1/ Republicans screaming about the horrors of Obamacare have made the conservatives in this country salivating to get rid of it, but when some of the better provisions kick in this year the politicians playing their right wing base may be in for a surprise because the average person gets good benefits and decent rates under the plan.
I heard this first hand from Sen. Alan Hays - our old, angry white Florida Republicans have just turned down $51 billion in Medicaid funds, all in the name of not having ANYTHING to do with Obamacare, even though it screws a million Floridians....they just don't care. Can't let the black guy win.
However......note the last line of this piece from the full article.
A friend of mine has an adult child with cancer, a young man just old enough to be beyond the age of coverage under his parents’ health care plan. After nearly killing him, the dreaded Hodgkin’s lymphoma is in remission. But he’s still a pariah in the eyes of the insurance industry, which means they can deny him a policy that might save his life.
Not for long. In six months’ time, the heartless practice of refusing to let sick people buy affordable health insurance — private-sector death panels, the most odious kind of American exceptionalism — will be illegal from shore to shore.
“I can’t wait for Obamacare,” my friend gushed the other day. And she’s not alone. About one in 10 people with cancer in this country have been denied health coverage.
The cartoon version of the Affordable Care Act, that much-loathed government takeover of one-sixth of the economy, is now moving from Beltway gasbags and caricaturists into the hands of consumers. Its fate will be determined by the countless anecdotes of people who will apply the law to their lives.
The early indications are that most Americans will be pleasantly surprised. Millions of people, shopping and comparing prices on the exchanges set up by the states, are likely to get far better coverage for the same — or less — money than they pay now. The law, as honest conservatives predicted, before they orphaned their own idea, is injecting competition into a market dominated by a few big names.
You won’t hear this from the entrenched forces that have spent about $400 million denouncing the law on television ads, groups like the Karl Rove-backed Crossroads GPS. They have good reason to fear it: if Obamacare works, the game will be over for those who oppose the most significant change in American life in a generation’s time. You also don’t hear much from Mr. Obama himself; once again, he’s a passive observer of his presidency.
2/ A thoughtful, well-researched article about how the large corporations worldwide are now effectively in control of the world's economy, and more interestingly a serious discussion of how the oligarchy works together, not as a formal group but as individuals with a common purpose......
The story is a bit wonkish, but it actually makes you think about the bigger picture and how the world economy really works. All of the investigative journalists like Matt Taibbi get the sordid details but this gives you perspective of why, their motivation. Most interesting.........the excerpt below summarises it well......
The growth of “interlocking directorates” is primarily confined to European and North American conglomerates, whereas those in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East largely remain “isolated from the global interlock network.” Thus, the “transnationalization” of corporate directorates and, ultimately, of global class structures “is more a manifestation of the process of European integration – or, perhaps, of the emergence of a North Atlantic ruling class.”
The conclusion of these researchers was that the ruling class is not “global” as such, but rather “a supra-national capitalist class that has gone a considerable way toward transcending national divisions,” notably in the industrialized countries of Western Europe and North America; in their words, "the regional locus of transnational class formation is more accurately described as the North Atlantic region.” However, with the rise of the "East" – notably the economic might of Japan, China, India, and other East Asian nations – the interlocks and interconnections among elites are likely to expand as various other networks of institutions seek to integrate these regions.
The influence wielded by banks and corporations is not simply through their direct wealth or operations, but through the affiliations, interactions and integration by those who run the institutions with political and social elites, both nationally and globally. While we can identify a global elite as a wealth percentage (the top 1% or, more accurately, the top 0.001%), this does not account for the more indirect and institutionalized influence that corporate and financial leaders exert over politics and society as a whole.
3/ Rowan Atkinson's comedy [Mr. Bean] is an acquired taste for most Americans, but he is also one of the best physical comedians in the world.......watch this hilarious 7 minute guide to "Elementary Dating".....
4/ If you have a mortgage in flood sensitive areas you are required to carry flood insurance, which is backed by the federal government. But a new report commissioned by FEMA says the risk of flooding due to climate change will rise by 50% over the next decades.....
What does this mean for you if you live in South Florida? You premiums are going to double fairly soon......
And although this report came out last Wednesday have you seen it in the mainstream media? Or on the TV News? Ha.....
FEMA Report: Climate Change Could Increase Areas at Risk of Flood by 45 Percent
Cleanup in Breezy Point, Queens, following Hurricane Sandy. Bryan Smith/ZUMAPRESS.com
Rising seas and increasingly severe weather are expected to increase the areas of the United States at risk of floods by up to 45 percent by 2100, according to a first-of-its-kind report released by the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Wednesday. These changes could double the number of flood-prone properties covered by the National Flood Insurance Program and drastically increase the costs of floods, the report finds.
The report concludes that climate change is likely to expand vastly the size and costs of the 45-year-old government flood insurance program. Like previous government reports, it anticipates that sea levels will rise an average of four feet by the end of the century. But this is what's new: The portion of the US at risk for flooding, including coastal regions and areas along rivers, will grow between 40 and 45 percent by the end of the century. That shift will hammer the flood insurance program.
5/ The Christian right are now complaining about intolerance towards them, so the Daily Show's Samantha Bee went to investigate........with a most amusing result.....
Four minutes of "where do these assholes come from?"
6/ Retirement Part 1
So you have or are about to retire, and you have accumulated a million dollars that you are going to live on in your golden years.......sounds good, doesn't it? You are in the top 10% of Americans with assets that large.
Not so fast - with interest rates this low that million might not be enough......
A MILLION dollars isn’t what it used to be.
In 1953, when “How to Marry a Millionaire” was in movie theaters, $1 million bought the equivalent of $8.7 million today. Now $1 million won’t even buy anaverage Manhattan apartment or come remotely close to paying theaverage salary of an N.B.A. basketball player.
Still, $1 million is more money than 9 in 10 American families possess. It may no longer be a symbol of boundless wealth, but as a retirement nest egg, $1 million is relatively big. It may seem like a lot to live on.
But in many ways, it’s not.
Inflation isn’t the only thing that’s whittled down the $1 million. The topsy-turvy world of today’s financial markets — particularly, the still-ultralow interest rates in the bond market — is upending what many people thought they understood about how to pay for life after work.
“We’re facing a crisis right now, and it’s going to get worse,” said Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. “Most people haven’t saved nearly enough, not even people who have put away $1 million.”
For people close to retirement, the problem is acute. The conventional financial advice is that the older you get, the more you should put into bonds, which are widely considered safer than stocks. But consider this bleak picture: A typical 65-year-old couple with $1 million in tax-free municipal bondswant to retire. They plan to withdraw 4 percent of their savings a year — a common, rule-of-thumb drawdown. But under current conditions, if they spend that $40,000 a year, adjusted for inflation, there is a 72 percent probability that they will run through their bond portfolio before they die.
Suddenly, that risk-free bond portfolio is looking risky. “The probabilities are remarkably grim for retirees who insist on holding only bonds in the belief that they are safe,” says Seth J. Masters, the chief investment officer of Bernstein Global Wealth Management, a Manhattan-based firm, which ran these projections for Sunday Business. “Because we live in this world we tend to think of it as ‘normal,’ but from the standpoint of financial market history, it’s not normal at all,” Mr. Masters said. “And that’s very clear when you look at fixed-income returns.”
Several rounds of intervention by the Federal Reserve and other central banks, aimed at stimulating a moribund economy, have helped to suppress rates, and so has low inflation. Low rates have led to cheaper mortgages and credit cards, helping to balance family budgets.
But for savers, low rates have been a trial. The fundamental problem is that benchmark Treasury yields have been well below 4 percent since early in the financial crisis. That creates brutal math: if your portfolio’s income is below 4 percent, you can’t withdraw 4 percent annually, and add inflation adjustments, without depleting that portfolio over time.
And with rising life expectancies, many people will have a lot of time: the average 65-year-old woman today can be expected to live to 86, a man to 84.
This is a follow-up column on the same subject........
7/ Retirement Part 2
You have planned ahead and taken out a long term disability insurance policy in case you need to be placed in a nursing care facility, and you are feeling more secure.....
Hold the phone - as this Times article points out your insurance may or may not cover you, according to their fine print. If you have one of these policies, you'd better read it.......
One of the big reasons people buy long-term care insuranceis to avoid burdening a spouse or grown children when they can no longer care for themselves.
But some family members are shouldering another type of burden: one that involves piles of paperwork and repeated phone calls, as they are forced to navigate a labyrinth of requirements to collect benefits that the insured spent many years paying.
“There is no possible way an elderly person who is ill and needs help can possibly do this work,” said Fiona Havlish, who coordinated her father’s home care in Pottstown, Pa., before he died last year, a week after his 90th birthday. “It took six to eight weeks to get the insurance into place, and this was working on it every single day. It was an incredible amount of work.”
Ms. Havlish, a former nurse who now works as a life coach in Boulder, Colo., said she first had to find a home care agency that was not only covered by the long-term care policy but one that she felt comfortable entrusting with her father’s care. Later, she had to follow up continually with the aides and doctors to make sure they were filing the proper paperwork so that they insurer would pay. “Three months after he was gone,” she added, “I was still fighting with them over paper.”
At least the bill for her father’s care was eventually paid. In other cases, families have had to fight to overturn denials, and have gone as far as hiring lawyers to file suit. Many Americans now in their 80s and 90s who are collecting benefits — or trying to — bought their policies decades ago when the policies were more restrictive than now. On top of that, many insurers have since left the businessafter mispricing the policies and failing to judge the economics of the industry, which has made collecting payments even more difficult.
“Everything is not rosy,” said Jesse Slome, director of the American Association for Long Term Care Insurance. “When insurers stop selling or exit the business, many of them hire these third-party administrators to adjudicate claims and that is where interpretations don’t seem to be as liberal.”
Insurance agents who have specialized in long-term care policies for a couple of decades, however, told me that most of the top-rated insurers pay claims without issue. And clearly, claims worth billions are paid each year: An estimated 264,000 people received long-term care benefits at the end of 2012, according to Mr. Slome, and $6.6 billion in benefits were paid that same year.
Still, “the process can be pretty daunting for people,” said Bonnie Burns, a policy specialist at California Health Advocates, an education and advocacy group.
8/ You may have read that Sarah Palin is back at Fox News, so John Oliver had a wonderful three minute commentary - "we can all just fxxking ignore her"!
Good stuff.......and look at the clip of her with the other idiots on Fox and Friends - doesn't she look 10 years older?
9/ This is interesting - it's an interactive map of where all of the states are with weed.....from basic legalisation [Colorado] to the other extreme [Texas].
Guess where Floriduh is?
10/ One of the problems we have in our superconnected society is that it makes it much easier for people to freak out and become scared of things they statistically shouldn't think about, and our media aids and abets this - just look at your TV news with an objective eye. One of the prime examples of this was in the 80's when a national story broke about how someone put razor blades in a Halloween apple.....the next year Halloween across the country changed, with parents accompanying their kids and checking everything they collected. The power of fear!
This story in the Times resonated with me because I truly believe in statistics, and it spells out what you REALLY should be wary of......everyday situations.
The other morning, I escaped unscathed from a dangerous situation. No, an armed robber didn’t break into my house, nor did I find myself face to face with a mountain lion during my bird walk. What I survived was my daily shower.
You see, falls are a common cause of death in older people like me. (I’m 75.) Among my wife’s and my circle of close friends over the age of 70, one became crippled for life, one broke a shoulder and one broke a leg in falls on the sidewalk. One fell down the stairs, and another may not survive a recent fall.
“Really!” you may object. “What’s my risk of falling in the shower? One in a thousand?” My answer: Perhaps, but that’s not nearly good enough.
Life expectancy for a healthy American man of my age is about 90. (That’s not to be confused with American male life expectancy at birth, only about 78.) If I’m to achieve my statistical quota of 15 more years of life, that means about 15 times 365, or 5,475, more showers. But if I were so careless that my risk of slipping in the shower each time were as high as 1 in 1,000, I’d die or become crippled about five times before reaching my life expectancy. I have to reduce my risk of shower accidents to much, much less than 1 in 5,475.
This calculation illustrates the biggest single lesson that I’ve learned from 50 years of field work on the island of New Guinea: the importance of being attentive to hazards that carry a low risk each time but are encountered frequently.
I first became aware of the New Guineans’ attitude toward risk on a trip into a forest when I proposed pitching our tents under a tall and beautiful tree. To my surprise, my New Guinea friends absolutely refused. They explained that the tree was dead and might fall on us.
Yes, I had to agree, it was indeed dead. But I objected that it was so solid that it would be standing for many years. The New Guineans were unswayed, opting instead to sleep in the open without a tent.
I thought that their fears were greatly exaggerated, verging on paranoia. In the following years, though, I came to realize that every night that I camped in a New Guinea forest, I heard a tree falling. And when I did a frequency/risk calculation, I understood their point of view.
Consider: If you’re a New Guinean living in the forest, and if you adopt the bad habit of sleeping under dead trees whose odds of falling on you that particular night are only 1 in 1,000, you’ll be dead within a few years. In fact, my wife was nearly killed by a falling tree last year, and I’ve survived numerous nearly fatal situations in New Guinea.
11/ Do you give to charities? Then have a look at this chart to see if one you have sent money to is on this list of the 50 worst charities in the US. It includes the Police ones .....all professionally run by telemarketers, most of the money going to the marketers and very little of the donations going to the people they are purporting to help......
It's a con. Give money to a local charity.
In Mount Dora, Lake Cares does an amazing job feeding your neighbors......
12/ Daft Punk have new music out this month, and their hit is called "Get Lucky". The Swedish duo in the space helmets haven't made a video per se, but a French site has put this great song with some wonderful dance clips from movies and TV......it's truly excellent.......
13/ We almost had a derecho last week [June 12/13th] that would have done major damage in dozens of states and NYC - these storm systems are really wide powerful wind and rain systems.....
Thankfully we didn't, but I thought I'd put this in because one thing's for sure - we will be getting these, more often......
What Is a Derecho, Anyway?
You've probably heard that a massive system of storms is currently bearing down on the Midwest and expected to reach the mid-Atlantic on Thursday. Meteorologists are warning that the storms may turn into derechos, or "land hurricanes." Almost 75 million people are in the path of the storms, and forecasters believe that conditions are favorable for one or more derechos this week. So what can we expect from these intense storms?
What is a derecho? According to NOAA, a derecho is a "widespread, long-lived windstorm that is associated with a band of rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms." In order for a weather event to be classified as a derecho, the wind damage zone must extend more than 240 miles and include wind gusts of at least 58 miles per hour. In "super-derechos", wind gusts can top 100 miles per hour. "You can think of a derecho as a tropical cyclone over land," NOAA research meteorologist Ken Pryor told Discovery News. "The impacts are very similar. There are damaging winds that cover a significant area." The storms are known to occur frequently at night, and they often bring hail, flooding, and tornadoes.
14/ A good column from Stephen Goldstein in the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel - how Tallahassee is a spin zone, from our Governor, Marco Rubio, the Republican House, Jeb Bush and the Tea Party Florida Chief Justice. Every one an asshole.
Tallahassee is "Spin City" — the capital of duplicity. Elected officials turn pulling the wool over the public's eyes into high art. Here are five egregious Florida spins "unspun:"
15/ Movie Reviews
"World War Z" starring Brad Pitt is in theaters, and per this review in the Times is a damn good film, not just because it's about zombies but rather the acting, directing and story are well done........phew.......I'd have seen it anyway because zombies are ultrasupercool, but it's nice to know the movie is good as well!
I know what some of you are thinking. Zombie apocalypse? Really? Again? But if you start complaining about the lack of originality in summer movies, honestly, when will you stop? (The answer in my case is Labor Day or cocktail hour.) And in many ways, when compared with “Man of Steel,” “Iron Man 3” and “Star Trek: OMG Ricardo Montalbán!,” “World War Z” is pretty refreshing.
The movie, loosely adapted from Max Brooks’s 2006 novel of the same title, is under two hours long. Its action set pieces are cleverly conceived and coherently executed in ways that make them feel surprising, even exciting. Brad Pitt, playing a former United Nations troubleshooter pressed back into service to battle the undead, wears a scruffy, Redfordesque air of pained puzzlement. And, best of all, “World War Z,” directed by Marc Forster from a script with four credited authors, reverses the relentless can-we-top-this structure that makes even smart blockbusters feel bloated and dumb. The large-scale, city-destroying sequences come early, leading toward a climax that is intimate, intricate and genuinely suspenseful.
Faint praise? Maybe. Mr. Brooks’s book is a work of sly pseudo-history composed of data and anecdote drawn from an eerily recognizable future world. A kind of sequel to Mr. Brooks’s “Zombie Survival Guide,” it was published at an earlier moment in the long zombie march through modern popular culture.
Compared with its source, and to “The Walking Dead” in both its graphic novel and cable television versions, Mr. Forster’s film represents a careful step backward. It does not expand the tonal range of zombie fantasy, like Ruben Fleischer’s“Zombieland” or Colson Whitehead’s novel “Zone One.” Nor does it exploit the allegorical potential of a world overrun by flesh-craving, half-decayed former people, in the manner of “The Walking Dead,” which turns the desolate, post-apocalyptic landscape into a forum for philosophical debate and ethical inquiry.
“World War Z,” in other words, does not try to extend the boundaries of commercial entertainment but does what it can to find interesting ways to pass the time within them.
It's the way the zombies move that's really scary.....
A very nice tribute to James Gandolfini, who died this week of an apparent heart attack, from Manohla Dargis, one of the movie critics for the Times. He was an excellent actor but was typecast because of his looks into "Tony Soprano" type roles......
If you liked him, this is worth a read.
At one point in David Chase’s coming-of-age movie “Not Fade Away,” the young protagonist – a New Jersey boy who dreams of breaking free of 1960s suburbia and the towering, disproving father played by James Gandolfini – looks at a film with Orson Welles. It isn’t just any film, but “Touch of Evil,” the 1958 pitch-black noir in which Welles cast himself as a great ruin of a man, a corrupt cop named Hank Quinlan. Mr. Chase holds on the movie and Welles just long enough for you to see this big man looming in the frame, this colossus of the art, long enough to set off a relay that links Welles’s image to that of the boy’s father and that of another titan played by Mr. Gandolfini, Tony Soprano.
In that single delirious cinematic moment, Mr. Chase creates a chain of signification that illuminates the Oedipal undertow that helped make “The Sopranos” a pop cultural sensation. Playing television’s scariest father (daddy kills best) could turned into a trap for Mr. Gandolfini, but his talent transcended the medium. Television was neither his stage nor a cage, but rather a pathway to other roles, including parts in film and in theater. He had appeared in some 20 movies before he was in “The Sopranos,” though beyond “True Romance,” you might be hard pressed to name most of them. Looks can be destiny for movie actors, particularly when no one knows what they’ve got, and it’s no surprise that initially he played bruisers and bullies and guys named Angelo, Vinnie, Eddie and Joey.
Mentioned in the tribute was his breakout role in the underrated "True Romance", where Gandolfini playing an enforcer wants Patricia Arquette to tell where her boyfriend has hidden the cocaine......the movie has Quentin Tarantino as a producer, and if you haven't seen it has some of the most incredible signature scenes in it......Christopher Walken/Harvey Keitel in "the Sicilian, Gary Oldman/Christian Slater in the Pimp, and the final scene in the hotel.......all amazing......
This clip with Gandolfini is an intense 9 minute scene, but is amazingly well acted by both principals.....however note it is very, very violent. Don't watch it if you are sensitive.......
Seriously......
"Dirty Wars" is a documentary with Jeremy Scahill about the secret wars the US government is waging around the world, using CIA, NSA and Black Ops mercenaries to kill covertly around the world. It is completely consistent with the realisation some aware Americans have had, especially with the NSA revelations, that the military-industrial complex is completely beyond anyone's control.
Welcome to the future.
From the Front Lines, if You Can See Them
‘Dirty Wars,’ Directed by Richard Rowley
NYT Critics' Pick
Richard Rowley/Ifc Films
Jeremy Scahill, center, kneeling, in Somalia in “Dirty Wars,” which he wrote with David Riker.
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: June 6, 2013
The thesis of Richard Rowley’s pessimistic, grimly outraged and utterly riveting documentary “Dirty Wars” is that America’s largely clandestine war on terror is now globally entrenched. Far from ending, the film argues, the fight has spread and begun breeding an increasing hatred of the United States that would have delighted Osama bin Laden. Because it is a hidden war, there are few Congressional restraints on how it is conducted.
The bearer of these bad tidings,Jeremy Scahill, who wrote the movie with David Riker, is a national security correspondent for The Nation and the author of the recently published “Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield” and “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.” Mr. Scahill, 38, narrates the film like a hard-boiled gumshoe following leads in a film noir. The cinematography includes some noirish touches, and there is somber music by the Kronos Quartet. Like “Inside Job,”Charles Ferguson’s incendiary exposé of Wall Street malpractice, “Dirty Wars” cuts to the chase.
Mr. Scahill’s journey into the heart of darkness begins in Gardez, Afghanistan, in February 2010, when two pregnant women were among those killed in a night raid. One casualty was Mohammed Daoud, an American-trained Afghan police commander. Gruesome photos of the carnage are shown here, in a movie that doesn’t turn away from images of extreme gore.
In the official United States explanation of what happened, the women were victims of a Taliban honor killing, although American soldiers were seen digging bullets out of their bodies. Mr. Daoud’s death was called “unfortunate.”
Mr. Scahill subsequently learns that during one week in Afghanistan, there were 1,700 such night raids. His sleuthing leads to his discovery that the attack was carried out by the Joint Special Operations Command, a covert military unit that operates not only in Afghanistan but also in countries on which no war has been declared. Algeria, Indonesia, Jordan and Thailand are mentioned.
An unsettling trailer for this film - I believe it will be on PPV fairly soon......
Todays video - time for the very funny Trunk Monkey commercials again - this has the extended Directors Cut versions.......
Todays Grandma joke........
A Grandma and her Grandson were shopping in a super market.The Grandma realizes that the Kid has picked a toy.She calls out; ''Degree, put that toy back".The Kid returns the toy.Astonished, another Customer asks; ''Is that his name?''The Grandma replies; ''Yes, I sent his Mother to the University and this is what she brought home''.
Todays political jokes....
California to Texas Translation Guide
CALIFORNIA
|
TEXAS
|
Arsenal of Weapons
|
Gun Collection
|
Delicate Wetlands
|
Swamp
|
Undocumented Worker
|
Illegal Alien
|
Cruelty-Free Materials
|
Synthetic Fiber
|
Assault and Battery
|
Attitude Adjustment
|
Heavily Armed
|
Well-protected
|
Narrow-minded
|
Righteous
|
Taxes or Your Fair Share
|
Coerced Theft
|
Commonsense Gun Control
|
Gun Confiscation Plot
|
Illegal Hazardous Explosives
|
Fireworks or Stump Removal
|
Equal Access to Opportunity
|
Socialism
|
Multicultural Community
|
High Crime Area
|
Fairness or Social Progress
|
Marxism
|
Upper Class or "The Rich "
|
Self-Employed
|
Progressive, Change
|
Big Government Scheme
|
Homeless or Disadvantaged
|
Bums or Welfare Leeches
|
Sniper Rifle
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Scoped Deer Rifle
|
Investment For the Future
|
Higher Taxes
|
Healthcare Reform
|
Socialized Medicine
|
Extremist, Judgmental, or Hater
|
Conservative
|
Truants
|
Homeschoolers
|
Victim or Oppressed
|
Criminal or Lazy Good-For-Nothing
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High Capacity Magazine
|
Standard Capacity Magazine
|
Religious Zealot
|
Church-going
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Reintroduced Wolves
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Sheep and Elk Killers
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Fair Trade Coffee
|
Overpriced Yuppie Coffee
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Exploiters or "The Rich "
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Employed or Land Owner
|
The Gun Lobby
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NRA Members
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Assault Weapon
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Semi-Auto (Grandpa's M1 Carbine)
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Fiscal Stimulus
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New Taxes and Higher Taxes
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Same Sex Marriage
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Legalized Perversion
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Mandated Eco-Friendly lighting
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Chinese Mercury-Laden Light Bulbs
|
Todays oldtimer joke
A man was sunbathing naked at the beach.
For the sake of civility, and to keep it from
getting sunburned, he had a hat over his private parts.
A woman walks past and says, snickering,
"If you were a gentleman you'd lift your hat."
"If you were a gentleman you'd lift your hat."
He raised an eyebrow and replied,
"If you were better looking it would lift itself."
"If you were better looking it would lift itself."
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