A thread for Democrats Only by THGRRI

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Too bad he's not Orwell.

That guy wrote books that still hold up 70 years later.

This dude can't even write a book that holds up before it gets published.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real

It used to be, Gibson had told me, that a defensive membrane divided his life from his work. He could consider the future as a professional, without picturing his own life, his kids’ lives. “I never wanted to be the guy thinking about ‘Mad Max’ world,” he said. “I had some sort of defense in place. . . . It’s denial, some kind of denial. But denial can be a lifesaving thing, in certain lives, in certain times. How on earth did you get through that? Some reliable part of you just says, It’s not happening.” The membrane, he went on, “which I very, very much miss, actually held until the morning after Trump’s election. And I woke up and it was gone, whatever it was. It was just gone, and it’s never come back.”

At dinner, Jack Womack joined us. The restaurant was loud and dimly lit, its tables and chairs artfully cheap, the specials written on mirrors in white pen. Attractive drinkers, dressed in black, raised coupe glasses. At our corner table, conversation turned to the jackpot.

“What I find most unsettling,” Gibson said, “is that the few times that I’ve tried to imagine what the mood is going to be, I can’t. Even if we have total, magical good luck, and Brexit and Trump and the rest turn out as well as they possibly can, the climate will still be happening. And as its intensity and steadiness are demonstrated, and further demonstrated—I try to imagine the mood, and my mind freezes up. It’s a really grim feeling.” He paused. “I’ve been trying to come to terms with it, personally. And I’ve started to think that maybe I won’t be able to.”

Womack nodded. “My daughter’s sixteen and a half,” he said. “Sixty years from now, she’ll be in her mid-seventies. I have absolutely no idea what the physical world will be like then. What the changes will be.”

“It’s totally new,” Gibson said. “A genuinely new thing.” He looked away from us, into the room. Another song came on the sound system. Incandescent light gilded the mirrors. A young woman in round glasses leaned back in her chair. I felt, suddenly, that we were all living in the past.

www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gibson-keeps-his-sci
ence-fiction-real

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, January 2, 2020 1:11 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
William Greider obituary

William Greider tackled gigantic subjects: the Federal Reserve (“Secrets of the Temple,” 1987), the evaporation of American democracy (“Who Will Tell the People,” 1992), globalization (“One World Ready or Not,” 1997), society’s deformation by the military-industrial complex (“Fortress America,” 1998), whether we can reinvent the U.S. economy (“The Soul of Capitalism,” 2003), and what to do when the people running this country seem determined to destroy it (“Come Home, America,” 2009).

All topics I've attempted to address in my posts. For my pains, I get called a "Russian troll", and hardly anybody wants to engage in thinking these Big Thoughts.

Quote:
Each of these books is still completely relevant — something that almost never can be said about aging political writing. Pick up, say, “Game Change,” the bestseller by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin about the 2008 election, and you’ll find it’s now as fascinating as gossip about the Harding administration.

Greider pulled this off because he didn’t care about the daily political garbage tornado. Instead, his focus was always on the huge subterranean battles that actually determine our lives, i.e., capital vs. labor, creditors vs. debtors, marketing vs. people, and capitalism vs. democracy.

YOU, SECOND, should take a lesson from him! Stop adding to the garbage tornado! TRUMP is NOT ... I repeat NOT ... the source of our problems, and getting rid of him won't solve them!

Our problems are decades in the making, rooted in our collective failure to tackle Big Thoughts and question our Big ASSumptions. What are our problems? What are our interests? How did we get here? What is right and what is wrong? How can we fix things?

How about making a New Year's resolution, SECOND? Kill that snake in your head and start thinking straight?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!

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Thursday, January 2, 2020 3:16 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

YOU, SECOND, should take a lesson from him! Stop adding to the garbage tornado! TRUMP is NOT ... I repeat NOT ... the source of our problems, and getting rid of him won't solve them!

Our problems are decades in the making, rooted in our collective failure to tackle Big Thoughts and question our Big ASSumptions. What are our problems? What are our interests? How did we get here? What is right and what is wrong? How can we fix things?

How about making a New Year's resolution, SECOND? Kill that snake in your head and start thinking straight?

I agree with you that getting President Trump out of the W.H. will not solve our problems. Mike Pence will step in. He is Trump, without the stupid lying, lazy/disorganized management style, and the personal tax cheating.

It wasn’t Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, who turned America upside down. It was the 1.5 million who followed him. It is not Trump, or Pence, who will turn America upside down. It is the 63 million who follow him. What did Jeff Davis’ followers believe was right and true and worth fighting for? Interestingly enough, William Gibson, Science Fiction writer, brings it up in an interview about the present. Midway through his career, the inventor of “cyberspace” turned his novel-writing attention to a strange new world: the present. www.historynet.com/confederate-army

In Wytheville, people owned books like “The Lost Cause,” an encyclopedic account of the Civil War, published in 1866, which depicted slavery as benign. In his library, Gibson unfolded himself from his chair, retrieving a copy of “The Lost Cause,” which he had salvaged from Wytheville.

“In our house, there were these objects that no one ever said anything to me about,” he said. “I just found them myself, and reverse-engineered what they meant. These were being sold from the very beginning of Reconstruction, and within them—actually, there’s another one. . . .” He bent low, and picked up a smaller volume, blowing dust from its binding.

“This is the most evil object in the house,” he said. “It’s just, like, unspeakable!” He handed it to me. The book was “The Old Plantation: How We Lived in Great House and Cabin Before the War,” by James Battle Avirett.

“Check out the inscription,” he said. It was dedicated to “the old planter and his wife—the only real slaves on the old plantation.”

Gibson settled on a hard-backed chair, adjusting the cuffs of his perfectly reproduced mid-century chambray workshirt. “It’s just the foulest revisionist text,” he said. “It was given to my grandmother when, I think, she was sixteen years old, signed by the author. She took me aside, on one or two ritual occasions, to try to indoctrinate me into the crucial, central significance of the ‘War of the Northern Invasion.’ ” He grimaced. “This is why the South is still so fucked up—because this stuff never quit. It never quit! It’s the formation . . .” He trailed off.

“Of our past?” I asked.

“Of our present,” he corrected me.

www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gibson-keeps-his-sci
ence-fiction-real

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, January 2, 2020 4:14 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?

You've never answered that SECOND, even though I've posted it hundreds of times.

You seem to like history, so here's some history. In the entire history of the democratic party, they've not once altered the course of the US contribution to global warming. They've not done it when they controlled the WH, or when they've controlled one House of Congress, or both Houses of Congress, or any two out of the three, or all three together. That's their history. Based on their history, why should I expect anything different from them in the future?

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Thursday, January 2, 2020 7:12 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?

You've never answered that SECOND, even though I've posted it hundreds of times.

You seem to like history, so here's some history. In the entire history of the democratic party, they've not once altered the course of the US contribution to global warming. They've not done it when they controlled the WH, or when they've controlled one House of Congress, or both Houses of Congress, or any two out of the three, or all three together. That's their history. Based on their history, why should I expect anything different from them in the future?

The growing climate awareness is mainly taking place among Democrats; the Republican base is largely unmoved. And the anti-environmental extremism of conservative politicians has, if anything, become even more intense as their position has become intellectually untenable. The right used to pretend that there was a serious scientific dispute about the reality of global warming and its sources. Now Republicans, and the Trump administration in particular, have simply become hostile to science in general. Hey, aren’t scientists effectively part of the Deep State?

Science Under Attack: How Trump Is Sidelining Researchers and Their Work
www.nytimes.com/2019/12/28/climate/trump-administration-war-on-science
.html
Political appointees have shut down government studies, reduced the influence of scientists over regulatory decisions and in some cases pressured researchers not to speak publicly. The administration has particularly challenged scientific findings related to the environment and public health opposed by industries such as oil drilling and coal mining. It has also impeded research around human-caused climate change, which President Trump has dismissed despite a global scientific consensus.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, January 2, 2020 8:18 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

So?

Aside from the dip at the Great Recession public opinion HASN'T CHANGED WITHIN A VERY NARROW RANGE IN OVER 30 YEARS.

So what did democrats do about global warming with all that public support - yanno, the ~ 60 - 65% who felt that the global warming threat was as important or more important than stated during those over 30 years?

And, since you yet again failed to answer the question, maybe you need to see it better, to help you focus on it.

And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?

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Thursday, January 2, 2020 9:12 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?

There is a list of bills from Democrats that have gone to the Senate only to die very quietly. If the Democrats get control of the Senate the bills will die loudly, with much screaming as they are horribly killed by the GOP filibuster. So, I guess you are right, Congress won't get any better. It would if a Democratic Senate Majority leader kills the filibuster, but how likely do you think that would be? www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, January 2, 2020 9:51 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Quote:
There is a list of bills from Democrats that have gone to the Senate only to die very quietly.

Name one - specifically. Tell me how EXACTLY that bill is going to do the job.

Are there - oh - increments of progress written in? Assignment of departments to calculate cost effectiveness? Granting of authority? Anything at all to indicate it's a serious bill and not just and empty position statement like the DNC platform was?

I'll wait.

And - as long as I'm here, let me just indulge in a little bit of SLOPPY snark on you.

You know, if you were able to run your life in any successful way, you'd understand that the way to bring this debate to a definitive close is to show me the democrats have DONE SOMETHING EFFECTIVE in any one of those 30+ years to address global warming,

But you're a loser in life, and you'll never be able to grasp what it means to be working from facts.

And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?

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Friday, January 3, 2020 6:10 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Quote:
There is a list of bills from Democrats that have gone to the Senate only to die very quietly.
Name one - specifically. Tell me how EXACTLY that bill is going to do the job.

I will name two: A bill to regulate assault weapons, to ensure that the right to keep and bear arms is not unlimited. Read the 125 pages of text for exactly how this works. www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/s66
The GOP will make sure it won’t pass in this session . . . or any other.

A bill to establish an improved Medicare for All national health insurance program. Read the 120 pages to see how this expands Medicare to people younger than 65 years. www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/hr1384
Not gonna happen, except over the dead bodies of Mitch McConnell and all the other GOP Senators.

But then most good ideas die because people fearfully won't try them, which has been humanity's way for hundreds of thousands of years, until certain capitalists figured out brutal, complex, and unreliable ways to get around that tendency in Congress in order to do things the way the capitalists think are best for themselves. Since those capitalists are less than 0.1% of the population, the other 99.9% will often be out of luck. The "good" idea works best for the 0.1% and isn't particularly good for anyone else.

Many health professionals support Medicare for All, including a majority of doctors and the largest nurses union in the US, as do a majority of registered voters in the US overall. But it ain't gonna happen. The GOP has stopped it dead.
www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/opinion--health-reform-in-america--
where-are-the-scientists--66884

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, January 3, 2020 3:01 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

What does that have to do with GLOBAL WARMING Sloppy?

FOCUS.

AND STOP LYING.

You know, if you were able to run your life in any successful way, you'd understand that the way to bring this debate to a definitive close is to show me the democrats have DONE SOMETHING EFFECTIVE in any one of those 30+ years to address global warming,

But you're a loser in life, and you'll never be able to grasp what it means to be working from facts.

And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?

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Saturday, January 4, 2020 10:03 AM

THG

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Quote:
There is a list of bills from Democrats that have gone to the Senate only to die very quietly.
Name one - specifically. Tell me how EXACTLY that bill is going to do the job.

Are there - oh - increments of progress written in? Assignment of departments to calculate cost effectiveness? Granting of authority? Anything at all to indicate it's a serious bill and not just and empty position statement like the DNC platform was?

I'll wait.

And - as long as I'm here, let me just indulge in a little bit of SLOPPY snark on you.

You know, if you were able to run your life in any successful way, you'd understand that the way to bring this debate to a definitive close is to show me the democrats have DONE SOMETHING EFFECTIVE in any one of those 30+ years to address global warming,

But you're a loser in life, and you'll never be able to grasp what it means to be working from facts.

And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?

Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:

If Trump was president, he'd have congressional opposition from BOTH the democrats AND the republicans.

He would literally not be able to get anything done. The idea of how dysfunctional his term would be is funny!

That's all. I didn't want to clutter up anyone else's thread.

Carry on.
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=60432

Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.

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Wednesday, January 8, 2020 8:04 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Health Care is a $7,800 Tax On Every American Family

The latest 2018 health care spending numbers for all the developed countries of the world shows the United States spends 16.9 percent of GDP on health care compared to 12.2 percent for Switzerland, the next most expensive.

US GDP was $20 trillion in 2018. If we cut back to Switzerland’s level we’d reduce health care spending by 4.7 percentage points, or about a trillion dollars. There are roughly 128 million households in the US, so that comes to a savings of $7,800 per household.

The real question at hand is: why don’t we make an effort to cut back to Swiss levels? After all, they have perfectly fine health care even with much lower spending.

The answer to that is easier: It’s because most of our outsize expense comes from paying doctors more, nurses more, medical staff more, hospitals (and their workers) more, drug companies (and their workers) more, device makers (and their workers) more, and so forth. Thus, the only way to seriously cut back our health care spending is to pay people a lot less than they’re getting now, and this can be done only slowly if at all. You can’t suddenly tell doctors and nurses that they’re all getting 30 percent pay cuts. Hell, you can’t even do that to pharmaceutical companies, as much as we might like to. Aside from being massively disruptive, it would generate massive opposition. And in a democracy, massive opposition matter.

This is why I think Elizabeth Warren was right to say that if we’re going to adopt Medicare for All, we’ll need to phase it in. I just wish she were more forthright about it. The plain reality is that it will never happen unless we agree not to slash everyone’s pay and instead just put the brakes on future pay increases. Even that will be unpopular, but it’s probably doable. It would mean that it’s a long time before we get anywhere near to Swiss levels of spending, but that’s just the way it is.

More at www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/01/health-care-is-an-8000-tax-on-e
very-american-family/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, January 9, 2020 1:39 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

We swing into the clubhouse dining room. Larry David seats himself at the one spot of a four-top not made up with silverware, near a huge TV showing coverage of the Trump impeachment hearings. “Oh, yeah, yeah,” he shouts sarcastically at the screen when the president appears to make a statement. “Stop lying, you asshole!” He is aware that in the wealthy precincts of the club there are sometimes other members nearby who feel differently about the administration. “I talk louder on purpose when they're around,” he says. “To me, if somebody bought Fox News, I would feel the same as I felt when the Berlin Wall came down. That feeling of euphoria, like the world was going to change.”

More at www.gq.com/story/larry-david-cover-profile-february-2020

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, January 9, 2020 8:30 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
We swing into the clubhouse dining room. Larry David seats himself at the one spot of a four-top not made up with silverware, near a huge TV showing coverage of the Trump impeachment hearings. “Oh, yeah, yeah,” he shouts sarcastically at the screen when the president appears to make a statement. “Stop lying, you asshole!” He is aware that in the wealthy precincts of the club there are sometimes other members nearby who feel differently about the administration. “I talk louder on purpose when they're around,” he says. “To me, if somebody bought Fox News, I would feel the same as I felt when the Berlin Wall came down. That feeling of euphoria, like the world was going to change.”

More at www.gq.com/story/larry-david-cover-profile-february-2020

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

It's owned by Liberals now. Is Larry David a secret Trump supporter, or is he just stupid?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, January 9, 2020 9:41 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
We swing into the clubhouse dining room. Larry David seats himself at the one spot of a four-top not made up with silverware, near a huge TV showing coverage of the Trump impeachment hearings. “Oh, yeah, yeah,” he shouts sarcastically at the screen when the president appears to make a statement. “Stop lying, you asshole!” He is aware that in the wealthy precincts of the club there are sometimes other members nearby who feel differently about the administration. “I talk louder on purpose when they're around,” he says. “To me, if somebody bought Fox News, I would feel the same as I felt when the Berlin Wall came down. That feeling of euphoria, like the world was going to change.”

More at www.gq.com/story/larry-david-cover-profile-february-2020

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

It's owned by Liberals now. Is Larry David a secret Trump supporter, or is he just stupid?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Fox News is NOT owned by Disney. I presume Disney is the liberals you think own Fox News.
www.foxnews.com/entertainment/fox-corporation-becomes-stand-alone-comp
any-as-disney-deal-set-to-close

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:09 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
We swing into the clubhouse dining room. Larry David seats himself at the one spot of a four-top not made up with silverware, near a huge TV showing coverage of the Trump impeachment hearings. “Oh, yeah, yeah,” he shouts sarcastically at the screen when the president appears to make a statement. “Stop lying, you asshole!” He is aware that in the wealthy precincts of the club there are sometimes other members nearby who feel differently about the administration. “I talk louder on purpose when they're around,” he says. “To me, if somebody bought Fox News, I would feel the same as I felt when the Berlin Wall came down. That feeling of euphoria, like the world was going to change.”

More at www.gq.com/story/larry-david-cover-profile-february-2020

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

It's owned by Liberals now. Is Larry David a secret Trump supporter, or is he just stupid?

Do Right, Be Right. :)
Fox News is NOT owned by Disney. I presume Disney is the liberals you think own Fox News.
www.foxnews.com/entertainment/fox-corporation-becomes-stand-alone-comp
any-as-disney-deal-set-to-close

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Nope and nope.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/lachlan-murdoch-takes-c
ontrol-of-fox-corp-but-how-will-he-deal-with-president-trump/2019/03/20/abbb43d6-40ee-11e9-a0d3-1210e58a94cf_story.html

Quote:
Lachlan Murdoch takes control of Fox Corp. But how will he deal with President Trump?

Fox News is one of the only pollsters that consistently to this day say that support for Trump's impeachment outweighs support against it. Even CNN and WaPo aren't telling that lie anymore.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/public_approval_of_the_
impeachment_and_removal_of_president_trump-6957.html#polls

You should really read more than Vox and MotherJones. You might actually learn a thing or two and be able to keep up with the adult conversations in the RWED instead of always throwing temper tantrums and quoting people followed by a reply that has nothing to do with what you quoted.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, January 10, 2020 6:05 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Australia Shows Us the Road to Hell – the political reaction is scarier than the fires.

In a rational world, the burning of Australia would be a historical turning point. After all, it’s exactly the kind of catastrophe climate scientists long warned us to expect if we didn’t take action to limit greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, a 2008 report commissioned by the Australian government predicted that global warming would cause the nation’s fire seasons to begin earlier, end later, and be more intense — starting around 2020.

Furthermore, though it may seem callous to say it, this disaster is unusually photogenic. You don’t need to pore over charts and statistical tables; this is a horror story told by walls of fire and terrified refugees huddled on beaches.

So this should be the moment when governments finally began urgent efforts to stave off climate catastrophe.

But the world isn’t rational. The anti-environmentalist media, the Murdoch empire in particular, has gone all-out on disinformation, trying to place the blame on arsonists and “greenies” who won’t let fire services get rid of enough trees.

As late as the 1990s, Democrats and Republicans were almost equally likely to say that the effects of global warming had already begun. Since then, however, partisan views have diverged, with Democrats increasingly likely to see climate change happening, while Republicans increasingly see and hear no climate evil.

There’s substantial evidence that conservatives who are highly educated and well informed about politics are more likely than other conservatives to say things that aren’t true, probably because they are more likely to know what the conservative political elite wants them to believe. In particular, conservatives with high scientific literacy and numeracy are especially likely to be climate deniers.

But if climate denial and opposition to action are immovable even in the face of obvious catastrophe, what hope is there for avoiding the apocalypse? Let’s be honest with ourselves: Things are looking pretty grim. Scientific persuasion is running into sharply diminishing returns. Very few of the people still denying the reality of climate change or opposing doing anything about it will be moved by further accumulation of evidence, or even by a proliferation of new disasters. Any action that does take place will have to do so in the face of intractable right-wing opposition.

This means, in turn, that climate action will have to offer immediate benefits to large numbers of voters, because policies that seem to require widespread sacrifice would be viable only with the kind of political consensus we clearly aren’t going to get.

More at www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/opinion/australia-fires.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, January 10, 2020 8:41 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Donald Trump Jr. and Sean Hannity were among the most prominent tweeters this week of the allegation that close to 200 people in Australia have been charged with arson for deliberately lighting brushfires. In many instances, the people promoting the arson narrative are doing so to refute climate change as a driver of the fires.

Officials in the state of Victoria have refuted arson as a major cause of bushfires. “Police are aware of a number of posts circulating in relation to the current bushfire situation, however currently there is no intelligence to indicate that the fires in East Gippsland and north-east Victoria have been caused by arson or any other suspicious behaviour,” a police spokeswoman told The Age on Thursday.

“The majority of these bushfires have been generated by lightning strikes associated with weather and climate effects,” Dale Dominey-Howes, a professor of hazard and disaster risk sciences at the University of Sydney, told HuffPost.

www.vox.com/2020/1/9/21058332/australia-fires-arson-lightning-explaine
d

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, January 11, 2020 5:30 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Australia is burning. The Arctic is melting. Yet Trump keeps gutting climate change regulations.

Trump is delaying ratification of a treaty on hydrofluorocarbons. The climate change solutions organization Project Drawdown has found that phasing out these chemicals would be the most impactful solution to stop global warming -- more than driving electric cars or switching to renewable energy. www.drawdown.org/solutions/materials/refrigerant-management

The International agreement to limit hydrofluorocarbons gases went into effect last year, but Trump has yet to send it to the Senate to ratify it.

The treaty is called the Kigali Amendment, and it deals with a little-known but highly potent class of greenhouse gases called hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are used in refrigerators and air conditioners. The gases are sometimes called "super greenhouse gases" because of their capacity to trap huge amounts of heat in the atmosphere; they have more than 1,000 times greater warming potential than carbon dioxide.

More at www.cnn.com/2020/01/10/politics/trump-climate-change-environmental-pol
icy-rollbacks/index.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, January 11, 2020 7:05 AM

I hope you're ready to live without A/C when the next Democrat president gets in there and ratifies it for you in 2024.

I've been doing it for years. It's not that bad, most of the time.

This will be entertaining.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, January 12, 2020 7:05 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I hope you're ready to live without A/C when the next Democrat president gets in there and ratifies it for you in 2024.

I've been doing it for years. It's not that bad, most of the time.

This will be entertaining.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

You didn't bother to click on the article, did you? There are alternatives to hydrofluorocarbons that are NOT 1,000,000 times worse greenhouse gases than CO2. Even CO2 can be used as a refrigerant for air-conditioning. But it is nice to know that as a Trump voter you gave another example of having very little useful knowledge of what you have strong opinions about. Vote Trump in 2020! He will look after you! (He sure does look after people like me, but I won't vote Trump.)

HFCs: Super Greenhouse Gases
https://eia-global.org/campaigns/Climate/what-are-hydrofluorocarbons

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, January 12, 2020 7:06 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are the authors of “Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope,” from which this essay is adapted.

Jan. 9, 2020

YAMHILL, Ore. — Chaos reigned daily on the No. 6 school bus, with working-class boys and girls flirting and gossiping and dreaming, brimming with mischief, bravado and optimism. Nick rode it every day in the 1970s with neighbors here in rural Oregon, neighbors like Farlan, Zealan, Rogena, Nathan and Keylan Knapp.

They were bright, rambunctious, upwardly mobile youngsters whose father had a good job installing pipes. The Knapps were thrilled to have just bought their own home, and everyone oohed and aahed when Farlan received a Ford Mustang for his 16th birthday.

Yet today about one-quarter of the children on that No. 6 bus are dead, mostly from drugs, suicide, alcohol or reckless accidents. Of the five Knapp kids who had once been so cheery, Farlan died of liver failure from drink and drugs, Zealan burned to death in a house fire while passed out drunk, Rogena died from hepatitis linked to drug use and Nathan blew himself up cooking meth. Keylan survived partly because he spent 13 years in a state penitentiary.

Among other kids on the bus, Mike died from suicide, Steve from the aftermath of a motorcycle accident, Cindy from depression and a heart attack, Jeff from a daredevil car crash, Billy from diabetes in prison, Kevin from obesity-related ailments, Tim from a construction accident, Sue from undetermined causes. And then there’s Chris, who is presumed dead after years of alcoholism and homelessness. At least one more is in prison, and another is homeless.

We Americans are locked in political combat and focused on President Trump, but there is a cancer gnawing at the nation that predates Trump and is larger than him. Suicides are at their highest rate since World War II; one child in seven is living with a parent suffering from substance abuse; a baby is born every 15 minutes after prenatal exposure to opioids; America is slipping as a great power.

We have deep structural problems that have been a half century in the making, under both political parties, and that are often transmitted from generation to generation. Only in America has life expectancy now fallen three years in a row, for the first time in a century, because of “deaths of despair.”

“The meaningfulness of the working-class life seems to have evaporated,” Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, told us. “The economy just seems to have stopped delivering for these people.” Deaton and the economist Anne Case, who is also his wife, coined the term “deaths of despair” to describe the surge of mortality from alcohol, drugs and suicide.

The kids on the No. 6 bus rode into a cataclysm as working-class communities disintegrated across America because of lost jobs, broken families, gloom — and failed policies. The suffering was invisible to affluent Americans, but the consequences are now evident to all: The survivors mostly voted for Trump, some in hopes that he would rescue them, but under him the number of children without health insurance has risen by more than 400,000.

The stock market is near record highs, but working-class Americans (often defined as those without college degrees) continue to struggle. If you’re only a high school graduate, or worse, a dropout, work no longer pays. If the federal minimum wage in 1968 had kept up with inflation and productivity, it would now be $22 an hour. Instead, it’s $7.25.

More at www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/opinion/sunday/deaths-despair-poverty.html

A $1 raise in minimum wage is associated with a drop in suicide rates of between 3.5 to 6% in people with a high school education or less. (Source: https://neurosciencenews.com/minimum-wage-suicide-15423/ )

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, January 12, 2020 8:37 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I hope you're ready to live without A/C when the next Democrat president gets in there and ratifies it for you in 2024.

I've been doing it for years. It's not that bad, most of the time.

This will be entertaining.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
You didn't bother to click on the article, did you? There are alternatives to hydrofluorocarbons that are NOT 1,000,000 times worse greenhouse gases than CO2. Even CO2 can be used as a refrigerant for air-conditioning. But it is nice to know that as a Trump voter you gave another example of having very little useful knowledge of what you have strong opinions about. Vote Trump in 2020! He will look after you! (He sure does look after people like me, but I won't vote Trump.)

HFCs: Super Greenhouse Gases
https://eia-global.org/campaigns/Climate/what-are-hydrofluorocarbons

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Why would I click on the article? You consistently put articles on the board and you never once take the time to put them in quotes and it looks as though you're trying to pass them off as your own work. Not one single thing you plagiarized in your post had anything to do with alternatives. It was all "Orange Man Bad", so coming from the source I just assumed that was the gist of the article, since that's the only thing that's been on your mind for three years.

So if there's this magic stuff that works so well, why aren't we already using it. It's not Trump's fault. It's probably because it doesn't work.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, January 12, 2020 9:35 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Why would I click on the article? You consistently put articles on the board and you never once take the time to put them in quotes and it looks as though you're trying to pass them off as your own work. Not one single thing you plagiarized in your post had anything to do with alternatives. It was all "Orange Man Bad", so coming from the source I just assumed that was the gist of the article, since that's the only thing that's been on your mind for three years.

So if there's this magic stuff that works so well, why aren't we already using it. It's not Trump's fault. It's probably because it doesn't work.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

The average house air conditioner is not using the alternatives to hydrofluorocarbon refrigerants because HFCs are $1.00 cheaper per pound. In the industry I worked in for the first 30 years of my career, petrochemicals, we didn't go for cheap, we used the best. I swear to God, 6ix, you are such a simpleton with delusions about your moral superiority and your work ethic. But that makes you the same as every other Trump voter I know. Keep on believing your falsehoods, you big whinny baby. That reminds me of Trump. I'll check on him! What is he doing this hour? He is doing exactly what you do all the time: complementing himself as superior to any Democrat. What an asshole he is. Please vote for him, 6ix. I tripled my net worth in the first 3 years of Trump. If he goes 8 years, I'll be a multi-billionaire, but I sure won't vote for that creepy dummy.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1216365925701705730

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, January 12, 2020 9:39 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Why would I click on the article? You consistently put articles on the board and you never once take the time to put them in quotes and it looks as though you're trying to pass them off as your own work. Not one single thing you plagiarized in your post had anything to do with alternatives. It was all "Orange Man Bad", so coming from the source I just assumed that was the gist of the article, since that's the only thing that's been on your mind for three years.

So if there's this magic stuff that works so well, why aren't we already using it. It's not Trump's fault. It's probably because it doesn't work.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
The average house air conditioner is not using the alternatives to hydrofluorocarbon refrigerants because HFCs are $1.00 cheaper per pound. In the industry I worked in for the first 30 years of my career, petrochemicals, we didn't go for cheap, we used the best. I swear to God, 6ix, you are such a simpleton with delusions about your moral superiority and your work ethic. But that makes you the same as every other Trump voter I know. Keep on believing your falsehoods, you big whinny baby. That reminds me of Trump. I'll checked on him. What is he doing this hour? He is doing exactly what you do all the time: complementing himself as superior to any Democrat. What an asshole he is. Please vote for him, 6ix. I tripled my net worth in the first 3 years of Trump. If he goes 8 years, I'll be a multi-billionaire, but I sure won't vote for that creepy dummy.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1216365925701705730

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Who's whining?

You're supposedly the richest guy on the board that's raking in millions of extra tax breaks right now and you're the biggest crybaby here.

If you hate Texas so much, fucking move already. We all know how much Nilbog hates where she lives, but she doesn't have a billion dollars to move to California where she thinks she'd be a lot happier. Supposedly, you do. Stop wasting all your time on this board and enjoy some of that money. Maybe do a few nice things for people with it so you don't have to feel so guilty that you have it.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, January 12, 2020 9:46 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Who's whining?

You're supposedly the richest guy on the board that's raking in millions of extra tax breaks right now and you're the biggest crybaby here.

If you hate Texas so much, fucking move already. We all know how much Nilbog hates where she lives, but she doesn't have a billion dollars to move to California where she thinks she'd be a lot happier. Supposedly, you do. Stop wasting all your time on this board and enjoy some of that money. Maybe do a few nice things for people with it so you don't have to feel so guilty that you have it.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

I love Texas! No income taxes. No rules for people like me. Republican politicians kissing my ass because I'm rich. What is not to like?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, January 12, 2020 10:01 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Who's whining?

You're supposedly the richest guy on the board that's raking in millions of extra tax breaks right now and you're the biggest crybaby here.

If you hate Texas so much, fucking move already. We all know how much Nilbog hates where she lives, but she doesn't have a billion dollars to move to California where she thinks she'd be a lot happier. Supposedly, you do. Stop wasting all your time on this board and enjoy some of that money. Maybe do a few nice things for people with it so you don't have to feel so guilty that you have it.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
I love Texas! No income taxes. No rules for people like me. Republican politicians kissing my ass because I'm rich. What is not to like?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Your life sounds "amazing".

You should probably stop bitching all of the time and maybe you'll enjoy it more.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, January 12, 2020 10:47 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Your life sounds "amazing".

You should probably stop bitching all of the time and maybe you'll enjoy it more.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

You mistake "bitching" for not enjoying myself. I like Republicans (but only the rich ones) because we share values. I dislike Trump because he lives up to a poor person's stereotype of a rich person. He is the ultimate clown. The poor people who defend Trump are even funnier than he is. I'm laughing at their delusions about their "moral" superiority and their irreplaceable place in the Texas economy. They think they are essential. They are stupid to believe it. Stupid people aren't paid well and a very low Federal minimum wage guarantees things will stay that way for them, until they get a clue. I expect most won't support raising the minimum.

Republican Views on the Minimum Wage
www.republicanviews.org/republican-views-on-minimum-wage/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, January 14, 2020 6:29 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

But you're a loser in life, and you'll never be able to grasp what it means to be working from facts.

And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?

So far repeated Republican attempts to destroy the Affordable Care Act have failed. In 2012 the Supreme Court rejected claims that the whole law was unconstitutional. In 2017 a Republican-controlled Congress narrowly failed to repeal Obamacare. And a variety of narrower efforts to undermine health reform and send insurance markets into a “death spiral” have fallen short: Markets seem to have stabilized, and one by one, states that initially rejected Medicaid expansion have been relenting.

The latest attempt is a lawsuit claiming that the 2017 tax cut, which reduced the penalty for not having insurance to $0, made the entire Affordable Care Act unconstitutional. The law suddenly becomes constitutional if the penalty was a penny or more. The Trump administration has joined the suit and a partisan Republican judge has indeed ruled that the A.C.A. as a whole should be struck down.

Clearly, this case is headed for the Supreme Court. But Trump doesn’t want it heard until after the election.

The Republican states on Friday agreed with Trump’s Department of Justice. “The lawfulness of the act is undoubtedly a matter of the utmost national importance, but the current petitions do not justify immediate, emergency review by the court,” said their brief, brought by the Republican attorney general of Texas and elected Republican officials in 17 other states. A group of Democratic-led states, which entered the case to defend the law, have asked the Supreme Court to rule right away. Their brief, filed last week, emphasized the major stakes of the case.

The Supreme Court could accept the case at this stage if four justices agree it is ripe for legal review. It would take a five-justice majority for the case to be considered on the “expedited basis” that would set up a ruling by the end of the court’s current session in June — before the 2020 election.

The entire case hinges on the A.C.A. being constitutional if the penalty for not having insurance is a penny or more, but unconstitutional if the penalty is $0. It is not a difficult, complex, or subtle case to decide. It doesn’t need a hundred pages of excruciatingly detailed legal reasoning to come to a conclusion, unless the Supreme Court Justices are blowing smoke in people’s faces to obscure the Court’s politics. Did a one-line change in the Tax Code of 2017 end Obamacare? Yes or No? If the one-line did end Obamacare, that really should have been mentioned when the bill was debated or else that was not what the 2017 Tax Code does.

More at www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/upshot/obamacare-lawsuit-delay-sought-trump
-republicans.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, January 14, 2020 9:09 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

But you're a loser in life, and you'll never be able to grasp what it means to be working from facts.

And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?

As soon as Friday, the Supreme Court could announce that it will hear Trump v. Pennsylvania, a case examining the Trump administration’s rules allowing virtually any employer to deny birth control coverage to its employees.

The case reignites a legal conflict over the rights of employers who object to contraception on religious grounds. This conflict raged throughout much of the Obama administration, then briefly simmered down after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death temporarily stripped conservatives of the Supreme Court majority they needed to expand the rights of religious employers.

The Trump administration’s rules permit employers to ignore the requirement to provide birth control coverage to their employees if the employer expresses either a religious or a “moral” objection to contraception — erasing the old rule that religious objectors may not undercut the rights of people who do not share their beliefs.

More at www.vox.com/2020/1/14/21059931/supreme-court-birth-control-religious-l
iberty-pennsylvania-little-sisters

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, January 14, 2020 9:52 AM

THG

Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:

If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.

Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.

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Tuesday, January 14, 2020 9:59 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Your life sounds "amazing".

You should probably stop bitching all of the time and maybe you'll enjoy it more.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
You mistake "bitching" for not enjoying myself. I like Republicans (but only the rich ones) because we share values. I dislike Trump because he lives up to a poor person's stereotype of a rich person. He is the ultimate clown. The poor people who defend Trump are even funnier than he is. I'm laughing at their delusions about their "moral" superiority and their irreplaceable place in the Texas economy. They think they are essential. They are stupid to believe it. Stupid people aren't paid well and a very low Federal minimum wage guarantees things will stay that way for them, until they get a clue. I expect most won't support raising the minimum.

Republican Views on the Minimum Wage
www.republicanviews.org/republican-views-on-minimum-wage/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

That's cool. At least we know that you enjoy yourself by being an awful person.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Tuesday, January 14, 2020 10:32 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

That's cool. At least we know that you enjoy yourself by being an awful person.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

6ix, are you feeling discriminated against? Many Trump voters do. At least the ones not rich:

Polls find that 55 percent of voters disapprove of the job he is doing, which roughly coincides with the percentage of voters who say he is ripping the country apart, and does not respect minorities. To be blunt, they think he’s a bigot and they don’t like a bigot as their president.

Nevertheless, unlike Democrats, Republicans simply don’t see Trump’s views and performance on race negatively — or maybe they refuse to confess that they see it that way because they don’t want to part ways with him. Eighty-five percent of Republicans approve or somewhat approve of his performance, with 65 percent saying they strongly approve. Tearing the country apart? No way, 68 percent of Republicans say. C’mon. They see Trump — and cheer him! — when he rips into Democrats, the media and anyone who criticizes him (such as the business leaders who quit his advisory councils). How can Trump supporters hoot and holler when Trump rips their foes and yet still claim that he is a great unifier?

One suspects that a high percentage of these Republicans know quite well how divisive Trump is, but they don’t want to think of their choice for president as someone who divides the country.

You see, a very large percentage of Republicans refuse to acknowledge Trump’s overt bigotry and divisiveness — or any other glaring character flaws. It’s not unusual for those who voted for a candidate to refuse to confess to their error or the candidate’s flaws.

When it comes to Trump, there is, however, something besides just voter denial and loyalty going on. A very large percentage of Republicans are convinced that minorities have an advantage over whites in this country. By every statistical measure, we know that is false, yet a plurality (40 percent) of Republicans, 38 percent of conservatives and 40 percent of white evangelicals are convinced that whites are the victims in society.

And that makes perfect sense. Trump’s core campaign message was about white grievance, as he sought to convince mostly working-class voters that their livelihood, their status and their cultural dominance were stolen from them by Democrats, “globalists,” elites and those who won’t say “Merry Christmas.” It’s only natural that the visceral connection that Trump made with them is hard to break. For these people, whenever Trump says or does something regarding minorities that others find horrifying, they see this as evidence that he is fighting for them and leveling the playing field (remember they think they’re the victims).

These voters are convinced that they’ve been done wrong, and it’s the fault of Democrats -- people who don’t look or live the way they do. This is identity politics run rampant, and Trump has perfected it.

www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/08/31/republicans-wont
-acknowledge-trump-is-a-really-bad-person/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, January 14, 2020 10:45 AM

THG

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

That's cool. At least we know that you enjoy yourself by being an awful person.

6ix, are you feeling discriminated against? Many Trump voters do. At least the ones not rich:

Polls find that 55 percent of voters disapprove of the job he is doing, which roughly coincides with the percentage of voters who say he is ripping the country apart, and does not respect minorities. To be blunt, they think he’s a bigot and they don’t like a bigot as their president.

Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.

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Wednesday, January 15, 2020 7:53 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

But you're a loser in life, and you'll never be able to grasp what it means to be working from facts.

And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?

The biggest selling point of Medicare for All is that it’s simple. Bernie and Liz should tell people that it means if they get sick, they just show their M4A card to any doctor or hospital and they get treated, full stop. And no one can take it away.

Amy Klobuchar’s moderate case against Medicare-for-all in two words: The Senate.

All of the Republican Senators and some Senate Democrats, including those who would lead the committees that write health care legislation, are NOT on board with single-payer. (Sanders supporters generally respond to these arguments by saying they don’t think they should be compromising on their ideal plan before a new president has even been elected. But the Senate is the place where good ideas ALWAYS die, unless either the Democrats or the Republicans have a super-majority of 67. The extra 7 votes above the 60 needed to override a filibuster allows for some stubborn old fool Senators to be ignored when passing good legislation. Thank Senator Joe Lieberman, a semi-Democrat, for no public option in Obamacare. There were only 60 Democratic Senators at the time Obamacare passed.)

Explanation of Public Option Vs. Single Payer
www.factcheck.org/2009/12/public-option-vs-single-payer/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, January 15, 2020 10:16 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

That's cool. At least we know that you enjoy yourself by being an awful person.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
6ix, are you feeling discriminated against? Many Trump voters do. At least the ones not rich:

Polls find that 55 percent of voters disapprove of the job he is doing, which roughly coincides with the percentage of voters who say he is ripping the country apart, and does not respect minorities. To be blunt, they think he’s a bigot and they don’t like a bigot as their president.

Uh huh.

#DemDebatesSoWhite

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, January 15, 2020 1:27 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

#DemDebatesSoWhite

Do Right, Be Right. :)

The Debates rules are biased against Wealth, not skin color; for the 7th debate, Bloomberg met polling criteria but not the fundraising criterion, as he is not currently asking for donations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Democratic_Party_presidential_debat
es#Qualification_7

Why didn’t Cory Booker catch on? It was not because he is black.
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/13/21063982/democratic-primary-
2020-cory-booker-drops-out

On Friday, I sat down with Sen. Cory Booker for 90 minutes. It was, simultaneously, one of the most inspiring and maddening interviews I’ve done with a presidential candidate. Inspiring because there is a moral radicalism and spiritual generosity to Booker’s politics that set him apart from other politicians. Maddening because when Booker turns his politics outward, they lose clarity. He shies away from drawing bright lines, his answers double back to blur out potential offense. In showing his love, he muddles his message.

There is a moral radicalism to the way Cory Booker lives out his politics. He lived for years in a housing project. He leads hunger strikes. He challenges political machines. He’s a vegan. He has a more ambitious policy vision than is often discussed, but beneath that is a far more radical ethical vision than he gets credit for.

The problem is that while he’s comfortable saying what that ethical vision demands of him, he’s very uncomfortable saying what it demands of the rest of us. In this conversation, I wanted Booker to risk my discomfort. And in his answers, I think you can hear both the remarkable promise of Booker’s politics and some of the challenges that have held back his campaign.

One exchange particularly stood out to me. I was pressing Booker on the way the current political moment rewards confrontation with attention and sharp line-drawing with support. Booker replied:

Barack Obama, God bless him, he played by the Queen’s rules, for lack of a better way of putting it. This president [Trump] is breaking norms and traditions every day to demean, distract, divide, degrade. If I’m the president of the United States, I’m not playing by the Queen’s rules. I will do things from that office people do not expect.

Okay, I asked. Like what?

Booker wouldn’t say. “I’m not going to do that because part of it is the element of surprise,” he replied. To that I reply "BULLSHIT! I'm not voting you."

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, January 15, 2020 3:03 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

That's cool. At least we know that you enjoy yourself by being an awful person.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
6ix, are you feeling discriminated against? Many Trump voters do. At least the ones not rich:

Polls find that 55 percent of voters disapprove of the job he is doing, which roughly coincides with the percentage of voters who say he is ripping the country apart, and does not respect minorities. To be blunt, they think he’s a bigot and they don’t like a bigot as their president.

Uh huh.

#DemDebatesSoWhite

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Uh huh.

#DemDebatesSoWhite

Do Right, Be Right. :)
The Debates rules are biased against Wealth, not skin color; for the 7th debate, Bloomberg met polling criteria but not the fundraising criterion, as he is not currently asking for donations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Democratic_Party_presidential_debat
es#Qualification_7

Why didn’t Cory Booker catch on? It was not because he is black.
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/13/21063982/democratic-primary-
2020-cory-booker-drops-out

On Friday, I sat down with Sen. Cory Booker for 90 minutes. It was, simultaneously, one of the most inspiring and maddening interviews I’ve done with a presidential candidate. Inspiring because there is a moral radicalism and spiritual generosity to Booker’s politics that set him apart from other politicians. Maddening because when Booker turns his politics outward, they lose clarity. He shies away from drawing bright lines, his answers double back to blur out potential offense. In showing his love, he muddles his message.

There is a moral radicalism to the way Cory Booker lives out his politics. He lived for years in a housing project. He leads hunger strikes. He challenges political machines. He’s a vegan. He has a more ambitious policy vision than is often discussed, but beneath that is a far more radical ethical vision than he gets credit for.

The problem is that while he’s comfortable saying what that ethical vision demands of him, he’s very uncomfortable saying what it demands of the rest of us. In this conversation, I wanted Booker to risk my discomfort. And in his answers, I think you can hear both the remarkable promise of Booker’s politics and some of the challenges that have held back his campaign.

One exchange particularly stood out to me. I was pressing Booker on the way the current political moment rewards confrontation with attention and sharp line-drawing with support. Booker replied:

Barack Obama, God bless him, he played by the Queen’s rules, for lack of a better way of putting it. This president [Trump] is breaking norms and traditions every day to demean, distract, divide, degrade. If I’m the president of the United States, I’m not playing by the Queen’s rules. I will do things from that office people do not expect.

Okay, I asked. Like what?

Booker wouldn’t say. “I’m not going to do that because part of it is the element of surprise,” he replied. To that I reply "BULLSHIT! I'm not voting you."

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Uh huh.

#DemDebatesSoWhite

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, January 16, 2020 12:38 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

But you're a loser in life, and you'll never be able to grasp what it means to be working from facts.

And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?

(Trump denies climate change and Trump added the W76-2 nuke to America's arsenal specifically for assassinating leaders in Iran and N. Korea with "Fire and Fury", Trump's trademark.}

America Has Built a Global Dystopia

Scheer asks Chomsky a question on many people’s minds nowadays as a variety of human caused factors threaten humanity’s very existence. “Is this the end of time for our species?” he asks. “I reread your book, ‘Hegemony or Survival,’ and firstly, you mentioned there that the typical life of a species is 100,000 years and that we may be coming to the end of this disfavor. And secondly, it’s an open question whether being smart, as we define smart, is an important way of averting disaster and preventing the disintegration of the species.

“The reason it’s a relevant question right at this moment,” Scheer continues, “is because we had the best and the brightest, as David Halberstam had described them, who gave us the Cold War and gave us Vietnam and gave us Iraq and everything else and, you know, gave away the money from Main Street to Wall Street, and all that. And now we have somebody who people like to think of as very crude, boorish, ill-mannered, which is Donald Trump. And we have Trump-washing. Suddenly the smart, liberal people who created much of this mischief are now whitewashed, or Trump-washed, by this buffoon.”

“[‘Hegemony or Survival’] begins with the discussion by the great biologist Ernst Mayr, who [makes the point] that intelligence seems to be a kind of lethal mutation,” Chomsky explains. “If you look through what’s called biological success, what allows the species to survive and proliferate, turns out as you move up the scale of what we call intelligence, capacity to survive declines. So the species that are really very successful are beetles, for example, which have a fixed niche; they never change. Everything changes, the whole world changes, but they stick to their niche and keep reproducing and they’re fine. … As you move up to … bigger mammals—their capacity to survive declines. What about when you get to humans? Well, you could argue that … we are now proving Mayr’s thesis. Not so much for the reasons you mentioned, which are bad enough, but we are racing to destroy the possibility of organized human life. And it’s a cooperation of those who call themselves the best and the brightest, and the Trumpian boors … all racing toward disaster, perfectly consciously, a great testimonial to human intelligence. And that’s only the beginning.”

Chomsky discusses the incredible global failure to address the climate crisis, as well as the nuclear arms race, which are both leading humanity to a precipice that may be impossible to walk away from.

More at www.truthdig.com/articles/noam-chomsky-america-has-built-a-global-dyst
opia/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, January 17, 2020 8:13 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

But you're a loser in life, and you'll never be able to grasp what it means to be working from facts.

And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?

Every advanced country mandates some form of paid leave for new mothers, typically three or four months — every country, that is, except America, which offers no maternity leave at all.

Most advanced countries devote substantial sums to benefits for families with children; in Europe these benefits average between 2 and 3 percent of G.D.P. The corresponding number for the United States is 0.6 percent of G.D.P.

Even where the United States does help children, the quality of that help tends to be poor. There have been many comparisons between French and American school lunches: French schoolchildren are taught to eat healthy meals; American children are basically treated as a disposal site for farm surpluses.

What’s especially striking is the contrast between the way we treat our children and the way we treat our senior citizens. Social Security isn’t all that generous — there’s a good case for expanding it — but it doesn’t compare too badly with other countries’ retirement systems. Medicare actually spends lavishly compared with single-payer systems elsewhere.

So America’s refusal to help children isn’t part of a broad opposition to government programs; we single out children for especially harsh treatment. It’s probably too much to claim that helping children pays for itself. But it surely comes a lot closer to doing so than tax cuts for the rich.

So we should be talking a lot more about helping America’s children. Why aren’t we?

At least part of the blame rests with Bernie Sanders, who made Medicare for All both a progressive purity test and a bright shiny object chased by the news media at the expense of other policies that are far more likely to become law.

Whoever becomes the Democratic nominee, I hope he or she will give our nation’s shameful treatment of children the attention it deserves.

More at www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/opinion/children-america.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, January 18, 2020 6:30 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

THAT THE POOR have any rights at all in this country is largely due to the passage, in 1935, of the Social Security Act. At the time, all across America, state and local relief programs had gone bankrupt. New York City didn’t even have such a program. The 1897 City Charter forbade it.

Essentially, Roosevelt’s New Deal and Truman’s Fair Deal created two primary entitlements. First, the Social Security Act gave states access to unlimited matching federal funds. And then, in 1950, the federal government granted individuals entitlement status, depriving states and cities of the power to deny the needy.

The Social Security Act contained deep flaws. It allowed localities to establish different benefit levels, which could never be standardized by the federal government. This crazy-quilt pattern kept the U.S. from mandating welfare as a national program, the way European nations do. And the provisions for unemployment compensation — at the urging of Southern congressmen — left out blacks by exempting maids and farm workers. But for all its defects, the Social Security Act did grant poor people entitlement status. Local governments can’t simply turn them away with the explanation, “That’s all folks, the money’s run out.” If that happens, officials are obligated to raise more.

More at www.villagevoice.com/2020/01/14/republican-nation-the-new-poor-laws/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, January 18, 2020 6:37 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The 2020s were pretty well predicted by Octavia E. Butler and other science fiction authors. The debate over climate change, the eroding of workers’ rights, the rise of the private prison industry, and the media’s increasing refusal to talk about all of these in favor of focusing on soundbite propaganda and celebrity news.

More at https://onezero.medium.com/how-science-fiction-imagined-the-2020s-f8e9
8a5bc729

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, January 20, 2020 7:00 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

“What is the Most Useful Idea in Economics?”

https://angrybearblog.com/2020/01/what-is-the-most-useful-idea-in-econ
omics.html

On January 18, 1933, Arthur Dahlberg appeared before a Senate subcommittee to give testimony on the thirty-hour work week bill. A small part of his testimony:

This capitalistic economy of ours is a bargaining economy. It is the same animal whether labor return is 90 per cent of the national income or 60, and the capital return 10 or 40 per cent. (43% in 2019 www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/employment-and-growth/a-new-look-at
-the-declining-labor-share-of-income-in-the-united-states )

The injection of machinery has diverted labor effort, has generated positions which undermine the bargaining power of workers in their dickering with employers.

During the course of the 1920s, for instance, when machinery came in very rapidly, they were unable to bargain to themselves a share of the national income commensurate with that going to the employer. The employers got most of the benefits from the injection of labor-saving machinery.

I also want to point out another effect generated, slow-moving effect, generated by this injection of labor-saving machinery. The very nature of the capitalistic process is this: that the recipients of claims to wealth must pour them back either in buying commodities or in investment in plant or stock. We got unemployment and a devitalized behavior.

If I was an employer and employed 100 men, and am spending, either for commodities, whatever they are, or for new plant, if I spend immediately the system clicks along without breakdown, but if I then inject, we will say, labor-saving machinery, which permits me to lay off 50 men, those men are unemployed until I utilize my increased profit derived from the injection of that machinery in buying other commodities for myself, or in building new plants, employing men to put up more brick.

More at https://angrybearblog.com/2020/01/what-is-the-most-useful-idea-in-econ
omics.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, January 21, 2020 11:02 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Immunotherapy — which expanded into the market in 2015 — had only limited effects on the drop in overall cancer mortality.

Much bigger drops in US cancer mortality would come from a fairer society. The American Cancer Society estimates that, in 2014, 59% of lung-cancer deaths observed in people aged 25–74 could have been averted by eliminating socio-economic disparities.

The data do make it clear that the majority of our most effective solutions will be found outside the cabinet of cutting-edge medicines.

That means we need to create strategies to treat hypertension, end the use of tobacco products, dismantle policies that promote obesity and use of environmental carcinogens, encourage physical activity and reduce levels of carcinogens in the environment. More effective drugs and sophisticated treatments that work would be nice. But what we really need is that the person being treated did not have cancer at all.

Our public policy is a series of self-inflicted wounds. The current US administration has allowed loopholes that let the known carcinogen asbestos remain in use. It has failed to improve standards for airborne particulate pollution, clearly linked to higher rates of diseases and death. It reversed a decision to ban a pesticide, chlorpyrifos, associated with impaired childhood brain development, and atrazine, linked to leukaemia.

We, as a society, are not doing what it takes to maximize our health. We are prioritizing medications that cost US$100,000 a year or more, and at the same time are loosening restrictions on environmental pollution. Both of these policies have one thing in common: they enhance corporate profits. It will take a realignment of public policy to make sure that we pursue systems that instead prioritize health.

More at www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00116-2

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, January 21, 2020 11:30 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Immunotherapy — which expanded into the market in 2015 — had only limited effects on the drop in overall cancer mortality.

Much bigger drops in US cancer mortality would come from a fairer society. The American Cancer Society estimates that, in 2014, 59% of lung-cancer deaths observed in people aged 25–74 could have been averted by eliminating socio-economic disparities.

The data do make it clear that the majority of our most effective solutions will be found outside the cabinet of cutting-edge medicines.

That means we need to create strategies to treat hypertension, end the use of tobacco products, dismantle policies that promote obesity and use of environmental carcinogens, encourage physical activity and reduce levels of carcinogens in the environment. More effective drugs and sophisticated treatments that work would be nice. But what we really need is that the person being treated did not have cancer at all.

Our public policy is a series of self-inflicted wounds. The current US administration has allowed loopholes that let the known carcinogen asbestos remain in use. It has failed to improve standards for airborne particulate pollution, clearly linked to higher rates of diseases and death. It reversed a decision to ban a pesticide, chlorpyrifos, associated with impaired childhood brain development, and atrazine, linked to leukaemia.

We, as a society, are not doing what it takes to maximize our health. We are prioritizing medications that cost US$100,000 a year or more, and at the same time are loosening restrictions on environmental pollution. Both of these policies have one thing in common: they enhance corporate profits. It will take a realignment of public policy to make sure that we pursue systems that instead prioritize health.

More at www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00116-2

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

It's a nice idea, but it's never going to happen.

This article only shows the negatives on one side of the equation. It gives all the blame to those making money off of the victims and zero blame to the victims themselves.

I smoke. I enjoy smoking. I've made a life for myself where I do a lot of self destructive things. As I've gotten older, I've been doing the best that I can to slowly remove those things from my life. I can't tell you what it would be like to be gluttonous to the point that you can barely get your ass out of bed, or how it feels to constantly be broke and to have run out of friends and family to bail you out because of your crippling gambling addiction, etc... but I can empathize with them because of my own vices, past and present.

The only way to do what this article states is to make things illegal and give fines that is going to piss a whole lot of people off (and we already know doesn't work with alcohol prohibition, taxing cigarettes to the point that poor people have to take payday loans to buy them individually, and all those shiny new pot shops opening up all around the country), or to become a tyrannical government that will harshly punish people with jail time or even death for doing things that it doesn't feel are appropriate.

Anything is possible with sufficient negative stimuli.

We all know about my vices here. What are yours? What do you enjoy doing to the point of compulsion that you try your best to hide from all of those Texas Republicans you've surrounded yourself with?

If the answer is nothing, you're lying.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Tuesday, January 21, 2020 11:36 AM

CAPTAINCRUNCH

... stay crunchy...

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Immunotherapy — which expanded into the market in 2015 — had only limited effects on the drop in overall cancer mortality.

Much bigger drops in US cancer mortality would come from a fairer society. The American Cancer Society estimates that, in 2014, 59% of lung-cancer deaths observed in people aged 25–74 could have been averted by eliminating socio-economic disparities.

The data do make it clear that the majority of our most effective solutions will be found outside the cabinet of cutting-edge medicines.

That means we need to create strategies to treat hypertension, end the use of tobacco products, dismantle policies that promote obesity and use of environmental carcinogens, encourage physical activity and reduce levels of carcinogens in the environment. More effective drugs and sophisticated treatments that work would be nice. But what we really need is that the person being treated did not have cancer at all.

Our public policy is a series of self-inflicted wounds. The current US administration has allowed loopholes that let the known carcinogen asbestos remain in use. It has failed to improve standards for airborne particulate pollution, clearly linked to higher rates of diseases and death. It reversed a decision to ban a pesticide, chlorpyrifos, associated with impaired childhood brain development, and atrazine, linked to leukaemia.

We, as a society, are not doing what it takes to maximize our health. We are prioritizing medications that cost US$100,000 a year or more, and at the same time are loosening restrictions on environmental pollution. Both of these policies have one thing in common: they enhance corporate profits. It will take a realignment of public policy to make sure that we pursue systems that instead prioritize health.

More at www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00116-2

Even with lower rates, all you have to do is drive around any large municipality and you'll see just how profitable the field is overall. Many of the new hospital wings or specialty HC buildings in my area are devoted to treating and researching cancer. I'm sure a fair portion of the vast amount money raised for fighting cancer goes toward Prevention and Elimination programs, but the real money is made with Treatment. And guess what? You can't treat the disease without patients. Just saying. Do hospitals really want to end cancer? It would be very interesting to see the numbers and listen to related conversations at after work cocktail parties. They couldn't just shutter new wings, could they? It's a twisted symbiotic relationship.
However... before it gets too dark... if Treatment is good enough it is perhaps the closest we can reasonably get to eliminating it by making it a single digit % threat.

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Wednesday, January 22, 2020 7:18 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Netherlands has universal health insurance — and it’s all private

Why the Dutch ended up with private health insurance for everybody

Democrats in the United States who support Medicare-for-all want to take a fractured and stratified health care system and make it more unified and equitable through nationalized health insurance.

The Netherlands saw the same problems in the mid-2000s, but they came up with a different fix.

Before then, the country had a two-tiered health care system: About two-thirds of the country was covered by a social health insurance program, and the remaining third was covered by private insurance. Disparities developed between the two tiers; wealthier people got better access to doctors with their private coverage.

By 2006, the two-tiered system teetered on the brink. Health care was becoming very expensive for the middle class, who faced high out-of-pocket costs. Yet private insurance was more attractive to doctors, because it paid better, than the public program that was covering people with lower incomes. And about 2 percent of the population still lacked insurance. (8.5% were uninsured in the US during 2018.
https://khn.org/news/number-of-americans-without-insurance-rises-in-20
18/ )

So the Dutch decided to overhaul their health insurance. The ruling center-right government compromised on a program to achieve universal coverage, which both sides agreed was essential, without abandoning the private market.

“There was a window of opportunity. The old system had really hit a wall,” Patrick Jeurissen, a health policy professor at Radboud University in Nijmegen, told me.

The average cost to a Dutch citizen for health insurance is about 1,400 euros, or $1,615, annually. The annual deductible is today capped at €385 ($429) . . . More precisely: In 2019, basic health insurance in the Netherlands would on average cost 1,453 euros per year per person.

More at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/17/21046874/netherlands-univers
al-health-insurance-private

=====================

I was not sure I believed those low, low costs. I looked it up. This is what I found:

Basic health insurance in the Netherlands (basisverzekering)
www.iamexpat.nl/expat-info/insurances-netherlands/dutch-health-insuran
ce
Basic health insurance costs around 100 euros per month and covers:

Appointments with your doctor (huisarts)
Stays at the hospital, surgery and emergency treatment (ziekenhuis)
Ambulance services and patient transport (ambulancevervoer)
Medicine prescriptions (medicijnen)
Blood tests (bloedonderzoek)
Dental care for children under 18 years (tandarts)
Limited dental care for adults over 18, restricted to dental surgery, dental x-rays
Mental health care (geestelijke gezondheidszorg)
Appointments with medical specialists such as dermatologists, allergists or internal specialists (medisch specialist)
Pregnancy, birth care and midwifery services (zwangerschaps- en geboortezorg)
Maternity care (kraamzorg)
Handicapped care (gehandicaptenzorg)
Aged care (ouderenzorg)
Nursing on location (wijkverpleging)
Some therapeutic services such as speech therapy, occupational therapy and diet advice
Physiotherapy (fysiotherapie) for chronic disorders, covered from the 21st treatment onwards
More at www.iamexpat.nl/expat-info/insurances-netherlands/dutch-health-insuran
ce

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, January 22, 2020 8:34 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Interestingly, one of those pop=up articles was about Australian health care, which is also a "mixed" system: There is universal government health care, but wealthier are encouraged to buy private insurance thru penalties. Like the Dutch system, tho, the private healthcare system is in a death-spiral: The private care, in private hospitals with private doctors, is more personalized and "nicer" but it is so much more expensive that younger healthier people are opting out, leaving older sicker people in privaye care which is becoming ever-more expensive.

In the Australian mileu, it looks as if the choice will be for public healthcare.

The article that you posted, SECOND, seems to confirm the general trend that private insurance ultimately becomes too expensive.

Quote:
Dutch patients face higher financial barriers to care than their peers in more socialized systems, and spending has accelerated in recent years, trends the critics blame on the privatized market.
Still, for now, the indicators seem undeniable...

The Dutch had to make several important adjustments in order to force the continued existence of private insurance.

The first is that everyone is absolutely mandated to buy, there's no such thing as opting out.

The second is that the public system had to disappear, since private healthcare was being outcompeted, cost-wise, by the public system. No more Medicare!

Aside from individual purchases (how would the USA force the indigent and working poor to pay for insurance premiums? Obviously the Dutch have far better safety net than we do) employers and the government also kick into the sytem.

INSURERS GENERALLY OPERATE AS NONPROFITS.

SO DO HOSPITALS (NONPROFIT).

There is according to their doctors a lot of red tape and administrative overhead. Services operate under price controls. So in reality, it's not as if "private healthcare" was saved en-masse, since both for-profit insurers and big hospital corporations would become a thing of the past. In reality, it's the doctors, specialists and nurses who're privatized.

They do one specific thing that saves money: They make housecalls.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!

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Wednesday, January 22, 2020 9:11 AM