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Ridiculous. US is dead last of 17 major developed countries in recent study.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/01/new-health-rankings-of-17-nations-us-is-dead-last/267045/

1. US health care cost is 2x that of other developed nations.
2. Despite this cost it has 10's of millions uninsured.
3. Results are worse than lower cost systems. Look at life expectancy for US v. Canada for example.
4. Medical tourism (people leaving US) for foreign destinations is booming. 100 times more US citizens go to other countries than people come here. 1.6 million US citizens traveled abroad last year for medical care.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/luizaoleszczuk/2013/10/22/central-europe-becoming-a-big-destination-for-medical-tourism/

5. Illegal immigrants come here from UNDEVELOPED countries, not from developed countries. And the care they get here is shit. Walk into a hospital emergency room with diabetes or any other chronic disease and see what kind of care you get.
6. ALL medical systems have patients die needlessly from care problems. My mother died from a misdiagnoses. People get stuck with the wrong drug. Coma patients don't get fed. Fact of life. In fact the US Medical System is the leading cause of death in the US.

http://www.ourcivilisation.com/medicine/usamed.htm

For those who know and those who do not, I recommend to read an excerpt from Candide by Voltaire called "The Surinam Nigger". Candide is the hero of the story, he is a naive and nice guy who has been expelled from his castle. At the gate of Surinam (An african-exotic country) he met a black slave who has been mistreated by his master. His foot has been amputate because he tried to escape and his hand is also cut off because of cotton working accident. Candide cry when he see this poor guy treated like a less than nothing, but a few minute later he go his way. Anecdotic. "Such are the conditions on which you eat sugar in Europe!" http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/voltaire/candide/chap19.htm

"Gun deaths in the US in 2010: 11,078 homicides, 19,392 suicides, and 606 unintentional killings."

The pharmaceutical/medical establishment kills 784,000* people each year. That is not counting the 1.5 million unborn children DELIBERATELY murdered each year by government licensed medical practitioners. If you want to do some math, that comes to over 13 Vietnam wars EACH year. Why is this never mentioned by our politicians or our liberal media?

  * http://www.ourcivilisation.com/medicine/usamed/deaths.htm

Our banking system is one of our most heavily-regulated industries, right up there with medicine and operating nuclear power plants.

Given the number of iatrogenic fatalities and the recent revelations about tritium leaks at Vermont Yankee, it's clear that neither medicine nor nuclear power plants are being effectively regulated. Nor are banks.

Hey I just took a shit. I parted with about what I would say looks like 200 grams of digested food and here's your fun science fact for the
day: shit also contains a _lot_ of dead intestinal cells - no kidding.

I bring this up because again we're knee deep into the Man-made Global Warming / Carbon Tax LIE-complex. Just think about it. Earth has
been around far far far longer than we've been poking a thermometer into its rear. From what we do know, the 1700s saw temperature
significantly higher as far up as the WINEYARDS(!) of England(!) (yep, England was known for its fine wine back then). The average temperature
was far higher than it is today and by that I mean the warm spell we had the years before. Now it's so cold they're changing their tune
either to "Global Cooling" (man-made too of course) or they're now resorting to the more generic term "Climate Change". I'm sick of this crap
and so should you be.

There's a whole world of deceit and outright lies out there spread mostly by the so-called "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change" ("IPCC").
Isn't it interesting that scientists sue -- and have to sue -- to get their names taken off the "IPCC" reports and studies because same scientists
either actually entirely disagree with the "findings" in those reports or just had their name listed without prior permission or any affiliation or
relation with the "IPCC".

So back to the turd I flushed. 200g of organic matter, I'm guessing 74% H, 5% oxygen, nitrogen, 1% calcium, sulphur, phosphorus and various
other minerals and of course 20% carbon. Why should I pay say an extra dollar for flushing my toiled to "offset" the fictitious "cost" of me being
alive with a metabolism .. when it's ALL A SHITTY LIE?!?!

Take a look at this:

http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aginatur/swindle.htm

A Review Of 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' By S. Fred Singer, (Atmospheric Physicist) March 19, 2007

Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth has met its match: a devastating documentary recently shown on British television, which has now been viewed by millions of people on the Internet. Despite its flamboyant title, The Great Global Warming Swindle is based on sound science and interviews with real climate scientists, including me. An Inconvenient Truth, on the other hand, is mostly an emotional presentation from a single politician.

The scientific arguments presented in The Great Global Warming Swindle can be stated quite briefly:

1. There is no proof that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from human activity. Ice core records from the past 650,000 years show that temperature increases have preceded--not resulted from--increases in CO2 by hundreds of years, suggesting that the warming of the oceans is an important source of the rise in atmospheric CO2. As the dominant greenhouse gas, water vapour is far, far more important than CO2. Dire predictions of future warming are based almost entirely on computer climate models, yet these models do not accurately understand the role or water vapor--and, in any case, water vapor is not within our control. Plus, computer models cannot account for the observed cooling of much of the past century (1940-75), nor for the observed patterns of warming--what we call the "fingerprints." For example, the Antarctic is cooling while models predict warming. And where the models call for the middle atmosphere to warm faster than the surface, the observations show the exact opposite. ...

If it is a theory, then we can apply this idea called "scientific method" and develop a testable hypothesis, and then... Wait, the flat earth idea has been shown to be false: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth and Earth is an oblate spheroid. "Round" could be interpreted as like a circle and two-dimensional, just those flat-earth people want you to think. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth These flat earth "alchemists" are just like those who claim that human activities could never affect the climate http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Climate_change_skeptics, there are endless oil supplies on earth for human consumption, http://economics.about.com/cs/macroeconomics/a/run_out_of_oil.htm, HIV does not cause AIDS http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aids/not/abstract.htm, and the only way to study whales is to kill them and sell the meat in the supermarket http://www.icrwhale.org/QandAjapanresearch.htm. Aaahhh these fucking assholes.

Find me a whitepaper and the scientific evidence backing this.

http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aids/not/evidence.htm

http://youtube.com/watch?v=i-Hxx7oyRQU

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

Okay, take a look at these (just a short list of the many refutations to global warming): https://www.conservativebookclub.com/Join/SingleBo okJoin.asp?sour_cd=sb242az&prod_cd=c7020 http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aginatur/moregw.htm http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHjczyA75jU

The Death of Common Sense

Assuming you mean this, then Common Sense is truly dead, laid to rest in her family plot along side her husband Critical Thinking, and her daughter, Common Decency.

Had she been alive, Common Sense would have dictated that the nuns revise their plans so that their operations could have been carried out from the ground floor and either close the upper floors entirely (gutting the top floor and turning it into a private garden would have been a nice touch), or spend the money on a lift and recoup it by renting out rooms on the upper floors to hard working low income people who would have appreciated reasonable rental costs in NYC.

The main problem is that it give people a "right" to something as opposed to giving them a right to be free of something.

The right to be equal can also be expressed as the right to be free from inequality. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and the idea of allowing the handicapped to participate in society by being employed and engaging in commerce rather than soaking up Medicaid/Medicare and welfare checks must have seemed a good one at the time. I wonder what went so wrong.

I find it hard to pick sides there. France=bad obviously, but that means Greenpeace must have been the good guys. No wait. Greenpeace, evil murderous fanatics, but that means the French must have been riASIASOOSOOSK@#$$. Core dumped.

Did you actually read some of those links ?

From this link:

What mankind is doing is moving hydrocarbons from below ground and turning them into living things. We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of the carbon dioxide increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with twice as much plant and animal life as that with which we now are blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the industrial revolution.
Hydrocarbons are needed to feed and lift from poverty vast numbers of people across the globe. This can eventually allow all human beings to live long, prosperous, healthy, productive lives. No other single technological factor is more important to the increase in the quality, length and quantity of human life than the continued, expanded and unrationed use of the Earth's hydrocarbons, of which we have proven reserves to last more than 1,000 years. Global warming is a myth. The reality is that global poverty and death would be the result of Kyoto's rationing of hydrocarbons.

Hardly seems a considered scientific opinion to me. You may, of course, think differently.

And considering this link:

Try reading something about the person who wrote it, in his own words, on the same site, here:

My esteem for my peers became replaced by contempt, and planted the seed of suspicion in my mind that my whole community was of the same calibre foolish cowards. A notion that experience rarely confounded but often confirmed, so insensibly I became a social exile. This was just as well, for in a declining community any citizen who retains respect for the truth must become alienated from the majority of his fellow citizens because they hate the truth.

Is this really the sort of considered scientific opinion you consider valuable ?

Did you actually read some of those links ?

From this link:

What mankind is doing is moving hydrocarbons from below ground and turning them into living things. We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of the carbon dioxide increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with twice as much plant and animal life as that with which we now are blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the industrial revolution.
Hydrocarbons are needed to feed and lift from poverty vast numbers of people across the globe. This can eventually allow all human beings to live long, prosperous, healthy, productive lives. No other single technological factor is more important to the increase in the quality, length and quantity of human life than the continued, expanded and unrationed use of the Earth's hydrocarbons, of which we have proven reserves to last more than 1,000 years. Global warming is a myth. The reality is that global poverty and death would be the result of Kyoto's rationing of hydrocarbons.

Hardly seems a considered scientific opinion to me. You may, of course, think differently.

And considering this link:

Try reading something about the person who wrote it, in his own words, on the same site, here:

My esteem for my peers became replaced by contempt, and planted the seed of suspicion in my mind that my whole community was of the same calibre foolish cowards. A notion that experience rarely confounded but often confirmed, so insensibly I became a social exile. This was just as well, for in a declining community any citizen who retains respect for the truth must become alienated from the majority of his fellow citizens because they hate the truth.

Is this really the sort of considered scientific opinion you consider valuable ?

There are no solid conclusions among all scientist on the effects of global warming. You can look here, here, here, and here to see the lack of consensus on this subject among scientists.

This is nothing more that a main stream media hype of one guys opinion to try to invoke fear in the general population.

Anyone can single out and focus on one area of the planet for a 100 year period in the Earth's history and come to a conclusion that would sound devastating if it really did apply to the whole planet for a longer period of time.

People with college degrees in high paying jobs should have some degree of competency with the English language.

For my degree course, in Aeronautical Engineering, there were only two books we were told were mandatory. One was The Complete Plain Words by Sir Ernest Gowers.

I think Davies has come up with a good idea, but it needs one thing - property rights. A development regime which provides some form of property rights will become increasingly necessary as space develops

Land property rights are different that plain, ordinary property rights.

Why is it that people think that you can't have capitalism without land property rights? Why do otherwise educated people from the west seem to fixate on this Medieval Idea of land ownership? Is it just because it is old and widespread in the west? Well, so is syphilis, but I don't think that makes syphilis a good thing.

The argument that it's the most efficient way to allocate scarce or valuable resources is bunk. Ever had to drive around an American city founded by a 'land run'? The number of ex-squatter 's houses that force otherwise useful through roads to dead-end is amazing (as well as other interesting geopolitical features.) Several slums exist in these cities where people refused to sell or improve the large tracts of land they got from the government at pennies on the dollar. These people forestalled development often just because they liked owning an (unused) farm.

With the exception of the freeloader and the tragedy of the commons, shared resources have many less problems than the 'stay off my land' model. (Including limiting NIMBY.) Look at the difference in progress in Open Source programming and the Intellectual-Property bound proprietary software.

I argue that space is much like the mental space or algorithms, programs and computer science/math theory. It is not like 'airable land' on the surface of the earth. The size of space is huge - and NONE of it is airable. The use of 'land' is ambiguous: your 'land claim' on a patch of surface on an asteroid is debatable if the whole asteroid is to be chewed up and used for raw materials to build something (like whole towns that are submerged under artificial damns that power serveral other towns and a small city or two and provide a conrolled body of water.) There is an inherent violation of use for natural resources in space, there's a reason NASA sterilizes spacecraft. And high cost of getting there, although it is cheap to move around once there. If you don't like IP patents like one-click or the DNS patent, I think you should object just as strongly to some one saying that they own the moon anymore than anyone else.

I'm no communist, but you can have capitalism without depending on property ownership! If the government must blow money to support and guard your property with troops and lawyers, they'll never be able to pay for important things for other people. Let the government 'own it' and everybody else use it just like any other public utility. It's just abstracting the ownsership problem back a level to force people to deal with affecting their neighboors with their so-called 'private' activities (you try living near people who plant weeds to which you and several other neighbors are dangerously allergic.)

brought out the terrifying aspects of his personality; he was cold, calculating, and brilliant. His restless mind never ceased to invent methods to trap, humiliate, and destroy his enemies.

Heydrich created his own web of spies and informers and sent them out to dig up any information that could be used for blackmail, the more scandalous the better. He did not only go after opponents of the Nazis, he also sought sordid information on high-ranking Nazis. He built a filing system that contained dossiers which listed everyone's dirty little secrets. His office was filled with boxes which contained index cards marking the different categories of offenders: Communists, Catholics, aristocrats, Jews, Freemasons, and Nazis with shameful pasts. A special "poison file" was reserved for offenders that fit into two or more categories.
( ...snipt... )
With the SA out of the way, Heydrich began building the Gestapo into an instrument of fear. He improved his index card system; since he created more categories of offenders, the cards were now color-coded. The line between criminal and law abiding citizen became blurred and the most trivial things became crimes; even if someone made an anti-Hitler comment in jest, the penalty was death. The Gestapo had the authority to arrest citizens on the mere suspicion that they might commit a crime. People were arrested for walking suspiciously, and since the Gestapo obeyed no law but their own, it was their discretion to decide what was considered "walking in a suspicious manner". The Gestapo had the right to arrest, beat, and murder whomever they wished. People were hesitant to speak in public places out of the morbid fear that their words might be misconstrued and they would find themselves under arrest. The members of the Gestapo were instructed to be merciless and people began disappearing throughout Germany never to be seen again. Sometimes a person would disappear for no apparent reason and at a later date, their family would receive an urn containing their ashes. Under Himmler and Heydrich, Germany became a legitimate and terrifying police state.
( ...snipt... )
As early as 1931, Heydrich was becoming one of the most dangerous men in the Nazi party. With his list of index cards, the fate of Nazi opponents rested with him. Also, his growing list of dirty files became invaluable to him as he had control over powerful Nazis by threatening to expose their secrets. In 1932, however, Heydrich was given a taste of his own medicine by Adolf Hitler.
( ...snipt... )
In July of 1932, Heydrich's counterintelligence service grew into an effective machine of terror and intimidation and it was officially named Sicherheitsdienst [SD] - Security Service. Heydrich was further promoted to SS colonel. In 1933, Hitler became chancellor of Germany, but he still did not have the dictatorial powers that he desired. In order to give himself more power, he pressured President Paul von Hindenburg to sign a series of decrees which would hamper opposition parties such as the Communists and Socialists. With these decrees, the police had the authority to search and confiscate property and arrest and detain people without allowing a hearing or trial. Reinhard Heydrich consulted his list of index cards and supplied the SS and the brown-shirted SA with lists containing the names of offenders that needed to be arrested. Since Heydrich's index cards numbered in the thousands, the prisons were soon overflowing and the first concentration camps were established in order to deal with the overflow of prisoners.
( &so.on )

Heydrich clearly saw that in a modern totalitarian system of government there is no limit to the principle of state security, so that anyone in

Although in the article, they mainly focus on Texas, it's pretty clear that the whole system is being gamed and gamed hardest by the Republicans.

I have a relative who is really into the Bigfoot scene. The Bigfoot believers are quite committed. They make a lot of mistakes because of that, though. What is really interesting to me is how so many of the same thought errors get made in radically different areas of human belief.

Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World is an interesting investigation of the entire phenomenon.

It is a terribly complex mental exercise to absorb all of the information in modern life and make intelligent decisions. The fact is that there are far too many claims to investigate for anybody to examine all of them with the necessary care. So we have to rely on the consensus of experts to make decisions. And the organizations necessary for consensus have the same flaws as all human hierarchal bodies.

Here are some of the various brands of kooky ideas that I have come across:

The AIDS Myth The medical analysis is surprisingly deep. A lot of qualified people have weighed in on this idea.
Carbohydrates not calories. They claim that our genes are still adapting to the modern high-carbohydrate diet, and that is why so many of us are so fat. (Enter Atkins.)
Democracy is not good government
Global Warming. Discussed on Slashdot a number of times
Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare Joe Sobran thinks that the Earl of Oxford wrote everything attributed to Shakespeare of Stratford on Avon.
Race and IQ Probably true, but kooky nonetheless.
Multiregional Evolution You can find most of Wolpoff's papers that are cited here somewhere online. I recommend "Bottlenecks and Pleistocene Human Evolution" and "Modern Human Ancestry at the Peripheries: A Test of the Replacement Theory." Wolpoff is kooky because there are very few anthropoligists left who will side with the Multiregional theory over the Out of Africa theory. (Wolpoff technically supports an Out of Africa theory, but that is how everyone refers to the debate.)

And here is one that I will actually advocate: Bohmian Mechanics It is about as kooky as you can get for a physicist, but I am convinced that it beats QM on the merits.

I have a relative who is really into the Bigfoot scene. The Bigfoot believers are quite committed. They make a lot of mistakes because of that, though. What is really interesting to me is how so many of the same thought errors get made in radically different areas of human belief.

Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World is an interesting investigation of the entire phenomenon.

It is a terribly complex mental exercise to absorb all of the information in modern life and make intelligent decisions. The fact is that there are far too many claims to investigate for anybody to examine all of them with the necessary care. So we have to rely on the consensus of experts to make decisions. And the organizations necessary for consensus have the same flaws as all human hierarchal bodies.

Here are some of the various brands of kooky ideas that I have come across:

The AIDS Myth The medical analysis is surprisingly deep. A lot of qualified people have weighed in on this idea.
Carbohydrates not calories. They claim that our genes are still adapting to the modern high-carbohydrate diet, and that is why so many of us are so fat. (Enter Atkins.)
Democracy is not good government
Global Warming. Discussed on Slashdot a number of times
Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare Joe Sobran thinks that the Earl of Oxford wrote everything attributed to Shakespeare of Stratford on Avon.
Race and IQ Probably true, but kooky nonetheless.
Multiregional Evolution You can find most of Wolpoff's papers that are cited here somewhere online. I recommend "Bottlenecks and Pleistocene Human Evolution" and "Modern Human Ancestry at the Peripheries: A Test of the Replacement Theory." Wolpoff is kooky because there are very few anthropoligists left who will side with the Multiregional theory over the Out of Africa theory. (Wolpoff technically supports an Out of Africa theory, but that is how everyone refers to the debate.)

And here is one that I will actually advocate: Bohmian Mechanics It is about as kooky as you can get for a physicist, but I am convinced that it beats QM on the merits.

I have a relative who is really into the Bigfoot scene. The Bigfoot believers are quite committed. They make a lot of mistakes because of that, though. What is really interesting to me is how so many of the same thought errors get made in radically different areas of human belief.

Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World is an interesting investigation of the entire phenomenon.

It is a terribly complex mental exercise to absorb all of the information in modern life and make intelligent decisions. The fact is that there are far too many claims to investigate for anybody to examine all of them with the necessary care. So we have to rely on the consensus of experts to make decisions. And the organizations necessary for consensus have the same flaws as all human hierarchal bodies.

Here are some of the various brands of kooky ideas that I have come across:

The AIDS Myth The medical analysis is surprisingly deep. A lot of qualified people have weighed in on this idea.
Carbohydrates not calories. They claim that our genes are still adapting to the modern high-carbohydrate diet, and that is why so many of us are so fat. (Enter Atkins.)
Democracy is not good government
Global Warming. Discussed on Slashdot a number of times
Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare Joe Sobran thinks that the Earl of Oxford wrote everything attributed to Shakespeare of Stratford on Avon.
Race and IQ Probably true, but kooky nonetheless.
Multiregional Evolution You can find most of Wolpoff's papers that are cited here somewhere online. I recommend "Bottlenecks and Pleistocene Human Evolution" and "Modern Human Ancestry at the Peripheries: A Test of the Replacement Theory." Wolpoff is kooky because there are very few anthropoligists left who will side with the Multiregional theory over the Out of Africa theory. (Wolpoff technically supports an Out of Africa theory, but that is how everyone refers to the debate.)

And here is one that I will actually advocate: Bohmian Mechanics It is about as kooky as you can get for a physicist, but I am convinced that it beats QM on the merits.

I'm a Canadian. I've been living in the United States for over five years. I don't like how the United States is devolving, but as long as I can make "Net" more money than I can in Canada I will continue to work here. I say we milk the United States for all its worth and then go to our safe homea, our pockets lined with the money of the United States. I see so many parallels between the decline of the Roman Empire and The modern Western world it scares me. Home may end up no better off.