Data transmission in modern worlds follows rules of contention.
ISP's typically provision their networks with 1:50 or higher contention ratios, because they know that 50 people on any normal day wont use up 1 torrent-user's typical bandwidth consumption under full saturation.

The ratios are calculated from the average access edge speeds....say avg speed is 3mbps, they could provision 50 customers to share 3mbps in the core network before they consider upgrading.

Contention....noone uses the entire networks bandwidth the entire time its available. Otherwise networking equipment and access costs would be 50 times greater!!

Its just not efficient to plan for everyone to saturate everyones links at the same time and not have a bottleneck....because 99% of the rest of the time, noones using shit on average. What a waste of power, space, equipment, service fees, support contracts, engineers to maintain the equipment / network etc..etc...etc...

How might gun ownership help a society? Well, it depends on the society doesn't it? Take Switzerland, for instance, which doesn't really have a standing army but inducts citizens into the militia and requires them to keep their firearms at home so they can mobilize quickly in the event of a crisis. I'd say there's a pretty strong benefit to their society (i.e. defense of the nation) in that case.

But I think @dystopianfuturetoday was probably asking about the benefits to a society in the U.S., where gun ownership is optional but also so prevalent So I'll focus on that area.

1) As has already been mentioned, from an economic standpoint, society benefits from the sale of guns and their related items through both taxes and levies and through the provision of jobs for those who produce guns, sell guns, or manage gun ranges. I have absolutely no idea exactly how big or small this benefit is in the U.S. but it certainly exists.

2) Armed citizens can (and do) stop "dangerous situations" from happening long before first responders have a chance to arrive and in some cases before they even have a chance to be notified. "Dangerous situations" here refers not only to crime but attacks by wild animals in rural areas.

3) Deterrence. Certain types of crime become much more risky to the professional criminal if you have to assume everyone is armed at all times.

Given these potential benefits to society, the question really then becomes do these benefits outweigh the costs to society? And also, what of the benefits to the individual? Certainly these must be weighed as well. CNN contributor David Frum wrote an interesting piece last year exploring these issues. You can find it here.

IF YOU THOUGHT HEALTH CARE WAS EXPENSIVE BEFORE, WAIT UNTIL OBAMARXCARE MAKES IT FREE!


Although some of the "fiscal cliff" taxes can be avoided through a deal made in Congress, new ObamaCare taxes are guaranteed to kick in on January 1, amounting to $268 billion tax hike.

The Obamacare Medical Device Tax – a $20 billion tax increase: Medical device manufacturers employ 409,000 people in 12,000 plants across the country. Obamacare imposes a new 2.3 percent excise tax on gross sales – even if the company does not earn a profit in a given year. In addition to killing small business jobs and impacting research and development budgets, this will increase the cost of your health care – making everything from pacemakers to prosthetics more expensive.

The Obamacare “Special Needs Kids Tax” – a $13 billion tax increase: The 30-35 million Americans who use a Flexible Spending Account (FSA) at work to pay for their family’s basic medical needs will face a new government cap of $2,500 (currently the accounts are unlimited under federal law, though employers are allowed to set a cap).

There is one group of FSA owners for whom this new cap will be particularly cruel and onerous: parents of special needs children. There are several million families with special needs children in the United States, and many of them use FSAs to pay for special needs education. Tuition rates at one leading school that teaches special needs children in Washington, D.C. (National Child Research Center) can easily exceed $14,000 per year. Under tax rules, FSA dollars can be used to pay for this type of special needs education. This Obamacare tax provision will limit the options available to these families.

The Obamacare Surtax on Investment Income – a $123 billion tax increase: This is a new, 3.8 percentage point surtax on investment income earned in households making at least $250,000 ($200,000 single). This would result in the following top tax rates on investment income:


The Obamacare “Haircut” for Medical Itemized Deductions – a $15.2 billion tax increase: Currently, those Americans facing high medical expenses are allowed a deduction to the extent that those expenses exceed 7.5 percent of adjusted gross income (AGI). This tax increase imposes a threshold of 10 percent of AGI. By limiting this deduction, Obamacare widens the net of taxable income for the sickest Americans. This tax provision will most harm near retirees and those with modest incomes but high medical bills.

The Obamacare Medicare Payroll Tax Hike --an $86.8 billion tax increase: The Medicare payroll tax is currently 2.9 percent on all wages and self-employment profits. Under this tax hike, wages and profits exceeding $200,000 ($250,000 in the case of married couples) will face a 3.8 percent rate instead. This is a direct marginal income tax hike on small business owners, who are liable for self-employment tax in most cases.

Not only does this tax increase costs on companies, it also increases costs on hospitals, doctors and people in need of medical treatment that requires medical devices to be used. As a consequence of this, biomedical or medical device engineering firms are already laying off workers who develop crucial medical products due to the "unforeseen" costs, or in other words, the costs of ObamaCare. Not to mention, the more money these companies pay to the government, the less money they have to invest in research and development.

With this new medical device tax, students who pay large sums of money to get degrees in the field of biomedical engineering, just like doctors, will no longer see the benefits of going into the field and therefore, we will have a shortage of engineers developing new medical device technology. The medical device tax is a death sentence for American medical innovation.

OWN IT, LIBS!

Lv,

QM

My ability to ignore the infinitesimal possibility of a malfunctioning gravity well is entirely a result of me having bigger fish to fry. It is not rigorously justified, it is merely a practical concession to my finite mind. It is indeed technically fallacious and yet it has been completely accurate so far. That may very well be the limited scope us humans have to deal with.

I'm glad you can admit it. That's real progress.

You have not demonstrated that there must be absolute knowledge provided to us, because you have not provided an example of anything in this world that is inconsistent with an uncertain universe, nor have you shown an instance of us relying on reasonable assumptions failing in some unexpected manner.

The argument is intended to show that we all treat it as absolute knowledge in reality, and that without absolute knowledge, you don't know anything. Therefore, you live in contradiction to what you actually believe, and what you experience, and that God is the only actual way to make sense of your reality. You say you do just fine by assuming what is contrary to reason, because it works for you. Well, that's what you accuse me of doing, isn't it?

Unless, of course, you would like to provide me an example or two. Sorry, but "obviously better in every conceivable way" just doesn't cut it. You have to give examples. Come on, with "every conceivable way" available to chose from, you should be able to come up with at least one, no?

You don't see how knowing that God exists would be better than not knowing? If God exists and you don't know it, it means you are ignorant of everything that matters. It means you don't know why you're here, what you're supposed to do, and how you can achieve your greatest potential. It means that you will never have any lasting peace because you have no peace with God. It means you'll have never known the love of God, or all of the blessings that He has provisioned for you. It also means, that you'll have missed your chance for eternal life with Him. I think the benefits as well as the consequences are self-evident.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/magazine/20pacemaker-t.html?pagewanted=all

One October afternoon three years ago while I was visiting my parents, my mother made a request I dreaded and longed to fulfill. She had just poured me a cup of Earl Grey from her Japanese iron teapot, shaped like a little pumpkin; outside, two cardinals splashed in the birdbath in the weak Connecticut sunlight. Her white hair was gathered at the nape of her neck, and her voice was low. “Please help me get Jeff’s pacemaker turned off,” she said, using my father’s first name. I nodded, and my heart knocked.
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Upstairs, my 85-year-old father, Jeffrey, a retired Wesleyan University professor who suffered from dementia, lay napping in what was once their shared bedroom. Sewn into a hump of skin and muscle below his right clavicle was the pacemaker that helped his heart outlive his brain. The size of a pocket watch, it had kept his heart beating rhythmically for nearly five years. Its battery was expected to last five more.

After tea, I knew, my mother would help him from his narrow bed with its mattress encased in waterproof plastic. She would take him to the toilet, change his diaper and lead him tottering to the couch, where he would sit mutely for hours, pretending to read Joyce Carol Oates, the book falling in his lap as he stared out the window.

I don’t like describing what dementia did to my father — and indirectly to my mother — without telling you first that my parents loved each other, and I loved them. That my mother, Valerie, could stain a deck and sew an evening dress from a photo in Vogue and thought of my father as her best friend. That my father had never given up easily on anything.

Born in South Africa, he lost his left arm in World War II, but built floor-to-ceiling bookcases for our living room; earned a Ph.D. from Oxford; coached rugby; and with my two brothers as crew, sailed his beloved Rhodes 19 on Long Island Sound. When I was a child, he woke me, chortling, with his gloss on a verse from “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”: “Awake, my little one! Before life’s liquor in its cup be dry!” At bedtime he tucked me in, quoting “Hamlet” : “May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”

Now I would look at him and think of Anton Chekhov, who died of tuberculosis in 1904. “Whenever there is someone in a family who has long been ill, and hopelessly ill,” he wrote, “there come painful moments when all timidly, secretly, at the bottom of their hearts long for his death.” A century later, my mother and I had come to long for the machine in my father’s chest to fail.

Until 2001, my two brothers and I — all living in California — assumed that our parents would enjoy long, robust old ages capped by some brief, undefined final illness. Thanks to their own healthful habits and a panoply of medical advances — vaccines, antibiotics, airport defibrillators, 911 networks and the like — they weren’t likely to die prematurely of the pneumonias, influenzas and heart attacks that decimated previous generations. They walked every day. My mother practiced yoga. My father was writing a history of his birthplace, a small South African town.

In short, they were seemingly among the lucky ones for whom the American medical system, despite its fragmentation, inequity and waste, works quite well. Medicare and supplemental insurance paid for their specialists and their trusted Middletown internist, the lean, bespectacled Robert Fales, who, like them, was skeptical of medical overdoing. “I bonded with your parents, and you don’t bond with everybody,” he once told me. “It’s easier to understand someone if they just tell it like it is from their heart and their soul.”

They were also stoics and religious agnostics. They signed living wills and durable power-of-attorney documents for health care. My mother, who watched friends die slowly of cancer, had an underlined copy of the Hemlock Society’s “Final Exit” in her bookcase. Even so, I watched them lose control of their lives to a set of perverse financial incentives — for cardiologists, hospitals and especially the manufacturers of advanced medical devices — skewed to promote maximum treatment. At a point hard to precisely define, they stopped being beneficiaries of the war on sudden death and became its victims.

Things took their first unexpected turn on Nov. 13, 2001, when my father — then 79, pacemakerless and seemingly healthy — collapsed on my parents’ kitchen floor in Middletown, making burbling sounds. He had suffered a stroke.

He came home six weeks later permanently incapable of completing a sentence. But as I’ve said, he didn’t give up easily, and he doggedly learned again how to fasten his belt; to peck out sentences on his computer; to walk alone, one foot dragging, to the university pool for water aerobics. He never again put on a shirt without help or looked at the book he had been writing. One day he haltingly told my mother, “I don’t know who I am anymore.”

His stroke devastated two lives. The day before, my mother was an upper-middle-class housewife who practiced calligraphy in her spare time. Afterward, she was one of tens of millions of people in America, most of them women, who help care for an older family member.

Their numbers grow each day. Thanks to advanced medical technologies, elderly people now survive repeated health crises that once killed them, and so the “oldest old” have become the nation’s most rapidly growing age group. Nearly a third of Americans over 85 have dementia (a condition whose prevalence rises in direct relationship to longevity). Half need help with at least one practical, life-sustaining activity, like getting dressed or making breakfast. Even though a capable woman was hired to give my dad showers, my 77-year-old mother found herself on duty more than 80 hours a week. Her blood pressure rose and her weight fell. On a routine visit to Dr. Fales, she burst into tears. She was put on sleeping pills and antidepressants.

My father said he came to believe that she would have been better off if he had died. “She’d have weeped the weep of a widow,” he told me in his garbled, poststroke speech, on a walk we took together in the fall of 2002. “And then she would have been all right.” It was hard to tell which of them was suffering more.

As we shuffled through the fallen leaves that day, I thought of my father’s father, Ernest Butler. He was 79 when he died in 1965, before pacemakers, implanted cardiac defibrillators, stents and replacement heart valves routinely staved off death among the very old. After completing some long-unfinished chairs, he cleaned his woodshop, had a heart attack and died two days later in a plain hospital bed. As I held my dad’s soft, mottled hand, I vainly wished him a similar merciful death.

A few days before Christmas that year, after a vigorous session of water exercises, my father developed a painful inguinal (intestinal) hernia. My mother took him to Fales, who sent them to a local surgeon, who sent them to a cardiologist for a preoperative clearance. After an electrocardiogram recorded my father’s slow heartbeat — a longstanding and symptomless condition not uncommon in the very old — the cardiologist, John Rogan, refused to clear my dad for surgery unless he received a pacemaker.

Without the device, Dr. Rogan told me later, my father could have died from cardiac arrest during surgery or perhaps within a few months. It was the second time Rogan had seen my father. The first time, about a year before, he recommended the device for the same slow heartbeat. That time, my then-competent and prestroke father expressed extreme reluctance, on the advice of Fales, who considered it overtreatment.

My father’s medical conservatism, I have since learned, is not unusual. According to an analysis by the Dartmouth Atlas medical-research group, patients are far more likely than their doctors to reject aggressive treatments when fully informed of pros, cons and alternatives — information, one study suggests, that nearly half of patients say they don’t get. And although many doctors assume that people want to extend their lives, many do not. In a 1997 study in The Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 30 percent of seriously ill people surveyed in a hospital said they would “rather die” than live permanently in a nursing home. In a 2008 study in The Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 28 percent of patients with advanced heart failure said they would trade one day of excellent health for another two years in their current state.

When Rogan suggested the pacemaker for the second time, my father was too stroke-damaged to discuss, and perhaps even to weigh, his trade­offs. The decision fell to my mother — anxious to relieve my father’s pain, exhausted with caregiving, deferential to doctors and no expert on high-tech medicine. She said yes. One of the most important medical decisions of my father’s life was over in minutes. Dr. Fales was notified by fax.

Fales loved my parents, knew their suffering close at hand, continued to oppose a pacemaker and wasn’t alarmed by death. If he had had the chance to sit down with my parents, he could have explained that the pacemaker’s battery would last 10 years and asked whether my father wanted to live to be 89 in his nearly mute and dependent state. He could have discussed the option of using a temporary external pacemaker that, I later learned, could have seen my dad safely through surgery. But my mother never consulted Fales. And the system would have effectively penalized him if she had. Medicare would have paid him a standard office-visit rate of $54 for what would undoubtedly have been a long meeting — and nothing for phone calls to work out a plan with Rogan and the surgeon.

Medicare has made minor improvements since then, and in the House version of the health care reform bill debated last year, much better payments for such conversations were included. But after the provision was distorted as reimbursement for “death panels,” it was dropped. In my father’s case, there was only a brief informed-consent process, covering the boilerplate risks of minor surgery, handled by the general surgeon.

I believe that my father’s doctors did their best within a compartmentalized and time-pressured medical system. But in the absence of any other guiding hand, there is no doubt that economics helped shape the wider context in which doctors made decisions. Had we been at the Mayo Clinic — where doctors are salaried, medical records are electronically organized and care is coordinated by a single doctor — things might have turned out differently. But Middletown is part of the fee-for-service medical economy. Doctors peddle their wares on a piecework basis; communication among them is haphazard; thinking is often short term; nobody makes money when medical interventions are declined; and nobody is in charge except the marketplace.

And so on Jan. 2, 2003, at Middlesex Hospital, the surgeon implanted my father’s pacemaker using local anesthetic. Medicare paid him $461 and the hospital a flat fee of about $12,000, of which an estimated $7,500 went to St. Jude Medical, the maker of the device. The hernia was fixed a few days later.

It was a case study in what primary-care doctors have long bemoaned: that Medicare rewards doctors far better for doing procedures than for assessing whether they should be done at all. The incentives for overtreatment continue, said Dr. Ted Epperly, the board chairman of the American Academy of Family Physicians, because those who profit from them — specialists, hospitals, drug companies and the medical-device manufacturers — spend money lobbying Congress and the public to keep it that way.

Last year, doctors, hospitals, drug companies, medical-equipment manufacturers and other medical professionals spent $545 million on lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. This may help explain why researchers estimate that 20 to 30 percent of Medicare’s $510 billion budget goes for unnecessary tests and treatment. Why cost-containment received short shrift in health care reform. Why physicians like Fales net an average of $173,000 a year, while noninvasive cardiologists like Rogan net about $419,000.

The system rewarded nobody for saying “no” or even “wait” — not even my frugal, intelligent, Consumer-Reports-reading mother. Medicare and supplemental insurance covered almost every penny of my father’s pacemaker. My mother was given more government-mandated consumer information when she bought a new Camry a year later.

And so my father’s electronically managed heart — now requiring frequent monitoring, paid by Medicare — became part of the $24 billion worldwide cardiac-device industry and an indirect subsidizer of the fiscal health of American hospitals. The profit margins that manufacturers earn on cardiac devices is close to 30 percent. Cardiac procedures and diagnostics generate about 20 percent of hospital revenues and 30 percent of profits.

Shortly after New Year’s 2003, my mother belatedly called and told me about the operations, which went off without a hitch. She didn’t call earlier, she said, because she didn’t want to worry me. My heart sank, but I said nothing. It is one thing to silently hope that your beloved father’s heart might fail. It is another to actively abet his death.

The pacemaker bought my parents two years of limbo, two of purgatory and two of hell. At first they soldiered on, with my father no better and no worse. My mother reread Jon Kabat-Zinn’s “Full Catastrophe Living,” bought a self-help book on patience and rose each morning to meditate.

In 2005, the age-related degeneration that had slowed my father’s heart attacked his eyes, lungs, bladder and bowels. Clots as narrow as a single human hair lodged in tiny blood vessels in his brain, killing clusters of neurons by depriving them of oxygen. Long partly deaf, he began losing his sight to wet macular degeneration, requiring ocular injections that cost nearly $2,000 each. A few months later, he forgot his way home from the university pool. He grew incontinent. He was collapsing physically, like an ancient, shored-up house.

In the summer of 2006, he fell in the driveway and suffered a brain hemorrhage. Not long afterward, he spent a full weekend compulsively brushing and rebrushing his teeth. “The Jeff I married . . . is no longer the same person,” my mother wrote in the journal a social worker had suggested she keep. “My life is in ruins. This is horrible, and I have lasted for five years.” His pacemaker kept on ticking.

When bioethicists debate life-extending technologies, the effects on people like my mother rarely enter the calculus. But a 2007 Ohio State University study of the DNA of family caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s disease showed that the ends of their chromosomes, called telomeres, had degraded enough to reflect a four-to-eight-year shortening of lifespan. By that reckoning, every year that the pacemaker gave my irreparably damaged father took from my then-vigorous mother an equal year.

When my mother was upset, she meditated or cleaned house. When I was upset, I Googled. In 2006, I discovered that pacemakers could be deactivated without surgery. Nurses, doctors and even device salesmen had done so, usually at deathbeds. A white ceramic device, like a TV remote and shaped like the wands that children use to blow bubbles, could be placed around the hump on my father’s chest. Press a few buttons and the electrical pulses that ran down the leads to his heart would slow until they were no longer effective. My father’s heart, I learned, would probably not stop. It would just return to its old, slow rhythm. If he was lucky, he might suffer cardiac arrest and die within weeks, perhaps in his sleep. If he was unlucky, he might linger painfully for months while his lagging heart failed to suffuse his vital organs with sufficient oxygenated blood.

If we did nothing, his pacemaker would not stop for years. Like the tireless charmed brooms in Disney’s “Fantasia,” it would prompt my father’s heart to beat after he became too demented to speak, sit up or eat. It would keep his heart pulsing after he drew his last breath. If he was buried, it would send signals to his dead heart in the coffin. If he was cremated, it would have to be cut from his chest first, to prevent it from exploding and damaging the walls or hurting an attendant.

On the Internet, I discovered that the pacemaker — somewhat like the ventilator, defibrillator and feeding tube — was first an exotic, stopgap device, used to carry a handful of patients through a brief medical crisis. Then it morphed into a battery-powered, implantable and routine treatment. When Medicare approved the pacemaker for reimbursement in 1966, the market exploded. Today pacemakers are implanted annually in more than 400,000 Americans, about 80 percent of whom are over 65. According to calculations by the Dartmouth Atlas research group using Medicare data, nearly a fifth of new recipients who receive pacemakers annually — 76,000 — are over 80. The typical patient with a cardiac device today is an elderly person suffering from at least one other severe chronic illness.

Over the years, as technology has improved, the battery life of these devices lengthened. The list of heart conditions for which they are recommended has grown. In 1984, the treatment guidelines from the American College of Cardiology declared that pacemakers were strongly recommended as “indicated” or mildly approved as “reasonable” for 56 heart conditions and “not indicated” for 31 more. By 2008, the list for which they were strongly or mildly recommended expanded to 88, with most of the increase in the lukewarm “reasonable” category.

The research backing the expansion of diagnoses was weak. Over all, only 5 percent of the positive recommendations were supported by research from multiple double-blind randomized studies, the gold standard of evidence-based medicine. And 58 percent were based on no studies at all, only a “consensus of expert opinion.” Of the 17 cardiologists who wrote the 2008 guidelines, 11 received financing from cardiac-device makers or worked at institutions receiving it. Seven, due to the extent of their financial connections, were recused from voting on the guidelines they helped write.

This pattern — a paucity of scientific support and a plethora of industry connections — holds across almost all cardiac treatments, according to the cardiologist Pierluigi Tricoci of Duke University’s Clinical Research Institute. Last year in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Tricoci and his co-authors wrote that only 11 percent of 2,700 widely used cardiac-treatment guidelines were based on that gold standard. Most were based only on expert opinion.

Experts are as vulnerable to conflicts of interest as researchers are, the authors warned, because “expert clinicians are also those who are likely to receive honoraria, speakers bureau [fees], consulting fees or research support from industry.” They called the current cardiac-research agenda “strongly influenced by industry’s natural desire to introduce new products.”

Perhaps it’s no surprise that I also discovered others puzzling over cardiologists who recommended pacemakers for relatives with advanced dementia. “78-year-old mother-in-law has dementia; severe short-term memory issues,” read an Internet post by “soninlaw” on Elderhope.com, a caregivers’ site, in 2007. “On a routine trip to her cardiologist, doctor decides she needs a pacemaker. . . . Anyone have a similar encounter?”

By the summer of 2007, my dad had forgotten the purpose of a dinner napkin and had to be coached to remove his slippers before he tried to put on his shoes. After a lifetime of promoting my father’s health, my mother reversed course. On a routine visit, she asked Rogan to deactivate the pacemaker. “It was hard,” she later told me. “I was doing for Jeff what I would have wanted Jeff to do for me.” Rogan soon made it clear he was morally opposed. “It would have been like putting a pillow over your father’s head,” he later told me.

Not long afterward, my mother declined additional medical tests and refused to put my father on a new anti-dementia drug and a blood thinner with troublesome side effects. “I take responsibility for whatever,” she wrote in her journal that summer. “Enough of all this overkill! It’s killing me! Talk about quality of life — what about mine?”

Then came the autumn day when she asked for my help, and I said yes. I told myself that we were simply trying to undo a terrible medical mistake. I reminded myself that my dad had rejected a pacemaker when his faculties were intact. I imagined, as a bioethicist had suggested, having a 15-minute conversation with my independent, predementia father in which I saw him shaking his head in horror over any further extension of what was not a “life,” but a prolonged and attenuated dying. None of it helped. I knew that once he died, I would dream of him and miss his mute, loving smiles. I wanted to melt into the arms of the father I once had and ask him to handle this. Instead, I felt as if I were signing on as his executioner and that I had no choice.

Over the next five months, my mother and I learned many things. We were told, by the Hemlock Society’s successor, Compassion and Choices, that as my father’s medical proxy, my mother had the legal right to ask for the withdrawal of any treatment and that the pacemaker was, in theory at least, a form of medical treatment. We learned that although my father’s living will requested no life support if he were comatose or dying, it said nothing about dementia and did not define a pacemaker as life support. We learned that if we called 911, emergency medical technicians would not honor my father’s do-not-resuscitate order unless he wore a state-issued orange hospital bracelet. We also learned that no cardiology association had given its members clear guidance on when, or whether, deactivating pacemakers was ethical.

(Last month that changed. The Heart Rhythm Society and the American Heart Association issued guidelines declaring that patients or their legal surrogates have the moral and legal right to request the withdrawal of any medical treatment, including an implanted cardiac device. It said that deactivating a pacemaker was neither euthanasia nor assisted suicide, and that a doctor could not be compelled to do so in violation of his moral values. In such cases, it continued, doctors “cannot abandon the patient but should involve a colleague who is willing to carry out the procedure.” This came, of course, too late for us.)

In the spring of 2008, things got even worse. My father took to roaring like a lion at his caregivers. At home in California, I searched the Internet for a sympathetic cardiologist and a caregiver to put my Dad to bed at night. My frayed mother began to shout at him, and their nighttime scenes were heartbreaking and frightening. An Alzheimer’s Association support-group leader suggested that my brothers and I fly out together and institutionalize my father. This leader did not know my mother’s formidable will and had never heard her speak about her wedding vows or her love.

Meanwhile my father drifted into what nurses call “the dwindles”: not sick enough to qualify for hospice care, but sick enough to never get better. He fell repeatedly at night and my mother could not pick him up. Finally, he was weak enough to qualify for palliative care, and a team of nurses and social workers visited the house. His chest grew wheezy. My mother did not request antibiotics. In mid-April 2008, he was taken by ambulance to Middlesex Hospital’s hospice wing, suffering from pneumonia.

Pneumonia was once called “the old man’s friend” for its promise of an easy death. That’s not what I saw when I flew in. On morphine, unreachable, his eyes shut, my beloved father was breathing as hard and regularly as a machine.

My mother sat holding his hand, weeping and begging for forgiveness for her impatience. She sat by him in agony. She beseeched his doctors and nurses to increase his morphine dose and to turn off the pacemaker. It was a weekend, and the doctor on call at Rogan’s cardiology practice refused authorization, saying that my father “might die immediately.” And so came five days of hard labor. My mother and I stayed by him in shifts, while his breathing became increasingly ragged and his feet slowly started to turn blue. I began drafting an appeal to the hospital ethics committee. My brothers flew in.

On a Tuesday afternoon, with my mother at his side, my father stopped breathing. A hospice nurse hung a blue light on the outside of his hospital door. Inside his chest, his pacemaker was still quietly pulsing.

After his memorial service in the Wesleyan University chapel, I carried a box from the crematory into the woods of an old convent where he and I often walked. It was late April, overcast and cold. By the side of a stream, I opened the box, scooped out a handful of ashes and threw them into the swirling water. There were some curious spiraled metal wires, perhaps the leads of his pacemaker, mixed with the white dust and pieces of bone.

A year later, I took my mother to meet a heart surgeon in a windowless treatment room at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She was 84, with two leaking heart valves. Her cardiologist had recommended open-heart surgery, and I was hoping to find a less invasive approach. When the surgeon asked us why we were there, my mother said, “To ask questions.” She was no longer a trusting and deferential patient. Like me, she no longer saw doctors — perhaps with the exception of Fales — as healers or her fiduciaries. They were now skilled technicians with their own agendas. But I couldn’t help feeling that something precious — our old faith in a doctor’s calling, perhaps, or in a healing that is more than a financial transaction or a reflexive fixing of broken parts — had been lost.

The surgeon was forthright: without open-heart surgery, there was a 50-50 chance my mother would die within two years. If she survived the operation, she would probably live to be 90. And the risks? He shrugged. Months of recovery. A 5 percent chance of stroke. Some possibility, he acknowledged at my prompting, of postoperative cognitive decline. (More than half of heart-bypass patients suffer at least a 20 percent reduction in mental function.) My mother lifted her trouser leg to reveal an anklet of orange plastic: her do-not-resuscitate bracelet. The doctor recoiled. No, he would not operate with that bracelet in place. It would not be fair to his team. She would be revived if she collapsed. “If I have a stroke,” my mother said, nearly in tears, “I want you to let me go.” What about a minor stroke, he said — a little weakness on one side?

I kept my mouth shut. I was there to get her the information she needed and to support whatever decision she made. If she emerged from surgery intellectually damaged, I would bring her to a nursing home in California and try to care for her the way she had cared for my father at such cost to her own health. The thought terrified me.

The doctor sent her up a floor for an echocardiogram. A half-hour later, my mother came back to the waiting room and put on her black coat. “No,” she said brightly, with the clarity of purpose she had shown when she asked me to have the pacemaker deactivated. “I will not do it.”

She spent the spring and summer arranging house repairs, thinning out my father’s bookcases and throwing out the files he collected so lovingly for the book he never finished writing. She told someone that she didn’t want to leave a mess for her kids. Her chest pain worsened, and her breathlessness grew severe. “I’m aching to garden,” she wrote in her journal. “But so it goes. ACCEPT ACCEPT ACCEPT.”

Last August, she had a heart attack and returned home under hospice care. One evening a month later, another heart attack. One of my brothers followed her ambulance to the hospice wing where we had sat for days by my father’s bed. The next morning, she took off her silver earrings and told the nurses she wanted to stop eating and drinking, that she wanted to die and never go home. Death came to her an hour later, while my brother was on the phone to me in California — almost as mercifully as it had come to my paternal grandfather. She was continent and lucid to her end.

A week later, at the same crematory near Long Island Sound, my brothers and I watched through a plate-glass window as a cardboard box containing her body, dressed in a scarlet silk ao dai she had sewn herself, slid into the flames. The next day, the undertaker delivered a plastic box to the house where, for 45 of their 61 years together, my parents had loved and looked after each other, humanly and imperfectly. There were no bits of metal mixed with the fine white powder and the small pieces of her bones.

Katy Butler lives in Mill Valley, Calif., and teaches memoir writing at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur.

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

"In the United States, stop signs have a size of 75 cm across opposite flats of the red octagon, with a 20mm white border. The white uppercase letters forming the stop legend are 25 cm tall. Larger signs of 90 cm (36 in) with 30 cm (12 in) legend and 25 mm (⅞ in) border are used on multilane expressways. Regulatory provisions exist for extra-large 120 cm (48 in) signs with 40 cm (16 in) legend and 30 mm (1¼ in) border for use where sign visibility or reaction distance are limited, and the smallest permissible stop sign size for general usage is 60 cm (24 in) with a 20 cm (8 in) legend and 15 mm (⅝ in) border."

In other words, anything else is not a valid or legal stop sign. This is the airport's fault, plain and simple.

@bareboards2

I'm also glad that we can discuss these issues like reasonable people. I apologize if I've come off as unreasonable in the past. The truth is that I'm always willing to talk things out.

I've heard the rhetoric about death panels from both sides; I just haven't put in the effort to separate fact from fiction. Now that I've looked into it, this is what I've found. What you're describing (end of life consultations) is not the same thing as what are now being called death panels in Obamacare. Yes, it is true that the provision you are speaking about was demonized by republicans and ultimately removed from Medicare. I'm actually not sure how I feel about it, because it is a form of assisted suicide, and it could be abused. Some seniors may feel pressured into forgoing care, just as you hear of some people receiving substandard care because they are organ donors.

http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/dad-rescues-brain-dead-son-from-doctors-wishing-to-harvest-his-organs-boy-r

In any case, the conversation has evolved, and we are no longer talking about these end of life consultations when we are talking about death panels. The death panel in Obamacare is an unelected board of 15 "health care experts" (the Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB) who will make critical decisions on what services within Medicare are financially viable, and which aren't. Here is a quote from President Obama in the first debate acknowledging this:

"It — when Gov. Romney talks about this board, for example, unelected board that we’ve created, what this is, is a group of health care experts, doctors, et cetera, to figure out, how can we reduce the cost of care in the system overall?” Obama said.

“Now, so what this board does is basically identifies best practices and says, let’s use the purchasing power of Medicare and Medicaid to help to institutionalize all these good things that we do,” Obama added.

This is also acknowledged by a senior adviser to Obama:

"WE need death panels. Well, maybe not death panels, exactly, but unless we start allocating health care resources more prudently — rationing, by its proper name — the exploding cost of Medicare will swamp the federal budget."

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/opinion/health-care-reform-beyond-obamacare.html?_r=2

So call it death panels, or rationing, the principle is still the same. The recommendations this board makes will become law unless it is overridden by a 2/3's majority vote in congress. Here is a good example of how this type of legislative oversight is making health care "better" (penalizing hospitals for readmitting patients within 30 days):

"Beginning Monday, the hospitals will receive lower reimbursements on Medicare claims filed with the government for each admitted patient. Over the year, the total amount of those reductions will vary from $1.2 million for MedStar Washington Hospital Center in Northwest Washington, the region’s largest private hospital, to about $12,000 for Reston Hospital Center in Virginia. Of 16 hospitals in the District and Northern Virginia, all but three will get paid less."

"Some of the hardest-hit facilities are inner-city hospitals that tend to treat sicker, poorer patients. These patients sometimes end up being readmitted because they have a harder time getting medication and follow-up doctors’ appointments, often because they lack transportation, hospital officials said.

“Not only do we have the very sick patients, they also have very significant social needs,” said Kamaljit Sethi, who heads quality and safety at Providence Hospital in Northeast, where officials estimate they will lose about $320,000 in the coming year."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/hospitals-in-dc-va-to-lose-millions-from-medicare/2012/09/30/2fe0f96c-08ca-11e2-afff-d6c7f20a83b
f_story.html

What this means is that patients with the greatest needs will lose the most services, because the hospitals will no longer be able to serve them because of this penalty. This outcome could turn out to be deadly for thousands of people, ultimately, all in the name of efficiency. This is a perfect illustration as to why Government should have as little power over your health care as possible. Here is testimony from the front lines:

" Today while working my shift in the emergency room, an old lady was brought in very sick and in fact near death. I did my usual workup and evaluation and attempted to administer life saving treatment. It was my plan to admit this woman to the hospital. I found out a little later that this same woman had been a patient here just slightly more than 2 weeks ago with a DIFFERENT DIAGNOSIS. I was told that if this woman was admitted, the hospital would not be paid.

The new Medicare rule now is that if the same Medicare patient is re-admitted to the hospital within 30 days, the hospital will not be paid. When they first started this nonsense they said this only applied to patients with the same diagnosis. Now they have "expanded" the rule to include re-admissions for any reason. So if you're in the hospital for pneumonia, and 3 weeks later, you break your leg.......too bad. Medicare will not pay the hospital to fix your leg."

http://grouchatrighttruth.blogspot.com/2012/10/death-panels-are-here.html

This is completely outrageous, I think you will be forced to agree. Personally, I think we need to have a national conversation about this issue, and both sides need to come together to hammer out this issue. Obamacare is clearly not ready for primetime, and as it stands it is going to hurt people.

As far as your other comments, I'm not limiting myself to any particular news source. I am a political independent and I will share with you that I won't be voting for either candidate this year. I will still participate in the local elections but I cannot vote for either candidate in good conscience. While I am socially and fiscally conservative on many issues, I am liberal on others, such as helping the poor, the environment (within reason), and immigration. I don't fit into a polical cookie cutter and I don't automatically support a candidate because they give God lip service.

wasnt there a provision for those who sought to utilize public airwaves that they had to have so much "educational" programming in order to gain and/or retain their broadcasting license?

and isnt PBS only 40% tax-payer backed? i forgot where i read that PBS was ran on 60% donations.that the taxpayers filled in the gap/loss which averaged a 60/40 ratio.

either way you slice it,what we are seeing is political hay and nothing more.making the argument that PBS is some socialists wet dream is just bullshit.i wonder if the irony is lost on these people who wish to shut down an institution to replace it with mind-numbing,vapid staleness.creating a zombified drooling public.

or is that the actual intent? to dumb down the american public?

i would like to subscribe to that conspiracy but these retards cant get out of their own way,nevermind concoct such an elaborate scheme such as i am suggesting.

so all for the sake of political whoring we may lose an institution that has brought some of the best and ground-breaking educational programming since the mid 60's.
and the collective IQ of this country drops.
sad...
so very very sad.

sesame street came out the year i was born.i learned how to read before i hit kindergarten because of that show AND it was one of many shows that got my craving to absorb information and learn.

but i guess "future strippers of america" is more important.
bollocks......

Remember, the SCOTUS upheld this atrocious provision of the Patriot Act in the case Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project. "Material support for terrorism" is what got others into jail for considerably less than what these open advocates of MEK are doing.

This guy, for instance, was sentenced to 69 months in prison for "providing satellite television services to Hezbollah’s television station, Al Manar".

But hey, if the Israelis are working with them, they can't be terrorists, right? Israel and state-sponsored terrorism? Nah, never.

Besides, members of MEK were trained by JSOC at the Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site. So if they were terrorists, the US would be equally guilty of state-sponsored terrorism. Luckily though, being on the State Department's terrorist watch list doesn't make you a terrorist by US definition.

Opposition to US interests makes you a terrorist. Support of WikiLeaks makes you a terrorist.

Part of the problem is that tipped minimum wage has been frozen (thanks to Herman Cain for a large part) at $2.13 since 1991. Even when they saw fit to raise the federal minimum to $7.25 in 2009, they didn't raise the tipped minimum. Since to keep up with inflation, minimum should be closer to $10.35, that puts tipped minimum far behind... and minimum is far below living wages... they should couple it back up with minimum and perhaps just drop that provision all together, then the servers could bust ass to make more on tips.

Some of the terms she used are used and understood by many Americans. Seems she was hanging out with a bunch of sheltered people. Who doesn't know flip flops=thongs or trunk=boot? The ATM thing is odd as I think the drive-through ATM is also a safety thing over having to walk out to an ATM on the side of the bank, plus the bank usually has a drive through anyhow, so it saves them money from having to build a shelter for the ATM and all that.

>> ^KnivesOut:

@ReverendTed You're incorrect about what happens in 2014. Here's a good overview of what the mandate actually means: http://www.cleveland.com/healthfit/index.ssf/2012/06/a
ffordable_care_acts_mandate_d.html
Thanks for the link, KO. That's an excellent synopsis of the individual mandate provisions that I hadn't seen or read elsewhere.



That said, I'm not convinced it makes my statement incorrect.
My employees are not American Indians, prisoners, Old Order Amish, covered by Medicare\Medicaid or undocumented immigrants. They will be required to purchase insurance or pay the penalty tax.
Depending on their salary, even with taxpayer subsidies they will be responsible for devoting (probably) 6.3% or 9.5% of their income to insurance, or be taxed at or around 1%-2.5% of their income.
As I mentioned, we've investigated state-subsidized policies before (which weren't terrible, but weren't "Cadillac" policies by any stretch) and my employees determined it wasn't feasible for them.

One provision I don't understand is the exclusion of "those who earn so little that health insurance premiums, after federal subsidies and employer contributions, would total more than 8 percent of their income." How is it determined that premiums would total more than 8% of income? Doesn't that depend on the type of policy?

(Yes, I appreciate that my comments come across as biased against ACA. I'll admit that I am skeptical and that it runs counter to my personal ideology, but I am genuinely interested in learning more about what it means from a practical standpoint.)

Pretty open and shut...

It's legal to openly carry a gun where he is.

It's illegal to stop him without consent unless the officer reasonably suspects he is a felon. It's illegal to search him unless the officer reasonably suspects he is a felon. It is illegal to confiscate his firearm unless the officer reasonably suspects he is a felon.

It most certainly violates standard gun safety to point any firearm, where you don't know if the firearm is loaded, at another person.

Public safety is irrelevant at this point as the law obviously has zero provisions in this case to invoke public safety concerns as a legal pretext for stopping, searching or seizing. Adding that in to the debate is a red herring because if there was a legal way to invoke public safety as a pretext, the officer or supervisor would have done it.

Personally, I tend to agree that little is served wearing the gun openly and the guy seems to be more interested in baiting cops for his video, but he is not breaking any laws or infringing on anyone else rights. As soon as you start condoning the law fudging the edges here and there for the "greater good" (rather than pursuing changes to the law to legally protect the greater good), you are condoning illegal activity by the police.

So the ensuing argument is pointless, if the cops weren't able to arrest him on some charge he has done NOTHING wrong under the law. Last time I checked, innocent people are innocent regardless of public opinion.

>> ^shinyblurry:

No bible was used in the making of this video, because it is factually incorrect. If you have to distort something to mock it you don't have a case..I thought atheists liked to boast about their bible knowledge?
Eve was tempted by Satan, not a talking snake. Adam and Eve both sinned when they ate the fruit, but the crime was not eating fruit, it was disobeying God. Their sin brought death into the world.
"Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:"
Jesus and the Father are not the same person. The Father is not the Son and the Son is not the Father, but they are both God. God is three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Jesus did not impregnate Mary; the Father sent the third person of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit, in this wise:
"And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God."
Jesus did not sacrifice Himself to Himself. Again, the Father and the Son are not the same person. He was an atoning sacrifice for the sins of the world. He bore the punishment (death) for all sins so that through Him, we could be forgiven for our sins and be given eternal life.
"This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins"
A dead body was not required for Gods plan of redemption, to correct the mistakes human beings made. What was required was a man who lived a perfect, sinless life in total obedience to God. Since no human being could fulfill that requirement, God sent His Son in our place.
"Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come
But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God's grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!
Again, the gift of God is not like the result of the one man's sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification.
For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God's abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ."
People are not sent to hell for doubting the love of God. They are sent to hell for their sins. God offers forgiveness to every single person, and He does not desire that any should perish, but that all will come to repentance. Never the less, because God is Holy and just, He will punish all sin.
People are not saved by taking the sacraments. That is a catholic ritual. We are only saved by faith in Jesus Christ, and that faith alone will justify us before God. We eat bread and drink of the fruit of the vine in remembrance of Him, but that is all.
The Kingdom of Heaven is not in the sky. The Kingdom of Heaven is on Earth, and will be in this Universe. We are not going anywhere. We will experience life as God had originally designed it, here on Earth, before the fall.
The gospel is simple:
We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and the wages of our sin is death. Because of sin we are spiritually separated from God and headed for His prison called hell. He has set a day to judge the world, and on that day all sin will be punished. However, God doesn't want to send anyone to hell. He created it for the devil and his angels, not human beings. He loves us, which is why God sent His only Son to bear the punishment for our sins, in our place, so we wouldn't have to go to hell. He took all of our sins upon Himself on the cross, and died in our place.
Now, because of Jesus, we can be forgiven and go free. Jesus paid our fine in full. This is the good news, that through Jesus our sins are forgiven, and that He grants us eternal life. Pray to Jesus Christ and ask Him to come into your life as Lord and Savior, and you will be saved.


~

No bible was used in the making of this video, because it is factually incorrect. If you have to distort something to mock it you don't have a case..I thought atheists liked to boast about their bible knowledge?

Eve was tempted by Satan, not a talking snake. Adam and Eve both sinned when they ate the fruit, but the crime was not eating fruit, it was disobeying God. Their sin brought death into the world.

"Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:"

Jesus and the Father are not the same person. The Father is not the Son and the Son is not the Father, but they are both God. God is three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Jesus did not impregnate Mary; the Father sent the third person of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit, in this wise:

"And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God."

Jesus did not sacrifice Himself to Himself. Again, the Father and the Son are not the same person. He was an atoning sacrifice for the sins of the world. He bore the punishment (death) for all sins so that through Him, we could be forgiven for our sins and be given eternal life.

"This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins"

A dead body was not required for Gods plan of redemption, to correct the mistakes human beings made. What was required was a man who lived a perfect, sinless life in total obedience to God. Since no human being could fulfill that requirement, God sent His Son in our place.

"Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come

But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God's grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!

Again, the gift of God is not like the result of the one man's sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification.

For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God's abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ."

People are not sent to hell for doubting the love of God. They are sent to hell for their sins. God offers forgiveness to every single person, and He does not desire that any should perish, but that all will come to repentance. Never the less, because God is Holy and just, He will punish all sin.

People are not saved by taking the sacraments. That is a catholic ritual. We are only saved by faith in Jesus Christ, and that faith alone will justify us before God. We eat bread and drink of the fruit of the vine in remembrance of Him, but that is all.

The Kingdom of Heaven is not in the sky. The Kingdom of Heaven is on Earth, and will be in this Universe. We are not going anywhere. We will experience life as God had originally designed it, here on Earth, before the fall.

The gospel is simple:

We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and the wages of our sin is death. Because of sin we are spiritually separated from God and headed for His prison called hell. He has set a day to judge the world, and on that day all sin will be punished. However, God doesn't want to send anyone to hell. He created it for the devil and his angels, not human beings. He loves us, which is why God sent His only Son to bear the punishment for our sins, in our place, so we wouldn't have to go to hell. He took all of our sins upon Himself on the cross, and died in our place.

Now, because of Jesus, we can be forgiven and go free. Jesus paid our fine in full. This is the good news, that through Jesus our sins are forgiven, and that He grants us eternal life. Pray to Jesus Christ and ask Him to come into your life as Lord and Savior, and you will be saved.

So even though the law specifically states partial birth abortions won't be allowed unless to protect the life of the mother, which btw, the average American you keep sighting would agree should be allowed, it's going to effectively let virtually every partial birth abortion to occur. That's right wing paranoia. The law specifically states otherwise, period. So even when it says that, you're saying otherwise.

Past that btw, are you saying that if a woman didn't abort the baby she would die, they should be legally required to have the baby anyway? Here's the problem; even if what you said is true that the floodgates for partial birth abortions would open, all you're proving is the impossibility to enforce the law. The overwhelming majority of Americans are against partial birth abortion bans that don't allow exceptions when the mother's health is at risk, or in cases of rape or incest.

There are plenty of laws where it's just impractical to enforce properly. I think if the entire US would abide by Prohibition, our society would be much better off without alcohol in the end, considering rates of alcoholism, etc. But it was impossible to enforce, so it was a bad law. I don't personally drink, and both my parents are recovering alcoholics, but I'd never be in favor of Prohibition.

Regardless, FOCA is not far left. It's not. This isn't intellectual dishonesty. I don't even care honestly if it passes or not. But it's not far left. Far left would not contain provisions at all to limit partial birth abortions. It would outright say parental consent laws are superceded and invalid. Etc. FOCA hasn't a single one of those things. It's center-left. But you're calling it far left because it's in any degree more left than where we are now. Same thing with what you're saying about moving any direction to the left on gay marriage. That's ridiculous. This is why we can't make any progress anymore legislatively or politically. Everyone thinks giving up an inch, even when it's a reasonable concession, is a slippery slope, the flood gates will open, Armageddon is coming, blah blah blah. The simple fact of the matter is while we're split on abortion, probably 70% of Americans would agree that we should limit partial birth abortions, but we should have exceptions for rape, incest, and for the health of the mother. FOCA is a reasonable compromise to move a tick to the left. Instead, it's tared and feathered as hard left, with many allegations that are outright lies, not just bending of the truth. Your point about the parental involvement requirements as a case in point. That's utter horsecrap, and you know it.

Prove provisions of the Obamacare is causing your mother's current health insurance coverage to be eliminated, and her premiums to go up. Prove it, explain what's going on, and show me where in Obamacare it's causing this. Until you can prove that, I'm calling BS.

I'm not saying companies don't end certain insurance policies because of Obamacare. I have a friend who works for Microsoft, and they're ending their health insurance plan in favor of another because the current plan falls under the category of a "Cadillac" health insurance plan, and will be penalized via a tax. So he'll go from super-awesome health insurance better than virtually any plan you could hope to find to a darn good one. He's pissed as hell because of this, but when I asked him did he look at this from the perspective of if this is good policy for society as a whole, he looked dumbfounded, as if why should he even consider that. If society as a whole is better off, I don't really care he has health insurance coverage a little closer to what the rest of us have. That should be the debate, not people deciding based on their own selfish interests.

The simple fact of the matter is health insurance premiums were already going up well before Obamacare was ever passed, but a lot of people now blame current premium increases conveniently on Obamacare when they don't know that was the reason why. Forget facts, it's that dang communist Obama!

I have a warped view of what's center-left vs hard left? If the only thing concerning gay marriage that Obama is advocating changing is that the federal gov't will begin recognizing the marriage legal IF and ONLY IF the couple's state considers it legal, explain how that's far left. If the only change to abortion laws is ensuring exceptions to partial birth abortions in cases of rape, incest, and to protect the health of the mother, explain how that's hard left. Explain how Obamacare, which largely keeps the same health care system we already have in place, is hard left. By definition, if we still have employee sponsored health insurance, no public option, no single payer, that's not a hard move to the left. It's not. The conservative right paints them all as these extreme measures, but every single one are compromises. Every single one of them, period.

And here's the result - Conservatives are urging the Supreme Court to dismantle the most significant health care reform since the invention of Medicaid to go back to a system everybody knows is broken, with no plan ready to fix it. We haven't even let Obamacare take effect quite honestly, but it's not stopping the GOP from claiming it's killing the economy. Ridiculous.

>> ^shinyblurry:


Hardly. FOCA will nullify the partial birth abortion ban, and any other state law which could be interpreted to "interfere" with a womans "right" to an abortion. The untruth is to say it is simply codifying roe vs wade; It will create substantial changes to hundreds of laws.
Yes, the law contains language that partial birth abortions would only be allowed in situations where the "health" of the woman could be impacted. Well, that is a meaningless distinction. Almost anything could be allowed under those circumstances, including mental health issues. The fact is, the ban will be repealed and partial birth abortions will be a go, and many will be justified under some flimsy pretext.
Again, to say FOCA isn't far left is simply to be intellectually dishonest. It goes far beyond what the average american would approve of.
I hope it gets thrown out if only for my mothers sake, who will have her current coverage eliminated and her premiums raised because of it.
What's clear is that you have a much different idea of what is far left, and what isn't from the average person.
>> ^heropsycho: