take to believe this nonsense. Except that there are some people out there who do. I've talked with them, both on line and face-to-face. I've reached the conclusion that there are really only two types of people who could believe this drivel: the mind-numbingly gullible, and the cold-bloodedly partisan.

And this sad fallacy of a meme is being driven even by members of the government. For example, Virginia Foxx (R-NC):



Now, at first, I thought that it might just be possible that she was as thoroughly gullible as she sounded. After all, the woman isn't young, and her impending mortality probably weighs on her mind late at night, as she lies there sleepless, imagining the unwashed hordes of homeless creeping up around her. But since her august record in the Senate involves calling the Matthew Shepard case a "hoax" (see, it was OK to beat up on him - he was gay!) and voting to let the victims of the Katrina hurricane die in the streets (they're just coloreds!), I think we can safely put her in the "partisan" category.

(I suppose it's possible that she could be both amazingly partisan and ignorant enough to believe this - after all, she is kind of old...)

The "fact" that they base this bizarre and ignorant claim on is the fact that, buried deep in the healthcare plan, there's a clause that would allow seniors to receive "end-of-life counseling." This is a reasonable, useful thing for someone like, say, Virginia Foxx, who's facing the encroaching loss of her faculties and needs a little help once in a while; this is something that Medicare isn't currently willing to pay for. In the words of the bill,

such consultation shall include the following: An explanation by the practitioner of advance care planning, including key questions and considerations, important steps, and suggested people to talk to; an explanation by the practitioner of advance directives, including living wills and durable powers of attorney, and their uses; an explanation by the practitioner of the role and responsibilities of a health care proxy.

You can read the actual bill here, or an explanation of these specific sections here.

But that simple clause is being taken out of context... no, I'm sorry, "taken out of context" doesn't reflect the actual intentions of the people involved. The deathers are openly lying about that clause, because it causes them physical pain to know that a black man is president (and, by extension, obviously better than they are).

They claim that the counseling would be mandatory... actually, let's just let World Net Daily explain it:

as people age or get sicker, it includes mandatory "consultations" offering suggestions on how to end life sooner... Those 65 and older will be required to undergo mandatory 'end of life' counseling to determine if they are worthy to continue to not only live, but take much needed resources from those who are younger and more worthy to receive them. Counselors will be trained to discuss how to end life sooner, how to decline nutrition and hydration, how to go into hospice, etc.

Of course, if you believe anything put out by World Net Daily, forced sterilization might be a useful option for you, because you're already too stupid to be allowed to breed. Just going to the site briefly, I feel like I've lost two points of IQ.

(Oh, yeah. By the way, are you morons aware that assisted suicide is illegal in 48 states? So you think that doctors are going to be pushing that on patients why, exactly?)

Let's consider one simple question: Does it make sense for the government to be killing off taxpayers?

"Ah," but the deathers answer, "these aren't taxpayers at all! These are people who are taking more money out of the system than they're putting in!"

Absolutely. Except for the cancer victims and the like, who also qualify for the counseling. Because you probably aren't aware of this, but a lot of cancer victims survive, and work, and pay taxes. Amazing, isn't it?

But let's look at this from a different standpoint. The US, far and away, spends more per person on healthcare than any other country in the world. But the US ranks 27th in life expectancy. The next nearest, Switzerland, pays only 70% what we do, and rank 4th; Cuba has the same life expectancy as the United States, and essentially pays nothing, comparatively. The longest life expectancy can be found in Japan, where they pay less than half what America pays.

It seems obvious that things could be done more efficiently. But it takes a special kind of inbred idiot to believe that killing off the elderly is the best plan that the government could come up with. (Admittedly, if G.W. Bush had fallen victim to that insidious pretzel attack, it would have been quite in keeping for the Cheney administration.)

I mean, come on! A few years ago, this kind of garbage would be something you'd expect to hear from some guy on a street corner, smelling like pee and holding up a hand-lettered cardboard sign. Now you find it on Fox News. (Which, technically, isn't much different from the previous scenario - they just have computer graphics instead of cardboard signs.)

You have to ask sometimes: do they really believe this garbage they spew? I'd like to think that they can't, but I don't have any evidence to support this theory. What do they think is Phase II of this nefarious plan? Soylent Green? (Well, at least then we wouldn't have to worry about the co-pay, right?)

I mean, I can see some benefits to what they're claiming is going on. After all, you get somebody who's just been told "Well, guess what, Mr Bernstein? It seems that you're going to live for quite a while. Now, you won't ever get that arm to work again, and there will probably be just a little bit of excruciating pain when you try to do something radical like, say, stand up or something. Oh, and you're going to need a machine to poop. And you do have a choice here - you can either have this bag of urine strapped to your leg, or you can occasionally lose control of your bladder and wet yourself. Either way, incidentally, you're going to spend a lot of time smelling like pee. And did I mention the excruciating pain? Actually, that won't be restricted to standing up. But the good news is, you're alive, right?"

Did anybody else ever see Who's Life Is It Anyway? I'm just curious.

But that isn't what's happening here. And there are some feeble intellects who might actually believe it, but I hold this hope, deep in my heart, that the majority of the people trying to claim this ignorant nonsense are simply evil, black-hearted villains who don't care who they frighten, as long as their political objectives are met.

Because otherwise, in the words of Glenn Beck, "I fear for my country."

Why Do Republicans Hate Americans?

There is a reason that healthcare reform in America is stalled, and it's spelled GOP. The Republicans are killing Americans because they don't want healthcare reform. And the Democrats are letting it happen.

Kent Conrad (D-NJ) even went on ABC's This Week to say that, despite having a 60-vote majority, Democrats couldn't pass this bill alone; he didn't explain how he came to this stunningly ridiculous conclusion.

But that only shows the blindness of some Democrats. Because the Republicans have already admitted that they want to defeat healthcare, not because they think it would be bad for the country, but because they want to defeat Obama. They openly do not care about the welfare of the American people; the GOP feels that they need to defeat a popular president because they disagree with his ideology.

That is the definition of a partisan hack.

And the Republican efforts are the reason that the current healthcare bill is going to fail. In an effort to be "bipartisan," and to make compromises to ensure that doctors wouldn't face a "pay cut," the House bill includes essentially a $245 billion chunk of payola to the healthcare industry. Well, guess what? If one of the reasons that we need to revamp the healthcare is because medical costs are out of control, then we have to cut medical costs.

Sorry, doc.

While we're at it, why is anybody worried about the insurance companies in all this? As a former executive in CIGNA testified before Congress last week, they've been defrauding us all along.

At a committee hearing yesterday, three health-care specialists testified that insurers go to great lengths to avoid responsibility for sick people, use deliberately incomprehensible documents to mislead consumers about their benefits, and sell "junk" policies that do not cover needed care. Rockefeller said he was exploring "why consumers get such a raw deal from their insurance companies."

The star witness at the hearing was a former public relations executive for major health insurers whose testimony boiled down to this: Don't trust the insurers.

"The industry and its backers are using fear tactics, as they did in 1994, to tar a transparent and accountable -- publicly accountable -- health-care option," said Wendell Potter, who until early last year was vice president for corporate communications at the big insurer Cigna.

Potter said he worries "that the industry's charm offensive, which is the most visible part of duplicitous and well-financed PR and lobbying campaigns, may well shape reform in a way that benefits Wall Street far more than average Americans."

Insurers make paperwork confusing because "they realize that people will just simply give up and not pursue it" if they think they have been shortchanged, Potter said.

In other words, the insurance companies use tactics that are illegal in any other industry: they bait-and-switch, they lie, they steal. And they're struggling with every ounce of energy they have to ensure that they can keep right on doing it.

Mitch McConnell (R-KY) likes to say (and a lot of brainless idiots like to repeat) that Americans don't want their healthcare "denied, delayed or rationed." But under the current system, it already is.

The latest Gallup poll shows that 16% of Americans have no health insurance at all (that's up from 14.8% only 18 months ago). With a current population estimate of 307,212,123, that's 49 million people uninsured. Now, you can add to that the underinsured. As of 2007 (and you can do the math yourself to figure out how much these numbers have increased since then), there were 25 million underinsured adults in the United States.

Much of this growth comes from the ranks of the middle class. While low-income people remain vulnerable, middle-income families have been hit hardest. For adults with incomes above 200 percent of the federal poverty level (about $40,000 per year for a family), the underinsured rates nearly tripled since 2003...

Respondents were identified as underinsured if they spent 10 percent of more of their income (or 5 percent if they were low-income) on out-of-pocket medical expenses, or if they had deductibles that equaled 5 percent or more of their income. An estimated 14 percent of all nonelderly adults were underinsured in 2007, and more than one of four were uninsured for all or part of the year. Adding these two groups together, 75 million adults—42 percent of the under-65 population—had either no insurance or inadequate insurance in 2007, up from 35 percent in 2003.

Lack of adequate insurance coverage, the study finds, is not a problem limited to low-income people. Adults with incomes below the poverty level were at the highest risk of being uninsured or underinsured, but "insurance erosion has spread up the income distribution well in to the middle-income range," the authors say. For those with annual incomes of $40,000 to $59,000, the underinsured percentage rate reached double digits in 2007. Barely half of those with incomes of 200 percent to 299 percent of the poverty level were insured all year with adequate coverage.

Sorry, Mitch, but that means that we have at least 74 million Americans whose healthcare is denied, delayed and rationed.

1 in 5 Americans have delayed or postponed medical care, usually because they couldn't afford it. And 60% of US bankruptcies are due to medical bills which have spiraled out of control.

More than 75 percent of these bankrupt families had health insurance but still were overwhelmed by their medical debts...

"Using a conservative definition, 62.1 percent of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical; 92 percent of these medical debtors had medical debts over $5,000, or 10 percent of pretax family income," the researchers wrote. "Most medical debtors were well-educated, owned homes and had middle-class occupations."

And rising healthcare costs are also costing us jobs. A study by the nonprofit Rand Corporation gave us the bad news there:

Economy-wide, a 10% increase in excess health care costs growth would result in about 120,800 fewer jobs, $28 billion in lost revenues, and $14 billion in lost GDP value.

Our Republican friends like to claim that all Americans already have access to health care: "After all, you just go to an emergency room." (GW Bush, 2007)

But that argument is a non-starter, too.

In every minute of every day, on average, an ambulance carrying a patient is turned away from a hospital because its emergency room is too full to take more patients...

Many emergency rooms barely can handle their daily patient loads, children don't always get good care and the quality of rescue services is erratic, the report says. Long waits for treatment are widespread, with ambulances sometimes waiting for hours to unload patients. Once in the emergency room, patients sometimes wait for up to two days before being admitted to a hospital bed....

The study cited three contributing problems to the rise in emergency room visits: the aging of the baby boomers, the growing number of uninsured and underinsured patients, and the lack of access to primary care physicians.

The report found that 114 million people, including 30 million children, visited emergency rooms in 2003, compared with 90 million visits a decade ago. In that same period, the number of U.S. hospitals decreased by 703, the number of emergency rooms decreased by 425, and the total number of hospital beds dropped by 198,000, mainly because of the trend toward cheaper outpatient care, according to the report.

So, ignoring all of the hot air being blown around by partisan hacks who get most of their campaign money from the healthcare industry, America can't afford not to have healthcare reform.

The good news is, another partisan hack (Governor Rick "Goodhair" Perry of the "great" state of Texas) recently said that he'd turn down universal healthcare for his state. And that, by itself, may just allow the program to work. Texas has the highest number of uninsured citizens, and ties with Iowa for having the eleventh fattest state (which might just explain why it ranks 16th for the most deaths caused by stroke). If we can get Texas out of the equation, healthcare may just pay for itself.

John Adams Is An Idiot

En route to a hard look at the healthcare issue, let's take a side trip to Crazytown, which is apparently a small whistlestop in Ohio.

It seems that an inappropriately-named state legislator from Ohio, John Adams (R-Imagine That) has reintroduced legislation (which was originally shot down in 2007), requiring a woman to get the permission of the biological father before she could get an abortion.

(After all, them wimminfolk can't make decisions like this on their own, can they? They need to get permission from their man, the way God intended!)

Wow, coming from the party that claims to want smaller government, what kind of nonsense is this? This is practically unenforceable, unless you hire on a whole new branch of law enforcement. Who's going to be paying for the DNA tests to prove that the woman isn't "providing a false biological father"? (That's the first offense - a misdemeanor.) Are we allowed to take her at her word? "Innocent until proven guilty" and all that?

(This whole argument does lead to the fascinating mental image of some kind of Uterine Police bursting into the room with guns at the ready - "Halt! Put down that speculum!" But that's a ridiculous side issue, and I shouldn't even have brought it up.)

We already have states with "deadbeat dad" laws, who are supposed to track down fathers behind on their child support. And these states can't keep up with the dads, because they aren't funded to do so. Again, how are these new laws supposed to be enforced?

Supporters of this bill like to claim that it won't cost the state any money - this provides guidelines that the clinic has to follow. Which is a ridiculous and unfounded claim. At the very least, you can't have a law passed in the first place without it costing time and money on the legislative side (plus the cost of judicial review). You can't enforce a law without it draining money from the police and the courts. And when this law is inevitably struck down, all of that money is wasted.

And if the woman goes to the next state over and gets an abortion there, what crime has she committed? Will Mr Adams be coming up with something fascinating for that, as well? Will he be tagging pregnant women with GPS monitors next?

Let's look at the words of Mr Adams, the bill's sponsor.

"...this is also an attempt and a hope to keep the two people who have created that child together, and I suppose if you just go back to the simple beginning, there is merit to chastity, and to young men and women waiting until marriage."

Which is, of course, complete nonsense. In the end, the bill has nothing to do with "permission," or "father's rights," or even changing the morality of a society (which isn't something you can legislate anyway). This is all about restricting the access to abortion. Period.

I notice there's no requirement for the father to stick around, pay child support, or to do anything other than give his permission.

Why isn't there some penalty for the father? Why is this punishing only the mother? Dad, following the rules of this legislation, can just walk away. What if the bio-dad fights with the mom and leaves? Mom thought they were getting married. She's now forced to have the baby as a single mom, and become one of Reagan's "welfare queens"? If Dad just refuses to sign a "permission slip" for whatever reason, why is he not then legally required to provide financial support for his incipient offspring?

This doesn't "promote" any kind of behavior in the father, just penalizes the woman. It's ignorant legislation, not well thought out, and would be struck down the first time it was challenged. Meaning it's just money down the drain, in the middle of a recession.

And why, you may ask, will this law be "inevitably" struck down? I mean, I've said that twice; what do I base that on?

It's very simple. Lincoln first signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 (there was a second one in 1863, but hardly worth arguing about). And within a year of his death in 1865, we had the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery.

When you try to claim that one person has any control over the body, life and health of another person, that is slavery, regardless of whether the first person is married to the second. And slavery is, as I just pointed out, unconstitutional. (I'm sorry, but marriage doesn't give him any claim on her internal organs.)

It's a cute idea, and a nice try in getting around abortion rights, but it doesn't hold up to any reasonable standard of judicial logic.

In the end, why should the father have rights? At what point is he going to go through 9 months of pain and discomfort, permanently change his body, and run the risk of dying or ending up with permanent health issues in the process?

(I'll assume that that most people are aware that the US has the worst rate of maternal mortality in the industrialized world, right? And the second highest newborn death rate. Of course, all those other countries have the advantage of universal healthcare. But very few of those people in favor of this bill would support that idea, either...)

(Of course, if you think about it, how can you denounce health care reform by claiming that government shouldn't come between people and their doctors, but have no problem placing government between women and their bodies? Do you see the dichotomy there?)

Mr Adams is concerned with legislating his brand of morality - sticking his nose (and the nose of the government) into other people's private lives. He wants to get the government involved in the sex lives of the American people. Am I the only one who’s reminded of Gladys Kravitz here? John Adams is worrying entirely too much about other people's behavior.

Quick Rerun

Update: I forgot that blogspot prints posts in the order that they were started to be written. So the "new post" I mention below can be seen immediately following this one.

This post originally ran July 14, 2007. I thought I'd throw it back out there, as a humanitarian effort. I'll cough up a new post tomorrow - it's already in the works. (Technically, I just needed the recipe, but since I looked it up, enjoy.)

Health Food For Everyone

I'm going to see if I can't make the world a better place in one simple blog post. Since it's July, this is a particularly far-reaching and important piece of news, and will increase happiness in much of this hemisphere.

First, let me point out that a study published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture tells us that researchers in Thailand and America discovered that the antioxidant properties of strawberries are increased by the application of a little alcohol. (This is true of blackberries and other colored fruit, if you're curious.)

Now, some naysayers would like to point out that too much alcohol damages the liver. Screw them. They always want to rain on our parade. So we'll ignore them, in that responsible manner of the Bush administration, which bravely ignores any scientific evidence it doesn't agree with.

Straight strawberries have other beneficial effects - vitamins, minerals, fiber. You know, stuff that nobody wants to know about, but, like traffic laws, we need to have to stay happy and out of trouble.

Then we have the benefits of honey. It's good stuff. Plus, if you get honey harvested locally, it can have beneficial effects on your allergies, as well.

So, here's how I'm going to improve your life.

Strawberry Daiquiri Smoothie

1 pint (16 oz) frozen strawberries
1/4 cup local honey
1/2 cup water
Juice of 1 lemon (around 1/4 cup)
¾ cup rum (spiced is good, by the way)

Put sugar in blender first, to grind for a second or two. Pour in water rum, and lemon juice. Blend until to mixed (a few seconds). Start adding frozen strawberries, a few at a time. At the end, you'll probably need to stop the blender and stir with a spoon, pushing down any floaters. Serve.

Makes 2 good-sized daiquiris (3 if you skimp a little).

If you want don't really care about the health bonus from honey, you can go ahead and use 1/4 cup of "superfine sugar." Just put regular sugar in a dry blender first, and run it for a few seconds. If you actually pay extra money for "superfine" sugar, I'll have to come to your house and break your kneecaps. I'm sorry, but that's just the way life is.

(Some people would tell you to increase the sugar by 1/4 when substituting for honey. Well, to tell the truth, that kind of measurement is too much for me. I'm lazy. And I recommend that you avoid trying that much math when you're cooking, too. Or drinking. Same problem. It'll cause brain rot.)

Now, I'm willing to go for something that'll make your life easier and cheaper almost every time. But I'm not willing to substitute the "juice of one lemon" part for an equal amount of any brand of "reconstituted lemon juice." Because if you look on the label, every one of them that I've found uses either potassium benzoate or sodium benzoate to preserve the stuff. So avoid it.

There. See? One simple blog post, and you're healthier, more regular, and more relaxed. So what could be better than that, right?

Communication Update

So, let's check in and see how things are running in my little corner of the universe at the moment.

First of all, the boys over at Kook's Manifesto won't be publishing my infinitely reasonable climate change discussion, because Andrew33's tender, sensitive feelings are hurt. Or something like that.

See, I ended up on their blog, mostly because I was invited here. So I did. We chatted - it was friendly and congenial, but we didn't talk about global warming, which is what got us talking in the first place.

So two weeks ago, I coughed up a post to sum up our previous talk on the subject. Which was apparently where things started to go wrong.

Andrew33 wandered into the room and said:

I have an offer for you. To be fair, you come up with a concise pro global warming post and I will post it on our blog. I am a believer in giving both sides of the story... You have debated us well and not resorted to name calling and insults so hopefully this shows that we are fair and treat everybody decently as long as they act like adults

Of course, then you scroll down six responses and you find him saying to Diogenes:

I could call you a typical liberal who thinks fancy language makes you look smart... Difference between you and NC is I respect NC... why are you doing the talking? I will no longer acknowledge your existence as between your ears lies a supermassive black hole... You however are not welcome on our blog since you obviously only think with the part of your body glued to the chair.

And then his pal KOOK chimed in with

I find it interesting that Diogenes Syndrome is a disease related to being slovenly...its symptoms include body odor and other signs of severe hygienic neglect ( a decent description of a liberal hippy type) Frontal Lobe impairment may also play a part in causation.

Diogenes is also the name, I believe, of the evil brother in the Pendergast novels, and a villain in Sherlock holmes.

Good name choice

And it got worse. They decided that either Diogenes and I were the same person, or were gay lovers; Andy took his own posts, insults and all, and posted them on his blog; and things just went generally downhill.

Interesting that KOOK didn't bother pointing out that the most famous Diogenes ("Diogenes the Cynic") was legendarily looking for an honest man. Didn't seem to find one here.

So I came back for the first time in three days, and find this nonsense going on. I got a little cranky, yelled at the children here and on their end, went about my business.

Now, Andy admittedly made something resembling an effort: he deleted all the posts on his end, and said that if certain "corrections" were made, we'd still be debating.

That's the difference between Andy and me. I support free speech, and believe everybody's views should stand on their own merit. And unlike Dick Cheney, I believe that the "public record" should stay out there in the public. I think I've stated this often enough: I stand behind everything I say. I'll admit if I get something wrong, but you get to see the discussion, warts and all.

So I didn't make any "corrections." I put together a second global warming post meeting his specifications, and I stood back to see what would happen.

Which would be "squat."

(This even confused some of his readers.)

So, I've moved on. I had some time in the evenings this week, and I've been picking on "birthers" (the people who are still up in arms that Obama's birth certificate is faked, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Admittedly, this is low-hanging fruit: while poking birthers with a stick is easy, it's ultimately unsatisfying. But, hey, it's been a long month.)

See, what happened was this:

Taitz asked the court to consider granting her client’s request based on (Maj Stefan) Cook’s belief that Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States and is therefore ineligible to serve as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Armed Forces.

Cook further states he "would be acting in violation of international law by engaging in military actions outside the United States under this President’s command. ... simultaneously subjecting himself to possible prosecution as a war criminal by the faithful execution of these duties."

Now, his orders were, in fact, revoked, but it had nothing to do with the lawsuit. But that didn't stop the birthers from shouting gleefully "See? Even the Army knows Obama isn't a real US citizen!"

Cook, it turns out, was a Freeper and a conspiracy theorist who just might have cooked this scheme up with Taitz months ago.

(If nothing else, consider that Cook applied for orders to Afghanistan back in May. Obama was already in office. The "facts" hadn't changed in the intervening period; why is Cook trying to claim this abrupt "crisis of conscience" now? If he was truly worried that Obama's citizenship was such a terrible threat to the safety of soldiers everywhere, Cook shouldn't have volunteered in the first place.)

The problem was, Cook is no ordinary Reservist: he's an Individual Mobilization Augmentee (IMA). An IMA is not ordered to go anywhere. He volunteers to go, and is allowed to change his mind about going up until he gets on the plane.

As such, he registered this (somewhat ridiculous) complaint, and the Army rescinded his orders. That's how the system works.

Now, since he no longer has to go to Afghanistan, and his suit is based around the argument that he shouldn't go to Afghanistan... well, the point is moot. The courts don't keep arguing once the basic charges have been settled, one way or another.

And now he's facing a court martial - check out Articles 88 and 94 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (or UCMJ, to those of us who lived under it).

Article 94 MUTINY OR SEDITION
"Any person subject to this chapter who... with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of lawful civil authority, creates, in concert with any other person, revolt, violence, or disturbance against that authority is guilty of sedition..."

("revolt," incidentally, does not always involve rocks and pitchforks, and "disturbance" covers a lot of ground)

More importantly, though:

Article 88 CONTEMPT TOWARD OFFICIALS
Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Transportation, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.

Thanks to Cook's IMA status, he's safe from some of the more esoteric charges such as Absent Without Leave (AWOL - Art 86) or Missing A Movement (Art 87). But he's still in for an interesting time.

(And by the way, here's how the Military Officer's Association sees it, if you're interested.)

I got the usual range of responses: some people wouldn't let it be heard (one guy even deleted it after initially posting it); a lot of people ignored me.

Two people let in the original comment, indulged in some character defamation, and then refused to print any follow-up comments. (I really love that last link - one of the first arguments of the unhinged right wing is to try and claim that I'm lying about 21 years of military service. It doesn't fit their limited world-view, and they refuse to accept it.)

There was one guy who generously allowed me to post, but said "This is the last unsigned response I will publish. I agree that everyone should be heard but, not if they remain annom." First of all, I have never been annom in my life and I am deeply offended that he would suggest such a thing. And secondly, a LiveJournal account? Really? That's so... 90's...

And two of them actually tried to debate the point. Not that it really got them anywhere.

But that's been my week. And now I have to spend the next week prepping for bringing our new electronic medical records on-line at the next facility. Yay.

(You really wouldn't think doctors would be Luddites, would you? And even the ones who can use a computer tend to fear change. It's sad.)

Global Warming 101

I've been asked to provide a simple, easy-to-follow look at global warming. There's a lot of misunderstanding of the subject out there, so let's take a basic look at the Big Picture.

The concept of climate change was first developed in the early 1800s. The idea of greenhouse gases was developed in the 1800s, and the term was coined by the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, who figured out in the 1890's that the increasing amount of CO2 in the air would warm the environment (in fact, he thought it would prevent the next ice age).

The greenhouse effect, in nature, is actually a good thing: it's the main reason that the Earth is significantly warmer than the Moon's surface (which doesn't have an atmosphere). The way it works is simple: sunlight is absorbed by the Earth, and instead of simply reflecting back into space, it's trapped by gases in the atmosphere that act as insulation. These gases, both natural and manmade, absorb and reflect parts of the infrared radiation: water vapor, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane and ozone are the primary greenhouse gases, along with entirely man-made gases such as hydrofluorocarbons and perfluorocarbons.

Left to itself, Nature is a careful balancing act. Whether you feel that it was made that way by God, or whether you want to take a more scientific approach, that is an indisputable fact. The earth could not have lasted either the billions of years that the scientists tell us, or the 6,000 years that the creationists want to promote, if this engine was out of balance. Let's use the metaphor of two machines and carbon dioxide (and we'll call it CO2, if only because it saves me typing ten letters every time - yes, I'm that lazy).

One machine puts out CO2, the other (which we'll call the "scrubber") absorbs it and cleans it up. The CO2 scrubber can absorb gases at only a certain speed, and can be overwhelmed by the amount produced by the other machine (that's because, to drop the metaphor for a second, plants can absorb CO2, but only at a fairly specific rate).

The system is set up for the CO2 machine to produce its gasses at a certain rate, which the scrubber can handle. This leaves a "safe," trace amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and everybody's happy. But if the machine starts producing too much, you get a larger amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and the insulating quality I described above starts to happen faster.

Now, the first machine is made up of people and animals breathing, fires, all the natural processes that go into the production of CO2. Now, suddenly, we introduce a second CO2 machine into the equation, pumping out even more CO2 (we even have a make and model for this second machine - the Industrial Corporation's "Revolution"). The scrubber can't keep up, and you have more and more CO2 in the air.
On top of this, remember that the scrubber is made up of the combined actions of all the plants in the world. And then consider this thing we call "deforestation," where more and more of the world's trees are being destroyed without anything new being planted. That's like somebody walking into the room every so often and dialing the scrubber to a lower setting, without turning down either of our machines.

This is obviously a very simplistic metaphor, but it gives a very basic overview of why the natural system isn't working the way it should, and why the gradual increase in CO2 that's been noted should be a cause for alarm.

Unfortunately, while the industries who've tied themselves to fossil fuels have waged a campaign to spread lies about climate change and global warming, these same industries openly ignored their own scientists. Back in the early 90's, the Global Climate Coalition represented these industries.

“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

The coalition was financed by fees from large corporations and trade groups representing the oil, coal and auto industries, among others. In 1997, the year an international climate agreement that came to be known as the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated, its budget totaled $1.68 million, according to tax records obtained by environmental groups.

So we can ignore most of what the industries are telling us, since they're only worried about how much money they can make. (This is yet another reason why allowing the "Free Market" to operate unchecked may not be the best way to run a country, incidentally.) Meanwhile, in the real world, the news is only getting worse.

Arctic sea ice thinned dramatically between the winters of 2004 and 2008, with thick older ice shrinking by the equivalent of Alaska's land area, a study using data from a NASA satellite showed.

Using information from NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Satellite (ICESat), scientists from the US space agency and the University of Washington in Seattle estimated both the thickness and volume of the Arctic Ocean's ice cover.

ICESat allows scientists to measure changes in the thickness and volume of Arctic ice, whereas previously scientists relied only on measurements of area to determine how much of the Arctic Ocean is covered in ice.

Scientists found that Arctic sea ice thinned some seven inches (17.8 centimeters) a year, or 2.2 feet (67 centimeters) over four winters, according to the study by NASA and the University of Washington, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans.

The big picture, by the way, is called "climate change" - the term "global warming" only refers to one specific aspect of climate change. An important, and even potentially disastrous aspect, but one that can still be corrected.

I don't care what you think about ice and snow on the roads, global warming is a bad thing

Today, let's talk about global warming. Also known as "global climate change."

See, on another blog out there, I said some mean things about Michele Bachmann, and somehow ended up in a debate about global warming. That's how things work on these here Intarnets - it's a series of tubes, and they don't always go where you expect.

(Now, part of the message of the post involved the Left Coast Rebel saying that liberals were close-minded and not willing to listen to other people's viewpoints. And ten minutes after I posted my viewpoint, that same rebel asked his readers if he should delete it. Ultimately, it stayed, but I like the inherent irony in him even asking the question.)

Now, much of that debate was reprinted here in three parts. And, since Andy has already posted replies to last week's rant, let's see if we can lure him here, since he seems to be particularly interested in climate change. (To level the playing field a little, I'll start here primarily with arguments he's already seen.)

Now, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a group put together back in 1988 by the UN to monitor studies about climate change and determine the facts of the matter. Despite White House opposition, the IPCC noted an increase of about a degree and a half in average surface temperature in the latter part of the 20th century. They determined that greenhouse gases and deforestation were the primary causes, and nature (solar variation and volcanoes) had produced most of the warming up through about 1950, but had actually cooled things somewhat since then.

The summary of that study is here, if you're curious. Most of the major scientific organizations internationally have endorsed that study, by the way, and the IPCC shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore on the subject.

You're heading out into Conspiracy Theory territory if you believe that a giant international cabal of scientists is counterfeiting their evidence for some nefarious purpose. Nor do I think that it's likely that all the governments in the world worked together to alter the findings of those same scientists, without any of those scientists saying anything. (On top of which, wouldn't the Bush White House have had some input in suppressing the results, if that was the case?)

(And, admittedly, there was one scientist who left the group, back in 2005, named Christopher Landsea. However, he was specifically miffed about another scientist saying that strong hurricane activity was due to global warming, when he had performed no studies in that area.)

There are several climate model projections in the IPCC report, which suggest that global surface temperatures will rise another 2 to 12 degrees F. up through 2100, depending on who you believe (and it will probably continue to rise beyond that, since the 75% of the earth covered in water is a great heatsink).

But even that 2 degrees will cause significant melting in the polar regions, and even a few inches of increase in the world's oceans will be a bad thing.

Now, I understand that there are arguments against this concept. A number of scientists (mostly funded by Exxon-Mobil, oddly enough) have come out saying that this theory is implausible. Sadly, the logic holds up, and the facts remain facts.

(On the subject of Exxon-Mobil, they did manage to get one leading scientist ousted as chairman. Not that they were trying to alter the results of the report or anything...)

Over the last 150 years, carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations have risen from 280 to nearly 380 parts per million (ppm). You know, since the start of the industrial revolution. Why would that be?

And looking at that CO2, let's consider the nature of the chemical.

There are 3 major carbon isotopes, numbered 12 to 14. Carbon-12 is the most common, and carbon-14, the radioactive one, is the least common. They're usually spread pretty evenly, but, being radioactive, carbon-14 has a relatively short half-life, so that you can measure how old something is by how much of the trapped carbon in a specimen is carbon-14 - the less -14 there is, the older it is.

Here's the thing: since the various carbon isotopes are spread evenly through nature, you'd expect that they'd be spread evenly in the atmosphere. Now, since the carbon in the air shows a lot less carbon-14, doesn't that mean that most of it came from older sources? Like, for example, fossil fuels?

Incidentally, before anybody brings up "well, there are questions about the accuracy of carbon-14 dating! -- you know, I've tried to look into that, and the only place I've found those questions are in Christian (primarily creationist) websites. If you want to make that argument, you'll have to include a link to something from the scientific community, because it looks to me like they're pretty clear on the subject.

Our government seems to be concentrating on CO2 in their current legislation, as if that was the only culprit in air pollution. I mean, there are others: for example, ozone (O3), which is an unstable form of oxygen (O2) which happens to be poisonous (we need it in the upper atmosphere, but not where we're breathing, right?). Then there's the various sulphur compounds, many of which will kill you, and a bunch of various other compounds (mercury, weirdly enough, was taken off the charts by the Bush administration, despite the fact that it's been noted for the number of birth defects and other horrific problems it can cause).

You know, there's a term in the air pollution field: "particulate matter." It's that crap in the air that floats around for a while and then drops and clings to things. "Soot" is one type. (You know those Sherlock Holmes movies with the fog and stuff? I understand that the fog in those was actually smog from the factories, back in the 1800s/Industrial Revolution era, and it used to stain men's clothes to the point that paper collars and cuffs, that you could remove and throw away, were common.)

You know, when you think about it, soot should be heavier than air, right? I wonder how it gets up into the atmosphere? I mean, if your experiment with carbon dioxide proved that heavier gases will always drop, wouldn't a particulate drop even faster?

And where does acid rain come from, anyway? I mean, moisture in the air mixes with nitrogren oxide, sulphur dioxide or the like, and forms an acid that might travel for thousands of miles before it lands and screws stuff up around it.

Do you not believe that dumping millions of tons of pollutants into the atmosphere might have an effect on things like the absorbtion of sunlight by plants? (And remember, it isn't just CO2 being put out by those smokestacks.)

And one of the favorite arguments of the anti-global-warming crowd lately has been this 2008 petition, where 32,000 scientists said that you can't prove global warming.

I've been wondering about those 32,000 scientists. I mean, when you look into it, you start to notice some discrepencies. Let's start with "scientist" as a definition. It means somebody with a degree and some science background, right? Are you required to be working in a scientific field? You've got 31,478 college graduates who signed this thing. But only 3,803 (by Ron Paul's count, at least) have "specific training in atmospheric, earth, and environmental sciences."

So, if we take their word for it about their training (and if they were going to fake this, they'd have a larger number, right?), that's about 12% who know enough about earth sciences to not be pulling information out of their posteriors. Did I do that math right?

You know, you've got to wonder about that other 88% of them. What did they study? There's got to be some math, some physics - that's a given, right? Of course, pretty much any degree has a certain number of prerequisites, including science, math and the like. But, really, a Doctor of Theology - well, by that definition, he's a scientist, right? I haven't seen a good accounting of what fields of study these degrees were in, so I can't talk with any certainty, but since they specified the numbers I used, I have to assume that there was a reason for it.

According to most studies, when you include the PhD's, there are 30,000 doctorates awarded each year. So based on that, they were only able to find 32,000 willing to sign on here? (OK, not even that many: only 31,478 - that doesn't seem like a lot.)