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What has happened to this country…
This is a very NON-PARTISAN explanation of the Affordable Care Act aka ObamaCare. It strikes me that a large number of folks are opposed to ObamaCare and actually have little or no understanding of what it really is.
One issue I hear a lot is that folks are afraid that they will be taxed to subsidize freeloaders. IMHO this is happening already in two ways. The first would be excessive corporate profits. There is a reason insurance executives can be paid those huge salaries and bonuses. Secondly, when poor folks have no other health care option but to show up at an emergency room we are taxed for by the cost be shifted into other arenas of the hospital and passed on to paying patients.
Health resources are limited which means they need to be triaged. The question becomes do you want the government triaging your health care or a for profit corporation. Seniors seem to love the governments Medicare program. Native Americans seem to find Indian Health Care more than acceptable. My personal issue with ObamaCare is that is leaves too much in the private sector, but I realize it was probably the best that could be done at the time.
At least invest the 15 minutes or so in a very well done video before you absolutely decide one way or the other about ObamaCare. Far too many of us many political decisions along partisan lines without all the information. Far too many of our politicians do not speak to the issue, but work on our fears. Educating yourself is at least a start in the right direction.
Humanity Will Always Live in Chaos as Long as Organized Religion Persists
He absolutely read my mind:
“Organized religion is the worst thing that’s ever happened to human kind.
All organized religion does is provide a tool for those in power to manipulate millions to act against their own self interests. Which is exactly what you see in Christianity and Islam. People in power, using religion, to get people to act like absolute fools. People living their lives under the control of religious rules that are derived by some human’s interpretation of something they read in a book.”
I do not have a problem with faith, just how it has be kidnapped by the power structure. I perfectly okay if you want to dance naked around a 10 foot statue of G.I. Joe. But please to not hand me a glass of your Kool-Ade or force me to dance.
I really did not know a lot about Ben Affleck before this, but after watching this episode of Bill Maher I lost a lot of respect for him. He did what a lot of folks seem to do on these types of shows, rather than reason and debate, he was loud and obnoxious in an attempt to make a point.
I am secular and I have a hard time with most religions, but Islam in particular (at least as portrayed by our media). The main reason being is the few Muslims I know personally seem like good and reasonable people. They seem to love and believe their faith as much as any Baptist from Oklahoma. In an attempt to understand the religion that is so much in the news these days I have read a couple books about Islam. At the core Islam seems full of love, care and kindness for fellow humans. I know that the Islam religion as practiced early was very tolerant of other religions. The Islam that seems to predominate today is one of the fundamentalist ilk that does not seem to very tolerant of some very basic human rights. It seems like separation of church and state is a goal to avoid. The religion I see on the news is not tolerant of different points of views. It appears to me that much of strife in the world currently comes from the Muslim arena.
The message that Christ preached was full of love, caring and kindness also. Something seems to happen when religions move pass this “Golden Rule” core. The history of all the Abrahamic religions is not pretty. It is one of strife, conquering, destruction, intolerance and murder all the way to genocide. The history of the Catholic Church is very troubling.
My basic point of view is that life is tough, so whatever gets you through the day is fine with me as long as you don’t want me to drink your Kool-Aid. I try to be tolerant of religion, but some days I just want to scream. I really do believe that the world would be a far better place if all religions would go away. I also realize that humans have a spiritual need. I just wish there was something else besides the bloody, intolerant Abrahamic religions to fill this need for the 2 or 3 billion individuals that follow these religions.
Oh well. Here is the video. It does not even include the worse of Ben Affleck’s rants.
Just as a point of reference, I missed this episode of The Daily Show. A friend of mine who is a Vietnam War veteran sent me this link.
…yeah I know you did not ask!
Definition of a politician: An individual who spends inordinately large sums of money to get elected to a job for which they are not qualified. Should they achieve this dubious goal the likelihood is that they will live up to the expectations of incompetence and/or corruption.
The CF continues. Apparently the Obama administration is in bed with InfoSys. To quote from the article from Computerworld in this link Court case offers a peek at how H-1B-fueled discrimination works :
“The passage of the Affordable Care Act brought with it a burst of IT spending and hiring. The District of Columbia, for instance, hired offshore outsourcing firm Infosys for $49.5 million to build its Healthcare Exchange.
The India-based Infosys brought in H-1B visa holders to work on the government project. And of the approximately 100 Infosys employees working on the healthcare project, only three were American, according to a civil lawsuit filed in federal court.”
Just to be clear the discrimination they are referring is against citizens of the United States in the IT field.
To quote from another article Lawsuit: Tech Company Hired to Build D.C. Obamacare Website Discriminated Against Americans Continue reading “Lawsuit Claims Obama Discriminated Against American Workers.”
I heard a really great definition of politics this morning on NPR, “Politics is about controlling the flow of money.”
Politics is, of course, about power. Frequently the flow of money is what it comes down to. Those in power receive more resources or are taxed less, and those who are not in power receive fewer resources or more of the burden.
The H1-B program is such a cluster fuck visited on the American worker that cluster fuck is not a strong enough term. I’m in IT and I have been watching this disaster for years.
I was contracting at large financial firm. I begin noticing a large number of young Indians coming in as contract workers. Contracting is a very common method in IT. Companies like because they can staff up and staff down as needed. I used to like because the companies generally compensated well for the insecurity of a contracting positions, and I did not mind moving around to different jobs. To get back to my position at the financial firm. When I saw all the Indians coming in I knew my days were numbered, and they were. They found a pretense to terminate my contract nine months early. It was my second contract at this firm, and they had actually given me more money to come back for a second contract. Additionally, they had given me an 18 month contract when normal they did not go over a year. They seemed to like my work. My consulting firm later told me that they were bringing in the Indians at $25/hour less than I was receiving. I can promise you I was not getting rich. This was at a time long past the glory days of contracting.
This particular consulting firm ended up going out of business as they could not compete with the cheap off-shore labor either. And this was one of the older and bigger consulting companies. Now days, when a consulting company calls you about a contract if you are talking to an American it is a miracle. If the consulting company is not Indian it is even more of a miracle. You have to give the Indians credit. Many of the Indian companies have used the minority preferences given by our laws to gain an advantage. Essentially this has allowed Indian firms to corner this market in preference to American firms.
Who do I blame? I do not blame individual Indians, but I do blame Congress and our President who are in cahoots with our corporations who only care about profit and cheap, cheap labor. It is something I have ranted about for years. Congress briefly played lip service to all the complaints, but I do believe the problem is even worse than it was before.
To read about one of these horror stories, go to This IT worker had to train an H-1B replacement at Computerworld.com
Just in case you do not know what a H1-B Visa — click the link for the Wikepedia article on same.