Global: I suggest that you just either delete that entry or at least edit it so that it is less personal. It seems to me only a misogynist would say such a thing. I've had to edit lots of things that I thought better of right after having submitted it. Maybe we all have.

Quote Global:a look into the future with Alice and her utopian wet dream of Medicare for all. ---

Oh, so we're pretending to be a fortune teller now, eh? Two can play that game. Let me look into your future in a utopian wet dream of free enterprise and pure for profit private Insurance run health care. The day is 11-10-2020.

The office of Old Doctor Young MD.

"Hello Mr. Global. Good to see you again. Please have a seat. I've called you in because as you know you were diagnosed 9 months ago with the condition of having acute Brain Farts. Last week we received the approval papers from your health insurance. I have good news and bad news."

"Oh, please Doctor, the good news first," says Mr. Global.

"Well, your condition is completely curable. It is caused by a small blood clot in your cerebral cortex putting excess pressure on the artery that supplies blood to the region of your brain responsible for reason. The treatment is a surgery which removes that clot and bypasses the damaged artery. You'll be back on your feet in a month and you will never again make a complete fool out of yourself," said Doctor Young.

"That is wonderful news Doctor. When are we going to have the surgery?"

"That's the bad news Mr. Global. The insurance has declined your claim. Apparently they feel that Brain Farts are a pre-existing condition. It seems you have been making a fool out of yourself long before you signed up for this policy."

"That's true! But up to now I was under the assumption that I was just an idiot. I had no reason to believe there was a sound medical cause of my condition until a good friend of mine recently recommended that I should get my head examined. Up till I saw you I thought my Brain Farts were a natural part of my personality."

"Nevertheless Mr Global. Your claim has been declined. You have two options. First option is you can go ahead with the surgery and pay out of pocket. The operation will run approximately $85,000."

"Jesus, I can't afford that!"

"There is another option. An experimental procedure. Your insurance would cover about 30%. We could perform a oral suture; that, in theory, would eliminate one major symptom of your Brain Farts."

"Please Doctor, what does that mean in English?"

"We could sew your mouth shut. It would effectively eliminate you making a fool out of yourself in public. However, you are still going to run into problems online and in social media. The procedure runs about $55,000. Your copay would be $38,000."

"I can't afford that either. Besides, the most damage my Brain Farts causes are online anyway. If those are my only options I think I'm just going to have to learn to live with the problem. Good day, Doctor."

"Just one minute, Mr. Global. There is one last issue."

"And just what might that be?"

"Again, I have good news and bad news."

"This time give me the bad news first."

"Very well! Your initial consultation, exam, tests and lab work, along with this appointment has maxed out your Insurance deductible."

"What?"

"You owe this hospital $6,500 payable immediately."

"You have to be kidding me. YOU DIDN'T DO ANYTHING!!"

"Yes we did. We looked at you. We tested you. We talked to you. We told you what you need and what you've got. We've also talked to your Insurance Company for you. Now we are talking to you again and you owe us $6,500.

"You mean to tell me that I've shelled out already this year $18,000 in premiums to my Insurance Company for absolutely nothing and now I owe you an additional $6,500 to tell me what you aren't going to do?"

"Yep! That's about it Mr. Global. Isn't Capitalism wonderful?"

"So what is the good news, Doctor?"

"We accept cash, checks, money orders, or any major credit card. We try to make life easy for our patients."

"Arggggg!"

"Mr. Global! Mr. Global! Nurse Sprocket, get in here I think Mr. Global just had a heart attack."

"Oh, no!" Exclaimed Nurse Sprocket. "Should I call an ambulance?"

"No, nurse. Mr. Global's policy doesn't cover ambulance rides. Call him a Taxi."

"Were should I tell the driver to take him?"

"Anywhere but my office. Mail his bill to his wife."

Reminds me of another quote that all socialists enjoy -

"What goes around comes around!"

"You all?" Too judgemental and categorical to be considered an intelligent response. I really would like to see things from your perspective to give me more insight into the norrow-minded Philistine mentality from which you come, but I cannot get my head that far up my ass, TROLL!

Aliceinwonderland: I flagged it too. That was way uncalled for!

My first ever blog posting. Excuse the ignorance. I'm so sorry for the loss that you much feel for Higgins. What a lucky cat. I volunteer for Albuquerque's Trap, Neuter & Return program. I have met with literally hundreds of people to talk nuts and bolts. Through these interactions, I have learned 1) cats are extremely political, 2) homophobia plays a major role in the intense hatred of cats and 3) men who ADMIT that they like cats are extremely secure in their sexuality/persons. Thank you Thom for being one of these beings. You probably don't realize how much you do for the basic welfare of cats by just being you.

Hello ignoramus jerkoff Global Chernobyl. Gee I must've really pissed you off. But... more on that later. First let's get to the politics, the real nitty-gritty here! The problem with this crony capitalism you love so much, Global, is that you eventually run out of poor people's money to steal. Here's a look into the future with Global's utopian wet dream of privatized everything: Welcome to Calcutta, USA, where Billionaire Welfare Queens live in a kleptomaniac's paradise and no one else has a pot to piss in, employed or not; where 99.999% of the population gets billed for the rainwater they collect in buckets, for bathing and cooking!

As for you Global, that last post of yours really takes the cake. Says an awful lot about you and the angry little white boy you are. I'm so sorry I've upset you. Go ahead, get it all off your chest while I sit back and marvel at the ugliness of your rant.

When someone loses control of his temper like you just did, pal, it's generally because he's lost the argument. And guys like you are sore losers. That is the sickest, most disgusting post I have seen on Thom's blog... Ever. Even Ken Ware's rants never quite reached the degree of filth that reeks from your diatribe. I can still make that claim, even after all the reams & reams of bullying crap Ken Ware used to dump on this forum, before I'd finally had enough and bailed last March.

Well piggie-poo, this time I'm not going anywhere. This time I'm flagging your slimy screed as offensive. With some luck, you'll be banned from this blog, and if so, good riddance! - Aliceinwonderland

I am sorry if this is off topic. This past week on the show Thom in a discussion about capitalism mentioned that there is an interpreteation of story of Cain and Abel as a metaphor for agrarian society triumphing over the hunter gatherers. I can't find any reference to this interpration. Can anyone share a link or a source? Thanks!

Quote Kend:DAnne the there is a great exodus out of Canada. It's our doctors. Canada doesn't pay well, but Obama care will bring a lot of them back.

Kend ~ Don't worry! I have no desire to see any Doctor who's sole motivation in life is profit. You are more then welcome to all of them; and, I hope their American counterparts follow as well. Good riddence!

DAnne the there is a great exodus out of Canada. It's our doctors. Canada doesn't pay well, but Obama care will bring a lot of them back.

More perceptive analysis from our friends at Der Spiegel! This article is titled: "Paradise Lost: Paranoia Has Undermined U.S. Democracy":

Agent Carrie Mathison is a topical figure. The main character in the American TV series "Homeland," played by the wonderful Claire Danes, shows her true relevance in the first few episodes, in which Mathison is nervously sitting at home, observing and listening in on the life of a terror suspect on a large screen. His apartment is bugged and Mathison is determined to find out as much as she can about him. She is hysterical, bipolar, paranoid and sick -- all advantageous traits for her job.

The real-life intelligence services of the United States take things much further than agent Carrie Mathison. They spy on just about anyone, even German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who, so far, has not been suspected of maintaining ties to Islamist terrorism, and yet whose cellphone was tapped.

It is often assumed that intelligence agencies are worlds of their own, and that they sometimes act on their own authority. However, they are also an expression of the societies in which they exist, especially of their fears. In other words, it is quite possible that there are not just paranoid agents, but also paranoid democracies that act in hysterical ways out of fear. They are characterized by a strong freedom myth, which leads to paranoia. It, in turn, poses a threat to freedom. The United States is currently in a late phase of this cycle.

"Freedom" means that there is an endless range of possibilities, and that anything can happen, including both good and bad things. That's why freedom engenders fear. The greater the freedom, the greater the fear. Where does America's fear come from? To answer this question, it's worth taking a look at scenes from a typical Hollywood Western, in which covered wagons pass through a harsh, unwelcoming landscape, and where the silence feels ominous and the settlers are constantly casting anxious looks at the hills to the left and right. Is anyone there? Of course there is. A group of Indians has congregated and will soon attack the wagon train. There will be deaths, and a few crosses will be left behind in the wilderness.

Paradise of Freedom?

The United States is a relatively young country that began as a society of settlers. They came to America to escape oppression at the hands of European monarchies, and they developed a strong desire for freedom in the process -- a freedom they could find in the continent's vast expanses. As political individuals, they refused to accept that even though they lived on the other side of the Atlantic, they were still controlled by the British colonial power, and they fought for their independence and democracy.

Because the settlers made such great sacrifices to seize their magnificent country -- from British troops, from the Indians and from the wilderness -- their achievements became imbued with a religious exaggeration. The country was essentially declared a paradise, or, in the words of the national anthem, "the land of the free and the home of the brave."

But the nation's genetic code has also retained the fear that many settlers had to endure, both on their treks and in wars. A covered wagon with a man, a woman and a horde of children -- it's the perfect symbol of the land of unlimited opportunity, a land where total freedom and maximum vulnerability go hand-in-hand.

To understand the United States, it's worth taking a look at other paranoid democracies. In southern Africa, Boer settlers battled the local population for land. To this day, the Boers still have a glorified view of their history, as suggested by Boer expressions like "Eie land, vrye volk," or "One land, free people." A strict apartheid system was implemented in South Africa starting in 1948. The system enabled the Boers to isolate themselves from the black majority and create a democracy, but only for whites, making it entirely undemocratic. Fear was the basis of that state. It built nuclear bombs, even though it had no enemies.

Politics Shaped by Fear

Israel is the promised land of the Jews. It was created primarily to give Holocaust survivors a place where they could feel free and safe. That freedom and safety was fought for and preserved in wars against the Palestinians and neighboring powers, wars that claimed many casualties. To this day, Israel retains elements of a settler society, as the country continues to expand into the West Bank.

In Israel, too, politics are shaped by fear -- and a justified one. The country is surrounded by enemies, some of which have made the renewed extermination of the Jews their objective. But does that mean that the Israelis have to have their presumed enemies murdered abroad? One of today's symbols of political paranoia is the giant wall that seals off Palestinian areas from Israeli territory. "Homeland" is actually based on an Israeli TV series.

The United States differs in many respects from South Africa during apartheid and Israel today. But the three countries are similar in terms of the triad of freedom myth, paradise and fear. This has led to the development of a tremendous ability to put up a fight, but also a heightened sensitivity.

Political paranoia requires an enemy, or at least the concept of an enemy. For a long time after the society of white settlers had destroyed or banished the Indian tribes, there was no enemy to threaten the Americans in their paradise. It was only the Soviet Union's bombers armed with nuclear missiles that made the United States vulnerable again and fanned new fears. At the same time, the rival in the East served as the alternative model to the freedom myth, because it was a society of compulsion and limited opportunity. It also offered an austere alternative model to the American paradise, which by then had become primarily a paradise of consumerism.

America felt threatened to its very core. A defeat against the Soviet Union would have turned the United States into either a nuclear desert or a Socialist satellite with cheap goods and no more than two available car models -- two nightmares for Americans that generated considerable fear. Soon a paranoia developed that was reflected in one of its early excesses, the McCarthyism of the 1950s. Those suspected of harboring sympathy for communism were persecuted. Throughout the Cold War, anti-communism remained a hysterical and fundamental element of American policy.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States experienced a relatively relaxed decade, until hijacked jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center and destroyed parts of the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. The men at the controls were belligerent Islamists, whose ideas also formed an antithesis to American society. They were foes of a liberal and individualistic way of life, and they yearned for a paradise where credit cards would be worthless. They were also the first to severely wound the United States in its own "homeland." They were the ideal enemy for the next wave of paranoia. The hour of the Carrie Mathisons of the intelligence world had arrived.

While far from all democracies are paranoid, virtually all dictatorships are. For dictators, paranoia helps shape and preserve their autocratic systems. Autocrats need an enemy -- always an internal enemy and sometimes an external one, too -- to legitimize violence and coercion, and to generate allegiance.

The Nazis are unparalleled in this art of hysterical governance. Their declared internal enemies were Jews, Communists, Social Democrats, the Sinti and the Roma, homosexuals and anyone who told jokes about Adolf Hitler. The external enemies were all the countries that Germany attacked, which was a large number, as well as the overseas democracies, especially the United States. For the Chinese party dictatorship, dissidents are the internal enemies, often people who express their criticism with a paintbrush, pen or laptop. Although China lacks an external enemy, it does have an aversion to Japan.

The United States cannot be compared with Nazi Germany or with China. Unfortunately, however, a paranoid democracy tends to use tools that are beneath a democracy, the tools of a dictatorship, and they include as much surveillance as possible.

US No Longer a Model of Democracy

Information is the most valuable thing in a paranoid world. Those who feel threatened want to know as much as possible about potential threats, so as to be able to control their fears and prepare preventive attacks. Even in the days of covered wagons, alertness was an important protection against attack. Before Sept. 11, the intelligence agencies were asleep at the wheel and overlooked many of the clues the attackers left behind during their preparations. One of the reasons agent Carrie Mathison is traumatized is that she let her guard down once, and she is determined not to let it happen again, even if it means breaking the law.

Now the intelligence services have developed a giant information procurement machine, which is also useful in industrial espionage. To ensure that nothing escapes their notice, they violate the privacy of millions and millions of people and alienate allied nations and their politicians.

Another form of paranoid information procurement is torture, used by American intelligence agencies to gain information about terrorists. Torture is the negation of democracy, freedom and human rights. If a democratic country allows itself to sink to the level of torture, it must already be extremely hysterical and anxious.

It isn't as if nuclear bombs were at issue. The aim of some of today's intelligence methods is to prevent attacks that could be very painful for America, but in truth do not threaten the American founding myths and are not capable of extinguishing the American paradise. Only the Americans themselves can do that. The fear aspect of freedom is destructive to freedom, because it allows the need for security to get out of hand.

While paranoia legitimizes a dictatorship, it can achieve the opposite effect in a democracy. The United States is no longer a model of liberal democracy. That much has been made clear in light of mass surveillance, torture, the extralegal detention camp at Guantanamo and an isolationist ideology that leads to author Ilija Trojanow being denied entry to the country, presumably because of his criticism of American policy.

Other nations also have their fears, but they lack the power to turn the world upside down. Power and paranoia are a dangerous mix.

Far as I can tell, I'm the first to submit a comment on their accompanying blog. Here's what I've posted: "Excellent article!" (subject line) "And what do all these countries have in common? They are all built on stolen land, a product of colonialism! When you are the bully on the block, accustomed to pushing your weight around and screwing everyone else out of what is rightfully theirs, you tend to project your own negative traits onto those you have victimized. This happens one-one-one between individuals as well as among nations. The way you've described the wall Israel erected to isolate the Palistinians reminds me of a wall certain "leaders" here in the USA would like to build, for the express purpose of shutting out the Mexicans. Because even in the 21st Century, humanity has yet to mature beyond this predatory mind-set, which keeps us stuck in the same old pattern of conquer-and-plunder. Because underneath all the art and science and so on, we're still a bunch of savages."

And on that cheerful note my friends, I bid you good night. - Aliceinwonderland

Yep! You just hit the ball out of the park Marc, yet again. And this is how we've - uh, involuntarily - created a parasitic, pampered class of Welfare Queen Billionaires! Have fun paying your premiums, Global. - AIW