HEALTHCARE IN AMERICA....The Commonwealth Fund has released its latest comparison of healthcare performance among various countries, and you can read all about it here. However, since I know you're all busy people, I'll just cut to the chase: we suck. Despite the fact that we see doctors less often, go to the hospital less often, and stay in the hospital for shorter times than any of the other countries in the report, we still spend by far the most money. In return for this we get lousier care.
(You're being played)
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
European socialized health-care is better and cheaper than US health-care.
Sorry, but it's true and it's been well documented for years..
By Milo Freeman, SPC, United States Army, Iraq
Memorandum for Record: Military Spending Concerns
FROM: SPC Freeman, Milo; US Army, Iraq
TO: Senate Democrats, Republicans, and "American Idol" viewers across the nation.
1. You. Punk. Ass. Pantywaisted. Bitches.
2. You had a chance. You could have put your money where your mouth is--could have put some ass behind all those claims of "favoring an end to war."
3. And you fucking choked.
4. Let me explain something to you. Your children; your spouses; your lovers and friends and parents and CONSTITUENTS are hostages to this war. They're dying for a conflict with no concrete objective. They're losing marriages and childhood moments to a neverending cycle of extended tours. Their equipment, their morale, is stretched thin. And some of them--those of us smart enough not to buy the fucking hype--were counting on you to find your fucking testicles and put an end to this shit. We were counting on you to save us from ourselves; to find a way to put us to use serving our country in ways perhaps more effective in rebuilding our nation.
5. And you. Fucking. Choked.
6. I haven't gotten a current edition of the paper in months. It's always a day behind. I don't get to check the news--I barely have the time. So what am I to think when I read yesterday's Stars and Stripes, and hear about this shit? Is that supposed to tell me that my leaders, my countrymen give a flying FUCK about what happens to me or my wife? Is that the message I'm supposed to glean from this STUNNING lack of cojones? Because I gotta tell you, America, I'm not seeing it.
7. I'm so sick of hearing this wretched war talked about in terms of Victory or Defeat. "If we leave, the terrorists will win."
8. Fuck that.
9. Today it's Terrorists. Yesterday it was Blacks/Gays/Jews/Hippies. Before that it was Communists. Before that, it was Uppity Colonials with Secondhand Muskets and Pitchforks. It's always fucking something with you people, isn't it?
10.You just need your little wars to feel good about yourselves, don't you? Something to make you feel threatened; something to make you feel heroic; ANYTHING to make you feel like your pathetic lives are more than just you against the Big, Black, Scary Infinite. Well, obviously, it's working.
11. You don't magically "win" an occupation. It's an inevitable bleed-out. We're stuck in a situation beyond our powers to fix, in a country that WE voted to destroy, whose history and people we neither understand nor care to try. We bought the hype, hook-line-and-sinker.
12. Fuck Victory. Fuck Defeat. Any way you slice it, This. War. Is. Wrong.
13.You don't keep trying to win the game after it turns out you bribed the refs. You fire the coaches and/or players responsible, and you hand over the Title. You take your lumps like a fucking man and try to rebuild. Accept it.
13. Hope you're happy, America. Clutch your pearls about all those dirty liberals who voted against the proposal ("They didn't Support The Troops!"). Whine about all the evil elderly schoolteachers and librarians protesting the war on a Saturday morning outside your courthouse.
14. But when your son or daughter or spouse or first lay comes home airfreight, mangled into a closed-casket service by a daisy-chain of 155s buried under Route Tampa, remember this:
15. It won't be the dirty liberals who put them there.
16. Hoo-ah.
//
ORIGINAL SIGNED
Milo Freeman, SPC
United States Army, Iraq
FROM: SPC Freeman, Milo; US Army, Iraq
TO: Senate Democrats, Republicans, and "American Idol" viewers across the nation.
1. You. Punk. Ass. Pantywaisted. Bitches.
2. You had a chance. You could have put your money where your mouth is--could have put some ass behind all those claims of "favoring an end to war."
3. And you fucking choked.
4. Let me explain something to you. Your children; your spouses; your lovers and friends and parents and CONSTITUENTS are hostages to this war. They're dying for a conflict with no concrete objective. They're losing marriages and childhood moments to a neverending cycle of extended tours. Their equipment, their morale, is stretched thin. And some of them--those of us smart enough not to buy the fucking hype--were counting on you to find your fucking testicles and put an end to this shit. We were counting on you to save us from ourselves; to find a way to put us to use serving our country in ways perhaps more effective in rebuilding our nation.
5. And you. Fucking. Choked.
6. I haven't gotten a current edition of the paper in months. It's always a day behind. I don't get to check the news--I barely have the time. So what am I to think when I read yesterday's Stars and Stripes, and hear about this shit? Is that supposed to tell me that my leaders, my countrymen give a flying FUCK about what happens to me or my wife? Is that the message I'm supposed to glean from this STUNNING lack of cojones? Because I gotta tell you, America, I'm not seeing it.
7. I'm so sick of hearing this wretched war talked about in terms of Victory or Defeat. "If we leave, the terrorists will win."
8. Fuck that.
9. Today it's Terrorists. Yesterday it was Blacks/Gays/Jews/Hippies. Before that it was Communists. Before that, it was Uppity Colonials with Secondhand Muskets and Pitchforks. It's always fucking something with you people, isn't it?
10.You just need your little wars to feel good about yourselves, don't you? Something to make you feel threatened; something to make you feel heroic; ANYTHING to make you feel like your pathetic lives are more than just you against the Big, Black, Scary Infinite. Well, obviously, it's working.
11. You don't magically "win" an occupation. It's an inevitable bleed-out. We're stuck in a situation beyond our powers to fix, in a country that WE voted to destroy, whose history and people we neither understand nor care to try. We bought the hype, hook-line-and-sinker.
12. Fuck Victory. Fuck Defeat. Any way you slice it, This. War. Is. Wrong.
13.You don't keep trying to win the game after it turns out you bribed the refs. You fire the coaches and/or players responsible, and you hand over the Title. You take your lumps like a fucking man and try to rebuild. Accept it.
13. Hope you're happy, America. Clutch your pearls about all those dirty liberals who voted against the proposal ("They didn't Support The Troops!"). Whine about all the evil elderly schoolteachers and librarians protesting the war on a Saturday morning outside your courthouse.
14. But when your son or daughter or spouse or first lay comes home airfreight, mangled into a closed-casket service by a daisy-chain of 155s buried under Route Tampa, remember this:
15. It won't be the dirty liberals who put them there.
16. Hoo-ah.
//
ORIGINAL SIGNED
Milo Freeman, SPC
United States Army, Iraq
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
ABC News Uncovers ‘Operation Northwoods’
In the early 1960s, America’s top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.
Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.
The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba’s then new leader, communist Fidel Castro.
America’s top military brass even contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing: “We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba,” and, “casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.”
The plans had the written approval of all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and were presented to President Kennedy’s defense secretary, Robert McNamara, in March 1962. But they apparently were rejected by the civilian leadership and have gone undisclosed for nearly 40 years.
Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.
The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba’s then new leader, communist Fidel Castro.
America’s top military brass even contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing: “We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba,” and, “casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.”
The plans had the written approval of all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and were presented to President Kennedy’s defense secretary, Robert McNamara, in March 1962. But they apparently were rejected by the civilian leadership and have gone undisclosed for nearly 40 years.
Chimpy: Lying, Insane or Both?
What a surprise, Bush is lying about the war in Iraq. What's disturbing is how blatantly Bush is now lying about public opinion on the war. Either he has decided that lying to the public is, again, the best strategy for a president to take with his people, or he truly believes the lies he's telling, which means that he's not just an idiot, he's also crazy.
Why repugs are so fucking stoopid.
The developmental data suggest that resistance to science will arise in children when scientific claims clash with early emerging, intuitive expectations. This resistance will persist through adulthood if the scientific claims are contested within a society, and will be especially strong if there is a non-scientific alternative that is rooted in common sense and championed by people who are taken as reliable and trustworthy. This is the current situation in the United States with regard to the central tenets of neuroscience and of evolutionary biology. These clash with intuitive beliefs about the immaterial nature of the soul and the purposeful design of humans and other animals — and, in the United States, these intuitive beliefs are particularly likely to be endorsed and transmitted by trusted religious and political authorities. Hence these are among the domains where Americans' resistance to science is the strongest.
Why repugs are so fucking stoopid.
The developmental data suggest that resistance to science will arise in children when scientific claims clash with early emerging, intuitive expectations. This resistance will persist through adulthood if the scientific claims are contested within a society, and will be especially strong if there is a non-scientific alternative that is rooted in common sense and championed by people who are taken as reliable and trustworthy. This is the current situation in the United States with regard to the central tenets of neuroscience and of evolutionary biology. These clash with intuitive beliefs about the immaterial nature of the soul and the purposeful design of humans and other animals — and, in the United States, these intuitive beliefs are particularly likely to be endorsed and transmitted by trusted religious and political authorities. Hence these are among the domains where Americans' resistance to science is the strongest.
"in about the time it takes a batter to swing"
drain bamaged republicants.
When confronted with moral dilemmas, the brain-damaged patients coldly came up with "end-justifies-the-means" answers.
Damasio said the point was not that they reached immoral conclusions, but that when confronted by a difficult issue -- such as whether to shoot down a passenger plane hijacked by terrorists before it hits a major city -- these patients appear to reach decisions without the anguish that afflicts those with normally functioning brains.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Dick Pace still a Chimp enabling clown.
General Pace's remarks were erroneous on several counts.
First, the website Iraq Coalition Casualty Count puts the number of US service-members killed since the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003 at 3,455. The Pentagon only lists it as 3,441, with 14 deaths not yet being confirmed by the Pentagon. With either number, the total number of fatalities long passed the count of victims who died on 9/11.
Second, the General overestimated the number of deaths on 9/11. The website September 11, 2001 Victims states that 2,996 died in the attacks, rather than "more than 3,000 murdered" that Pace cites.
Finally, many of the victims who died on 9/11 were not American citizens. The aforementioned website lists 209 of the victims as foreign nationals.
26 reasons to keep church and state seperate.
Oh and, by the way, you’ll never be able to truly gauge any of the biases you might be operating under since it’s not possible to accurately observe a system you’re part of. Now, get out there and delude yourself!
1 Bandwagon effect - the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink, herd behaviour, and manias. Carl Jung pioneered the idea of the collective unconscious which is considered by Jungian psychologists to be responsible for this cognitive bias.
2 Bias blind spot - the tendency not to compensate for one’s own cognitive biases.
3 Choice-supportive bias - the tendency to remember one’s choices as better than they actually were.
4 Confirmation bias - the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.
5 Congruence bias - the tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing.
6 Contrast effect - the enhancement or diminishment of a weight or other measurement when compared with recently observed contrasting object.
7 Déformation professionnelle - the tendency to look at things according to the conventions of one’s own profession, forgetting any broader point of view.
8 Disconfirmation bias - the tendency for people to extend critical scrutiny to information which contradicts their prior beliefs and uncritically accept information that is congruent with their prior beliefs.
9 Endowment effect - the tendency for people to value something more as soon as they own it.
10 Focusing effect - prediction bias occurring when people place too much importance on one aspect of an event; causes error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome.
11 Hyperbolic discounting - the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, the closer to the present both payoffs are.
12 Illusion of control - the tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes which they clearly cannot.
13 Impact bias - the tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.
14 Information bias - the tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.
15 Loss aversion - the tendency for people to strongly prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains (see also sunk cost effects)
16 Neglect of probability - the tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.
17 Mere exposure effect - the tendency for people to express undue liking for things merely because they are familiar with them.
18 Omission bias - The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful omissions (inactions).
19 Outcome bias - the tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.
20 Planning fallacy - the tendency to underestimate task-completion times.
21 Post-purchase rationalization - the tendency to persuade oneself through rational argument that a purchase was a good value.
22 Pseudocertainty effect - the tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.
23 Selective perception - the tendency for expectations to affect perception.
24 Status quo bias - the tendency for people to like things to stay relatively the same.
25 Von Restorff effect - the tendency for an item that “stands out like a sore thumb” to be more likely to be remembered than other items.
26 Zero-risk bias - preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk.
1 Bandwagon effect - the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink, herd behaviour, and manias. Carl Jung pioneered the idea of the collective unconscious which is considered by Jungian psychologists to be responsible for this cognitive bias.
2 Bias blind spot - the tendency not to compensate for one’s own cognitive biases.
3 Choice-supportive bias - the tendency to remember one’s choices as better than they actually were.
4 Confirmation bias - the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.
5 Congruence bias - the tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing.
6 Contrast effect - the enhancement or diminishment of a weight or other measurement when compared with recently observed contrasting object.
7 Déformation professionnelle - the tendency to look at things according to the conventions of one’s own profession, forgetting any broader point of view.
8 Disconfirmation bias - the tendency for people to extend critical scrutiny to information which contradicts their prior beliefs and uncritically accept information that is congruent with their prior beliefs.
9 Endowment effect - the tendency for people to value something more as soon as they own it.
10 Focusing effect - prediction bias occurring when people place too much importance on one aspect of an event; causes error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome.
11 Hyperbolic discounting - the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, the closer to the present both payoffs are.
12 Illusion of control - the tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes which they clearly cannot.
13 Impact bias - the tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.
14 Information bias - the tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.
15 Loss aversion - the tendency for people to strongly prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains (see also sunk cost effects)
16 Neglect of probability - the tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.
17 Mere exposure effect - the tendency for people to express undue liking for things merely because they are familiar with them.
18 Omission bias - The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful omissions (inactions).
19 Outcome bias - the tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.
20 Planning fallacy - the tendency to underestimate task-completion times.
21 Post-purchase rationalization - the tendency to persuade oneself through rational argument that a purchase was a good value.
22 Pseudocertainty effect - the tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.
23 Selective perception - the tendency for expectations to affect perception.
24 Status quo bias - the tendency for people to like things to stay relatively the same.
25 Von Restorff effect - the tendency for an item that “stands out like a sore thumb” to be more likely to be remembered than other items.
26 Zero-risk bias - preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk.
The Top 10 Conservative Idiots, No. 292
...even Wilkes drew a line on what he would do for the congressman. For one thing, Wilkes was totally disgusted by the hot tub Cunningham put on the boat's deck during the autumn and winter. What repelled Wilkes -- and others invited to the parties -- was both the water Cunningham put in the hot tub and the congressman's penchant for using it while naked, even if everybody else at the party was clothed. Cunningham used water siphoned directly from the polluted Potomac River and never changed it out during the season. "Wilkes thought it was unbelievably dirty and joked if you got in there it would leave a dark water line on your chest," said one person familiar with the parties. "The water was so gross that very few people were willing to get into the hot tub other than Duke and his paramour."
ridicule republicans now, loudly and often
When Rudy Giuliani says that Iran, which had nothing to do with 9/11, is part of a “movement” that “has already displayed more aggressive tendencies by coming here and killing us,” he should be treated as a lunatic.
When Mitt Romney says that a coalition of “Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda” wants to “bring down the West,” he should be ridiculed for his ignorance.
And when John McCain says that Osama, who isn’t in Iraq, will “follow us home” if we leave, he should be laughed at.
When Mitt Romney says that a coalition of “Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda” wants to “bring down the West,” he should be ridiculed for his ignorance.
And when John McCain says that Osama, who isn’t in Iraq, will “follow us home” if we leave, he should be laughed at.
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