Health Care Reform has been a hot topic for years. Now it comes before the Supreme Court of the United States of America. This is a sober moment for lawyers and justices, commentators and media, patients, and you, the public. But if you only really KNEW the medical system a little better, you might be laughing instead of fighting and fretting.
Here are a baker’s dozen of reasons to laugh about so-called health care reform:
1) There is no such thing as health care. Physicians know next to nothing about health. They never take a single course in health. They only know about disease, and not all that much about many of them.
2) It follows that there is simply no such thing as health insurance. All we have is disease insurance, which very often adds to the cost of medical care because physicians believe in their disease model. They test and test and test at your expense.
3) The present medical model promotes spending, duplication and waste — regardless of any intended reform. This pattern has been developing since the 1940s, when Tinsley Harrison, the famed editor of a textbook on internal medicine named after him, wrote about “the present-day tendency towards a five-minute history followed by a five-day barrage of special tests in the hope that the diagnostic rabbit may suddenly emerge from the laboratory hat.”
4) The bottom line very often in the medical office, clinic, and hospital is income not care or service. The whole system caters to medical professionals and not human beings in the grasp of patienthood.
5) Physicians use protocols, guidelines, algorithms, and most of all, guess work to pursue diagnoses of patient problems. Your physician generally knows only tidbits about the medications s/he prescribes, less about diseases diagnosed, and practically nothing about the human beings who consult him/her.
6) If you only knew how little your doctor knows about so many diseases. There are dozens of ways your physician can and does say “I don’t know,” while using medical terminology and professional verbosity to make you think otherwise.
7) Physicians get paid for dealing with illness, not with making you well. Job security and income are based on keeping you coming to the clinic and the hospital, not for helping you stay home and at work.
8) Medics takes bigger and bigger bites out of western economies because we believe they KNOW what they are doing. Most of the time, they use tests, procedures and scientific propaganda to hide their ignorance. Our ignorance and their ignorance add up to large medical bills.
9) We live in an age of technology which has taken men to the moon. We imagine physical and medical scientists to be akin to rocket scientists. But we have yet to usefully understand arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, schizophrenia, etc. The list is almost endless.
10) Clinics and hospitals are memorials to disease, not healing. Today, hospitals are treated as shrines and physicians as priests. Yet, how holy, healthy, and healing are they really?
11) Medical and cancer centers get larger and larger, and more and more expensive — but not because people are cured. Cancer, like many other modern diseases, is largely incurable for the simple fact that its causes are almost totally unknown. How can such a disease be reasonably treated and dealt with when its causes are yet unknown?
12) Westerners pay huge bills for medical care which may be no more effective than the machinations of witch doctors. They actually may be less effective while costing fantastically more money. Many witch doctors and shamans work for free.
13) Physicians NEVER give guarantees on their treatments and surgeries. If any thing goes wrong, you suffer physical, emotional, financial and other consequences. You pay for doctors’ mistakes.
March 2012
44 posts
The AP released a fascinating report this morning about Washington’s fight with the Pakistani government over the use of CIA drone strikes. The story describes the lengths to which CIA Director David Petraeus has gone to maintain Pakistan’s blessing in the use of drone strikes, Pakistan’s unwillingness to continue blessing said drone strikes, and the Obama administration’s incredible snow job on the entire affair, which amounts to, “Everything is fine, predator drones are great, terrorists are bad.”
The real treat, however, is the AP’s description of the 8-year drone program. According to the wire service, it’s been nothing but a smashing success:
The diplomatic furor threatens to halt the CIA’s drone program, which in the last eight years, has killed an estimated 2,223 Taliban, al-Qaida and other suspected militants with 289 strikes, peaking at 117 strikes throughout 2010, reducing al-Qaida’s manpower, firepower and reach, according to Bill Roggio at the Long War Journal website, which tracks the strikes. U.S. officials say his figures are fairly accurate, though they would not give more precise figures.
If U.S. officials aren’t objecting to a reported death tally, you’re doing something wrong. In this case, we know the AP is committing a sin of omission by not including Sadaullah, a 15-year-old Pakistani who lost both legs, one eye, his wheelchair-bound uncle and two cousins during an errant drone strike; or 16-year-old anti-drone activist Tariq Aziz and his 12-year-old cousin, both of whom were killed by a CIA drone while driving to retrieve their dear old aunty.
The Long War Journal’s numbers are also contradicted by the UK’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which estimates that
civilian casualties occur in approximately one fifth of U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan. Since the drone war began in Pakistan in 2004, more than 2,300 people have been killed and at least 1,150 wounded in these strikes. The Bureau estimates that the dead could include as many as 780 civilians, including as many as 175 children.[13]
The New America Foundation, meanwhile, put the number of civilian casualties from drone strikes at 32 percent.
There’s a lot of daylight between those three estimates; enough that the AP should know better than to regurgitate the claim that every person killed by a CIA drone strike in the last eight years was a terrorist.
(NaturalNews) The state of Michigan is only days away from engaging in what can only be called true “animal genocide” — the mass murder of ranch animals based on the color of their hair. It’s all part of a shocking new “Invasive Species Order” (ISO) put in place by Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR). This Invasive Species Order suddenly and shockingly defines virtually all open-range pigs raised by small family farms to be illegal “invasive species,” and possession of just one of these animals is now a felony crime in Michigan, punishable by up to four years in prison.
The state has said it will “destroy” these pigs beginning in April, potentially by raiding local farms with government-issued rifles, then shooting the pig herds while arresting the members of the family and charging them with the “crime” of raising pigs with the wrong hair color. This may truly be a state-sponsored serial animal killing spree.
Reality check: You may think this story is some kind of early April Fools prank, but it isn’t. This is factually true and verifiable through the documents, videos and websites linked below. The state of Michigan seriously intends to unleash a mass murder spree of pigs of the wrong color beginning April 1.
Yet these are the very pigs that farmers and ranchers in Michigan have been raising for decades. The state doesn’t seem to care about this, and there are indications that this ISO may have been nudged into position by the conventional pork industry as a tactic to wipe out its competition of local, specialty ranching conducted by small families and dedicated farmers who don’t work for the big pork corporations. (The Michigan Pork Grower’s Association.)
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/035372_Michigan_pigs_farm_freedom.html#ixzz1qJm79oaj
A terrible and sad event that needs further investigation.
More sad, however, is how those in power have succeeded in manipulating the masses with this event so that race and division are the issue. Keep people looking at issues other than them. That is all they are about.
Heaven forbid that the people come together and figure out that the problem of all problems is government. They will go to any lengths to insure that there are great rifts between people.
Primitivism has drawn heavily upon cultural anthropology and archaeology. Within the last half-century, societies once viewed as barbaric have been largely reevaluated by academics, some of whom now hold that early humans lived in relative peace and prosperity. Frank Hole, an early-agriculture specialist, and Kent Flannery, a specialist in Mesoamerican civilization, have noted that, “No group on earth has more leisure time than hunters and gatherers, who spend it primarily on games, conversation and relaxing.”
ok wikipedia
I do not know much about Primitivism outside of the rhetoric of Derrick Jensen & his ilk, but the rest of what was stated in that Wiki is basically the fact of the matter. It was not until agriculture began to be practiced in earnest and we transitioned from hunting & gathering to settling in one spot, planting seed, and calling it all ours (the idea of property & ownership) that any sort of true warring began.
There is a reason that we have mythologies of a more idyllic times so entrenched in our minds.
This isn’t a bad thing, it is not bad that we were once more “peaceful”, because that peace was not something that needed to be fought for. There was no need for fighting. Resources were abundant and human populations were small and relegated to ancestral localities, sans huge environment upheavals.
Once again, it was not until the paradigm shift of agriculture took over and the concept of property was born along side a huge surplus in food that quickly grew populations that we started creating this huge pile of shit that is now hitting the fan.
In saying this I am not hearkening back to the “good ol’ days” of hunters & gatherers. We cannot go back to that. There are far too many of us and evolution is not recessive.
I, personally, do not know how humanity will find its way back into Eden, but it will not be dressed in the skins of animals we have hunted. But I do believe, and this IS ever increasingly supported by science, that in the first 10-15,000 years of our human history, we lived INFINITELY more in tune with the natural world than we do today and I see nothing wrong with studying this and seeing if there is something from this we can take and reapply in our lives today in the efforts to prevent ourselves from doing ourselves in.
Civilization as we know it is only a transitional period within the grand scheme of humanity. I am a complete optimist, I believe that humanity will exist for many thousands of years beyond us. But what will make that existence for our children and our children’s children and so on worth it is that eventually, we will discover the means and methods to eliminate the state of scarcity. Capitalism will whither away not out of a great revolutionary movement but out of complete uselessness.
Someday it will happen, and it may happen sooner than you think. We are experiencing post scarcity in several of the great areas of human endeavors, literature, cinema, music, intellectual discourse, information itself even, they’ve all been made accessible for next to nothing, it costs nothing to copy an mp3, it costs nothing to read a pdf, it costs nothing to download a few .avi files. We are experiencing post scarcity today in the realm of culture and information and it is a magnificent thing where profits mean nothing and people work because they wish to, and they are infinitely more productive due to the combination of will and technology.
That’s the future of civilization right there, that’s how we will recapture a peaceful society. We will not need to regress, progress will take us to places that we never could have imagined.
The technology - increasing automation, mechanization and open source software - that enables a post-scarcity economy explicitly based upon resources and not capital opens up vast potential - but what bothers me is the establishment structures that profit off of the suffering generated by the current system will try to preserve the class division and fossil fuel economy even at the expense of our health and the environment. A cursory glance at the legislation being passed by both parties in the corporatist duopoly make it clear that we still have a long way to go before the failing old system can be replaced by one that actually takes care of human and ecological needs over the profit generated by scarcity and lack of technical efficiency.
Technology is the problem.
What gets me is that people think we are better off now than when we were 10,000 years ago.
When problems and issues were your problems and issues. Not someone else’s.
When the people you know you lived with.
When time was like a wheel and not a straight line.
When beauty and abundance were everywhere.
When the awe of existence instilled cooperation rather than domination.
There is no top to this and no bottom, there are no sides to this and no
way to contain it. It can only be held in place temporarily, only with
makeshift propaganda and truckloads of hubris. This involves us all,
every last mother loving son or daughter of us and it is inescapable,
it is our destiny, our Alpha or our Omega, a new beginning or a certain
end.
From the power of Barack Obama to the powerlessness of Trayvon Martin,
from the violence of George Zimmerman to the violence of Robert Bales in
Afghanistan. We are a violent and bloody people who tend to excuse our
way past our own violence. Bales was serving his country as a hired
assassin six thousand miles from home as bankers were attempting to take
his home and throw his family into the street. George Zimmerman comes
off as a Travis Bickle wanna be as he says “They ****** always get
away!”
The harder the state tries to control us the more it spins out of
control, the Revolution has already begun and just because they haven’t
shot at you yet, doesn’t mean it isn’t so. If you are a college student
you already know it. If you are a teacher you already know it. The
Occupiers know it and even the Tea Partiers know it, they might not
understand it, but they know it alright.
There are two America’s, the real one and a media created imaginary one
and there’s a hard rain gonna fall on the real America,. The other day
Occupy Wall Street protestors attempted to retake Zuccotti Park in New
York. Here is what the Reuters News Agency reported, “The movement has
made headlines for its clashes with police after campsites were set up
for months in cities from New York to California.”
Wait a damn minute here, protestors never clashed with police. Police
clashed with protestors or to put even a finer point on it, armed men
with intent to do violence attacked, maced, pepper sprayed and otherwise
assaulted a public gathering which was occupying a public space because
the government didn’t like their politics or their message. Get it?
Corporations are people and money is speech but actual people expressing
their opinions are criminals and are met with state sponsored violence.
Yet the New York police were quick to deploy half of their force the
other day to limit the public’s view of this police state in action. A
new era of Perception management has been put into place as the media
couched previous reports of occupiers in Zuccotti Park with terms like
defecation and rats. Rats? In New York City? Really rats?
(NaturalNews) A recent study published by researchers from Harvard Medical School (HMC) claims that eating “red meat” can lead to an early death caused by heart problems or cancer. But just like most other studies conducted on meat, this one, which was published in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine, does not differentiate between red meat from feedlot cattle and red meat from grass-fed cattle, which are two entirely different foods with very different effects on health.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/035310_red_meat_grass-fed_beef_processed_food.html#ixzz1q2TH3BLX
A veteran American journalist has been fired after referring to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian and Syrian land as “brutal.”
Sunni Khalid, managing news editor at WYPR-FM in Baltimore, was dropped by the public radio station on Thursday after more than nine years on the job.
He had been on probation following criticism of comments he made on Facebook about Israel’s continued illegal occupation of Palestine.
“I, for one, have had enough of this pandering before the Israeli regime,” he wrote.
“The war-mongering toward Iran has, once again, distracted the world from Israel’s brutal military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.”
Khalid, who previously worked for National Public Radio, has also written for Time Magazine, The Washington Times, and USA Today.
Israel maintains economic control over Gaza and the West Bank, with devastating consequences for the Palestinian civilian population.
Rights groups including Amnesty International have repeatedly condemned rights abuses against Palestinians.
(Al-Akhbar)
On March 16, 2012, President Obama issued an executive order entitled, “NATIONAL DEFENSE RESOURCES PREPAREDNESS.” (http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/03/16/executive-order…)
This executive order states that the President alone has the authority to take over all resources in the nation (labor, food, industry, etc.) as long as it is done “to promote the national defense” — a phrase so vague that it could mean practically anything.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/035301_Obama_executive_orders_food_supply.html#ixzz1penseJOe
A NYPD officer raped a woman at gunpoint and his defense lawyer, who has conceded that he is guilty, is trying to convince the jury that he “shouldn’t do 10-to-life.”
A cop. raped. someone at gunpoint. and he deserves to be back out on the street in less than 10 years? How could anyone believe that enough to let it out of their lips?
Welp as expected. Fairly certain he’ll wind up with probation at worst.
they aquitted two NYPD dudes for rape last year so wont be surprised if he dont get shit.
and note these victims are rarely if ever white.
the police is literally out to get some of us, while they protect you.
