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Alright, I'll confess.

In 1978, our ship docked in Venice, Italy. Docked nearby was a Russian tour ship. Little did we boots realize that the tour ship was a cover for something far more important.

Our crew was formed into ranks, and marched over to the tour ship our first night in port. We were all hypnotized by Russia's Hypnotoad, and given the agenda of the future. Russia was preparing, already, to cave in on the Cold War. But, they were also preparing their revenge.

During the briefing, we learned that the Russians had a tame Orangutan in a sleeper cell in New York. The Orangutan was to be Russia's "Trump card", so to speak. All of us were informed that the Orangutan would one day run for President of the United States, and that we would recognize him when the time came.

Almost all American servicemen were briefed between the years of 1970 and 2010. And, all of us veterans were prepared to vote Trump when the time came. A lot of civilians, too, of course, but all of us veterans voted Trump. Well, except for a few whose hypnosis didn't work very well.
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Alright, I was shooting for funny. My story isn't really all that funny though. What's REALLY FUNNY is, a lot of progressives will believe my bullshit story. Yeah, there WAS a Russian cruise ship in Venice. That's where this story's connection with reality begins and ends.

This one is a first for me. The IRS has never called me before - either for real, or as part of a scam.

"This phone call is to inform you that you have been named in a lawsuit by the Internal Revenue Service. If you wish to settle the claim against you before the suit is filed, you should call 6466326448. Thank you, the Internal Revenue Service."

I wish I had recorded it, to be sure that I got the phrasing precise, and the phone number accurate, but there it is, very close to what I heard. Note that neither my name, nor my wife's name was used - no names at all. Some mysterious "you". I used Google Talk to try calling the number, and got some tones, and a message that the number is not in service.

Funny that they didn't repeat the phone number - even scammers know that people don't always have a pen and paper in reach. I would think the scammers would want to make sure that the victim knows what number to call, so he can be properly scammed.

Ahhhh - looking at the telephone, I see that I got the number wrong - it is 6466321448. Dial that number, and I get a busy signal. I know it's the busy season, but, doesn't the IRS have like unlimited phone lines coming in? Gonna try a couple more times, just to get an idea how the scam works . . .

entering the number into Google leads me to this page, http://mobilecallertracker.com/phone-search/6466321 and 2/3 down the page, I find the number. So, the IRS callback number is a mobile phone? Wow - THAT is interesting!! I've heard that landlines are pretty much obsolete, but the IRS is all mobile now?

Well, still busy - I don't want to spend my day trying to scam a scammer. Maybe I'll try a couple more times later today.

Suggestions, anyone? I suppose I should inform my local sheriff's office of this call - maybe they will ask the local radio stations to warn their listeners - or something.

https://www.irs.gov/uac/stay-vigilant-against-bogus-irs-phone-calls-and-emails

https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/contact_report_scam.shtml

Online complaint made - I guess I've done my civic duty of the day.

Lots of hedge fund managers and silicon valley billionaires have decided they've been fucking up the country so bad that they need to prepare for it all to go to shit. Every time you hear about a rich guy buying property in NZ, its because they are doomsday prepping.

Those assholes ought to be working on the problem of helping to build new institutions to replace those being torn down by the social isolation and paranoia that their creations are inducing. Instead they are running off to the other side of the planet.

For all of the shit he did, Carnegie built 3,000 public libraries. What has Thiel ever done? Create the fucking eye-of-sauron Palantir, try to stake freedom of the press for a personal vendetta, and oh yeah, help president fugazi dishonor the leading symbol of freedom and democracy on the planet.

Fuck that guy.

While it's probably accurate as concerns Thiel's intentions, there is this blaming as well. So what new institutions need to be built? And why do we want rich people doing that, if they're causing so many problems in the first place?

Let's Godwin this argument a little. So let's say you're a Jew and you have all these crazy Nazis in your society howling about how you're causing all these problems. Even if you wholly agree, what sense would it make in sticking around after they get power? The responsible Jew will be treated exactly like the irresponsible one every time there's a problem and someone needs to be blamed. And with a group as incompetent as crazy Nazis, you know there's going to be plenty of problems, real and imagined, needing plenty of scapegoats, unfortunately for the Jews, it's going to be the Jews.

The universal smart move here is to run before the crazies start killing Jews indiscriminately. There's no reason for Jews or society to even care what Nazis claim responsible Jewish behavior is. It's just propaganda spin.

Same goes for the rich. For example, when the crazies took over and created the USSR, they started blaming all their problems on scapegoats like Kulaks, counter-revolutionaries, etc. Anyone who had been even moderately well-off before the revolution was now the enemy and blamed for everything that went wrong. If you were lucky, that just meant a little prison time and permanent pariah status.

Too many people have learned from the past. When the people in power speak of the problems that the rich as a group didn't cause (for example, someone got rich off of the wars of the past couple of decades, but it wasn't every rich person!) and the responsibilities they're sure that they can't shoulder (you need to make a bunch of vaguely defined, but no doubt enormously expensive "new institutions" to fix the problems you didn't cause), then why shouldn't they eye the escape routes?

I think this sort of ruthless, ideological scapegoating is precisely why US politics is so divisive today. It's a bunch of crazy, bad faith actors who are so far out there that a sane person wouldn't want to compromise with them on anything.

Watch the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekgiScr364Y

Then read the text, alright?

"Prenatal care. These are the kinds of services folks depend on Planned Parenthood for.”

- Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards

Planned Parenthood is spending millions of dollars in advertising right now, saying they support “choices” for pregnant women, but nothing could be further from the truth…

Despite Planned Parenthood’s claims, Live Action’s investigative team found that prenatal care is virtually non-existent for mothers who actually want to keep their babies. We documented it in our NEW investigative video, which you can see HERE:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekgiScr364Y

Our investigators contacted all 41 Planned Parenthood affiliates in the United States, reaching out to 97 facilities, and discovered only FIVE offered any sort of prenatal care at all.

By turning away pregnant women for prenatal care, it’s obvious Planned Parenthood has one priority - and supports only one option - for most women: abortion.

But that doesn’t stop Planned Parenthood from lying to the public about its prenatal services. In fact, this is all part of Planned Parenthood’s strategy to protect its $550 million in taxpayer funding -- by downplaying the 887 preborn children they dismember, poison, and starve to death every day.

With the fight to defund Planned Parenthood in full force in Congress, we need to act quickly and share this information with more Americans so that, they too, know the truth: Planned Parenthood is not a “health care provider,” they are an abortion corporation.

Please share this video with your friends on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/liveaction/videos/10154911641473728/.

And for your friends who aren’t on Facebook, email them this link.

In the following weeks, Live Action will be releasing more videos exposing Planned Parenthood's relentless focus on abortion and the lack of authentic health care. Live Action’s groundbreaking investigative report will shatter the narrative and the myths Planned Parenthood so desperately want the American people to believe.

Now is the time to deal a crippling blow to the abortion giant - the lives of preborn children are depending on us. Together, we can put an end to Planned Parenthood’s lies and the state-sponsored killing of children.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/01/20/text-president-trumps-obamacare-executive-order.html

Text of President Trump's ObamaCare executive order

MINIMIZING THE ECONOMIC BURDEN OF THE PATIENT PROTECTION AND AFFORDABLE CARE ACT PENDING REPEAL

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1. It is the policy of my Administration to seek the prompt repeal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Public Law 111-148), as amended (the "Act"). In the meantime, pending such repeal, it is imperative for the executive branch to ensure that the law is being efficiently implemented, take all actions consistent with law to minimize the unwarranted economic and regulatory burdens of the Act, and prepare to afford the States more flexibility and control to create a more free and open healthcare market.

Sec. 2. To the maximum extent permitted by law, the Secretary of Health and Human Services (Secretary) and the heads of all other executive departments and agencies (agencies) with authorities and responsibilities under the Act shall exercise all authority and discretion available to them to waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay the implementation of any provision or requirement of the Act that would impose a fiscal burden on any State or a cost, fee, tax, penalty, or regulatory burden on individuals, families, healthcare providers, health insurers, patients, recipients of healthcare services, purchasers of health insurance, or makers of medical devices, products, or medications.

Sec. 3. To the maximum extent permitted by law, the Secretary and the heads of all other executive departments and agencies with authorities and responsibilities under the Act, shall exercise all authority and discretion available to them to provide greater flexibility to States and cooperate with them in implementing healthcare programs.

Sec. 4. To the maximum extent permitted by law, the head of each department or agency with responsibilities relating to healthcare or health insurance shall encourage the development of a free and open market in interstate commerce for the offering of healthcare services and health insurance, with the goal of achieving and preserving maximum options for patients and consumers.

Sec. 5. To the extent that carrying out the directives in this order would require revision of regulations issued through notice-and-comment rulemaking, the heads of agencies shall comply with the Administrative Procedure Act and other applicable statutes in considering or promulgating such regulatory revisions.

Sec. 6. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:

(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or

(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.

(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.

(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

DONALD J. TRUMP

THE WHITE HOUSE,
January 20, 2017.

If you listen to the pundits who support Planned Parenthood, the sky will surely fall if the abortion chain is defunded.

If even one Planned Parenthood affiliate or center has to close as a result of defunding, they say, the patients Planned Parenthood serves will have no access to health services elsewhere. This is utter nonsense, of course.

The claim that removing federal dollars from Planned Parenthood will shutter their doors is ludicrous. As Live Action News has previously reported, the organization’s own annual reports reveal that Planned Parenthood has been netting a profit for many years. Almost every year since 2000, Planned Parenthood’s revenue has exceeded their expenses — not just by a few dollars, but by tens of millions of dollars (yearly surpluses ranging from $18.5 million to a high of $127 million). In addition, with the threat of defunding now more real under the newly elected Congress and president, Planned Parenthood has repeatedly claimed that private donations are suddenly flooding into their coffers.

For the sake of argument, let’s imagine what would happen if we applied this same logic — that a profitable organization should be taxpayer funded, merely because closing would disenfranchise its customers — to any other business. Let’s suppose it was thought that department store chains should receive taxpayer funding because online sales are hurting chain stores’ business. The argument could be made that these department stores have served many people, that they are located in many disadvantaged communities, and that poor people who do not have internet access will be disenfranchised if these stores close. Should we then give these stores half a billion taxpayer dollars every year (the amount Planned Parenthood receives) to keep them open?

The truth is that there are Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC) already in place, which could serve the patients Planned Parenthood serves — outnumbering Planned Parenthood centers 20 to 1 — so why do Planned Parenthood spokespersons (many who earn six-figure salaries) want you to believe that American women could not survive without them?

Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards has even made totally unsupported claims that millions would be without healthcare if Congress votes to defund Planned Parenthood. Richards recently told Rolling Stone:

        This is literally whether a young man in Texas can come to us for an STI testing, or whether a woman who has a lump in her breast can come to us in Ohio to have a breast exam or be referred for screenings, or whether a college student or a young person anywhere in the country can come to us for family planning. We’re talking about more than a million-and-a-half people who rely on Planned Parenthood, and for most of them we’re their only medical provider. As all of the medical institutions have said: There’s no one to take our place providing low- and moderate-income people with preventive health care. There isn’t any other entity that is doing that work.

Interesting that she mentions the breast screenings, because Planned Parenthood, as Live Action has documented, does not do mammograms — but FQHCs do.

I am curious, however, as to how the defunding of Planned Parenthood would cause the apocalypse, but closures of other non-profits — specifically hospitals, which one could argue offer far more needed “services” — would not.

Let me explain.

According to a 2015 report published by the Journal for Health Affairs, patient health was not significantly compromised when hospitals closed. The Non-Profit Quarterly reports pointed out with regards to the study that “vulnerable hospitals that have not been financially sustainable, with operating margins of ‑20% on average, have been the first to close, causing public concern that displaced patients will experience declining health and even death when access to care goes away.”

Despite this concern, the 2015 study found “no significant difference between the change in annual mortality rates for patients living in hospital service areas (HSAs) that experienced one or more closures and the change in rates in matched HSAs without a closure…. Nor was there a significant difference in the change in all-cause mortality rates following hospitalization….”

The unknown in the study was how the closures affected low income patients. But according to Non-Profit Quarterly:

        Researchers reported that among Medicare patients there were no substantial changes in admissions, lengths of stay, or readmissions, but also cautioned that the study should not be interpreted to mean that every hospital loss is harmless….

        While the study supports the argument that access to care has improved, the data does not, however, tell the whole story. One-third of institutions that were closed were “safety net” hospitals that treated large numbers of low-income and uninsured people. Since only easily-accessed Medicare patient information was reviewed, impact on those populations is still unknown.

Unknown? A study of three hospital closures from 2015, conducted by the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured and the Urban Institute, actually found that lower income and elderly patients were negatively affected and “were more likely to face transportation challenges and thus more likely to delay or forgo needed care.”

But in Planned Parenthood’s case, there are already hundreds of FQHC alternatives available, open and ready to serve the public. A December 2015 Congressional Research Service report which compared the services of Planned Parenthood Federation of America-affiliated health centers (PPAHC) to those of Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC) found…

        FQHCs are required to provide primary, preventive, and emergency health services.
        FQHCs focus on providing more comprehensive primary care, dental, and behavioral health services.
        FQHCs provide far more services in a given year than do PPAHCs.
        PPAHCs focus their services on individuals of reproductive age; FQHCs provide services to individuals throughout their lifetimes.
        FQHCs served 22.9 million people in 2014; PPAHCs served 2.7 million.
        358 counties have both a PPAHC and a FQHC.
        FQHCs also receive federal grants that require them to provide family planning (among other services) to Medicaid beneficiaries.

Planned Parenthood and its supporters want the public to believe that only Planned Parenthood is able to care for the needs of the 2.5 million patients they “serve.” And they will suggest that if they are defunded and close facilities, the hundreds of FQHC that replace them (already in existence and serving patients, mind you) will be overwhelmed with patient influx, thus unable to address the many needs. (This was the same fear that plagued Democrats when they passed the Affordable Care Act, yet they argued that the system would be more than able to handle that influx.)

A study on the effects of the Affordable Care Act, conducted by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and health care company Athenahealth, which gathered data from 15,700 of Athenahealth’s clients, found that new patient visits to primary care physicians only increased slightly. It was anticipated that uninsured patients now gaining insurance might have unmet medical needs, and their demand for services might overwhelm the capacity of primary care doctors. But according to the study, this idea proved false. Kathy Hempstead, director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, told USA Today that the study “suggests that, even though there’s been a big increase in coverage, it’s a relatively small part of the market and the delivery system is able to handle the demand.”

For years, Planned Parenthood has been closing centers despite a steady increase in funding under the Obama administration. The Congressional Research Service found that the number of PPHAC affiliates and facilities has declined since 2009-2010, when PPFA reported having 88 affiliates (a 32 percent decline) and 840 health centers (a 21 percent decline). And, as of December 20, 2016, there are now only 650 Planned Parenthood centers, indicating a 22.67 percent decline.

In addition, Planned Parenthood patients have also decreased over the years. In 2014, Planned Parenthood saw 2.5 million patients — down a whopping 24.24 percent since 1996, when they saw 3.3 million and received far less government funding ($177.5 million in 1996 compared to $553.7 million in 2014). In contrast, FQHCs have increased the number of patients seen in each year since 2009. From 2009 to 2014, FQHC patients increased from 18.9 million to 22.9 million.

Planned Parenthood is the largest provider of abortion in the nation. Live Action has documented how Planned Parenthood manipulates its own data to cover up the fact that abortion – not women’s health care – accounts for the lion’s share of the corporation’s services for pregnant women.

Defunding the largest chain of abortion clinics will not send millions of patients to their demise — and Planned Parenthood knows this. The truth is that taxpayer dollars can be better spent on real health care organizations that will serve the American public and maintain the sanctity of life in the process.

http://liveactionnews.org/sky-fall-planned-parenthood-defunded-heres-why/

Found a story about my... well not my home town but the town you have to go to from my home town for anything besides gas, beer, or religion. Turns out Nick Cage's rental car broke down there and he had a thing or two to say about the place. See, that's what I mean when I say to folks who only see what my views on politics and other big shat are, you don't know me at all.

This kind of shit is just another day in a red state. If someone comes up and says you owe them something that you don't, you laugh and punch them in the face but if you see someone in actual need, you help your fellow man because it's the right thing to do and because you might need a hand too some time. In a place where most everybody grows up poor and having to work their ass off to get by, you help each other because it's just what you do. Nick could have broke down a half mile from where he did over by the meth dealers and he still would have gotten the same reception.

If there was any sort of "we're all in this together" feeling, it would help, but there isn't.

There isn't such a feeling because we aren't all in this together.

Why does US labor have to take a haircut while the 1% get lots more money?

Because you're competing with several billion people who will work for a lot less while the capital of those rich people does not. There's no reason to expect this to be fair. But at the same time, it's not unfair to expect you to adapt to the situation rather than make it worse.

For example, let's say you're the only plumber in a town. You are a paragon of virtue and don't abuse your effective monopoly position and offer prices comparable to neighboring towns which do have more than one plumber.

Then one day, five new plumbers move in and immediately start offering lower and lower prices. It's not fair to you. Nobody else in town has this sort of competition going on. You are losing wealth relative to everyone else who isn't a plumber through no fault of your own. Income inequality increases as a result with six poor plumbers.

At this point, you have a number of choices, all of them bad to some degree. For example, you can attempt to tough it out to be one of the last ones standing, knowing that you'll still have a greatly reduced market share and profit as a result. You can move to a new town and be a plumber there. Or you can abandon plumbing as a career altogether. Maybe you'll try to take a chance and create a new plumbing service that the other plumbers can't match (maybe it'll pay off, maybe it won't)..

There are all ways you could attempt to better your situation. But you could also choose to make the situation worse such as developing a drinking habit. I believe this is going on at a vast scale in the developed world. There's all this entitled talk about how the rich people owe us a good salary and such. Well, they owe the Indians and the Chinese good salaries too. And good salaries there are much less than good salaries in the developed world.

Bottom line is that developed world labor has to be able to offer something that developing world labor can't offer (and it can be as simple as access to a nice market, though the developing world has nice markets too) or it won't get the work for the pay that is desired. Developed world labor just doesn't have pricing power and won't get it until there is near parity with the developing world (which is improving at a good rate) or until some remarkable advantage is created (I'm not seeing the remarkable advantages in the long run).

You want what rich people have, but you don't have leverage to get it. You're not going to make your situation any better by making it harder for rich people to give you what you want.

I know a lot of you are disappointed I didn't go ahead and finish the debate on the MIT petition story. Tough.

Most days it's fun smacking down the willfully ignorant but sometimes outside forces conspire to make me too tired to bother. I just delete all the messages, pop open a beer, and watch some TV.

This was one of those times and you're just going to have to live with it.