I have often thought I have burned out all the absolute rage in my life….sometime after leaving Iraq. I heard a particularly powerful sermon at church on, yes, you guessed it….loving one’s enemies. After tears, contemplation and talking to the pastor…the last of the burning rage I felt… left me. But I felt an ominous stirring of the old rage, because of it. What is “it”? A story that illustrates actual evil, made possible by regulation.
A bit of background – I am from the city of Rockford. I grew up there in the 1970s and 1980s, when it went from a stodgy, stolid middle class town based on tool and die and specialty industry (and the band Cheap Trick!) the second largest city in Illinois….to a shrinking, crumbling city, fighting as hard as it can to hold on. The city had three hospitals – my father worked at one of them (not the one hurt in this story). So I was pleasantly surprised to hear the old home town had a hospital that was going to build:
The health system unveiled plans in April for a four-story, $70 million structure to serve women and children that would include an intensive care unit upgraded to the highest-rated level of care for newborns. Other upgrades would include the addition of 10 psychiatric beds, an expansion of the emergency department, and additions to the surgery and catheterization lab areas of the hospital.
But, we cannot have an increase in the ability to heal the sick, care for the newborn or the mentally ill! Heavens no!
“The applicants have exceeded the State standard size requirements” for six of 14 expansion-development areas, according to review board documents. Those areas include a nursery, emergency and surgery departments, medical-surgical inpatient unit, cath-angiography unit, and neonatal intensive care unit.
This was a shock, since:
The board in June OK’d SwedishAmerican’s plan to develop the highest-level neonatal intensive care unit, which is expected to open in the hospital’s current tower location in 2019, Kirby said. The plan is to relocate it to the new women’s and children’s tower. The board is “asking for a resubmission of our modernization project, which includes our women’s and children’s tower plan,” Kirby said.
There was no written opposition to SwedishAmerican’s expansion plan and no public testimony in opposition. More than two dozen supporters formally backed the plan, including City Council members and other elected officials.
Oh, and…
In 2015, the board approved Mercyhealth’s request to build a 188-bed hospital on 263 acres in far east Rockford. Construction is underway on the $505 million project.
OSF Saint Anthony Medical Center in Rockford is adding 78 single-patient rooms as part of an $85 million expansion expected to be completed in spring 2018.
So how in the absolute rage inducing Hell could this vital boost to a hurting city get stopped? Why, politics, of course!
The “how” – we see what many libertarians have railed against, Illinois has a “Certificate of Need” law. Want to punch a wall while screaming in rage, vomiting and crying at the same time? Check this little intro out:
The Health Facilities Planning Act (Act) (20 ILCS 3960), established Illinois’ certificate of need (CON) program. The CON program promotes the development of a comprehensive health care delivery system that assures the availability of quality facilities, related services, and equipment to the public, while simultaneously addressing the issues of community need, accessibility, and financing. In addition, it encourages health care providers to engage in cost containment, better management and improved planning.
No, you sanctimonious shitheels, it allows you to stop people from building hospitals, clinics, nursing homes and other useful things, so you can protect established players in the field from competition. Period.
So, if nobody “publicly” spoke out in opposition…how did this get beat (for now)? Well, you need 5 of 7 members voting to approve. In our case here:
Members Present: Chair, Kathy Olson; Senator Deanna Demuzio; Joel Johnson; John McGlasson, Sr.; Marianne E. Murphy; Richard Sewell
Member Absent: Senator Brad Burzynski
So there were only 6 present – Senator Brad Burzynski happened to skip out. Now why would he do that? Maybe, just maybe a good friend of his, Senator Dave Syverson, asked him to skip out? Gosh, why would he want a member to miss the meeting, and reduce the available votes? Maybe take a peek at his biography. See something at the bottom of the page…
He also serves on the Mercyhealth System Board
My oh my…on the board of a competitor health system?! I am shocked, shocked to find this out! He also just may have asked backers of the plan to withdraw their support, so I was told.
So who voted “no”? The record does not say, and the reporter I conversed with has tried to find out, with numerous calls unreturned. Maybe the chair, who happens to be on staff at local clinic? So why would it matter that she was on the staff of another local provider (other than obvious competition concerns)? Oh, lookie here!
I am in touch with a reporter (I am going to leave names out for this for now) and will do my best to find out the exact no votes. Right now this is only educated guesswork on my part. But I sure seem to have found some terrible looking coincidences, eh?
But no matter the who, and the why – the very existence of something like the “Certificate of Need” is a monstrous evil, serving only to hurt.
I am not sure how the medical industry as it exists today in this country is not considered socialized already. Well, fascisized anyway.
metastasized?
Cronyized.
MetaFascized
It’s so fucking hard to tell people that our healthcare system is not “unregulated”. I list off a million instances of blatantly anti-competitive policies like the one that our esteemed Swiss Servator has detailed here, and it’s just like talking to a brick wall. They usually just say something like, “Healthcare is just too complicated for the market to handle; the government should do it… Did you know they have high quality healthcare for free in Europe??“
It’s so complicated that a few people who’s only discernible skill is getting votes should make decisions for millions.
Yeah. It is estimated the fedgov healthcare programs together pay for 2/3 of the total healthcare expenditures.
I went through and dug up as many numbers as I could find a few years back, before Obamacare was passed, and while the official percentage of healthcare paid for by government is only ~50% those numbers do not seem to include government employee and retiree health plans in that total.
Once I managed to dig up some numbers and estimates for that at the state and local level it rose to ~70% of all health care dollars were paid by the Federal Government.
So whether government is paying 50% or 70% depends on whether you consider government agencies (fed, state, local) to be public expenditure or private employers.
You were right.
*URGE TO KILL RISING*
Me right now.
Seriously, at least with government-controlled health care you never have to go through charade like this. You get what you get when your betters decide, and until then, FY.
Who, Swiss? And would it help?
People don’t seem to care, or they’d vote these pieces of shit out.
Conflict of interest? Insider trading? Bah, you just want these poor public servants to starve!
Yes I want them to starve.
Something similar almost happened in my hometown. They needed a Certificate of Need to build a cardiac unit in the county next door, and the hospital that had two in my county gave up one of theirs so they could open one up.
Pretty fucked up.
You just don’t get how these things work. It’s complicated.
Sorry, but since I missed all the discussions this morning again…a few things to bring up.
On the one hand, this makes sense to me viscerally, but the overall percentage – I know it’s at least a 20% jump in 3 months – really does seem nuts from other perspectives.
https://t.co/OfmMZUrFGt – TW WAPO
I’d really like to see a link to the original YTN link though if anyone can find one.
If anyone here speaks Korean, they can go to ytn.co.kr and look it up.
Best I could find.
Thanks for digging. Might be an issue since YTN is mostly broadcast news.
FWIW, Yonhap claimed Gallup Korea ran the poll. Financial Times cites a similar poll from Jan 2016, where:
So it doesn’t look like the needle’s been moved that much since last year. The SK people, per polling, have changed quite a bit on whether they want THAAD there or not, with 71 percent being in favor. Not that THAAD will help much against a full-blown ICBM diving in from 2k miles up. Especially if the Russian/Ukrainians helping the Norks have introduced them to MaRVs.
Never mind the ‘not much.’ I thought the recent poll showed 58% support, not 68%.
It’s no fun when the rabbit has the gun.
There’s a difference between ROK developing nuclear weapons and the US redeploying tactical/strategic nukes on the peninsula – ie. the ones we haven’t had in Europe for the past 25 years *wink wink*.
Government owns means of production of goods and services = socialism
Government controls means of production of goods and services but does not own them = fascism
Non-government entities own and control means of production of goods and services = racism/white nationalism
We live in fucked up times.
…shouldn’t they have recused themselves due to conflict of interest? And then, what? the bar is lowered for the approval, right?
Though I do like that they’re willing to literally kill people for a few bucks. They’re as bad as people think libertarians are, just without the moral standing to back it up.
Yes, but this is Illinois.
CON laws are epitome of cronyism. They need to go. They should never have been passed amd are an evil. Our health care system is one of the best in the world despite the government actively trying to destroy it. Imagine how great it would be if it were left to develop and grow on its own.
I would just like to buttonhole one of these turds and ask “so…NO to more neonatal and children’s hospital space, eh? Why are you not bragging about this vote?”
I think you would fully justified in punching one of them in the throat.
Over and over again.
The CON shit started around the same time black politicians demanded more police in their neighborhoods in the late 70’s/early 80’s.
Hospitals were closing in black neighborhoods because the hospitals were losing money. And the closing hospital would always say “This is due in part to the new hospital that opened four miles west of here that took away all the paying customers.” And the black politicians whined that “We shouldn’t have to go ten more minutes away to get health care.”
TOP MEN
AND TOP WOMEN.
This bed is on fire with passion and love.
Passion.
I do appreciate all the discussion re: Jones Act going on now….finally.
Regarding “waivers” – it’s a formal application per cargo with DHS. If you look at the articles I put up back in March, the one that really pisses me off is back in 2011 – DHS issued 56 waivers to shift gas, etc around for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve – but then they couldn’t be assed to support a one-time massive move of a *huge* piece of drilling equipment from Texas to Alaska. That is to say – the waiver was approved, but then after (due to ship maint. etc reasons) the operational window slid right out of the original waiver, they refused to re-approve the waiver (that had been fine the first time).
It’s not as though we have the shipbuilding capacity to meet our real needs – we can’t manufacture an LNG carrier for example…and with only a half dozen or so full-size shipyards and those booked for years in advance…
Obviously the folks like Alaska and Hawaii just don’t have the pull to get this rescinded – and I was wrong yesterday – McCain has supported getting rid of it before (I don’t recall who kept torpedoing it). Hopefully this hurricane will provide the final impetus.
Did you just “Gilmore” an entire post, rather than a thread? This article is about a hospital getting stiffed on a Certificate of Need.
I think he’s treating the comments as an open thread since the PM Lynx comments are going to be dead in short order.
Yep, I don’t know if its just here or on all blogs, but it seems that every new post immediately shuts down any discussion in earlier post. I think it might be the single column format, maybe a grid layout with the last four or five posts equally prominent could change this, or it might just be human nature and there are no design solutions.
I can think of uses for a *huge* piece of drilling equipment in the context, though…
Yeah…that’s kinda how I see them – every now and then the PM links continue into the evening and the evening article stays focused…but I’m pretty sure I’m not the first person to do this.
I totally concur with your CON points though – it’s freaking obscene.
The Jones Act is the one thing that the ultra-violet blue citizens of Hawaii agree to scuttling. It is pretty amazing that they do since the self same citizens killed inter-island ferry service due to a textbook case of a Baptist and Bootleggers.
Hawaii has only 4 electoral votes all delivered to the Dems since statehood (less Nixon 72 and Reagan 84) and a very junior 4 Dem Congressional delegation with the dumbest Senator not named Boxer and 3 other near non-entities. If any heavy lifting is needed for the Jones Act it won’t be coming from this lot.
Swiss, if it turns out that Burzynski is doing his friend a favor, I’m not going to outright say that you shouldn’t use that argument against CONs; it’s certainly a more winnable battle. But I think the war can only be won (slowly, very slowly) by focusing on this:
What makes me want to puke is these same dirtbags stand in front of a camera or in Congress and tell sob stories of hurting or suffering children.
Yup. High class scum, which are the worst of the worst, because they don’t even need to do shitty stuff to survive.
Yeah. that makes me want puke when I see that. Scumbags.
I want to post something more intellectual about this but I’m having a hard time seeing through all this red.
Good luck Swiss, keep us posted.
As maddening as this is just multiply it by . . just pick a (large) number. Not just the disapproved projects but the ones that never even get planned ’cause folks know they lack the influence.
Unseen costs for the win.
yes. it literally happens 100 times a day, all across the country. Right now, somewhere, someone is getting fucked over by scumbag crony pols.
Happened to my wife- was going to start a baby massage business teaching people how to treat infants with problems using massage. She is a licensed therapist (but not a massage therapist) who could do it in any other state, but New York is full of asshole control freaks so its not allowed. Ironically, after the requirement was passed, no one in at least within 200 miles is doing the classes anymore (unless you go to PA), so they didn’t even effective protect the jobs of massage therapists, because none of them do it.
OMWC wants to give baby happy endings.
*very slow clap*
Big democrat-run state is corrupt; local pols have ties to entrenched interests; film @ 11
I was thinking it was going to be a clip from Network.
Each according to his ability, each according to his certificate of need.
*Supreme Soviet applause*
But how long can you keep it up?
The applause that is.
If more than 4 hours, see your commissar
If less than 4 hours, commissar see you!
In defense of CoNs.
If Starbucks had to file for one for every shop we wouldn’t have so damn many of them.
“You already have three of them at that intersection. Disapproved!”
/Sarc
Yeah, and where else exactly do you think an aspiring pink and blue haired xe can get a job?
HR department?
“Office of Diversity and Inclusion”
*deletes comment*
Barnes and Noble
No. Starbucks is connected and woke enough that with a few million in the right place politicians would suddenly see the need for another one.
Muthafucken, fuck, fucken shit. What is a “certificate of need” other than protectionist shite. Because no one has ever heard of hospitals in certain locals that excel in some form of care that receive patients from across the country and across the globe for that matter. People who do this have a special place in hell waiting for them.
I have mentioned before conversations I have had with people on other forums who claim the free market is what has screwed up our health care system. Ya, that’s it. Pointless to argue free market to people who don’t know what one is.
We know they play eeny meeny miney mo with the favors they dole out. Selective enforcement of laws. Exemptions for the well connected. It’s the brazen nature of it that gets me.
“What is a “certificate of need”
I means ‘I needz that you not get one of them new fangled thingies there, like the one I haz. Cuz some people might start using yours and I don’t make any money from that’.
A little background on CONs:
They are a (crony/regulatory capture) relic of a bygone age when hospitals filed their proposed charges for the coming year with a state commission for approval. Although the weren’t overtly regulated as utilities, they were effectively regulated as utilities. They had to get their rates approved, and they had to get major capital projects approved.
The theory was that hospitals were, if not quite natural monopolies, something close to that. The actual justification for CON laws was that, if hospitals overinvested in new facilities, then they would have to raise their rates too high to cover their investments. Yes, folks, the theory was that when supply outstrips demand, that makes prices go up.
I got into hospital law when Wisconsin decided (re)adopted a CON law. The hospital association decided it needed to staff up to help its members deal with the law, so they hired me. I knew zero about CON laws. When I got a good look at what the law really meant, I said “We’re in the lobbying business. Let’s get this idiotic POS law repealed.” In a miracle of internal politicking, the association agreed. The association, not knowing me very well, scheduled a debate between me and the legislative sponsor of the law. I characterized CON (I am not making this up) as “Stalinist central planning”, and put up some studies showing, shockingly, that states with CON laws invested less in health care, and even more shockingly, that less investment in health care results in lower access to care and lower quality.
Revolutionary stuff, no? The law was repealed, although the tax on hospitals to fund the CON commission is still being collected more than 20 years after repeal.
Right on, good work RC.
This shit is indeed infuriating, as is the fact that it is largely unknown and that even pretty well informed people (besides libertarians) have absolutely no idea stuff like this exists. As above commenters including Suthen noted, we have nothing close to a free market healthcare system and we have not for a very very long time. It is straight up Fascism.
Wow, you were doing god’s own work there. *doffs cap*
That is some good work.
Much appreciated.
And here we all thought you just made cocktails and blindly stared at the desert. Good work.
That sounds like a good idea for an article*hint, hint* recounting that.
I was too young and dumb to realize that I was actually lobbying to have the reason for my job repealed.
They kept me on anyway. Leading, among other things, to the world’s best HR Manual. In its entirety:
(1) Do what you are told.
(2) Don’t be an idiot.
(3) Unless the CEO says otherwise.
One of the April Fool’s jokes that almost got me fired.
Awesome.
Thanks RC.
Because you pretty much lifted Nordstrom’s company policies? Or at least, how it used to be.
Truly grateful to people like you who do this kind of thing.
“the availability of quality facilities, related services, and equipment to the public, while simultaneously addressing the issues of community need, accessibility, and financing. In addition, it encourages health care providers to engage in cost containment, better management and improved planning.”
Laws always seem to do the opposite of what politicians claim they are for. It’s always opposite day wherever pols meet.
I think that out of all the draconian regulations in this country, those on healthcare must be the worst and the most harmful. If you ever work in a health related area and have to deal with things directly affected by this regulation, it is none less than mind boggling. The people writing the regulations, they don’t sleep, they can’t. If you think you’re going to get done with complying with one regulation before there’s another one to deal with, think again. One day in the near future, everything is just going to come to a grinding halt where nothing is ever done except complying with regulation and documenting the compliance with regulation and reporting on the compliance with regulation. No real work will ever be done. We’ve reached the end of progress. It’s not going to be a singularity of technology. It’s going to be the singularity of regulation, a place where time stands still, forever.
My father is a medical doctor.
He told me this several years ago-
I used to try and save people money years ago when they would come to me. If I wasn’t certain what the problem was and I needed to run tests, I would order only the tests that cover the most likely causes. In that way, I would be right most of the time, and would save the patient money. Now, I just test them for everything and to hell with the cost because I am required to.
This, It took twenty-four hours of tests and scans and what not before they would just screw my broken ankle back together. Procedure took two hours, I spend three days in the hospital. I wonder why medical bills are so high.
But no matter the who, and the why – the very existence of something like the “Certificate of Need” is a monstrous evil, serving only to hurt.
Agreed.
New Hampshire, being the “LIVE FREE OR DIE!” state, can’t quite get rid of them:
The construction cap won’t be lifted totally, however.
On Monday, Gov. Maggie Hassan signed a bill sponsored by Sen. Jeb Bradley, R-Wolfeboro, that would keep some restrictions on the construction of new medical facilities, with the state Department of Health and Human Services, as opposed to the CON board, having the final word.
Senate Bill 481 goes into effect July 1, the day after the CON board dies, but the bill – once dismissed by critics as the “Son of CON” – is mainly focused on safety, not competition, though it does shield rural hospitals.
And interesting little tid-bit later in the article:
New Hampshire adopted its CON board in 1979, after national regulators tied health care dollars to it, but the federal government reversed course when studies revealed that it didn’t actually save money. That may have been because competition kept costs lower than government regulations, or it may have been because the board usually slowed down new projects but did not prevent them.
Thank the Feds for widespread CON laws!
Fixed link.
Do they still have Gov. Gregg’s temporary rooms and meals tax?
Indeed.
Yep. The meals tax went up a few years ago if I remember correctly.
For people who haven’t been to NH, the “temporary” tax would closing in on 30 years now.
It existed before I moved to NH. I expect it will exist when I leave.
It only took about 100 years to get rid of the telephone tax to pay for civil war veterans and their widows.
I guess that also counts as a temporary tax.
One way to stop thinking about something that irritates you is to think about something else. Like this:
https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/37285/
***
A nine-minute video posted on Facebook today by University of California Riverside student Matthew Vitale shows him trying to get his bright-red Make America Great Again hat back from an identified peer who goes on a lengthy tirade against free speech and America itself.
“UCR is letting people wear this shit on campus? Make American Great Again, really? There were lynchings and genocide and mass deportations. … I fucking hate this country. … And I am not leaving. … We need to get rid of all ya’ll,” the video shows her say.
“… Fuck your freedom of speech boy, your freedom of speech is literally killing a lot of people out there, your hats like these that promote laws and legislation that literally kill and murder people of color,” she continued.
…
A staffer in the office at one point interjects and tells the student she needs to return the hat to Vitale, but she refuses to comply at first.
“We are really trying to fight genocide from happening,” she said.
“Give me my property and I will leave and go back up to the retreat,” says Vitale, referring to a campus event at which she spotted him wearing the hat in the first place.
“The reason why this is pissing me off is you wore it in a group where literally most of the organizations in this school are people of color,” she replies.
“I am half-Nicaraguan,” Vitale responds.
“You’re a fucking white boy,” she says back.
“Are you assuming my race?” he asks.
“You pass as a white man,” she continues.
***
[head desk]
“I have the right to tell you what your identity is” is profoundly evil.
“You pass as a white man,” she continues.”
I think ‘You pass as a stupid cunt” is an appropriate response.
She’s making a strong immigration argument here. For Trump.
Oh I get to post this again
Genocide and Nazis
That’s all I am to you
Genocide and Nazis
No wonder you’re so blue
Genocide and Nazis
Make me feel warm inside
Genocide and Nazis
You should run and hide
Genocide and Nazis
You really went for broke
Genocide and Nazis
You think that makes you woke
Since you’ve Godwinned everything
Where will you go to now
The only names that might be worse
Are Stalin, Pot, and Mao
HA!
I fucking hate the phrase “people of color”. The leftists have really gotten this shitsack of a racist term broadly adopted into popular use.
Everybody’s skin has a color and white is a color as well. It’s an idiotic term. Should we refer to fat, smelly people as “people of size and odor”?
fun fact: the word melanin comes from the Greek word for black. Melancholy basically means “black bile” in Greek. Black bile was the bodily humor associated with sadness. Using the same logic, being happy and energetic should be called erythrohemy- red-blooded-ness.
They’re already trying to push calling fatties “people of size.”
Putting all “whites” in one group and all others in another is some of the most fucked up racist things you could push. I hate it.
YES!
I am forever doing this now.
I only made it part way through. Good god I have never been more glad I am old and don’t have to talk to people like that. And what is with the cartoon dog on the back wall? Is that a college or grade school?
“Is that a college or grade school?”
After listening to one of their students it should be obvious that it’s a grade school.
To be sure, there was an article at The Before Place by guess who, basically calling the MAGA guy a pussy for getting worked up. I haven’t watched the video and I don’t want to to be honest.
Someone takes my legally obtained shit and gets in my face you’re damn tootin I’m going to get worked up and the other person is quite liable to get worked over.
It is not worth your time to watch. Trust me. I feel dumber for it with just the few minutes I watched.
“I feel dumber for it with just the few minutes I watched.”
Another satisfied customer! That’s Uncle Derpy’s Guarantee: 5 fewer IQ points or your money back!
it is amazing how that guy can take the most unbelievably one-sided issue that has a very obvious take-away; basically a “T-Ball” story which provides a classic case study in the sort of basic libertarian ideas of free-speech and property rights, etc….
…and somehow, every time he’ll manage to completely fuck it all up by injecting some meaningless and (often logically contradictory) value-judgement into it.
honestly, shikha is an idiot, ENB is just pretending to be libertarian for the job, and Chapman is basically just a mainstream democrat…. but Robby is absolutely the fucking worst. Because he takes very simple libertarian arguments and *fucks them up so badly with equivocating nonsense that any 3rd party reading it would think that all libertarians are intellectually-squishy messes.*
It is really not that difficult and yet he still manages to equivocate.
“UCR is letting people wear this shit on campus? Make American Great Again, really?”
Yes, really. Regardless of what you think of him, Trump is the President if this country, and that was his campaign slogan. It would be crazy for a state school to ban it. For that matter, if Trump were really as evil Nazi tyrant you thought he was you would be severely punished for daring to publicly question him.
Censorship 2: Orwell Bugaloo
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2017/09/chinese-police-order-xinjiangs-muslims-to-hand-in-all-copies-of-the-quran
***
Chinese authorities in the northwestern region of Xinjiang have ordered ethnic minority Muslim families to hand in religious items including prayer mats and copies of the Quran to the authorities, RFA has learned.
Officials across Xinjiang have been warning neighborhoods and mosques that ethnic minority Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz Muslims must hand in the items or face harsh punishment if they are found later, sources in the region said.
“Officials at village, township and county level are confiscating all Qurans and the special mats used for namaaz [prayer],” a Kazakh source in Altay prefecture, near the border with Kazakhstan told RFA on Wednesday.
“Pretty much every household has a Quran, and prayer mats,” he said.
Dilxat Raxit, spokesman for the exile World Uyghur Congress group, said reports have emerged from Kashgar, Hotan and other regions of similar practices starting last week.
“We received a notification saying that every single ethnic Uyghur must hand in any Islam-related items from their own home, including Qurans, prayers and anything else bearing the symbols of religion,” Raxit said.
“They have to be handed in voluntarily. If they aren’t handed in, and they are found, then there will be harsh punishments,” he said.
***
[head desk]
fun fact: Xinjiang means “new frontier”. China conquered it in the 1800s.
Chinese province names are not very creative
Hunan- south of the lake
Hubei- north of the lake
Hebei- north of the river
Henan- south of the river
Shandong- east of the mountains
Guangdong- east of the plain
Shanghai – On the Bay
It’s useful to reminded from time to time that the Chinese government remains pure evil.
Beijing = Northern Capital.
Of course china (Zhongguo) is the Middle Country or Middle Kingdom. Not Middle as in time but Middle as in the center of the world.
Hugh Hefner Damaged Countless Women’s Lives—Let’s Not Pretend Otherwise
Civil rights supporter or not, the Playboy icon was a sexual predator, hardly better than Bill Cosby.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/hugh-hefner-misogyny-legacy
***
But what exactly did Playboy ever do to encourage female sexuality? How does a magazine published explicitly for the male gaze offer sexual liberation?
…
Hugh Hefner was a gross, powerful white man who was bad for women. He literally called them objects, and believed that sexual liberation would heal us all. It hasn’t. Life in America is still much harder for women than it is for men, socially, economically and psychologically. It’s a world that Playboy, and the mogul behind it, helped forge.
***
[face palm]
I couldn’t even get past the title before I face palmed.
Why School Choice is the Last Thing America Needs to Solve Its Huge Racial Wealth Gap
Federal housing policy segregated cities and created today’s staggering racial wealth gap. Charter schools won’t fix that.
http://www.alternet.org/racial-wealth-gap-housing-segregation
***
JB: School choice advocates make the claim that ‘your education shouldn’t be limited by your zip code,’ arguing essentially that allowing parents to choose their way out of neighborhood schools is the way to overcome the legacy of residential segregation. What do you say to that?
RR: My argument is that we can’t have good schools unless we have integrated neighborhoods. We don’t measure school quality well today. We consider schools good if they have a lot of White middle class children who are well prepared to succeed and who the schools simply have to pass through. They come in successful and they leave successful. We consider schools bad if they have schools with a lot of disadvantaged children who come to school with serious economic and social problems that interfere with their learning.The question is how can we integrate neighborhoods in every school. Has a mix of low moderate affluent families income families is integrated. Fundamentally we’re not going to solve this problem by choosing schools. We’re going to solve this problem by enforcing the neighborhood school concept in integrated neighborhoods.
***
[head desk]
“My argument is that we can’t have good schools unless we have integrated neighborhoods.”
So wait, are they for gentrification or not? Can they at least be consistently authoritarian?
Authoritarians are almost by definition capricious.
Intellectual coherence and noncontradiction are entirely foreign to people who have gone down that line of thinking. Seriously, once those worms gentrify your brain, it’s all over. I always note the multiple conflicting stated goals of these folks.
so we have:
Option A: Let parents find better schools for their kids than the shithole public schools.
or
Option B: Forcibly move everyone in the country to get a mix of wealth levels in each neighborhood, and force them to attend the same shithole schools.
(PS: don’t forget the wealthy will never allow this)
and this moron thinks ‘B’ is the better option?
speaking of white-hot rage.
Moving poor people into wealthy neighborhoods will make the parents smarter? By osmosis?
Cargo cult. You can see another example of this at the UN–parading genocidal tribal dictators in expensive suits and having them pretend like they’re civilized, in the hopes that going through the motions will make that true. Works just as well there.
And the only thing that can fix it is federal education policy!
pretty much the leftist playbook for everything
You finished, Derpy?
MICROAGGRESSIONS!
It’s been up for 2 hours.
Don’t wipe it away. Let me have my little vicious circle. You know, the circle is the perfect geometric figure. No end, no beginning.
What you don’t understand, all of you, is that I’ve got to know it’s around. That I can have it if I need it. I can’t be cut off completely. That’s the devil. That’s what drives you crazy.
[Montage of Derpy shambling down street with neon signs of Alternet and Everyday Feminism in the background]
The Möbius strip is more perfect.
Juice just posted this at TOS. You’ll never be one of them, dude. What’s racism again?
https://youtu.be/3i6J2fcrKi8
Yesssss….. feel the derp flow through you….. strike down the white ally, and your journey to the prog side will be complete.
Sorry, Packer haters.
Did the Packers’s kneel so hard tonight that they clipped through the earth? Had to play the 2nd quarter in Australia?
What happened? I’m watching old Roadrunner cartoons with my kids.
I figured you be more of a Speedy Gonzales kind of guy
Soooo…. Might not have a firearms friday tomorrow. I was hoping that the SHARE act would come up for a vote this week but it didn’t, and other than some minor bad news I have nothing of interest to report. So….. yeah.
http://imgur.com/g8oJRNA
Here ya go
anyone who can name all the rounds sitting on top of my safe wins one internet.
From L to R:
.22 LR, .45 ACP, Wolf 7.62 x 51, 7.62 x 54R, 7.62 x 63 (30-’06), 12 gauge 2.75 inch, 20 x 102mm training round? (Looks too small for 25 x 137)
Never mind, I think it is actually 25 x 137. Former Brad crewman?
Gray Ghost, you damn near got it on the first try. .22lr, 9×18 makerov, .308, 7.62x54r, 30-06, 12 gauge, and 20mm.
you win close to one internet.
I was going to say 25mm from my MK38….but if it’s 20mm – CIWS?
Damn Squids! Taking my wonderful Vulcan and removing the loving, human touch of a man in turret. Fun Fact – During live-fire exercises down at Ft. Hunter Ligget (Ft. Ord has only small arms ranges), we would often drop acid and try to write our names in the sky with the tracer rounds; HEIT-SD (High Explosive Incendiary Tracer – Self Destruct) are quite pretty at night.
22mm
12 gauge 2 3/4″
.300 WinMag
.30-06 Springfield
.308 Winchester/ 7.62 NATO
.45 ACP
9x19mm NATO? Hard to tell on my Gen2 iPad
Commie Killer 1 through 7
Not quite
9×18 and 7.62x64r are commie round. Although originally designed under the tsars, they were used for killing facists, white army soldiers, Austria-Hungarian soldiers, and russian dissidents. Probably more, the 9×18 was the standard police round for many eastern European country’s police forces while they were behind the iron curtain.
Bullet, bullet, bullet, bullet, bullet.
From left to right:
Small Awesome.
Also small awesome.
Awesome.
Much Better Than Awesome Because it is 54R
Also Awesome
Barrels of Fun
Big Awesome
Lol. I love shooting my nagant. 54r is a blast, and cheap to boot.
From left to right:
pewey small one, chode, assault death metal 1, assault death metal 2, assault death metal 3, shotgun shell, anti tank round.
Okay, send me my internet.
Didn’t realize so many would give joke answers, I thought everyone here was a bit of a gun nut (NTTAWWT).
Just let Derpy do it.
Just post a random question and see what we come up with. For example, “What round for STEVE SMITH?”
All of them.
STEVE SMITH LIKE ALL ROUNDS. AND BY ROUNDS MEAN RAPE.
New species of rat discovered; top law schools compete to offer it scholarships
Scientists find tree-dwelling, coconut-eating rat in the Solomon Islands
https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2017/09/27/Scientists-find-tree-dwelling-coconut-eating-rat-in-the-Solomon-Islands/8081506535562/?utm_source=sec&utm_campaign=sl&utm_medium=6
Ya know Derpy, we really love what you do for us here. But I’m getting worried about you. All this derping has got to be taking its toll on you. Take it easy man before you do permanent damage.
I’LL TELL *YOU* WHEN I’VE HAD ENOUGH!
I think he’s trying to innoculate himself to the derp. And with the way even entertainment media like ESPN and The Mouse is heading, I must admit it makes some sense.
Oof. Packers are demolishing.
I see the lamestream news is running a “incredibly wealthy Hollywood actress from a billionaire family gets breast cancer, uses it as an opportunity to shill for unions and socialized healthcare like she wouldn’t be able to afford care without her union” story tonight.
I was actually on the verge of just going, “Oh, that sucks” and then not paying further attention, but then the politics came in.
This is like when Jimmy Kimmel used his son as a fucking political prop to support obamacare because ‘OMG look at this baby! It would have TOTALLY died if not for the lightbringer!’. Dude, you make fucking millions and could probably get the surgeon to do the surgery for free if you show up at his kid’s birthday party. Fuck off.
I would have told Kimmel that in the UK they would have killed the baby like they did to Charlie Gard.
That’s actually my go-to response right now. Still don’t understand why that didn’t blow up more… well, I do, it’s because people want to believe in unlimited space-age totally free healthcare administered by unicorns with MDs. But still.
+1. About as savage as that tweet to Patton Oswalt about his inability to recognize sick women.
I paid no attention to that. I was irritated more by the news about Kirsten Sinema running for senate in 2018. No wonder she keeps visiting the Phoenix VA….
This is the kind of investigative gumshoe work we *should* be seeing at Papers Of Record and the various other mainstream outlets.
But oh no, it’s kneeling football players, Trump Derangement Syndrome, and fucking identity politics.
Thank you, Mr Servator. This was an awesome piece of local rage journalism. Keep us updated, and keep up the good work.
If anyone knows where one may find actual journalism, I would like to know. As far as i can tell, damn near all media is propaganda.
You’re here, and this is it.
It is genuinely difficult.
in my opinion, Reuters and AP can do basic news-feed reporting pretty well. Both succumb to lefty bias in their more-detailed ‘story writing’. but if all you want is facts, you can subscribe to barebones newsfeeds which give you by the hour “headlines+2 paragraphs”. If you spice up your feed with some assorted other sources (Christian Science Monitor is surprisingly good, so are some british papers like the Telegraph + Times) you can add some more detailed reporting which avoids setting off the propaganda-alarm
i’ve also noticed that local papers – e.g. smaller cities than NY/Chi/LA/DC – often have better story-coverage than the major national papers, and sometimes much-better editorials.
Thanks Gil. My local news is pretty good. Most everything else is trash. It sucks that one has to sift through so much bullshit to find a nugget of truth.
I like the Wall Street Journal.
Rockford is a nice town for Illinois. I kinda like that whole corridor from Rockford up to Beloit. They make shit there. Like Jeeps (in Belvidere) Estwing hammers and the legendary Astro-Physics telescopes . When visiting, SIV highly recommmends dining at Hoffman House, conveniently located in the Holiday Inn.
I like Jim Rockford.
That was a great show
I gotta say Swissy, this looks like actual journolisting. Nice job, it was less bad than my gym time.
Yesterday at the supermarket was the first time this year I saw eggnog on sale.
I really enjoy the one or two half-gallons of egg nog I buy each year.
I first read that as “egg noodle” and got really confused.
One of the local dairies produces eggnog year round for the past several years.
Oh god, TCM is running a short on LSD. The Big Cube is coming on overnight and is a hoot.
It’s Hollywood Hippie hysteria night. The Love-Ins was pretty good. Riot on Sunset Strip is about to start.
The music is great in Riot, thanks to the Standells.
Yeah. https://youtu.be/8jNxAScOlck
CON laws are terrible. In medical especially, since they can actually prevent needed services from saving lives. Telecom is also infested with them.
Watching Netflix’s show on how Carter stabbed us in the back on the Panama canal. Interesting to listen to them squirm into finding a way to justify it.
Having finished episode 1, I get the feeling that carter doesn’t even know why he did it. Even if you think it was a bit of an immoral land grab, that doesn’t mean you have to transfer all assets there to Panama.
That sounds good, I am big on LatAm stuff.
Carter knows why he did it, he just cant admit to it. At least Obama was in our faces about nearly everything he did. He wouldn’t come right out and say it but he didn’t do much to hide it either.
America is guilty and deserves to be punished. At least that is what most progs say they think. I dont really believe it. Personally I think they despise a constitution of negative power that severely limits power of government and guarantees individual negative rights. It is too much of a hindrance to there ambitions.
I saw that too, and what exactly did the US get for the canal? From what it showed, we just gave them the canal and thousands of buildings and other infrastructures to them for no money down, no payments, no nothing. Fuck Carter.
I liked the part where they made it seem like Panama might not agree to the conditions. As if we needed a treaty to intervene in their affairs.
It really pissed me off that they didn’t point out we got not one red cent (kind of tiptoed around it). If you consider we built the canal and ran it at no profit for almost 100 years, with the intent of subsidizing our businesses and then we give it to Panama and they immediately start running it as a profit making venture… yeah Carter is a retard, or hates America as Suthen says (I think as a young person I am under the mistaken belief that hating America is a new phenomenon, but really all the shit happening now is at a minimum foreshadowed 20 and 40 years ago, and probably earlier than that). He kept mentioning how it was unpopular and a bunch of Senators lost their seats over it. Yes, you fuck, people don’t like it when the government fucks them. Obviously I am a libertarian, and the fedgov had no business doing any of that stuff, but it doesn’t seem particularly libertarian to fuck the taxpayers with a rusty fork after we’d already paid for the canal in various ways. Don’t forget that we did help panama get independence for the canal zone, seems a fair deal to me, and they obviously thought so too at the time.
what’s it called?
Panama Canal Prized Possession
After further review, the Bears still suck.
You sent me down the rabbit hole with this one. I started looking through healthcare regulations that the Certificate of Need comes from and got as far back as the National Health Planning and Resources Development Act of 1974, which talks about healthcare regulations as far back as 1944, before I snapped.
Everything that’s said about healthcare regulations now was said back then and nothing got better. In fact it got consistently worse.
The entire premise of the Certificate if Need is founded on an absolutely false assumption and it states that in the second paragraph of the first Google source of Certificate of Need after Wikipedia.
The National Conference of State Legislatures said this to justify having CONs: “the basic assumption underlying CON regulations is that excess capacity stemming from overbuilding of health care facilities results in health care price inflation.”
These people are evil. Pure, unadulterated evil. I’ve never actually believed that before, I always figured they’re just stupid, but after diving into the regs there’s no other way to describe them.
Between this and estate taxes talked about in the links I can only conclude they really do want everyone who’s not dead by their hands to be equally dirt poor. Fuck them. Fuck this. Fuck all of it.
Fuck them. Fuck this. Fuck all of it.
Also, fuck em sideways, Fuck em six ways for sunday, fuck em past the alter, and fuck em then feed them fish heads. I agree with your sentimemt. CON laws kill people and enrich cronies. Fuck everyone involved. Fuck.
Hey, I got your certificate of kneed right here! *Crumples Bureaucrat.
That’s why it’s so fucking maddening to hear the ‘progressive” claim that free market healthcare has failed. What fucking free market are you talking about??
It’s like someone who claims to be on the paleo diet while eating donuts and ice cream, then going around declaring that the paleo diet is a complete failure since they didn’t lose weight by doing it.
It’s the ONE TIME in the history of the planet that increased supply caused prices to go up.
On the “politics is everywhere now” front, I watched the return of “Will and Grace” with the wife tonight.
For some reason they decided that it would be great to start with an episode devoted entirely to politics. And not just any politics, but the snarky, Huffington Post comments section sort of politics. The entire episode was about how Republicans and tough guy secret service guys are all secretly gay, and Republicans are dirty and evil and homophobic and they hate clean water and trees. And mostly about how awful Trump is. Not because of his political positions, but just because we all hate him. And he’s orange, like a Cheeto. (yes, they actually did a visual joke with a bag of Cheetos)
The writing was absolutely horrific, even when they weren’t making silly HuffPo style political screeds that don’t actually align very well with reality.
In short, if you hate Trump, it was wonderful. The wife thought it was great.. especially when they made the Cheetos joke and when they left a hat in the Oval Office that said “Make America Gay Again”.
I thought it was a very odd choice for a network sitcom to intentionally limit its audience to only Hillary supporters.
But the real reason I wanted to comment on it was that they hit a home run in the irony department.
The entire episode was about Grace getting a job as an interior decorator to do the Oval Office. The characters on the show (and obviously the writers) believed that she should never take a job providing a service for Trump, because of her political beliefs. They had several characters come right out and say that she couldn’t in good conscience provide her services to Trump in violation of her deeply held political beliefs. I really couldn’t help noticing the parallels and wondering if they would have felt the same way if Trump had asked her to bake a cake.
One additional episode of irony came when they addressed politics in the workplace. After spending half the show on a purely partisan political polemic, they had Grace deliver a lecture to the Trump supporting Karen about keeping her politics out of the office. (it is offensive)
Huh. Who woulda thought that Hollywood would have produced a series that depicted half the country as stupid, racist, etc.
And, look, I really got nothing against gay guys, but Jesus Tap Dancing Christ, if the cast of Will and Grace flame any harder, they’re going to start a fire.
And, I mean that. Alexander the Great? Conquered half of Eurasia, queer as a three dollar bill. Hemingway. Probably Lincoln.
I don’t care. Everybody has their thing. But stop being so goddamned annoying about it.
GOLD, JERRY! GOLD!
I’m not sure why the writers thought that would be some sick burn against Trump. As I understand it, he’s been more consistently pro-gay than Hillary (who was still saying that marriage is between a man and a woman as late as 2008).
I did not read the article. I have not read the 6k comments before this one..
I’m here for one reason, and one reason only:
WHAT UP MY NEGROES!?!?;!;!;!!????!?
shitlord
You are the pimpiest pimp-bot ever. I don’t care what that “other Bender” on here says. Do. Not. Fucking. Change.
Shitlord
South Park had a beautiful juxtaposition for this one..
All of the social signaling about victimhood + Ancestry DNA test = free pass to victimhood
“I’m 2.5% black! I can say the N-word now!!”
“I’m 3.7% Navajo….. I’m a victim!”
Fucking A Swiss. Stay on this. The pols look as corrupt as the CON law. Maybe your journalising will help put one behind bars.