Archive | Just Plain Crazy
What if Doomday Clock is slow?
Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker thinks the world is becoming less violent, but scientists believe we’ve taken a step back in our efforts to avert nuclear catastrophe:
It is five minutes to midnight. Two years ago, it appeared that world leaders might address the truly global threats that we face. In many cases, that trend has not continued or been reversed. For that reason, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is moving the clock hand one minute closer to midnight, back to its time in 2007.
More here.
Piggie of the Week: A Modest Proposal for Tom Corbett
Asshole Class War Dirty Rotten Scoundrels Fuck the Poor Just Plain Crazy Scary Crazy Wingnuts The New Depression Worshipping Mammon
Governor Tom Corbett to PA’s working poor: “I hope you and your kids starve to death.”
Republican Gov. Tom Corbett has announced a major assault on the food stamp program that feeds 1.8 million Pennsylvanians, including 439,245 in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania’s Department of Public Welfare announced that on May 1, people under 60 with more than $2,000 in savings or other assets will be barred from receiving food stamps. People over 60 would have a $3,250 cap…
Eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse” is an old and recurrent refrain from those who seek to dismantle the country’s social welfare system. But it’s a cynical ruse: 30 percent of those eligible for food stamps in Pennsylvania don’t receive them. According to federal data, the Inquirer notes, Pennsylvania has a fraud rate of just one-tenth of 1 percent.
AP Ticker has a more modest proposal:
Israel’s loose cannon targets Iran
This should be interesting. How will Barack Obama react if Benjamin Netanyahu tries to start World War III?
President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are engaged in intense maneuvering over Netanyahu’s aim of entangling the United States in an Israeli war against Iran.
Netanyahu is exploiting the extraordinary influence his right-wing Likud Party exercises over the Republican Party and the U.S. Congress on matters related to Israel in order to maximise the likelihood that the United States would participate in an attack on Iran.
Obama, meanwhile, appears to be hoping that he can avoid being caught up in a regional war started by Israel if he distances the United States from any Israeli attack.
New evidence surfaced in 2011 that Netanyahu has been serious about dealing a military blow to the Iranian nuclear programme. Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who left his job in September 2010, revealed in his first public appearance after Mossad Jun. 2 that he, Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) chief Gabi Ashkenazi and Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin had been able to “block any dangerous adventure” by Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak.
The Hebrew language daily Maariv reported that those three, along with President Shimon Peres and IDF Senior Commander Gadi Eisenkrot, had vetoed a 2010 proposal by Netanyahu to attack Iran…
ADD nightmare
Seriously, how frustrating (and silly) is this, that the DEA is keeping people from getting needed medication?
Medicines to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are in such short supply that hundreds of patients complain daily to the Food and Drug Administration that they are unable to find a pharmacy with enough pills to fill their prescriptions.
The shortages are a result of a troubled partnership between drug manufacturers and the Drug Enforcement Administration, with companies trying to maximize their profits and drug enforcement agents trying to minimize abuse by people, many of them college students, who use the medications to get high or to stay up all night.
Caught in between are millions of children and adults who rely on the pills to help them stay focused and calm. Shortages, particularly of cheaper generics, have become so endemic that some patients say they worry almost constantly about availability.
While the Food and Drug Administration monitors the safety and supply of the drugs, which are sold both as generics and under brand names like Ritalin and Adderall, the Drug Enforcement Administration sets manufacturing quotas that are designed to control supplies and thwart abuse. Every year, the D.E.A. accepts applications from manufacturers to make the drugs, analyzes how much was sold the previous year and then allots portions of the expected demand to various companies.
The wild west
How fortunate that no one was injured:
CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) – Police in Wyoming say nobody was hurt when a small gun that was inside a girl’s purse fired while she was in a Cheyenne Starbucks.
The bullet went through a chair and into a wall and narrowly missed several customers.
Police say the mishap occurred while officers were at the coffee shop around 7 a.m. Monday. They found a gunshot hole in the purse and a small, Derringer-type, double-barrel .38 Special inside.
Authorities say the girl is under age 18 and didn’t release her name. She was cited for underage possession of a firearm.
The Wyoming Tribune Eagle reported that the girl’s father had given her the gun and encouraged her to carry it for her protection. According to police records, she hasn’t had any formal firearms training.
Protection
I read an intriguing article years ago (I think it was in Harpers) about how SUVs were actually designed to look hostile and aggressive — to appeal to the angry white male. There was a lot of talk about how buyers would perceive them as rolling fortresses to protect themselves and their families in a dangerous world. (It was more than a little ironic that so many of the early SUVs had a little problem with rollover that killed their passengers, but I digress.) For someone who’s paranoid, you can’t possibly have enough protection – unfortunately for the rest of us.
I’d suggest that we all just stay home, but at least two people were shot by stray bullets while they were asleep this past week.
Anyway, the Times takes a look at how that open-carry law in North Carolina has worked out, so be sure to go read the rest:
Alan Simons was enjoying a Sunday morning bicycle ride with his family in Asheville, N.C., two years ago when a man in a sport utility vehicle suddenly pulled alongside him and started berating him for riding on the highway.
The bullet passed through Mr. Simons’s helmet.
Mr. Simons, his 4-year-old son strapped in behind him, slowed to a halt. The driver, Charles Diez, an Asheville firefighter, stopped as well. When Mr. Simons walked over, he found himself staring down the barrel of a gun.
“Go ahead, I’ll shoot you,” Mr. Diez said, according to Mr. Simons. “I’ll kill you.”
Mr. Simons turned to leave but heard a deafening bang. A bullet had passed through his bike helmet just above his left ear, barely missing him.
Mr. Diez, as it turned out, was one of more than 240,000 people in North Carolina with a permit to carry a concealed handgun. If not for that gun, Mr. Simons is convinced, the confrontation would have ended harmlessly. “I bet it would have been a bunch of mouthing,” he said.
[...]
Accidents will happen
When a gun is involved, even minor accidents can kill people. And that’s the thing about guns, right? Someone else’s slip of the hand, carelessness or anger can result in the death of another human being. It doesn’t seem like it should be so controversial to have more common-sense rules in place. Unfortunately, the NRA believes that any rules are an affront to reason and they’ve bought enough politicians to block them.
I don’t know what it’s like in rural areas, but most cities have laws against firing guns in the air for this very reason. If you don’t understand that the bullet can still kill people, maybe you shouldn’t have a gun:
An Ohio sheriff says Rachel Yoder, 15, was shot in the head Thursday night while riding in her buggy after a Christmas party at a produce farm, the Associated Press reports.
She was heading to her home in Wayne County, between Columbus and Akron, when she was hit, according to Wayne County sheriff’s Capt. Douglas Hunter.
Hunter says his department had traced a trail of blood along the road for about three-eighths of a mile into Holmes County in an area of farms and rolling hills.
Holmes County Sheriff Timothy Zimmerly says investigators figured out what happened after the gun-cleaner’s family came forward and after his neighbors reported hearing a shot at about the time the girl was wounded.
The man had fired the gun in the air about 1.5 miles from where Yoder was shot, Zimmerly says. State investigators are checking the rifle for a ballistics match, he says.
“In all probability, it looks like an accidental shooting,” Zimmerly says. No charges have been filed.
Zimmerly said he informed the Yoder family that the shooting appeared to be accidental, the AP reports.
This post is written as part of the Media Matters Gun Facts fellowship. The purpose of the fellowship is to further Media Matters’ mission to comprehensively monitor, analyze, and correct conservative misinformation in the U.S. media. Some of the worst misinformation occurs around the issue of guns, gun violence, and extremism, the fellowship program is designed to fight this misinformation with facts.
Electronic medical records
Why the refusal of the medical profession to streamline information with computers keeps the system from finding out what actually works – and from saving money.
AP Ticker’s Piggie of the Week: The He-Man Woman Haters Club in the PA State Legislature
It would be immoral to describe the ill I wish on every piece of shit that voted for this.
Crooks have no conscience
Gov. Corbett is perfectly okay with throwing sick people off Medicaid, but can’t bring himself to tax Marcellus Shale drillers. This is your sociopathic Republican party at work:
Since August, the Corbett administration has cut off more than 150,000 people – including 43,000 children – from medical assistance in a drive to save costs. That purge far exceeds what any other state has tried, health policy experts say, and officials may be walking a fine line between rooting out waste and erecting barriers to care for the poor and disabled.
When most states were experiencing flat or rising Medicaid enrollment from the economic downturn, stepped-up eligibility reviews in Pennsylvania began producing a decline over the summer. The pace of cuts picked up in November, with 90,000 cases, or 4 percent, dropped in a single month. In New Jersey, enrollment increased by 391 the same month.
The Department of Public Welfare in Harrisburg says most of the people cut were dead, had moved out of state, or were found to be ineligible, but it could provide no breakdown. Advocacy groups, clients, and representatives for caseworkers paint a different picture. Pressure to quickly review a backlog of files and close cases overwhelmed the system, they say, as reams of paperwork were lost and computer programs automatically ended benefits when patients’ responses had not been entered by preset deadlines.
The Pennsylvania experience, while extreme, illustrates the difficulty of reining in increases in health-care costs nationwide. For the short term, the cost of providing public insurance ballooned as people lost their jobs and employer-provided benefits, while states’ belt-tightening reduced the workforce that processes applications.
Marie Stopa of Holmesburg received a letter Sept. 15 saying her four children would be cut off Sept. 19 if renewal paperwork was not received. She says she sent it the next day, but benefits were cut off anyway. Her 10-year-old son, Marek, has landed in emergency rooms twice since then for asthma attacks Stopa believes would have been avoided had he remained on the preventive medication she can no longer afford.
They say an armed society is a polite society
And nothing says “good manners” quite like pulling out a Beretta and plugging your son-in-law, does it? Fortunately, the perpetrator (a 66-year-old grandmother) lives in Florida, a modified open-carry state. Whew! So as long as she was carrying it in her grandson’s backpack, she only has to worry about the attempted murder charge:
A 66-year-old grandmother is under arrest after police say she shot her estranged son-in-law because of an ongoing custody battle he and her daughter were having over the pair’s young son.
The victim, Salvatore Miglino of Boca Raton, had his cell phone recording the entire time, and the audio was key to the investigation of the Wednesday shooting in Broward County, Fla.
The incident unfolded when Miglino, 39, went to pick up his 3-year-old son for a scheduled visit. His mother-in-law, Cheryl Hepner, stood outside the home with the toddler’s pillow and bag.
“According to him, when he asked for the things, she instead pulled out a handgun and starts firing shots,” according to Dani Moschella, a spokeswoman for the Broward County Sheriff’s Office.
Miglino was shot twice with a .22 caliber Beretta handgun. The bullets hit him in the shoulder and rib cage. Even though he was injured, he pounced and wrestled the gun away from Hepner, then drove away while calling for help, police said.
She also lied to the cops, claiming her son-in-law shot her. See, that’s just rude. Shame on her for telling a lie!
I have to confess, I’ve noticed a lot of rude behavior involving guns, frequently when people are drinking. But I want to point out it’s not the guns’ fault, after all — guns don’t shoot people! Drunken, careless, angry or psychotic people shoot people. They just happen to be using guns, which happen to be deadly. Nothing makes other people behave quite like brandishing a gun at them, and don’t you forget it.
This post is written as part of the Media Matters Gun Facts fellowship. The purpose of the fellowship is to further Media Matters’ mission to comprehensively monitor, analyze, and correct conservative misinformation in the U.S. media. Some of the worst misinformation occurs around the issue of guns, gun violence, and extremism, the fellowship program is designed to fight this misinformation with facts.
Bill Keller
Believes in Newt Gingrich! Charlie Pierce, whose well never runs dry, brims over with critical response.
Living on borrowed time
If only more voters realized that tax cuts are simply stealing money from the things we really need, we might not have so many situations like this.
Remember when
Those Tennessee firefighters let a house burn to the ground because the owners didn’t pay their $75 fire fee?
Why, that makes as much sense as letting someone suffer from an illness because they haven’t bought insurance… oh, never mind.
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