News that makes us laugh, cry, or both

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sun Jun 07, 2009 1:00 am

If that's too glib for you, consider the following:

Right now, we have about 40% of the population right now who would oppose any kind of Democratic-propose health care plan just because it was proposed by Democrats. All things being equal this wouldn't accomplish jack diddly, but it does give us a starting number to work with.

We also have about 2/3rds of people with health insurance right now (no particular overlap with the first group) saying that they're happy with their providers and don't want to have a scheme where they're forced to switch.

This makes upgrading to a new system fairly difficult as it is. But the biggest obstacle right now probably is the Blue Dog caucus in the Senate; and yes, they're completely in the pockets of the health care industry. We're not going to be able to get through any health care plan without at least a little of their support, too.

When you combine all of these factors then we see that actually having a robust and well-supported health care option is nothing but an uphill fight.

This right now is why people are pushing for the public option rather than single-payer, because we might actually have a chance of getting that without it getting neutered to the point of unworkability. But until then we have to take baby steps. Fortunately for us Obama has said that he wanted a fully-supported public option that covers everything and the DNC is at its weakest point in recent history. Also fortunately for us get single-payer will be a lot easier to get once we make that step.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sun Jun 07, 2009 1:28 am

By the way, what the hell is Hulu and why should I give a care about it?

IGTN · Post by **IGTN** » Sun Jun 07, 2009 1:40 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote:By the way, what the hell is Hulu and why should I give a care about it?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Hulu

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sun Jun 07, 2009 1:42 am

I was hoping for an opinion, maybe even an editorial on it, smartass.

erik · Post by **erik** » Sun Jun 07, 2009 1:48 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote:By the way, what the hell is Hulu and why should I give a care about it?

Hulu is an awesome streaming video flash site that has TONS of free shows and movies to watch. I have pretty much entirely been watching my TV online for the last year or so, largely thanks to hulu.com. I wait with bated breath to see what comes of their intentions to move towards becoming a pay-site.

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

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sun Jun 07, 2009 1:54 am

Would become a pay-site work?

From my understanding it works right now because it has corporate backing and it's more-or-less 'free' to the consumer and easier for videos--as opposed to a place like YouTube which has a bunch of restrictions people don't like.

I suppose the question is though is how much they think people will pay for the convenience of having a technically sound website where people can watch Family Guy. It certainly can't be very high, since it's not all that hard for some other guy to go 'fuck this' and put out a torrent or jump on some other free video website or whatever.

Any parallels with the Napster model?

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Sun Jun 07, 2009 5:39 am

I saw what may be the first interview with Green Ronin about the tabletop RPG version of Dragon Age:
http://www.gamebanshee.com/interviews/dragonagerpg1.php

I chuckled a bit at the idea of seeing boxed sets by level ranges again, but I must say that I'm at least a little intrigued. The setting-specific RPGs I've seen from Green Ronin in the past seemed... tolerable, if not exemplary. The Black Company one was more amusing than anything else, but that may be partially because I never read the books it was based on.

ckafrica · Post by **ckafrica** » Sun Jun 07, 2009 6:27 am

clikml wrote:
Crissa wrote:78% percent of those bankruptcies are people who have 'health insurance'.

...

This is only ~10% more than before 2005 when the total number of bankruptcies were halved.

There's just nothing good about these numbers.

-Crissa
I watched Michael Moore's Sicko with my wife last week. At the end I was seriously considering how viable it would be to leave the U.S. and join another country.

Why in Koresh's holy name do we let insurance companies dictate our health care such that we are all getting fvcked?

Seriously you're probably better off moving somewhere else. Even if there is no public health-care insurance almost anywhere else in the world is cheaper. Like A good insurance plan for me at age 30 is 1.5k a year. Now while Vietnam doesn't have great hospitals (even our foreign run ones aren't somewhere I'd want a major operation done at if I could help it) I'm really close to Thailand which has some of the best hospitals in the world.

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Mon Jun 08, 2009 1:26 pm

Lago, Hulu is damned good to a point but they are driven by the backers.

Pros: short sparse ads of 30 seconds or less once or twice in a 30 minute program or they have tried running a whole 3-minute ad for a 60 minute show or a movie at once and you have no interruptions for the entire show.

The connection is excellent. THe program selection for the most part is pretty good and rangy. It isn't just same old Lost, and Medium. You get CBC programming such as Regenesis, Davinci's Inquest, and Naruto Shippuden in or Death Note, in Sub rather than dub because they don't have the rights to the Dub. They have quite a bit of Anime available. Lot of old '80s sitcoms and scifi shows and reality shows, movies. The point is that they have range. It's not just the 80s but it has range. Sometimes it is the entire episode or movie but sometimes it might be a teaser.

Cons: The backers are the studios and the distributors and such. So if Fox doesn't want all of Dollhouse shown, They might show episode 1 for an expirational period of 4 days and then remove it. But sometimes they don't give a warning. These days they are pretty good at giving warnings.
FX is notorious for doing things half-assed for things like this. They have an amazing biker show in my opinion. It's called "sons of anarchy" and when I finally got into it on hulu, they only had a few disparate episodes in the middle such as 4, 7, and 2. and I watched one or two to get a feel of the show. I was amazed at the feel. It made me do things that FX probably didn't want me to do but I'll never know my dog paul ever again. I wish FX can live with that. (snifff)

They have a good buffer system. THey had an invite system, but now it's all out get in. if you need an invite, I'm sure I can get you in.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Mon Jun 08, 2009 11:05 pm

Which is strange, considering Comcast thinks that my $100 a month deal (not including internet!) for no premium channels is awesome.

No, their commercials don't advertise the real price. How is that even legal?

-Crissa

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Tue Jun 09, 2009 12:42 am

Oh, update on the crazy Pres. Obama myths.

-Crissa

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Tue Jun 09, 2009 12:43 pm

Anyone been to TVtropes lately?

What's with all of the purging of articles that have controversy or a high amount of subjective opinion to then? I noted this when the Macekre article got blammed. Then Untwist. Black Hole Sue, too.

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Tue Jun 09, 2009 6:04 pm

Crissa wrote:Oh, update on the crazy Pres. Obama myths.

-Crissa

Jesus' biblical prediction of the coming of the Antichrist describes him as coming as "lightning from heaven"; that translates to "baraq o bama" in Hebrew.

...

"As President, Obama now has unbridled power to systematically destroy the only source of checks and balances to his radical policies: talk radio."

Awesome.

Neeeek · Post by **Neeeek** » Wed Jun 10, 2009 3:17 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Anyone been to TVtropes lately?

What's with all of the purging of articles that have controversy or a high amount of subjective opinion to then? I noted this when the Macekre article got blammed. Then Untwist. Black Hole Sue, too.

I noticed they purged a bunch of stuff from the Some Anvils Need to be Dropped page.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Wed Jun 10, 2009 3:18 am

http://everything2.com/title/Warning%25 ... nvolvement

Allow me to share an Alabama state secret:

One of our unofficial mottos is:

"At least we aren't Mississippi."

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Thu Jun 11, 2009 3:26 pm

Sickening shit:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-r ... 10637.html

Of course, you know, they've realized how fucking insane they were:

http://robarnieanddawn.com/

This is both good, and obviously bad. It's good because it gets people to talk and understand the situation, hopefully with more information there will be more understanding. It's bad because anyone with a shred of conscience would have never said those things in the first place.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Thu Jun 11, 2009 7:15 pm

Transgendered people get the shaft even by their allies in the LGBT movement and suffer a ridiculously high percentage of targetted violence as it is. But we'll never know the exact amount because the FBI refuses to keep 'violence against transgendered people' as a statistic.

Lich-Loved · Post by **Lich-Loved** » Thu Jun 11, 2009 8:47 pm

In the US, we have the best government that money can buy...

Oh, and this bears upon the Facism discussion we had earlier concerning bribery.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri Jun 12, 2009 2:34 am

While we're talking about fascism, what's your opinion on the Obama administration not releasing torture photographs?

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Fri Jun 12, 2009 3:14 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote:While we're talking about fascism, what's your opinion on the Obama administration not releasing torture photographs?

The reasons given for not releasing the photos do not add up at all.

Glenn Greenwald wrote:How can it possibly be that, on the one hand, there's nothing new or revealing about these photos -- nothing we need to see; just move along -- yet, on the other hand, release of these photos is going to single-handedly prompt mass bloodshed and conflagration in the Middle East? Don't those two claims rather obviously negate each other?

cthulhu · Post by **cthulhu** » Fri Jun 12, 2009 4:51 am

I figure they just figured that it was a too hard for no reward case, so just run some interference until it goes away.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Fri Jun 12, 2009 5:06 am

I can understand why they wouldn't release the photos if they were already doing something about it.

Seriously, you're intellectually aware that torture happened. You're pissed, yes. You don't need to see the pictures. What has been seen, cannot be unseen.

And by the same token, releasing graphic visual proof would really just make the situation over there that much more difficult and dangerous for the people who are over there. People in the Middle East have very little sense of humor about some stuff. I mean, they rioted in Jerusalem for more than a year over a guy visiting a holy site. Just the other day, I saw an article about how some people in Israel were up in flames because a photograph of Obama on the phone with the Prime Minister of Israel featured Obama with his feet on his desk, because it's apparently an insult to show the sole of your foot to someone.

So, yeah, don't need to pour gasoline on an already burning flame.

But, yes, it pisses me off that people were tortured in Iraq. But I don't have any particular desire to view the evidence, and I can understand why the Obama administration would not want that photo evidence hitting the public and, eventually, the Internet.

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Fri Jun 12, 2009 5:52 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote:While we're talking about fascism, what's your opinion on the Obama administration not releasing torture photographs?

Apparently some of them would be considered child pornography, and that's illegal to distribute in the United States. Therefore, the administration is doing the right thing in suppressing all further information relating to child abuse by the US military in vassal states. They're also subscribers to the "pics or it didn't happen" philosophy.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Jun 12, 2009 8:09 am

It is true that releasing pictures of torture would increase attacks worldwide against Americans. It is also true that whether the pictures are released to the public or not should have no effect on the investigations and trials of the people who broke the law - the judiciary would have the pictures to vomit over in private. It is not standard practice to release victim photos in ongoing investigations. It undermines those investigations.

Not releasing the photos is normal. The part where the investigation doesn't seem to be moving forward, that is bullshit. The CIA's claim that they didn't torture, that the torture they did was justified, that it was all under orders from congress because they discussed it all with Nancy Pelosi in specific meetings that demonstrably never happened because she is on tape being different places when they supposedly took place - that's a fucking sham. That kind of incompetence can't be allowed to go unpunished.

A spy agency only gets pass on breaking the law to further the ends of the nation if they are actually furthering the ends of the nation. Rounding people up and torturing them in order to get the intelligence needed to justify an illegal war based on lies is not OK. There is exactly one kind of information that you can get from torture that you can't get other ways: lies that you made up. They are a spy agency. They can just make stuff up, they don't have to torture people to repeat their lies into a recorder.

-Username17

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Fri Jun 12, 2009 8:52 am

FrankTrollman wrote:The CIA's claim that they didn't torture, that the torture they did was justified, that it was all under orders from congress because they discussed it all with Nancy Pelosi in specific meetings that demonstrably never happened because she is on tape being different places when they supposedly took place - that's a fucking sham. That kind of incompetence can't be allowed to go unpunished.

Hilariously, everyone's favourite joke news program bought that sham completely, showing that they're competing in the incompetence network. Bill-O even set up a poll on "Should Pelosi be forced to resign over this?"

Some individuals who wish to remain Anonymous caught wind of this, and were already... displeased with his portrayal of them. They changed a ~70% "Yes" majority into a ~90% "No" majority.

They can just make stuff up, they don't have to torture people to repeat their lies into a recorder.

Not that this is acceptable either, but it's a hell of a lot better than torturing people for kicks on top of that.