Health Care By Dr. Beams

A great article on the current health care debate in the US, showing problems and issues that need to be addressed by Obama’s initiative.

Klepto Capitalism

I came across this term while catching up on my 3QD posts. Klepto capitalism makes a lot of sense and it describes corporate America very well. How can a company pay its workers $50,000 per annum and give its top execs millions, if not billions, of dollars each year? I think that the worst culprits are in the financial sector, especially in merchant banks and investment banks, with their bloated end-of-year bonuses often going into millions. Even with the economic downturn, these ultra-rich are getting richer.

Klepto Capitalism (n.) — an economic system where publicly traded corporations are run not to produce value for shareholders but to provide obscene amounts of wealth for CEOs and top executives.

What we have in the United States is no longer capitalism but klepto-capitalism: a system where publicly traded corporations are run not to produce value for shareholders but to provide loot for a new class of corporate mega-thieves.

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Death Panels and Trollumnists

After getting the term trollumnist out there, I came upon this article over at 3QD which clearly points out a few examples of trollumnists. Unlike the original article which coined the term trollunist, these aren’t Australian examples, but really good American ones.

The first example of a trollumnist is is none other than Betsy McCaughey, who’s infamous for coining death panels and being the architect behind the idea.

Betsy McCaughey – architect of the widely rumored “death panels” idea – that Obama’s health care proposals would create government sponsored draconian consultations imposing conditions upon both patients in end-of-life circumstances and doctors treating said patients to decide which patients were worthy of living.

Here is where the trolluminsm comes in:

James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly described her role in the healthcare debate as: “She has brought more misinformation, more often, more destructively into America’s consideration of health-policy issues than any other individual. She has no concept of “truth” or “accuracy” in the normal senses of those terms, as demonstrated when she went on The Daily Show¹. Betsy resigned from the board of directors of Cantel Medical Corporation the next day.

Bill Kristol is another fine example of a trollumnist.

But Jon manages to rise past the agendas of his guests – conservatives and liberals alike – in the most ingratiating manner. When he peppered Bill Kristol – editor of Weekly Standard, a right-wing opponent of health care reform that includes a public insurance option – he even managed to steer him into complimenting government run health-care².

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NSA’s Yottabytes of Data

Aerial view of NSA HQ at Fort Meade, via NSA

The NSA is building two new storage facilities to house yottabytes of data. One in Utah and one in Texas. The scale is staggering. There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte. A yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000 GB¹.

This data is mostly pocket litter: trillions of phone calls, email messages, web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other data trails.

The issue is critical because at the NSA, electrical power is political power. In its top-secret world, the coin of the realm is the kilowatt. More electrical power ensures bigger data centers.

Does this scare you? As for myself, no. As a mathematician, I’ve often fantasized working at the NSA. From the article, it seems like they don’t have enough supercomputing power to deal with the vasts amounts of data that they are harnessing and storing.

I like the term infoweapons used in this article. Infoweapons are supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs.

On a remote edge of Utah’s dry and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may become America’s equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Library of Babel,” a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world’s knowledge is stored, but not a single word is understood. At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.

Unlike Borges’s “labyrinth of letters,” this library expects few visitors. It’s being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency—which is primarily responsible for “signals intelligence,” the collection and analysis of various forms of communication—to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital “pocket litter.” Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.

Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report prepared by the MITRE Corporation, a Pentagon think tank. “As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve,” says the report, referring to a variety of technical collection methods, “the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (10²⁴ Bytes) by 2015.”^[1] Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven’t yet been named. Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite “libraries,” the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be—or may one day become—a terrorist. In the NSA’s world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story.

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Top 50 Dumbest Bush Quotes

My wife was laughing about these Bush quotes for about 6 hours. She told me that it was the gift that kept on giving. I’ve never liked him as a President and by God, does he look dumb in these quotes.

Favorites include [best ones are at the bottom!]:

I couldn’t imagine somebody like Osama bin Laden understanding the joy of Hanukkah.

“I would say the best moment of all was when I caught a 7.5 pound largemouth bass in my lake.” –on his best moment in office, interview with the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag, May 7, 2006

“Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.” –in parting words to world leaders at his final G-8 Summit, punching the air and grinning widely as those present looked on in shock, Rusutsu, Japan, July 10, 2008

“The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him.” –Washington, D.C., Sept. 13, 2001

“I don’t know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don’t care. It’s not that important. It’s not our priority.” –Washington, D.C., March 13, 2002

“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on –shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.” –Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002 (Watch video clip)

“Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB-GYNs aren’t able to practice their love with women all across this country.” –Poplar Bluff, Mo., Sept. 6, 2004 (Watch video clip)

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” –Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004 (Watch video clip)

 

Not Everybody Is Happy With President Obama Winning Nobel Peace Prize

Not everyone is happy about President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

President Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize

It’s pretty incredible news. President Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize! Other nominees include Sima Samar and Greg Mortenson for promoting peace in Afghanistan, Hu Jia in order to promote reform in China., but this is pretty incredible. The Nobel Prize site is currently overloaded with Americans trying to get news about the new Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In 2002, President Jimmy Carter won it for his efforts for peace in the middle east. In 2007, Al Gore won it for his environmental efforts.

OSLO — President Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in a stunning decision designed to encourage his initiatives to reduce nuclear arms, ease tensions with the Muslim world and stress diplomacy and cooperation rather than unilateralism.

Nobel observers were shocked by the unexpected choice so early in the Obama presidency, which began less than two weeks before the Feb. 1 nomination deadline.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama woke up to the news a little before 6 a.m. EDT. The White House had no immediate comment on the announcement, which took the administration by surprise.

[...]

Until seconds before the award, speculation had focused on a wide variety of candidates besides Obama: Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, a Colombian senator, a Chinese dissident and an Afghan woman’s rights activist, among others. The Nobel committee received a record 205 nominations for this year’s prize, though it was not immediately apparent who nominated Obama.

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The Polanski Furore

The Observer on the divide between Hollywood and the rest of America about their reaction to Polanski. This led me to Kate Harding’s post. Her original post that went viral was for Broadsheet. Harris from The Observer remarked at how Hollywood’s reaction had united different American factions, from feminists to right-wing activists. I also liked Kate’s piece on Whoopi Goldberg’s insane rape-rape comment.

Illegal Art

Nice stencil work by LES, via tumbl p0ps

All of those cities getting tough on graffiti vandals are imbeciles in my book. Instead of arresting street thugs, they are punishing artists like UTAH (Danielle Bremner) who got arrested and will serve 6 months in jail. In March, Yoshimoto Nara was arrested in NYC.

PRC’s 60th Anniversary

Fireworks explode over Tiananmen Square, via The Big Picture

I was debating with myself if I should post this photos. Ultimately, it’s a really nice photo and that’s all that counts. None of that cross-straight political stuff will be found here.