The real pork!

With the current economic ‘crises’ that seem to be prevailing the nation and parts of the world, one has to look the prematurely started presidential campaign and its estimated expenditure over its course. Estimates have already pegged the campaign spending for Obama’s reelection, both through his campaign and outside proponents, at one billion dollars. That is a lot of money that is really going towards one thing, the possible election of one person into a position of ternary power.

Not only should we be looking at how such an affront to the democratic process where the populous is set with determining the officials to be elected is allowed to exist within all manner of legal means but why so much money is being diverted into semi-useless facets when it can be diverted to more important measures. Regardless of how much money is spent on the election campaign, the election will happen and someone will win it, the levels of excess in spending for campaigns is almost pointless in the long run.

In school we are taught about the evils and dishonesty in the old political machines of 100 years ago, where the dead voted, thugs coerced citizens to select their Man and special interests paid handsomely for special favors. All such practices were looked upon with disdain and some elicited legal recourse. Yet here we are after the hay day of the Big Chicago Machine and the same situations are mostly recurring, with full abandon and in the limelight.

The same type of political gerrymandering that occurred at the turn of the last century and was considered, immoral, illegal and unethical, is now protected, supported and encouraged by the legal system. Now instead of having to supply a suitcase of hundreds in a seedy motel you show up at a luncheon and write a check, then turn around and get a break on your taxes for doing your thing to support the candidate of your flavor.

The idea of having the people, the citizens of the nation, elect their officials is farcical when a few hundred extremely wealthy individuals are the ones that provide the most financial support for elections, fill the ears of the officials at all times through their PAC’s while in office and ultimately massage their own agendas into place. While at the same time, having enough money left over to apply the appropriate messages and sounds bites to sway public opinion in their favor.

This is not new, nor has our nation ever been without this sort of influence, what is most disparaging is the fact that it is open, accepted and legally within the bounds of the system and has been building to this point for a long time now.

Regardless of your political bend, the Amerikan ideal of ‘I have mine, so screw you’ needs to end if we are going to survive as a people. I would say it is shocking that so many purported followers of Christ, who taught nothing but acceptance, compassion, sharing and caring for fellow man, are some of the most vocal supporters of this ideology…but that would mean these people would have to be true to their faith every once in a while instead of using it as a weapon for their own hatreds.

SAVE NOW! Only 3 instalments!!

How we can save innocents with greater fire power!

So according to this post, the military has developed an explosive material for munitions that is capable of exerting up to 5x the kinetic damage that the current munitions cause. Yet, by doing this we can decrease civilian casualty levels! It sounds pretty magical to me!!

So what they are saying is...the explosion will be more direct and larger, thus somehow reducing collateral damage while increasing catastrophic damage? I like that logic. So if we can make our rounds explode more forcefully outright instead of just hitting something them exploding for lamer damage totals we not only get to obliterate the target with some button combo power up found in Nintendo Power, but it also emits a Mother Teresa like aura of militant saintism to protect children and women and elderly.

Somehow this logic eludes me...but then again, it's the military. I guess I don't know any better.

I think by that logic...the atomic bomb would only have killed military targets and most of the residents of Nagasaki and Hiroshima would not have been incinerated. That munition too was made of special combinations of different metals that exploded with a concentrated reaction on impact with the target, releasing a great amount of energy compared to a standard munition of similar size...perhaps as much as 1000x more (that's like the 10-string from hell!).

Perhaps I am misunderstanding...maybe the real benefit of this round is that the casing it's self is consumed in the explosion where as normally fragments of the casing would fly everywhere in a hail of shrapnel. So instead when we hit the school on accidentpurpose all of the students/terrorists in training will be vaporized or left completely un-phased...accept for the idea that the round does 5x the explosive damage there by just blowing everyone up instead of hitting the people further away with some shrapnel, possibly causing them to have an uncomfortable existence with various levels of alloy imbedded in them. Yes...this seems much more humane. Just incinerate them and get it over with instead of letting them go through hours of painful surgery and months of painful recovery.

Primer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_military_history_events

Revenge of the Sith

My original idea was to unplug my connection to a television signal.
That got changed to blocking all of the stations accept PBS and the kids cartoon station. Now...I feel I have to stay in tune and tuned up during the 2012 presidential cycle that began a month ago. For once I want to be as wide eyed during the cycle as much as possible...as I continue to miss things about candidates I end up voting for that would otherwise have caused me to not vote for them.
I want to put an end to voting to stop the other guy from getting in. There is a high chance in 2012 I may just write in a candidate given the historic nature of 'both' parties that typically sit at the top. So, stay tuned...because I'm going to get a bit radical in my dogma.
I have come to the conclusion that the Republicans and Democrats on the national stage are some of the greatest threats to the citizens of the united states of the Bank of America. the rhetoric and policies of the liberals and conservatives do nothing but further capitalism, which only benefits the people who already have all the money, regardless of what all of you believe or think. sure...you can get pretty well off on your own means if you have the correct amount of luck, backing and intestinal fortitude. But, no matter how big your house is in the lot and how much your monthly lease is for your car you still lose.
The reason you lose is because 10 minutes by car from your enclave is a group of youths who are desperate, isolated and resigned enough to their fate to do what it takes to ease their wants and placate their sense of desolation by taking it from you.

A couch by another name is a little bigger than a loveseat or a chaise lounge.

In discussing the horrors of computer disseminated intelligence I got on the subject of semantics and verbiage. There are a number of things that have a variety of names. Like the Eskimos supposedly have 10,000 works for snow.

For about a decade now I ponder ever so often the reason why we have a number of different terms for a ‘couch’. Yet I have not been motivated enough to actually find out why.

Couch

Davenport

Sofa

Divan

Chesterfield

Semantics…but apparently from quick internet based research sofa would seem the most appropriate, but only when the political climate is not controlled by Arab hating zelots, since sofa comes from suffah which is essentially the same thing.

Because the blood of Americans is blue, since red is communist.

The Temple of DOOM

In order to implement this site into its original intent, which I forgot about from the beginning I will begin posting some conversations I generate in life.

I walked up to a coworker and told her that the heart pulling scene from the Temple of Doom popped into my head. Then when I found out she really dug Indiana Jones I asked her opinion on the last movie, which many people didn’t like. She said it was good until the end when it turned into a big cliché. I corrected that idea and saying they are all that way.

The original 3 movies are no so far in the past that we have all romanticized their quality. They are no Gone with the Wind, never have been and never will be great pieces of literature. So sit back, let reality take a back seat and enjoy the ride. Remember also, aliens are just as believable or unbelievable as boxes that melt Nazi’s and Jesus.

Insert witty title here

Hmm…so much to talk about, so much to stress about but I want to keep some semblance of coherency with this post…

So lets just go back to one of my original declarations that my life is controlled by robots, some of it by choice some of it not so much.

Earlier this week according to an article in my only semi trusted printed media outlet, BBC, there was this article.

Let me know when you get done reading it…

Done yet?

No seriously, read the fucking article you lazy fuck, because I’m not going to give you the cliff note of a cliff note.

Did you really read it?

Ok, fine forget you them, on with the conversations.

So it’s quite interesting that they have discovered some semblance of evidence for possible organic ‘lifeforms’ on Titan that could be contributing to it’s varied and stable atmosphere. I would love to see what would happen with some implemented terraforming on the moon. Commercial space exploration can quickly get us to a point of this being a viable option…but at the cost of…

OK…if you have read the article I linked to you would be wondering what the fuck I was referencing too…it was a test to see if you actually read the article or not.

Fucking read it!!!!!

Ok, on with the real thing, thanks for spending the same amount of time it would have taken you to originally read the article instead of going through my bait and switch thinking I would do it for you.

The biggest implication I am concerned about is using this advanced artificial processing power to disseminate information for people. Look, I understand when you type in ‘slavery’ in Google it takes a long time to get to an actual article about human slavery in modern and historical applications, as opposed to a bunch of malware Russian sites about bondage. That doesn’t mean we should rely on outside sources to further filter that information for us than it already is. I think the real problem with that concern is proper search etiquette. Just type in ‘slavery in America’ or ‘work conditions in modern China’…just be more specific.

Where my concern comes in is that people are contemplating the idea of using artificial intelligence to figure out what information to disseminate…this is about as promising in accuracy and completeness as asking the government to do the same thing.

The implications I see with this is a further buffering of information to the masses, a way to counteract an educated populace. We are already to the point where the majority of the population in America tunes in to narrow band frequencies to generate their opinions. They do so and are content to take the information at face value because they have decided to arrange their value system around it. This leads to the scenario of women voting for candidates who have histories of incredibly destructive policies towards women.

People choose not to question things that they want to hear, so they never look into the ‘facts’ being presented to them. When they hear thing’s that conflict with their ideals they turn to their trusted information sources to correct the facts for them, instead of researching it themselves. It’s too hard and there isn’t enough time for someone to look up the facts on a simple subject, especially if they consider making a balanced meal too time consuming for them to waste their time on. We have an increasingly growing population of citizens who will abandon everything else for the sake of perceived convenience.

To see what will happen when computers determine how much information we need in relation to what we are looking for view this.

I rest my case.

Scarlet Letters!!!

Why does the letter C get so much love? What about the letter S? It does some of the same jobs as well and even begins the word0 See. I think it’s a shaft job by the front of the alphabet to hold down the end of the alphabet. Shit just look at the lack of work provided by X, Y, Z? Y is even part of the exclusive vowel club but only part time, it’s like Y has 2^nd rate citizenship because it doesn’t get as much love from the other vowels. Elitist fucks.

A, B, and C have been running the game for so long now no one questions their authority at the head of the pack. They are the spokesmen of the alphabet while everyone else falls behind their shinning spotlessness. The first half seem to be a pretty exclusive bunch yet you can sense some tension in those ranks, especially with G.

G is the fat one that everyone knows shouldn’t really be there but relegating it to the back of the pack might tarnish their reputation some so they put up with G’s ungainliness. It should really be closer to Q, who is one of the most shunned members of the tribe. Q can barely stand up with out the support of U even with its kickstand. It must be due to U’s membership in the vowel club.

While C is more famous than S; S, T and U with the help of O try to usurp power over all the other letters in the ghetto of the alphabet. Using their popularity as supporting characters (with a hefty amount of starting positions) to subjugate their fellow destitute letters.

Perhaps the best solution for the disparity in the alphabet is to inject some of the systematic uniformity on the numbers into the mix, decimal communism, where everyone shares importance and follows the rules. Well, except 1, but then again every governing body has to have it’s leader right? But then there is the outcast 0 and the untouchables, the negative numbers. OK…so maybe the numbers have their flaws too and might not be able to bring much equality to the alphabet.

Fuck it, maybe we should wipe them both out and try again for something more uniform.

Vegard Sverre Tveitan makes Varg Vikernes look like Charles Edward Coughlin

My radio silence can only be broken by the monumental task held before me…the choice of the greater of 2 evils.

While I actually know the answer I posit the question to you as well. Decide for your self which below is the true ruler of Hell and which one is the Other Guy From Whamm?

First up is the that venerable Cave Troll who was recently taken from this mortal coil by the only means necessary of killing it’s kind…fire and fucking lots of it.

The contender is actually nothing but Connecticut’s version of 50 Cent.

Between the two of them they have elicited long running reigns of terror and malfeasance under the guise of custodial aid to the worlds useless sacks of genetic material whose own existence seems to be nothing better than reproduction chambers.

With the demise of the Progenitor the Platinum One still pales under the Dark Energy of the Bipedal Whale, whose empire grows unchecked by the legions of light…actually in a cosmic slight of hand the legions seem to be among her greatest minions. Perhaps as prophesized the Singularity may be the harbinger of Apocalypse which would make IT the spawn of the Great Troll.

Damn the French have a deep and sinister plan in store for mandkind.

Illegal is...still illegal.

While on the kick of radicalization I wanted to get my thoughts on the recent legislation by Arizona that is pissing off a lot of people, some of whom I know and consider friends if not friendly acquaintances.

Even though I am a Democrat leaning radical there is one thing I don’t agree on and that is illegal immigration. Aside from the Native Americans all of us in the states are immigrants or the product of immigrants, this is true. So how can I be against illegal immigrants? Easy, the term illegal.

I may not have a lot of value in the United States of America as this beacon of world justice, equity and the way to live as a gOD fearing human being…no. I’m American by birth not be choice. So I’m not saying that people shouldn’t come into America and that they should stay in their own country. No I am all for people living where they want to.

But there is a process that needs to be gone through in each country for an ex-patriot to become a legal citizen or temporary alien within said country of choice. Every single country in the world has rules relating to these ideas and according to the laws of each country that government expects ex-patriots to follow the laws and go through the required processes for citizenship or extended residency.

WHY IS THIS SO HARD TO BRING INTO THE EQUATION?

Look, people who enter a country illegally to try and make their lives a little easier know exactly what they are doing, they are entering a country ILLEGALLY and when/if they are caught by the authorities they have to understand they will be deported to their country of origin at a minimum.

In regards to illegal immigrants and their rights there isn’t much they are rightfully due in accordance to laws that govern and protect established and legal citizens. There are laws and protocols that are, or should be, generally understood in much of the world in humanly dealing with illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants, in the terms of humanitarian means should not be treated harshly or tortured because they do not afford the rights of a legal citizen. If the only reason they are in custody is because they are illegal there is no reason for any law enforcement agent to treat them as anything other than a minor offender.

But, if someone is found in the country illegally then the only option, THE ONE AND ONLY POSSIBLE OUTCOME BY THE LAW, is deportation back to their country of origin. PERIOD!!!

What is wrong with this? Why is this an issue? This is not racial profiling or anti anyone, the only anti it is, is anti-ILLEGAL ALIEN. Whether Russian, Sudanese, Mexican or Californian, if you illegally enter the United States of America and reside with in it for ANY amount of time as an illegal alien you should promptly be returned to the country you retain citizenship status in.

Now there are a few cases were leniency or complications can take place. The biggest one with many protestors is the idea of an illegal alien with children who are legal citizens. In cases such as these, there should be and probably are to an extent, allowances for the speed in which deportation takes place as well as the speed in the legalization process. Children born in the United States by illegal aliens are legal citizens, but their parents still have to go through some form of naturalization or at least extended visa status to remain within the country. The existence of their children SHOULD come into play in delaying their deportation and in speeding up their naturalization process. (Yes I said the same thing twice)

If someone is in the country 10 years illegally and when they are finally caught and they start bitching about not given the opportunity to become legal…shame on them, they had 10 years to work through that process. If there is a network that is extensive and supportive that they rely on to find employment, residency and even licensing as an illegal, they sure as hell can get access to a network that will safely help them through the legalization process.

Beyond due process of law afforded to an illegal alien in the terms of their illegal residency with in the country or in some cases criminal litigation for additional crimes committed, illegal citizens do not have additional rights beyond human rights. I can see where the wacko conservative ass holes are right in the sense that illegal aliens should not be provided anything with tax money beyond the costs associated with their deportation. They should not be provided an attorney is they can not afford one, they should not receive welfare, and they should not receive any form of government subsidized assistance afforded to citizens of the country they are with in. Period. This has nothing to do with whether or not they pay taxes as illegal workers, it has everything to do with the fact they are illegal.

With out counting the number of times I have written illegal in this post I can’t stress it enough. ILLEGAL = ILLEGAL, against the law, done with the understanding of deceit. Breaking rules that govern the entity. The law says, any person who has entered the country illegally shall be returned to their country of origin.

Instead of foolishly fighting against the deportation of illegal aliens, everyone needs to start protesting about the bureaucracy involved with naturalization/citizenship. If you are for everyone being able to easily enter and reside and work and live within this country than fight for everyone to be able to do that legally easier than it currently is.

I know naturalization in this country isn’t an easy process, to some extent it makes sense, we can’t let everyone in, some of them are crazy…you just get a free pass if you were born here crazy!!!

It's not Socialism...it's taking down Capitolism!!

Hmmm…it has been quite a while since anything has generated from my brain that is worth posting and I’m not sure if what I have to say is worthy…to an extent.

After thoughts, concerns and time as well as watching a number of documentaries and having some conversations I have come to the conclusion that we are pretty much FUCKED!

The reason we are so screwed is all due to greed. Yes ladies and gentlemen the reason why humankind has suffered for sooooooo long is due to some people’s obsession with possessions. People who have personalities in place that allow them to gain incredible power and use that power to build their resources, for better or worse.

Now, not every greedy person has chosen to do so at any cost necessary and some greedy individuals have seen the light and decided to return some of what they have reaped through whatever nefarious means to those less fortunate and/or motivated.

So where that leaves us, to the best of my knowledge is thus…

The rapidly developing Asian nations are producing all of the goods the western nations consume with abandon. They are given this amazing opportunity because they can do it cheaper than the modern western nations can due to; lack of ‘expensive’ anti-pollution measures, lack of modern workers rights and a general apathy for any of these by the multi national corporations that spurn on this growth.

It’s still incredibly hard to tell me that it costs less to have your injection molding done in China by a legion of field workers then ship it, once the logistics are all straightened out with dealing with their bureaucratic nightmare, across the ocean to be unloaded in California and shipped over land to your distribution hubs. This is cheaper? You have to be kidding me, it might have been cheaper at one point but it can’t be that much of a cost savings measure now.

We are slitting our own throats for an instant and short term profit margin. Many of the people responsible only care about themselves and that concern only stretches about as far as the fabled goldfish memory span.

While the vegans and PETA fucks are going about it the wrong way ultimately their underlying message is correct and should be headed. Why are we cutting down swaths of forests that create the air we breathe only to provide inexpensive hamburgers? When in the end the health problems attributed to the mass consumption of fast food blow the cost of a good meal out of the water and cost of what we are doing to our world overshadows that exponentially. It is incredibly fucked that the countries that we use to help subsidize out produce and livestock are using methods of farming that ultimately cost them more money than they originally thought to save while also devaluing our own resources.

Why are we, one of the largest nations in the world, so hell bent and controlled by importing every fucking thing we consume?

We desperately need to re-educate every single person in our nation that we must not expect the cheapest value, doing so will only continue this shortfall on our longevity all again at the cost of instant savings. I don’t know how much I can stress that.

It is cheaper to buy junk food than healthy food.

Every time I look at the news now I feel this great and overwhelming sense of despair.

Much like it was hard for me not to flee the resort I stayed at in Mexico during my honeymoon to go join the Zapatista’s

It is incredibly hard for me to contain my self in the plight of how much every single one of us is being fucked by these dick heads.

And not pick up a gun and fight for revolution.

We need to mobilize against the people who currently control the world. We need a revolution, everyone needs to wake up and realize they are being played.

The Bolsheviks were partially right, but they only mobilized the people for their own greed…which is something that will always face mankind, but right now the best course of action the world can take, actually the people of the world, is to over throw the elites currently in power. While I greatly detest organized religion, I’m not going to call out against the religious leaders in the world, they seem to actually be acting sanely on the outside at the moment, yes even the Islamic clerics to all you foolish pro-patriotic knuckleheads…fuck you and your semper fidelis blinders. (Nothing against jarheads just people who use Americanism as a cover for racism). We do need to leave the Middle East the fuck alone, let them, as independent peoples control their own destinies…but OPEC needs to be destroyed. The easiest way that will happen is when we tell them to go fuck themselves and stop using their product.

Again, a small and vocal minority has the right idea but the wrong reasons. The conservationists and environmentalists are absolutely right for what they are yelling about, but it’s not because of the world. It’s because of us. If we don’t do something to stop the destruction of the world right now WE will go away. The planet will remain and some of the flora/fauna will as well but ultimately we will probably not exist any more. We have a hard time adapting to extremities and have always relied on mechanical means to cope. We haven’t been evolving our bodies to adjust to changes just artificially adjusting out environment. Eventually we won’t be able to keep up if things progress as fast as the doomsayers predict.

Let’s be perfectly honest, most people only do what they do in terms of activism to save themselves, we are selfish…period.

If we want to survive as a race, if we TRULY care about our future generations, the only thing we can do is be completely honest with our intentions. We must spread the message that we need to stop the destruction of the world in order to remain on it. Fuck the rest of the species’ survival, that isn’t the real reason. We have to honestly say we only care about our selves, and maybe that will make the average man wake up and join the cause. Once that is in place the revolution can begin.

Fuck the leaders we need to change this stuff quick, or else we are all doomed.

WOOOO!!! SOAPBOX!!!!

Last night as I tried not to watch even more mind numbingly useless local news once the 10 o’clock shift started I began channel surfing and discovered that BBC World News is currently broadcast on one of the local PBS stations at the same time. Being incredibly interested in events regionally and globally than the crap that passes for local information, I quickly put the remote down.

I was interested and put off to find that on Sunday some US officials were gunned down in the Mexican border town with the worst drug cartel violence. Now I didn’t watch the world news on Monday or pay that much attention to the local news as it makes my brain melty, but I don’t recall this being mentioned. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t covered too extensively regardless. I looked back at my own companies’ product from Monday and noticed a modest sized paragraph buried in the middle of the 5^th page of the main section. In favor of NCAA crap, un-news about not finding fish, an nth free advertisement for the census and a story about investigations into gun use in street crimes all on the front cover.

I can understand the reason for 3 of those ads being front and center, but I would think the Mexican story would have taken more precedence than the guns from evidence to back on the streets story.

The story on BBC was pretty in depth. On top of that I ended up watching a rare News Hour episode as well and when they talked about the whole Toyota telling the douche from California that his problem wasn’t due to the car not working the reporter said that the News Hour is underwritten by Toyota, just to clear the air about any biased reporting questions. Nice…who the hell ever does anything like that?

The state of reporting seems to be pretty sad as for a long time now the mass market news programs are all about dramatics as opposed to fact finding and information dissemination. In the past decade this seems to have taken on a more dramatic shock and awe style with such programs as 48 Hours and Dateline trying to hook ratings by creating their own scoops (To Catch a Dumb Motherfucker Parts 3 thru 21). This brings me back to the only TV I really watch, Nova and Frontline, both PBS documentary series. I watch Nova to learn sciencey stuff and Frontline to be kept up to date about the war on non-Christian religious extremism and about how the government is REALLY fucking up/us over.

I dig investigative journalism as long as it’s something that actually matters. Fortunately and surprisingly for my employer they started an investigative series this past Sunday that actually took my attention. Unfortunately, unlike the other series they have done in the past that haven’t really grabbed me, this one only seems to have done 1 installment, with no word on future ones…oh well.

The article is about how private doctors are being paid hansom wages by drug companies to tell other doctors and patients to buy their drug. Yeah, shocking right? I mean NO ONE knew this was going on. I mean drug manufacturers, insurance companies and medical facilities only care about the health of the patients correct? There is something incredibly wrong with every single entity involved in the process when a patient decides to go with a doctor recommended fish oil pill that is a prescription from an international drug manufacturer and costs 10 times more than the OTC equivalent only because the customer won’t have to pay as much out of pocket.

So the ‘drug’ is covered by insurance as a prescribed medicine, when the same exact thing I gotten for a fraction of the price normally through a grocery store. Yet instead of the patient paying $300 or so over the course of the year to swallow a pill of omega-3 they opt to have their insurance provider, whom they pay (or someone pays) probably on average $150 a month to cover most if not all of the $2000 yearly prescription. Because they don’t make any connection between them giving money directly for the product instead of paying people to pay people for it they think they are saving.

As some people have said in the past few days as the administration pushes for the health care reform, you can’t just blame the insurance companies. And honestly, you can’t, at least not entirely. The problem is thus; a number of doctors enter the profession for the money and the prestige, not necessarily to help people. Some clinics/hospitals care more about gaining as much funding as possible, usually through clinical studies and not through patient care, over providing the best possible care for their patients. In turn many hospitals charge exorbitant fees to the insurance providers in order to nullify any costs accrued through patient care. The insurance companies, who are only in business to make money do anything they can to minimize their overhead and pass the buck to the consumer as much as possible. While corporations are expected and/or forced to provide some extent of medical coverage to some of their workforce they try to offset as much of what they see as wasted expenditure on the employees themselves. Drug manufacturers are actually only in the business to make money, researchers for the companies may have the drive to do well but I can assure you the CEO of GlaxoSmithKline doesn’t. The way they do this is by helping people, sure people aren’t going to buy your product if it doesn’t work, but it doesn’t mean you need to slap such a high price tag on designer medicine or refuse to produce a ‘generic’ derivative. If drug companies really cared about helping people above anything else we wouldn’t have patents on the drugs and any manufacturer who had the ability to do so would be able to use the same formula and bring it to the people, to help them be healthy and all. Then we come to the consumer who for the most part only pays attention to what the doctors feed to them and what advertising imprints in them.

A doctor who is being paid by a drug manufacturer to tell its patients and colleagues to use a particular medicine only has their own personal interest in mind. The drug companies know this and use this to benefit them. It’s a lot cheaper to pay a doctor $40,000 a year to sling your message than to spend $2,000,000 for a yearly ad campaign that is doing the same thing. Everyone is to blame for why it costs so much in this country. The only way we can make it better is to throw the old systems out and start over…but it will never happen as long as we are capitalism. There is too much stupid money in medicine and people don’t want to give it up.

People cry that a socialist health care system will destroy America, that it will be too expensive, that health care will be abysmal and old people will be passed up for medical care because they are too old. Here’s a news flash, it already is expensive. Our healthcare is abysmal, the waits are long and the coverage isn’t always the greatest. There are some states in this country I would refuse medical care in. Elderly people are already passed up for medical coverage. The transplant lists are not based entirely on how long one has been on the list. Doctors routinely tell elderly patients not to undergo a procedure due to their advanced age and the increased chance of failure. A man who is 93 years old with cancer is highly unlikely to begin chemo due to a number of reasons that make sense but are still uncaring. Whether it is a just thing or a logical thing isn’t easily discerned, but it is a fact in our current health care system which is not a product of socialism.

I think a large push against socializing the medical system in this country along with other things from average citizens is the idea of personal greed and selfishness. One push back I here ever so often and seems to be the most truthful and most understandable, if not agreeable is that people don’t think they should be responsible for people who choose not to take care of them selves.

“I shouldn’t have to work and pay for someone who chooses to sit on their ass.”

I agree with this on some things. I firmly believe if you are able bodied and can get a job, then do so. There are plenty of positions out there, some aren’t great jobs, some don’t pay the best, but hell, its better then not getting paid. McDonalds is hiring all the time. Instead our welfare system, which I believe in but also believe is broken and mismanaged, makes it so you can make better money by sitting on your ass. That I think I wrong, but the person who has a medical reason for not being able to work shouldn’t be left to die either. But when it comes to medical care, the ability to see a doctor when you need help, which is a basic, modern, necessity to live. It is something that everyone requires and everyone deserves. There are two ways to pay for it; the government or the individual. If the government pays for it then everyone can have access to it. If the individual pays for it, then only those that can pay for it have access to it. But hold on…how will the government pay for it? Who pays the government? Everyone who works and purchases luxury goods and owns property does. So in essence if you are opposed to having everyone covered to some extent with quality and respectable medical coverage you are uncaring for your fellow man, regardless of who they are. If you feel it is unfair and un-American for someone who chooses not to contribute to society to receive medical coverage provided by your tax dollars when they get sick and you would rather have them die in a gutter then I think you need to reevaluate your understanding of what it is to be a human being.

I think most people are socialists when they need help for socialist programs (college students) but the minute they actually start making money they don't want to give it away so they turn capitalist/conservative.