The pending Jesus-sponsored holocaust

A statistical abstract of the absurd notion that we are somehow threatened by people with plastic explosives in the soles of shoes or nitroglycerin in shampoo bottles:

    Number of airline hijackings, Europe and North America, during 1970’s: 31

      Number of deaths resulting from said hijackings: 29
    Number of airline hijackings, Europe and North America, during 1980’s: 13

      Number of deaths resulting from said hijackings: 61
    Number of airline hijackings, Europe and North America, during 1990’s: 6

      Number of deaths resulting from said hijackings: 0
    Number of airline hijackings, Europe and North America, during 2000’s: 7

      Number of deaths resulting from said hijackings: 2,973
    International terrorist attacks**, 1970’s: 920 (deaths: 287)
    International terrorist attacks, 1980’s: 1,219 (deaths: 990)
    International terrorist attacks, 1990’s: 626 (deaths: 367)
    International terrorist attacks, 2000’s: 188 (deaths: 3,303)
    Number of Vietnamese war casualties, Vietnamese side (Government of Vietnam): 3,100,000
    Number of children starved to death by Bill Clinton in 1990s (UNICEF): 500,000

    Number of civilian casualties in Iraq since U.S. invasion, March, 2003:

      Iraq Body Count: 94,000-102,574
      Johns Hopkins (2006): 655,000
      ORB (Opinion Research Bureau of London (2007): 1.2 million
      United States Government (Washington) DKDC*
    Number of Jews in the world (Jewish People Policy Planning Institute): 13.2 million
    Number of Jews that will survive in end times (Revelations): 144,000
    Number of Jews that Jesus intends to kill if the end of the world is today: 13,056,000
    Number of Jews killed in Holocaust: 6,000,000
    High end estimates of dead in U.S. attacks on Vietnam and Iraq (sanctions and war): 4,800,000

Summary: The U.S. is getting there, approaching Holocaust numbers, but in the end, Jesus is the best damned killer of all.

*Doesn’t know, doesn’t care

**U.S. defines a “terrorist” attack as an act of violence committed against civilians by a non-military person or group, thereby exempting state-sponsored terrorism (its own activities) from consideration. So, for instance, during the 1980’s, 180 “terrorist” attacks in Colombia were actually insurgent attacks on a U.S.-owned oil pipeline that is at the center of that country’s civil war. U.S. acts of retaliation (“counterinsurgency”), also part of that war, are not considered.

An insider talks about health insurance costs

This was refreshing – a letter in today’s Denver Post from Jandel T. Allen-Davis, M.D., Denver, vice president of government and external relations for Kaiser Permanente Colorado. It concerns Colorado legislation, rather than national, but that is beside the point.

Not all health insurance companies are opposed to House Bill 1355 [which passed the Colorado legislature in 2007], which prohibits rate hikes for businesses that have sicker employees. Kaiser Permanente Colorado supported that bill and many previous legislative attempts to encourage greater access to insurance. We believe that the rules of the game must change so that insurance carriers are encouraged to expand the pool of insured and take on their fair share of risk.

More importantly, the debate over HB 1355 is all about how we shift premium costs around and not at all about how we keep premium costs down. Americans spend more money on health care than any other country, yet the country is No. 37 in quality of care. We should be talking about how to get our money’s worth.

We should be talking about effective treatments, coordinated care, and electronic medical records — the kind of health care delivery innovations that enable Kaiser Permanente to keep rates 20 percent lower for small businesses, compared to other insurers.

I encourage readers to become familiar with Kaiser Permanente’s health reform proposals, detailed at http://www.kaiserpermanente.org/reform. Unless we address the fundamental delivery inefficiencies in our system, America’s health care spending will continue to skyrocket.

Kaiser Permanente is a non-profit health insurance provider. The part in bold I emphasized above is a plea to for-profit insurance companies to change the rules, take a little more risk. Kaiser has no choice but to play by for-profit rules when for-profits dominate the marketplace. Otherwise, they end of with for-profit rejects, and go under.

For-profit health insurance companies exist for the sole purpose of skimming money off the health care system, and therefore do everything in their power to maximize profits by minimizing payouts for medical losses. Kaiser is, oddly, different. Why?

Anyway, nice to hear a reaosnable voice from inside the business.

A bailout under a blue cross

Upon hearing of the passage of H.R. 3962, the so-called “reform” bill, the voice I wanted to hear above all others was that of Rep. Dennis Kucinich. He has been the one true reformer among the Democrats.

It was Kucinich who offered up an amendment to the bill that would have allowed individual states to enact their own single-payer plans if they so desired. That amendment passed committee with bipartisan support, but was stripped from the final bill by the Democratic leadership under pressure from the White House.

In Canada, single-payer first passed in the Saskatchewan Province, and proved so successful that the private insurance system eventually collapsed. American insurance companies, working through the Obama Administration, stripped us of that weapon.

Here’s Kucinich on the overall thrust of the bill:

We have been led to believe that we must make our health care choices only within the current structure of a predatory, for-profit insurance system which makes money not providing health care. … When health insurance companies deny care or raise premiums, co-pays and deductibles they are simply trying to make a profit. That is our system.

This is why it was futile, from the beginning, to fight for anything other than single payer. It’s like trying to fight a cancer by applying a salve to some unaffected region of the body.

[Insurance companies] are driving up the cost of health care. Because their massive bureaucracy avoids paying bills so effectively, they force hospitals and doctors to hire their own bureaucracy to fight the insurance companies to avoid getting stuck with an unfair share of the bills. The result is that since 1970, the number of physicians has increased by less than 200% while the number of administrators has increased by 3000%. It is no wonder that 31 cents of every health care dollar goes to administrative costs, not toward providing care.

That 31% is an outrageous number, and it is the height of corruption to allow it to go on. It is imposed on us by sheer force of power – the power of private finance over politicians, the power of insurance companies over doctors and hospitals and other providers. The fact that the Democrats have done nothing about it speaks to their ineptitude and corruption.

In H.R. 3962, the government is requiring at least 21 million Americans to buy private health insurance from the very industry that causes costs to be so high, which will result in at least $70 billion in new annual revenue, much of which is coming from taxpayers. This inevitably will lead to even more costs, more subsidies, and higher profits for insurance companies—a bailout under a blue cross.

This is how Democrats work. They took all of the good energy for real reform, and turned it against us, and into another subsidy for business. This is what Bush and Baucus did with “Medicare D” – prescription coverage for seniors … isn’t it interesting that Medicare still cannot negotiate prices with Pharma even after Democrats took power?

Bloomberg reports that Curtis Lane, a prominent health industry investor, predicted a few weeks ago that “money will start flowing in again” to health insurance stocks after passage of the legislation.

This is anecdotal, but I was watching several health care stocks yesterday in the wake of passage of 3962 on Friday. They were all up, not dramatically, but the interesting thing was that they all spiked early in the day – that is, there was an influx of money into those stocks as the session opened. Someone or some institution saw some reason to stake out a position. If 3962 was any kind of threat at all to private insurance, the flow would have gone the other way.

The “robust public option” which would have offered a modicum of competition to a monopolistic industry was whittled down from an initial potential enrollment of 129 million Americans to 6 million….This health care bill continues the redistribution of wealth to Wall Street at the expense of America’s manufacturing and service economies which suffer from costs other countries do not have to bear, especially the cost of health care….Notwithstanding the fate of H.R. 3962, America will someday come to recognize the broad social and economic benefits of a not-for-profit, single-payer health care system, which is good for the American people and good for America’s businesses, with of course the notable exceptions being insurance and pharmaceuticals.

The key words there are, of course, “not-for-profit”. It is the profit motive that undermines our health care system, and makes it the most expensive and inefficient among the world’s industrial democracies.

Oh Conrad where art thou?

With passage in the House last night of the Health Care “Reform” bill, I thought well, we’re f*****. Democrats have done it again – they’ve taken all of this healthy energy for reform that existed, and turned it against us. Industry has a new revenue stream, health care costs will continue to rise, the problem of the uninsured will continue to haunt us, and that creeping problem known as under-insurance will continue to grow. Medical bankruptcies will continue to climb, access to care will still be denied to millions of us.

Everywhere premiums, deductibles and co-pays are going up, coverages diminishing. The health insurers have us by the balls. What happened last night was a naked exercise of power. Insurers are sticking it to us, teabagging us in a battlefield victory dance. We will now be forced to buy their crappy and expensive products.

It’s humiliating.

But oddly, Democrats don’t seem to mind humiliation. I should say “liberals”, I suppose, rather than Democrats. But I don’t know. The terminology is confusing. Am I a “progressive”? A “Naderite”? A “radical”, “malcontent”? Terminology, like liberals, can be mushy. Maybe I am just a guy with two eyes and a brain. I only know this – the people in the room last night that passed this bill are not reformers, and are not our friends.

Saul Alinski said (in the 1940’s) that the difference between the liberal and the radical is that the liberal leaves the room when an argument turns into a fight. Oddly, he’s wrong. Liberals owned the room on health care, kicked the radicals out at the beginning. But it is true that they avoided the fight. They simply did not want us watching as they laid a wet and sloppy fellatio on the health insurance companies.

Baucus should have said what he meant when he had the single-payer doctors arrested: “No voyeurs!”

If any conservatives or right wingers are reading this – I want to give you a feeling of what it is like to be a Democrat, reformer, a radical – whatever you want to call us: The House Progressive Caucus issued a statement some months ago saying that they would not vote for any bill that did not contain a “strong” public option. Their numbers are up around eighty, and that is enough for force Pelosi’s hand.

They caved. The didn’t stick together. Pelosi, working with Rahm Emmanuel and Obama, worked behind the scenes to undermine them. Much pressure was brought to bear. They were told that funding for district projects would be cut off, that there would be no help from Obama in their reelection campaigns, and in the worst cases, that a well-financed primary opponent would emerge. They caved.

How do I know this? Oh, I don’t know. I just know things. Unlike liberals, I have an understanding of the nature of power.

Anyway, right wing friends, here is what it’s like to be a progressive, to rely on Democrats to achieve your ends. It’s like being drunk – too drunk to move, but conscious enough to be looking up through a haze at your friends as they stand in a circle around you pissing in your face. It’s a warm feeling, but not a good one.

There will be cheering and backslapping as this monstrosity makes its way through the Senate. Maybe we can kill it still. But I’m having a laugh – a good and hearty laugh as I realize that we would be so much better off right now if Conrad Burns were our senator instead of Jon Tester.

So, right wing enemies and detractors, if you read this, when you get a chance, raise a glass to me and to my comrades on the left, because we have on thing in common, if only one thing: Contempt for liberals.

Minnesota shines

Several studies here:

Aiming Higher: Results from a State Scorecard on Health System Performance, 2009 (Separate chart from this study here).

America’s Health Rankings, 2008 Edition

Kaiser Family State Health Facts, 2009 Rankings of Deaths per 100,000

There are scads of charts and comparisons. My curiosity was driven by one anomaly that turns up time and time again. Minnesota consistently ranks at or near the top in virtually all health care categories, along with Vermont and Hawaii and sometimes Delaware.

It could be many things … climate, ethnicity, occupations and industries. The reason, however, that I picked on Minnesota is this: For-profit health insurance in that state is illegal.

You might say that’s irrelevant, that the lofty scorecards for the state are dependent on many factors. You might be right.

I only draw this conclusion: Getting rid of for-profit insurers will not hurt us, might even help us.

Manager wonders why computer model is not selling

COSTCO has on display many computers of various prices, all PC’s. I was looking at the one priced at $999.99 this morning, and there was one of those electronic sticky notes up in the corner that said

Check out this sticky note. It’s really cool. Bet it makes you want to spend $1,000 on a crappy computer.

Had to be an Apple guy -they are kind of cultish.

Conspiracy theories

Blogging can indeed be fun. A post by JC this week over at 4&20 devolved into a firefight about conspiracies and “conspiracy theorists”. I believe in several conspiracy theories, and so was victim of the standard “tin foil hat” insult. It’s the easiest posture of all to adopt when one is thoughtless, unimaginative, and compliant.

What “conspiracies” do I believe in? It’s not that simple. Events are complex, and cannot be managed so much as motives disguised. Take, for example, the case of the JFK assassination. It was a conspiracy for sure, as there was more than one person involved. It threatened to expose government activity that our government did not want exposed, and so inspired a cover-up. And the cover-up inspired wild conspiracy theories about the CIA, LBJ, JFK as a martyr, and Vietnam.

It took some conspiring to cover that crime up, to pin it on a patsy, but it was mostly people thinking on their feet, making things up as they wildly scrambled to cover up other things that were going on. They came up with some crazy theories, patently false on their face, about what happened that day. There was no magic bullet, there was a shooter in the grassy knoll, and as I am fond of saying, Lee Harvey Oswald and I share one common trait: neither of us were in the window of the Texas Book Depository that day.

So far, so good – a murder, a mystery, a cover up, crazy theories on all sides about what happened, one (Oswald acting alone) spun deliberately to mislead the public. It gets even more interesting. It’s a lesson in how various people form opinions about the world.

With JFK, there’s objective data out there that says that official explanations do not make sense. Plenty of it. Different people approach it differently. Me and my ilk look at it, wonder, look for alternative explanations (and are often wrong) – it’s a curiosity that compels us to delve deeper. We don’t buy the official story. Some of us just love a good murder mystery. It’s my favorite genre.

Others get their “truth” from authority figures. The official explanation is that Oswald did it, and that he acted alone. To make this theory, which is virtually unsupported by evidence, stick, they rely on the willingness of people to trust those in power, and the gullibility of people to believe any lie if it is told by an authority figure. Would Earl Warren lie to us?

Mr. Warren did what he had to do, and he did it for high and noble reasons. But he lied. LBJ selected him to head the Commission that looked into the crime because he was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and was therefore extremely credible. He had a big lie to tell, and it had to be told with force, and it had to be believed.

Earl Warren was an honorable man. And he lied to us. Reluctantly. He didn’t want the job. LBJ talked him into it. LBJ was a persuasive man.

Down here at the bottom, we who are naturally curious, who wonder and read and are enthralled by mystery have to endure fools of a sort who have the audacity to call us names based on their willingness to accept official truth, no matter how flawed. It’s way too easy, and they shouldn’t get away with it. Journalists, who should be naturally curious, are oddly the most likely to rigidly adhere to official truth and fire the tin-hat arrows at us. I don’t really understand why that profession is so deeply flawed. They should be more curious, more willing to question official truth, but they aren’t.

There are conspiracies afoot, everywhere, and especially in politics, where most of what we see in front of cameras is mere theater. Politicians, by the very nature of their profession, must forge alliances among natural enemies. They lie, play charades and engage in elaborate tricks to make things happen. It’s a real skill, and I admire those who are good at it. I like Dick Nixon, for example, purely Machiavellian, dark, brooding and conspiratorial. He’s my ideal.

And conspiracies are generally effective when carried out by people who have power. Pizza delivery boys don’t generally succeed at attacking military bases, but wealthy Wall Street Barons can deal secretly in oil futures and drive up the price, play the naked short-sell game behind the scenes and bring down investment houses, and have so much financial power that presidents are at their beck and call.

Oh, yeah – and they can steal elections, get us into wars based on brazen lies, murder people, entrap them in flagrante delicto, destroy and make careers, and and make people behave as they wish. That is the nature of power.

I wonder about those who seem to believe that power behaves itself. That’s loony, tin-hat thinking. Power is as power does.

Understand, of course, that events are random and largely uncontrollable. The Bush people who got us into the Iraq war probably thought it would be quick and easy. They set in motion a deadly set of unmanageable events that in the end, would kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people. They suffered from the illusion of control and had weaponry at their disposal. They are dangerous, and should be in jail or hanging, Nuremberg style, at the end of a rope.

But powerful people can influence events, and most importantly, influence how we view events. Iraq was about oil, among other things. That is painfully obvious. The degree to which the reader of this essay thinks in line with official truth about why we invaded Iraq defines how compliant that person is in his thoughts. Most people are followers, and so adhere to official truth. It’s a pity, as there is so much fun to be had trying to understand this crazy world.

Oh, yeah, and weak people would conspire, if they could. I haven’t heard anything about McDonald’s clerks quietly working behind the scenes to influence its stock price. I do hear all the time about powerless people who seek to make their living dealing in illegal substances. That’s conspiracy, and it happens all the time.

Why is it so easy to believe in conspiracies when the perpetrators are weak people, but so hard when they are powerful?

Could it be that thing about the emperor?

Our work here is done …

This from an amazing email I received from “Bryce, Matt, John and the whole Forward Montana family.”

With historic health care reform so close to passing after a meager 60 years of debate, we at Forward Montana are ready to sink our teeth into the next big progressive issue.

Suggestion: If this is your best work, please don’t be about fixin’ anything else.

Agitation Radio

Mr. Shackleford put up an interesting post on talk radio, which linked to a series of reports on CNN on the phenomenon. It’s a favorite subject of mine.

Different media affect us in different ways. Television is a guest in our home, usually right in the middle of our family rooms, and so TV hosts usually have to be charming. Maybe that’s old school – Glenn Beck certainly doesn’t fit that bill, but over the years, TV anchor spots have generally gone to the likes of Brian Williams and Katie Couric. They are pretty, vapid, and likable. Dan Rather even went so far as to wear a sweater under TV lights, thinking it would make him appear more comfortable to viewers, and therefore more trustworthy.

Radio is different. The channel of communication in radio is one talker, one listener. Rush Limbaugh may be reaching 13 million people, but it’s a one-on-one medium.

Radio hosts do not have to be charming. Most aren’t. Radio is inflammatory – that one talker has that one listener by the testicles, and can implant all kinds of ideas and really make him angry. (Most talk radio listeners are men.)

Marshall McLuhan called radio “the tribal drum”.

Radio is provided with its cloak of invisibility, like any other medium. It comes to us ostensibly with person-to-person directness that is private and intimate, while in more urgent fact, it is really a subliminal echo chamber of magical power to touch remote and forgotten chords. …Radio affects most people intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and listener. That is the immediate aspect of radio. A private experience. The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber. … The only medium for which our education now offers some civil defense is the print medium.*

Ellul wrote about radio in his 1965 book Propaganda:

[Paul] Lazarsfeld, in his [1942] survey of radio broadcasts, cites the case of programs designed to acquaint the American public with the value of each of the ethnic minority groups in the American population. The point was to demonstrate the contribution each group was making, with the purpose of promoting mutual understanding and tolerance. The survey revealed that each broadcast was listened to by the ethnic group in question (for example, the Irish tuned in the program about the Irish), bur rarely anybody else. …

What happens? Those who read the press of their group and listen to the radio of their group are constantly reinforced in their allegiance. They learn more and more that their group is right, that its actions are justified, thus their beliefs are strengthened. At the same time, such propaganda contains elements of criticism and refutation of other groups, which will never be read or heard by a member of another group.

Last summer’s Tea Parties and Town Halls all had the tenor of talk radio. People yelled, talked over one another, but most importantly, they were angry. Talk radio made them that way. Talk radio controls the right wing, and sets the tenor of our debates, the content of signs at rallies, and the comments on blogs.

And the right wing is angry, my friend. Angry and unreachable. It is characteristic of victims of propaganda to exist in a bubble, to reject opposing views without regard to content or carrier. Tea Parties demonstrated to me both the power of radio and of agitprop itself.

Left wing talk radio is very similar, I might add. There just isn’t much of it out there.

Ronald Reagan did away with the Fairness Doctrine, and Rush Limbaugh hit the airwaves around the same time. Right wing talk radio owes its existence to Reagan. Were it necessary to give more than one side of an issue, to grant use of our airwaves for rational debate allowing expression of all sides of any issue, there would be no Rush. What he is doing is as old as radio itself – he is agitating.

Now I hate to say this, as the natural conclusion is that I am drawing parallels, and what happened in post-Wiemar Germany will never repeat, but the Nazis did make effective use of radio to advance their agenda. It’s an effective tool for propaganda – one-on-one, captive listener, one-side only.

Then there is the odd and precisely symmetrical case of Father Charles Edward Coughlin. He had a radio audience of forty million back during the time of FDR. He spewed antisemitism and became an apologist for Hitler and Mussolini. (To be fair, he also supported the New Deal before he turned against it.)

So this is not a new phenomenon by any means. The larger point is that the medium is what agitates, and not the message. Any propagandist could encapsulate his views in talk radio format and make people angry.

I don’t listen to right wing talk radio. I do like a healthy exchange of views, so I listen to Thom Hartmann on my Ipod while exercising or driving. Hartmann drives me a little batty with his high-energy – he overwhelms callers and guests. (He admits to being ADD.) But he does allow opposing viewpoints on and treats those who carry those views with respect.

There are others on the left – Randi Rhodes is offensive to me, so I avoid her. David Sirota has a local morning show here in Denver, and tries to get interesting guests. Stephanie Miller is a comedienne, and a very funny one, so I give her leeway for not knowing very much. She’s entertaining. Air America is fading into the shadows, and is apparently trying to reinvent itself yet again.

But mostly, talk radio is a right wing phenomenon, and I think that it is the anger of that side that drives it. The right is angry about liberals, taxes, the media, Vietnam, abortion … so radio is a natural fit for them. It’s agitation.

But it’s more than that – there are stations aplenty, but Clear Channel, a right wing corporation, owns 1200 radio stations, 58 of them “blow torches”, or 50,000 watt behemoths. That has a lot to do with why right wing dominates the airwaves. Clear Channel dominates station ownership.

The problem is that our airwaves are dominated by one view only, the mother’s milk of propaganda. In addition, we have allowed a few companies to take control of too many stations. The result: we are swimming in agitprop.

The answer: Reduce the number of stations any one company can own to a very low level, say fifty, and no more than one in any market.

And: Return the Fairness Doctrine. It’s far more important to have free expression than “free markets”.

———————
*Marshall McLuhan, Radio: The Tribal Drum, 1964

The inimitable Mr. Shackleford

I get a kick out of Rusty Shackleford. I am one of the few people who puts up comments on his blog, and I had to quit because I could never remember either my name or password, and the password recovery system doesn’t work. I am either Mark T or Tomato Guy or Boulder Boy over there, and right now none of the three work.

Anyway, Rusty doesn’t write much – he merely links and puts up things others have written. His commentary is saved for his “topics” at the end of each post. Here’s the list for a piece he put up on talk radio:

Shut Up Hippie
Liberal Shenanigans
Traditional Media
Stupid People Rule!
Media
Zombie Apocalypse
Barack Obama
Stupid things the Left does/says
Liberal Bias

Does that sum it up? His close is always “That is all”.

I’ve given him a hard time – he doesn’t seem to care. He never actually addresses anything head on – he just characterizes things. He’s not deep. He’s not terribly witty. He never links to anyone who isn’t bona fide right wing.

Here’s his comment from over at Left in the West, where some dude Yellowstone Kelly wrote a long piece on how hard it is to run against Denny Rehberg:

There’s a point to this commentary, right?

Anyway, I’ve tried to reason with the guy. I’ve tried to be sympathetic and understand that he is probably young and needs a lot more weathering. Here’s the problem I’m having: He’s likable. He’s unique. He’s unpretentious. He’s not full of himself. He’s refreshing. I get a kick out of him. I’ve got to stop being mean to him.

Weird, eh?