fail to tell our own

Treasury Secretary Paulson and other senior Bush financial regulators flouted the law. The Bush administration wanted to cover up the depth of the financial crisis that its policies had caused.

Economics Populist:

I have a hard time understanding Americans sometimes.

They seem to have unlimited ability for outrage against government workers collecting middle-class paychecks, but can’t seem to work up a protest against a massive amount of fraud and theft from people who don’t live next door to them.

Why is that?

We, and by that I mean working people, have been betrayed at every level, and the average American just cannot accept it. The deception is so broad, and so complete, that Americans have turned to blaming scapegoats instead. Because they can’t accept that fact, when all the evidence points toward it, they are easily used and manipulated.

Their crime is trusting people who are obviously lying to them.

nature in the debate

The health care clash, like American politics, remains rooted in our mommy and daddy political parties.

Our political parties are ‘maternal’ and ‘paternal’?

See, the Democrat Party is the Mommy Party because it projects “warmth.” And the Republican Party is the Daddy Party because it leaves work early to have anonymous sex, drives home blind drunk, knocks over the neighbors’ mailboxes, yells at the kids for dressing like sluts and fags, kicks the dog, sexually harasses the undocumented Guatemalan housekeeper, and spends the rest of the night blogging on the Decline of Civility.

I’m exaggerating, of course. In reality, the Daddy Party just wants to keep us safe from immigrants and taxes and Mohammedanism and socialized medicine and gay sex and Hollywood and stuff like that.

pharma’s derivatives

Asymptomatic Depression
Hidden Epidemic and Huge Untapped Market
Simplifying diagnosis, screening, intervention and treatment

In recent years, antidepressant sales have skyrocketed beyond the pharmaceutical industry’s wildest dreams.

Yet despite widespread screening programs and aggressive marketing campaigns designed to raise mental health disease awareness, a significant percentage of the population remains undiagnosed and untreated. Estimates vary, but research suggests nearly a third of American adults have never been diagnosed with any mental disorder. Precisely this segment of the population must be targeted for intervention if pharmaceutical profits are to continue rising at their current rate.

One way to increase the prevalence of a disease is to broaden its diagnostic criteria. By providing physicians with an ever-growing laundry list of signs and symptoms to evaluate (insomnia or oversleeping, poor appetite or overeating, constant crying or inability to cry, apathy or hostility, fatigue or restlessness, and so on), the number of potential clients/patients is greatly expanded.

However, a major flaw in this strategy is that it focuses exclusively on those who complain of sickness, while completely overlooking those who feel well. The present article explores the novel hypothesis that patients who feel well are, in fact, patients who need treatment.

hat tip to Deric Bownds.

coyote playlist

Charlie, The Daily Coyote, sings with ChloeCharlie the Coyote and his Wyoming duet.

When I’m calling you uuu uuu, Will you answer true uuu uuu…

She’s a little bit countryyyyyy, I’m a little bit rocknrollllll…

Noooo-body knooows, the trouble I’ve seeeen…

“That note was sour, dawg”

we are stuck with us

we the karikaturePulitzer-prize winning Leonard Pitts, Jr. wrote, “Increasingly, we are a people estranged from critical thinking, divorced from logic, alienated from even objective truth.”

You can’t demand that debate be rational strictly on the basis of the evidence, because that’s not how the public operates.

Which is to say, we’re stuck with us.

Public discourse has changed; information that does not fit one’s worldview is now discounted or rejected.

I think Plato made a somewhat similar argument. As did Francis Bacon, when he said that “the mind of man is far from the nature of a clear and equal glass wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their true incidence; nay, it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not delivered and reduced.”

a strategic attack

The Economic Elite Vs. The People of the United States of America:

America is the richest nation in history, yet we now have the highest poverty rate in the industrialized world with an unprecedented number of Americans living in dire straits and over 50 million citizens already living in poverty.

The government has come up with clever ways to downplay all of these numbers, but we have over 50 million people who need to use food stamps to eat, and a stunning 50% of US children will use a food stamp to eat at some point in their childhood. Approximately 20,000 people are added to this total every day. In 2009, one out of five US households didn’t have enough money to buy food. In households with children, this number rose to 24%, as the hunger rate among US citizens has now reached an all time high.

We also currently have over 50 million US citizens without healthcare. 1.4 million Americans filed for bankruptcy in 2009, a 32% increase from 2008. As bankruptcies continue to skyrocket, medical bankruptcies are responsible for over 60% of them, and over 75% of the medical bankruptcies filed are from people who have healthcare insurance. We have the most expensive healthcare system in the world, we are forced to pay twice as much as other countries and the overall care we get in return ranks 37th in the world.

A comprehensive, energized and well composed rant by David Degraf.

  1. Casualties of Economic Terrorism, Surveying the Damage
  2. The Rise of the Economic Elite
  3. Exposing Our Enemy: Meet the Economic Elite
  4. The Financial Coup d’Etat
  5. Overcoming the Divide and Conquer Strategy
  6. How to Fight Back and Win: Common Ground Issues That Must Be Won