American Civilization

An Excellent Idea

Bleg
Yes, this is a post about a bleg. (Begging on a Blog == Bleg). Yes, there are about a thousand of these and most of them have worthy causes.

I think this is indicative of a far larger problem though.

She was only 14 years old when she was an eighth grader, a cheerleader, a young, vibrant girl with her whole life ahead of her. She was only 14 years old, when she enjoyed her last year of life as a normal, healthy girl.

She was only 15 years old, when she started chemotherapy for Ewing's Sarcoma, a rare form of childhood cancer that attacks the bones. She lost her hair, had the cancerous bone in her pelvis removed, and then her lungs started to deteriorate.

She lived through her 16th year with an oxygen bottle her closest companion, as her lung function approached a mere 20% of normal capacity.

In May of 2007, she was only 17 years old, when she finally had a double lung transplant, to replace lungs killed by interstices lung disease, brought on by the chemotherapy which saved her from the bone cancer.

When her health insurance is canceled later this year, it will be canceled with the simple explanation that she has reached her "lifetime maximum benefits."

Maximum Lifetime Benefits, another of the charming euphemisms come up with by our healthcare for profit system.

It might as well be called 'Maximum Lifespan Benefits'.

UPDATE II - Insurance companies are constantly canceling insurance for the people who need it most, like Brittani. And then the insurance they are able to get to replace their canceled policy is usually terrible, restricting care, curtailing choice, and ultimately subject to cancellation, or "rescission," to use the industry term, once the insured person starts to make actual use of the policy.

"Blue Cross is one of several California insurers that have come under fire for issuing policies without checking applications and then canceling coverage after individuals incur major medical costs. The practice of canceling coverage, known in the industry as rescission, is under scrutiny by state regulators, lawmakers and the courts.
. . . .

Victims of cancer and other serious medical problems often are unable to get new coverage once their insurance has been rescinded and they may go without treatment when they need it most. Suddenly swamped by medical debt, some people have lost homes and businesses. -- Source, L.A. Times"

Honestly, why couldn't we have a Democrat with a spine, who would simply go out on stage at a debate and say, "You want to know a difference between myself and my opponents? I'm going to kill private health insurance. That's right. I'm going to make a single payer system and nationalize Aetna, Blue Cross, etc. There's not a damn thing they can do about it."

People hate their health insurance providers so much, that mythical candidate with a backbone would win by 30 points, guaranteed.

I guess the lobbyist checkbooks are just too hefty.

Source: Justice For None

A Shocker
This one shocked me, that's for sure. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously, on the side of workers -- and the Bush administration wanted it that way.

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that individual participants in the most common type of retirement plan can sue under a pension protection law to recover their losses.

The unanimous decision has implications for 50 million workers with $2.7 trillion invested in 401(k) retirement plans.

James LaRue of Southlake, Texas, said the value of his stock market holdings plunged $150,000 when administrators at his retirement plan failed to follow his instructions to switch to safer investments.

The issue in the LaRue case was whether the Employee Retirement Income Security Act permits an individual account holder to sue plan administrators for breaching their fiduciary duties.

The language of the law refers to recovering money for the "plan" rather than for an individual, raising the question of whether a participant can sue solely for himself.

Justice John Paul Stevens, in his opinion for the court, said that such lawsuits are allowed. "Fiduciary misconduct need not threaten the solvency of the entire plan to reduce benefits below the amount that participants would otherwise receive," Stevens said.

In other words, if someone is negligent with your money, you can sue to recover it. SHOCKING

Employers were of course opposed to this, but, eh, who cares.

Source: Yahoo News

Military-Idiot Complex, the Moron Triangle
So the Seattle Times has been doing some stories about how, gee, campaign contributions lead to disgusting political favors.

Big surprise there.

Heath and military affairs specialist Hal Bernton found a disturbing trend in awards that representatives in the Pacific Northwest were handing out: Money was going towards manufacturing products that would never be used, or that nobody asked for to begin with.

One such product was Microvision Corporation's "Nomad," a helmet with a mounted computer display, meant to flash maps and relevant data to a soldier in combat. In 2001, Senator Slade Gorton (R-WA), who would later join Microvision's board, earmarked $8 million for the development of the "Nomad."

Democratic Senator Patty Murray, his successor, would appropriate a total of $11.5 million more to buy the helmets.

"Junk," one Army commander called the helmets, which have never seen combat; a contractor called Rockwell Collins was awarded the contract instead, but Senator Murray awarded Microvision $6 million for the purchase of their product anyway.

Ahh, bipartisanship! It sure gets things done.

Source: Raw Story

Florida Sucks
Seriously. They still qualify as a state?

A small fire took out the electrical grid for most of the state, including several nuclear reactors!

MIAMI, Florida (CNN) -- Florida authorities are investigating how a small fire and a switch failure at an electrical substation outside Miami triggered a power failure that affected millions of people.

When a nuclear power plant sensed the disruption, it shut down. In turn, the state's power grid triggered rolling blackouts Tuesday across the state.

More than 2 million people lost power at the peak of the outages, but electricity quickly was restored to most parts of the state.

Authorities said no injuries were reported.

Morons!

Olivera said Turkey Point's two nuclear reactors and a natural gas-powered generation unit automatically shut down when the plant's systems detected a fluctuation in the power grid.

"In a fraction of a second, the demand was far greater than the power plants that were online generating electricity could handle," he said. "When you have that kind of imbalance, we have a system that kicks in and it starts turning people's lights off, essentially balancing the demand with what's available."

So the official Floridian solution to demand exceeding supply (because a short is dumping all the current on a small line into the ground) is to CUT PRODUCTION, THUS CAUSING A BIGGER DEFICIT IN SUPPLY, THUS CAUSING THEM TO CUT SUPPLY, THUS CAUSING A BIGGER DEFICIT...

Yeesh. We're lucky this process didn't continue all the way back through time, until they were hunting and gathering for berries.

Source: CNN.com

More Mad Cow
It's baaaaaaaaack....

Canadian officials confirmed a new case of mad cow disease Tuesday, the second such case in two months and the 12th since the disease was first discovered in Canada in 2003.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency said no part of the carcass entered the human food or animal feed chains. The cow was detected in Alberta under a national monitoring program that targets cattle most at risk for the disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

...


U.S. Department of Agriculture Deputy Secretary Chuck Conner said Canada's latest case would not affect trade with the U.S. "This is no cause for concern," Conner said.

Right, unless you really want to AVOID dying in one of the most horrifying manners imaginable.

Source: Raw Story

Health Care With Pirates

A Musical Adventure

Sunday Morning Stomachache News

Apple juice it soothes the pain...

I Just Hope It Doesn't Mean Another Costume Change
So the United Nations is teaming up with Marvel to do a comic promoting UN humanitarian efforts to children, starring Spiderman.

I've actually seen worse; I acquired for my brother in law a copy of a Target/Marvel comic to promote reading, when I worked at that hellstore. The plot involved traveling through time and reading hieroglypics, which were intrepreted as sequential art, thus proving that you had to have both literacy AND comics to defeat the villain and save the world.

Compared to that, this sounds positively restrained. Unless, of course, you get a new villain, Doc Republican, who tries to cut UN funding because he thinks that an army of black helicopters is going to invade his stately mansion, where he conducts illegal cloning experiments on puppies.

Hmm. I take it back; that could be entertaining, and couldn't be any worse than the original Spiderman Clone Saga..

Source: The BBC

Catholic Hospital Says Yes to Breast Implants, But Only for XX Women
Ok, long story short, a transgendered person wants to get breast implants. Their hospital says no, Catholic doctrine only allows us to give regular women breast implants. They're suing under a California law that prohibits religious discrimination in healthcare.

Honestly, it's about time. First we had to have an actual debate in Connecticut over making Catholic hospitals stock emergency contraception for rape victims, now this, and of course they still ban abortions and sterilization procedures. Why do we let any church dictate health policy in this country? If they want to help people by providing quality healthcare, fine, dandy; but they need to do it on reasonable, scientific terms, or they can pack up their game and go home to the Vatican already.

Source: PageOneQ

Fascism is What you Make of It?So, despite recent non-seller Liberal Fascism by that Doughiest of Pantloads, Jonah Goldberg, it seems that real world fascists remain stubbornly conservative. Sadly, No! highlights a recent ad by the Gathering of Eagles group, comparing anti-war protestors COde Pink to a lethal bacteriological strain, and noting how similar that was to certain Nazi propaganda tools... like....

The Jew will be identified! The same battle which Pasteur and Koch had to fight must be led by us today. Innumerable sicknesses have their origin in one bacillus: the Jew! Japan would also have got it had it been remained open any longer to the Jew. We will get well when we eliminate the Jews. --Good Old Liberal Adolf

Yeah, I think we win this one again, Jonah.

Source: Sadly, No!


This Had Better Not Stop Me From Getting Eureka 7 Vol. 11 On Time
There used to be defective runs of dvds like this all the time, but these days it's so rare it's actually newsworthy. A bunch of Bandai dvds for their January 8th release window have a very high rate of defect; reportedly as much as 10-25% a title being unplayable. That's a fairly astonishing quality assurance problem.

But like I said; this had better not stop me from getting Eureka 7 Vol. 11. I need to know what happens to *blank* when they get to *blank* after *blank* *blankity blank*

Spoilers removed for your convenience.

Source: Anime News Network