The re-framing necessary to move away from talk of health care death panels

Here's another excellent and succinct analysis by Dylan Ratigan, part of an mass emailing he recently sent out. Allowing conservatives to argue about "death panels" is a big mistake and here's why -- and BTW, the time to make policy is not as we gather around very sick people challenging each other as to who can spend the most to to extending someone's last breaths by 3 months, bankrupting healthcare in the process. We need to grow up and get our heads out of fantasy-land. Let's redefine healthcare in terms of sustainable and meaningful goals. Ironically, there is date that those who claim to be most confident in the existence of an afterlife insist on the highest rate of last-minute desperate expenditures. Here's Dylan's email:

Dear Friends, Generally speaking, there are only two ways to earn money. 1. Charge a fee for goods or services. 2. Charge a mutually agreed upon percentage based on a future outcome based on the newly created value. This percentage can be in the form of equity or commission. As it stands, healthcare in America is based on the first model. This creates a system with many, high fees generated by acute and traumatic care. The chart above, from this report by the International Federation of Health Plans, shows how much we are paying compared to the rest of the world: In reality, this care is for only 5 percent of us at a given moment, yet accounts for 50 percent of what each of us spend on the service regardless of whether or not we are using it. If this unfortunate reality upsets you, please relax...close your eyes....and imagine for a moment a healthcare model that uses the second model of income generation. One that is based on equity or commission based on a future outcome. [More . . . ]

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Present day leaves

One of my photographer mentors advised that I try to shoot SOMETHING every day. And this morning I finished reading Phil Zimbardo's "The Time Paradox," from which I learned (for the 800th time) that my perspective is skewed way toward future time orientation, which causes me to miss out on the present, especially ordinary things that are actually quite stunning. Therefore . . . I gave myself an assignment to take photos of leaves from the backside, illuminated from the front by direct sun. I tried to simply enjoy their beauty, but couldn't help contemplating their incredibly sophisticated function. IMG_2216 Leaves IMG_2261 Leaves 2 IMG_2299 Leaves 2 IMG_2321 Leaves 2 IMG_2324 Leaves 2

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Dangerous Intersection supplemental posts over at Facebook

I'm working on some longer articles for Dangerous Intersection at the moment, though I'm not publishing at DI as often as I did several years ago. However, I have lots of plans to address quite a few exciting topics here. This will be the location for extended commentary and my own substantive articles. In the meantime, I've been posting many links to worthy articles over at my Facebook page. I'm publishing some of those materials only at Facebook, not here at DI. If you are interested in tapping into those very short articles and links, simply send me a Friend Request at Facebook.

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Pure Ayn Rand: Not dead yet, somehow.

Matt Taibbi takes aim at an amazingly bizzare Forbes article written by Ayn Rand devotee named Harry Binswanger. I was curious about Ayn Rand back when I was 18, but I moved on. Binswanger hasn't and, in fact, has doubled down. As always, Taibbi's serious message is wrapped in entertaining prose:

It reads like an Onion piece, just hilarious stuff. I mean, Jesus, even Lloyd Blankfein himself didn't go so far as to take the "God's work" thing 100% seriously, and here's this jackass saying, without irony, that the Goldman CEO literally out-God-slaps Mother Teresa. The thing is, for all its excesses, Mr. Catyanker's piece does reflect an attitude you see pretty often among Rand devotees and Road To Serfdom acolytes. Five whole years have passed since the crash, and there are still huge pockets of these Fountainhead junkies who genuinely believe that the Blankfeins of the world are reviled because they're bankers and they're rich, and not because they're the heads of unprosecutable organized crime syndicates who make their money through mass fraud, manipulation and the shameless burgling of public treasure. In this case you have a guy who writes for Forbes, a business publication,and apparently he isn't acquainted even casually with any of the roughly 10,000 corruption cases involving Blankfein's bank.
Taibbi's article contains a succinct rundown of many of the ways Goldman Sachs actually makes money. Hint: It's not by producing goods or services helpful to ordinary Americans.

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Epitaph for the tomb of modern journalism

Glenn Greenwald takes issue with a recent comment by U.K. "journalist" Chris Blackhurst: "Edwared Snowden's secrets may be dangerous. I would not have published them." This leaves Greenwald in a state somewhere between seething and despondent:

What Blackhurst is revealing here is indeed a predominant mindset among many in the media class. Journalists should not disobey the dictates of those in power. Once national security state officials decree that what they are doing should be kept concealed from the public - once they pound their mighty "SECRET" stamp onto their behavior - it is the supreme duty of all citizens, including journalists, to honor that and never utter in public what they have done. Indeed, it is not only morally wrong, but criminal, to defy these dictates. After all, "who am I to disbelieve them?" That this mentality condemns - and would render outlawed - most of the worthwhile investigative journalism over the last several decades never seems to occur to good journalistic servants like Blackhurst. National security state officials also decreed that it would "not be in the public interest" to report on the Pentagon Papers, or the My Lai massacre, or the network of CIA black sites in which detainees were tortured, or the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program, or the documents negating claims of Iraqi WMDs, or a whole litany of waste, corruption and illegality that once bore the "top secret" label.

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