Eureka!

Hey, ES, Hey Newt!

FWDiva

Do you know who I love?

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ES!!!

Good evening newtonusr..)

Hey! funny special person!

FWD Mary…)

Sara has and interesting postcard up. Hint, she visited a Canadian ER.

Postcard From Canada: Why I Missed Obama’s Speech
Sunday, September 13, 2009
– by Sara

ES! Newt! Funny! Mary!

Sunny!

Great Lake Swimmers – really, really like them.

Sunny!
Funny!
Mary!

and Luiza !!!

Outstanding post.

We are incapable of learning anything as a nation.

Hi Sunny!

Agreed newtonusr,

First, the waiting time between walking in the door and being admitted was literally about 45 seconds.

We can’t get a fast food snack in that amount of time.

Well, Pups,
I gotta get up early-ish and be coherent for another job interview tomorrow, so I will bid y’all a fond adieu.

FWDiva

Good night FWD

If I disappear, please forgive. My computer has the sniffles.

Funny, how did the interview go?

nite diva

I love Billionaires for wealthcare. I want to do that sometime soon.. Maybe I will be a butler. /s

I think it went OK, but I can never quite tell. I sure as heck want the job, though!
Long afternoon. Interesting folks…the hiring manager and one of the team members have worked with someone I worked with in my last position, so that’s kinda cool. “Oh, you mean so and so…yeah, he’s great. He’s on my list of references…”

Just re-read the listing for tomorrow’s job…it’s only a 50% FTE, which won’t be nearly enough as a long term solution. But I’m committed now, so what the heck.

Thanks again for all the positive thoughts, y’all. See ya tomorrow.

FWDiva

OK, Jeeves.
If something like a fight breaks out, it will be because one of the 3 or 4 intelligent TeaBaggers figures out the deal and takes exception.

I just wish the country saw this ‘movement’ from the perspective of looking in a mirror. If you are not aghast at this behavior, and are not seeing it as reflective of us as a culture, you are not fully awake.

Thanks, that’s quite a story. Efrique, an Australian mathematician, wrote “My close-up experience of grandma-killing ’socialized’ medicine” a couple of weeks ago about how emergency medicine works in his country.

Must have gone fairly well, she has another.

Yeah, truly amazing how few baggers understood it.

Well…for a different position at a different institution. But I still think it went OK. And I’d already done 2 phone interviews.
FWDiva

ES! Hi all!
Thanks for the music and for the Sara post. I’ve already passed it on.

I don’t recall who posted this, but it is pretty cool, and will come in handy when DC has something happening again.

It’s a page of DC-area webcams. Click on a blue dot and the cams stream pretty good real-time images.

Interesting note at the end.

[It is interesting to think on this: We have just as much a problem with obesity here as the US does. We have less money (about 20% less per capita). But we live FOUR YEARS longer. Government involvement in health care - it’s certainly not perfect - but it seems it saves lives. Lots of lives. Even grandma’s.]

Hi Margot.. you are face book wiz..)

Yes, it is. Canada has a different cross to bear, of course. They have a similar per capita income to the US, but a crappy climate and some very serious wilderness. Yet they also manage to live several years longer on average.

I find it very hard not to despise our politicians for pretending this is so hard to do. Every other country with similar resources has managed already. It isn’t easy, but it needs to be done and it’s been done before.

Now that’s interesting. I had to pitch a fit, literally, for them to let me get an MRI when this happened to me.
The first doc told me I’d get one to check for previous stroke lesions, then the second doc said “Oh you don’t have insurance? You don’t get an MRI. You also can just take aspirin instead of the Plavix.”

I thought you’d been looking for some time. Is this just coincidence, or is there more work in your field all of a sudden?

It turns out, not surprisingly, that Jane Hamsher was and is right on the money:
Incumbency.Protection.Racket.

Sara’s story is somewhat similar in that regard. All the tests she needed, and of course all the pharmaceuticals. Didn’t cost her a thing. Quite a contrast with the stories some anti-reform types want to spin of Canadians sneaking across the border to use our MRI machines.

oops I didn’t post it to facebook but I will. I meant email.

And “moral pygmies”, a phrase I use astonishingly often.

I’m out. Effing computer. Be well all.

I like that one, too.
Imagine if ‘veal pen’ (another real beauty) makes it out into the MSM…
That one has rather vivid imagery.

In the early eighties I worked in an ER as a clerk. I was young and considering everything as a possible career at the time. AFter that stint… it was very clear actual care was far down the chain in terms of importance in American hospitals.

Shortly after that, I worked for a very expensive HMO survey company, as HMO’s were in their early stages. Again, it was shocking… what they wanted to know and how far they would go to manipulate the situation. These surveys were often an hour long over the telephone.

Then I moved to San Francisco and worked with a number of giant insurance companies, their law firms and so on.

It was fubar then, it’s worse now.

When I read how other countries handle things, or watch SICKO.. I think to myself, you know I wish I could work in actual care like that.

Hope it clears up, Sunny.

Nite Sunny.

nite sunny

It could be worse.

Indonesia’s Aceh passes stoning law

Legislators in Indonesia’s Aceh province have unanimously approved a law allowing adulterers to be stoned to death.

The regional parliament for the devoutly Muslim province on Monday passed the “qanun jinayat”, or sharia law for crimes, also allowing for homosexuality to be punishable by long prison terms and people caught having pre-marital sex to receive 100 strokes with a cane.

Aceh’s parliament is the only legislature in Indonesia – the most populous Muslim nation in the world – to employ sharia (Islamic law).

They probably won’t understand the imagery, and in a month it will mean something entirely different.

You are right.

I have paid comparatively little attention to the health care sector, but it seems as though the whole thing has become badly distorted by unreasonable profit expectations (as has much of America). It used to be that was OK to make a few percent of investment. Now, if it’s not at least ten percent it’s not worth bothering.

Ian Welsh wrote about an experience he had with Canadian health care. Three months in the hospital, expensive drugs, physical therapy – no charge.

If that happened to any of us here we’d be paying off the hospital for the rest of our lives, assuming we weren’t just dumped out on the street.

Ah, well, I’ll try to find some more horror stories about foreign health care tomorrow. For now, it’s bed time. Goodnight, all.

nite cujo

me too. nite you guys

I miss Ian’s presence here in the lake.

Good night firedogs.

Every so often, political developments in 21st century America remind me of this 1952 novel; per the Wikipedia:

The Space Merchants is a science fiction novel by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth first published in book form in 1953 […]

Plot introduction

In a vastly overpopulated world, businesses have taken the place of governments and now hold all political power. States exist merely to ensure the survival of huge trans-national corporations. Advertising has become hugely aggressive and by far the best-paid profession. Through advertising, the public is constantly deluded into thinking that the quality of life is improved by all the products placed on the market. However, the most basic elements are incredibly scarce, including water and fuel. […]

The protagonist, Mitch Courtenay, is a star-class copywriter in the Fowler Schocken advertising agency who has been assigned the ad campaign which would attract colonists to Venus. But a lot more is happening than he knows about. It soon becomes a tale of mystery and intrigue, in which many of the characters are not what they seem, and Mitch’s loyalties and opinions change drastically over the course of the narrative.

Get the picture, this was first published in paper in 1952. 65 years ago, these guys had an accurate grip on how our government would devolve into a transnational corporatocricy. And the protagonist is a “word smith, star class”, i.e., a master propagandist, a Frank Luntz, who finally gets it.

Ian Welsh wrote about an experience he had with Canadian health care. Three months in the hospital, expensive drugs, physical therapy – no charge.

According to President Obama:

There are those on the left who believe that the only way to fix the system is through a single-payer system like Canada’s, where we would severely restrict the private insurance market and have the government provide coverage for everyone.

Which is the way of the other 21st-century democracies.

On the right, there are those who argue that we should end the employer-based system and leave individuals to buy health insurance on their own.

Which is the out-of-pocket way of the third world. But Obama continues:

I have to say that there are arguments to be made for both approaches. But either one would represent a radical shift that would disrupt the health care most people currently have. Since health care represents one-sixth of our economy, I believe it makes more sense to build on what works and fix what doesn’t, rather than try to build an entirely new system from scratch.

So, to avoid that disruption, Americans shall be left with something in the center, between the 21st century and the third world.

SWELL. JUST FUCKING SWELL. Is Nader willing to run in 2012?

Me too.

Speaking of the deep blue sea, shipping don’t lie (about “green shoots”); thanks Yves Smith.

(I keep telling myself those are mostly tugs and accessory boats in the picture …)

Per HuffPo:

During a CNBC interview on Monday, President Obama called Kanye West a “jackass” regarding his behavior at the MTV Video Music Awards.

Every so often …