SoylentNews

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.

(Illustrated version here)
        After buying copies of books from my book printer, finding errors to correct, and giving the bad copies to my daughter who wants them, rather than discarding them I realized I was stupid. It would be a lot cheaper to buy a laser printer.
        An inkjet wouldn’t work for me. The printer is going to be sitting idle most of the time, and inkjet nozzles clog; I’ve had several, and all clogged if you didn’t use them at least every other day. Plus, the ink dries out in the cartridges. Being a powder, toner has no such problem.
        So I went looking at the Staples site, and they badly need a new webmaster. This little four year old laptop only has a gig of memory, and a lot of people have far less. The poor little machine choked. That damned web site took every single one of my billion bytes!
        Or rather than firing him, make him design his websites on an old 486. Or even 386.
        So what the hell, I just drove down there; I didn’t want to wait for (or pay for) it to be shipped, anyway, I just wanted to see what they had.
        Buying it was easy. They had exactly the printer I was looking for; Canon, a name I trusted since we had Canons and other brands at work, wireless networking, and not expensive. They had a huge selection of lasers; it’s a very big store. I paid for the printer and sheaf of paper, and man, lasers sure have gotten a lot less expensive. I expected at least $250 just for the printer, maybe without even toner, but the total including tax and paper was just a little over a hundred.
        When I got home, of course I pulled out the manual like I do with every piece of electronics I buy—and it was worse than the “manual” that came with the external hard drive I ranted about here earlier. Cryptic drawings and very little text. At least the hard drive didn’t need a manual. All there is is a network port, a USB port, a power socket, and an on/off button. Plug it in and it just works. With the printer, I really needed a manual.
        Kids, hieroglyphics are thousands of years out of style and I don’t know why you’re so drawn to emoticons, but there was an obvious reason for these hieroglyphics: globalization. Far fewer words to be written in three different languages.
        I could find nothing better on Canon’s web site. So I followed the instructions in the poor excuse for a manual for unpacking it and setting it up, as best as I could.
        I couldn’t find the paper tray.
        I’ve been printing since 1984 when I bought a small plotter and wrote software to make it into a printer. Afterwards I had ink jets at home until now, and lasers at work. All the lasers were different from each other in various ways, usually the shape of the toner cartridge, but all had a drawer that held the paper no matter what brand of printer.
        I couldn’t find it. Sighing and muttering, I opened the lid to the big laptop and copied the CD’s contents to a thumb drive to install the printer on the smaller notebook. There’s no reason to make two calls to tech support, because an installation screwup is never unexpected when you’ve been dealing with computers as long as I have.
        And why send a CD? Fewer and fewer computers have CD or DVD burners any more. Why not a thumb drive? All computers have USB ports these days, and have had for over a decade.
        The installation was trouble-free but still troubling; I didn’t think the wi-fi was connecting, as it said to hold the router button until the blue light on the printer stopped flashing. I held the button down until my finger hurt and was about to call tech support, but as I reached for the phone the light stopped flashing and burned steadily.
        Maybe it was working, but I’d have to find the paper tray to find out. But it had installed a manual, one I couldn’t find. So I plugged the thumb drive back in and searched it visually with a file manager, and found an executable for the manual. Running it took me to an offline web page which wasn’t too badly designed, but I would have far preferred a PDF, as I could put that on the little tablet to reference while I was examining the printer in search of where to stick the damned paper, instead of a bulky, clumsy notebook.
        I finally found it, and it wasn’t a tray, even though that’s what the documents called it. I haven’t seen anything like it before, and the documentation was very unclear. But I did manage to get paper in it, and sent a page to it, and it worked well.
        Meanwhile, I wish Staples would fix their web site, and Canon would fix their documentation.
        When did clear, legible documentation go out of style? Hell, the lasers we had at work didn’t even need docs. Good thing, too, because IT never left them when they installed crap. Another reason I’m glad I’m retired! Work sucks.
        At any rate, a few hours later I printed the cleaned up scans of The Golden Book of Springfield so I could check for dirt I missed looking on a screen. I saved it as PDF and printed it from that. And amazingly, this thing prints duplex! It only took fifteen or twenty minutes or so to print the 329 pages.
        I’m happy with it. Man, progress... it just amazes me. But when I went to print from Open Office, the word processor I’ve used for years, I didn’t try sending the print job to the printer, but it looked like Oo won’t print duplex.
        Then I discovered that they may stop developing Open Office because they couldn’t get developers; the developers were all working on Libre Office.
        Damn. The last time I tried Lo it didn’t have full justification, which was a show stopper when I’m publishing books. I’d tried it because someone said it would write in MS Word format. I was skeptical, and my skepticism was fully warranted. It could write a DOC file, but Word couldn’t read it. Plus, of course, the show stopping lack of full justification.
        I decided to try it out again, since Oo may be doomed… and man! Not only does it have full justification, it has a lot Oo lacks that I didn’t even know I needed. It appears to now actually write a DOC file that Word can read, even though when you save it in DOC the program warns you it might not work in Word.
        And it might… I haven’t tested it… might arrange pages for a booklet. I’ll test it with this article… when it’s longer than four pages, as it is now.
        This was all over the course of the last week as I was working on a PDF of the Vachel Lindsay book. The computer nagged me that the printer was running low on toner (it has a small “starter” cartridge), with a button to order toner from Canon. I clicked it, and damn, the toner cost almost as much as the printer did.
        Then I ran out of paper, so I went back to Staples, where I discovered that the printer I had paid eighty something plus tax for was now twice that price! So I got the toner and five reams of paper.
        At any rate, I tried to print this as a booklet, and this is what came out:

        It’s backlit; the picture on the top left and the grayer text on the bottom right are on the other side of the page.
        But a little fiddling and yes, it will print booklets. It isn’t Libre Office doing it, it’s the printer itself!

        I like this printer. I’ve figured it to about a penny per page, and I don’t think that’s too expensive, considering a page is both sides.
        And then I had this document open in Libre Office, tried to insert a graphic (the second one in this article), and it simply didn’t insert. Maybe it doesn’t like JPG files, I don’t yet know. A little googling showed me that I’m not the only one with this problem, and none of the fixes I found fixed it. I have Open Office open now.
        And here I was going to uninstall Open Office. I’d better not, I guess. I’ll need it if I want to insert a graphic; inserted in Oo they show in Lo. Puzzling.
        A week later and I’ve found that sometimes it will insert a graphic, but only if you go through the menu; using text shortcuts never inserts it. And sometimes it simply doesn’t insert the picture, and sometimes it says it doesn’t recognize the format when I’d just put the same graphic in another Lo document.
        Well, I’m not uninstalling Open Office yet, anyway. Not until Lo solves the graphics show-stoppng bug.
…
        I wrote that a few weeks ago, and have been using both. Libre Office has a horrible problem with keyboard shortcuts, and those shortcuts save a LOT of time. But except for its horrible bugs, it’s a better word processor than Open Office. So both will remain installed.
        It’s possible I may uninstall Microsoft Office, depending on how well Lo’s spreadsheet works. I haven’t even fired it up yet, but Oo’s spreadsheet is almost useless.
…
        The above is several months old now. Lo does lack one important thing Oo has: controls to move to the next or previous page. Not good when you’re writing books. Also, it still has graphics problems. Often, simply opening a document in Lo removes any graphics.
        After sitting idle for a month or so, I needed to print a return label. I’m starting to become wary of buying anything from Amazon. I’d bought a new battery for this laptop a year or two ago, and the battery came from someone other than Amazon, and it was the wrong battery. I got the right battery directly from Acer.
        Then I ordered a long throw stapler to make booklets with, and staples for it. The stapler came a week later; no staples. So I bought a box from Walgreen’s. A week later, the staples came, again not from Amazon, and they had simply thrown the box of staples in an unprotected envelope. The box was smashed, the rows of staples broken.
        Then I ordered a DVD, Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I watched the first six, put the seventh in the DVD player—and it was region coded for the UK! Some company from Florida sent it. WTF is wrong with people? So I needed a return label.
        It wouldn’t print; it just hung in the print queue until it timed out. After a little digging, I found that the router had assigned a new IP address to it.
        So after a lot of googling, I gave up and cringed; I was going to need tech support, which is usually a nightmare. I wind up on the phone talking to someone with an accent so heavy I can barely understand them, if at all, who is ignorant of the product and reading from a checklist.
        I found Canon was one of those few companies that actually care about keeping their customers happy. Support was over email, painless, and effective.
        I have to say, it’s the best printer I’ve ever owned.

Some highly paid people seem to not be very good at thinking straight... or at all.

We’ve all seen robot bartenders in movies: Star Wars episode one; The Fifth Element; I, Robot, etc. Ever notice that human bartenders often have a lot of screen time in movies, but robot bartenders don’t? The reason is simple: robots are boring. Which is why we won’t see many robot bartenders in real life, and this real life robot bartender is going to go over like the proverbial lead balloon.

I suspect that the engineer who designed the thing doen’t frequent bars, but likes science fiction movies, because nobody goes to a bar to drink. From my upcoming Voyage to Earth:

“Is Mars still short of robots?”

“Not since that factory opened two years ago.”

“I’m surprised you don’t have robots tending bar, then.”

“Screw that. People don’t go to bars to drink, they go to bars to socialize; bars are full of lonely people. If there’s nobody to talk to but a damned robot they’re just going to walk out. I do have a tendbot for emergencies, like if one of the human bartenders is sick and we don’t have anyone to cover. The tendbot will be working when we’re going to Earth, but I avoid using it.”

Someone who doesn’t visit bars inventing something to use in bars is about as stupid as Richardson in Mars, Ho!, who assigned a Muslim to design a robot to cook pork and an engineer who didn’t drink coffee to make a robotic coffeemaker.

Just because it works in the movies doesn’t mean it works in real life.

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.

(This was written last year but never posted)

        I spent a hundred bucks on my next book last week.
        Each story had an illustration at the beginning, except one: “Watch Your Language, Young Man!” I could find no suitable old women on Google Images, so I figured I’d have to either find an old woman at a bar who would want to be the illustration of a shrewish old lady, or just get out my pencil and make one.
        Rust never sleeps! And boy, but my fingers seemed to be solid rust. Of course, when I was young I drew every day, or at least almost every day. I was damned good.
        Not any more. I haven’t drawn a single thing since my kids were born three decades ago. So of course when I sat down with pencil and paper, nothing was produced but offal.
        Damn. It was late and I’d had a few beers, so maybe I was drunk? I set it aside for the next morning.
        Several days and a couple sheets of paper later and I finally had a cartoon drawing of an angry old crone. I figured I’d digitize her the same way I digitized my slides—I’d use my phone’s camera. With an eight by ten image to photograph, it should work fine. After all, the cover of The Paxil Diaries is a photo of one of my paintings I painted when I still had talent, and it turned out all right.
        Not Mrs. Ferguson. The white paper was a neutral gray in the digital image. “GIMP’ll fix it,” I thought.
        Nope. Adjusting the brightness and contrast removed some of the details. Actually, a lot of them.
        Several tries later I gave up, and decided to just scan it. I went down to the basement, where the scanner’s been since I moved in here, and realized that first, it probably wouldn’t work any more, and even if it did it used a parallel port to get the image in a computer, and when was the last time you saw a parallel port? So I drove to Staples, where all the scanners were attached to printers!
        I finally found a sales guy, who found a couple without printers that cost more than the ones with printers attached. He said they always put printers on cheap scanners, so I bought one of the expensive ones, an Epson Perfection V39.
        I took it home and scanned Mrs. Ferguson, put her at the top of the story, printed her out, and shrunk down like that, again a lot of the details were gone. So I thickened some lines and rescanned. It’s fine now.
        I wasn’t going to mention it because when I bought the scanner I had the idea of scanning all the photo albums for Patty, but that’s taking a long time, they won’t be done by Christmas, and Leila says she can’t come this year, anyway.
        I have one scanned, and half its photos straightened out and separated from each other, but I’ll be at it for a while. I’m also going to scan the book my uncle co-write, and if I get permission from my aunt to publish it I’ll do so. Of course, it would only be of interest to family since it’s about family history, some of it ancient, fifteenth century ancient.
        I really like that scanner! It’s a lot smaller than the old one in the basement; that one’s four or five inches thick and a foot and a half by two feet, and has a power cord with a big box in the middle and a parallel port. The new one is smaller than my big laptop and needs no power cable, as it gets its power from the USB port. It uses the same kind of USB cable as your phone (unless you have an Apple, which is compatible with nothing).
        At any rate, I haven’t written much lately...

Whoa. Did the capacity of Li-ion batteries just triple while I wasn't looking?

Last time I checked they seemed to top out at 3000mAH, now I see a lot of 5800-6000mAH and even 9800-9900mAH cells for sale. Any reason I can't stuff these into an old laptop battery pack that originally came with 2200mAH cells? (and boost the battery life to 12 hours?)

Having recently added some more old PC parts to my collection, I had the opportunity to compare an Athlon II X2 against a Phenom II X2. The former CPU is a true dual-core die (Regor) whereas the latter is really a quad-core with two cores disabled (Deneb/Callisto). But functionally, the only difference between them is that Callisto has 6MB of L3 cache which Regor does not, instead having a larger 1MB L2 cache (vs. 512KB) per core. Presumably, the L3 is slower than L2 while still being faster than DRAM, so I was curious which would have a greater performance benefit. (I still wonder whether hitting the L3 is faster than snooping the other core's L2, or if having the L3 enables some kind of increased parallelization like write-behind caching of L2 victims maybe...)

I ran a few benchmarks, and the TLDR answer is that sometimes the CPUs tied, other times the one with L3 won (the one without L3 never won).

First I had to get the Phenom II X2 to work correctly in this board. Both of these CPUs launched after the last BIOS update for this particular MB. The Athlon II is setup correctly except for the CPU name string "AMD Processor Model Unknown." It doesn't like the Phenom II at all though for some reason. It boots up at 800MHz and is stuck there. The P-State limit register is set to zero and Phenom MSR Tweaker doesn't work.

I looked in the AMD docs to try and figure out what register settings were preventing me from changing the speed and I found out that I could change it by setting the COFVID control register. Actually you have to set it twice because it doesn't actually change speed unless the P-State bits change. So I wrote something like $0000000038013840 first, to change to a low speed and voltage and "P-State 1" (it's not really P-State 1 though, it doesn't use the data from P-State 1's register). Then I wait for a moment, and write it again with $0000000018001810. So without changing the actual P-State registers now I am at 3.2GHz. (Or 3.52GHz with a 10% overclock)

System specs:
CPU: Athlon II X2 or Phenom II X2
freq: 3520MHz
L2: 1024KB x2 or 512KB x2
L3: none or 6MB
northbridge: 1760MHz
HT: 1760MHz
RAM: DDR2-880 5-5-5-18
gfx: GeForce GT240
OS: Windows 2000

benchmarks:
CPU-Z version 1.75: 349 vs 349
my FreeBASIC software 3D renderer: 19.3fps vs 20.7fps
3dmark01: 35148 vs 41560
3dmark03 gfx: 24005 vs 24803
3dmark03 cpu: 1975 vs 2309
3dmark06 gfx: 8783 vs 8980
3dmark06 cpu: 2968 vs 3017
cinebench 11.5: 1.86 vs 1.90

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.