Dozens of pro-Palestinian activists have been refused permission to board a flight from Paris’ Charles De Gaulle airport bound for Israel where they were due to stage a protest.
The group were prevented from leaving for Tel Aviv following a request from authorities there.
In an unprecedented move, European airlines have been given the details of 300 blacklisted passengers who will be refused entry to Israel.
Dozens more protestors headed for the same fly-in demonstration were also prevented from leaving Brussels. (Read more from euronews.net)
The US has conducted its first drone strike on Islamist militants in Somalia, marking the expansion of the pilotless war campaign to a sixth country.
The missile strike on a vehicle in the southern town of Kismayo, reported last week as a helicopter assault, wounded two senior militants with al-Shabab and several foreign fighters according to the Washington Post.
Armed Predator and Reaper drones already operate in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen and Libya, where they are controlled by the US military or the CIA.
The CIA-run programmes are controversial. Although they provide the Obama administration with a low-risk weapon against Islamist militants, they stir intense anti-American hostility among the local population.
Opposition is most vociferous in Pakistan, where the government said on Wednesday it was shutting down a big CIA drone base, and had ordered US personnel based there to leave. (Read more from guardian.co.uk)
Diplomats in Pyongyang confirmed that students were being drafted into manual labor on the outskirts of the city until April next year to prepare for major celebrations to commemorate the centenary of the late leader Kim Il Sung’s birthday. But they said this did not mean the closure of universities.
But part of the motivation may come from fears of student revolution. Last week someone put a piece of graffito on the wall of a Pyongyang College which called the Dear Leader “a dictator who starved people to death.”
For North Korea, this is more or less the equivalent of setting the White House on fire with a Molotov. Pyongyang was locked down (more than usual) for three days in a vain search for the culprit. Hopefully he or she is well-hidden, or followed the seven folks who triggered a border security crackdown when when they defected to the South a few weeks ago, joining the 21,000 other former North Koreans who have had that same great idea since 1953. (Read more from reason.com)
From Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick’s “Anarchy, State and Utopia.”
Imagine you are a slave.
Stage one: You are the slave at the mercy of a brutal master, who forces you to work for his purposes and beats you arbitrarily.
Stage two: The master decides to beat you only for breaking the rules, and even grants you some free time.
Stage three: You are part of a group of slaves subject to this master. He decides, on grounds generally acceptable, how goods should be allocated among you all.
Stage four: The master requires his slaves to work only three days per week, granting them the other four days off. They can do as they wish during their free time.
Stage five: The master now allows the slaves to work wherever they wish. His main caveat is that they must send him three-sevenths of their wages, corresponding o the three days’ worth of work they once had to do on his land every week. In an emergency he can force them to do his bidding once again, and he retains the power to alter the fraction of their wages to which he lays claim.
Stage six: The master grants all 10,000 of his slaves, except you, the right to vote. They can decide among themselves how much of their (and your) earnings to take and what outlets to fund with the money. They can decide what you are and are not allowed to do. We can suppose for the sake of argument that the master irrevocably grants this right to the slaves. You now have 10,000 masters, or a single 10,000-headed master.
Stage seven: You are granted the freedom to try to persuade the 10,000 to ecercise their vast powers in a particular way. You still do not have the right to vote, but you can try to influence those who do.
Stage eight: The 10,000 grant you the right to vote, but only to break a tie. You write down your vote, and if a tie should occur, they open it and record it. No tie has ever occurred.
Stage nine: You are granted the right to vote. But functionally, it simply means, as in the eighth stage, that in the case of a tie, which has never occurred, your vote carries the issue.
Question: at which point did this become something other than the tale of a slave?
In a FOIA lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, EPIC has just obtained documents concerning the radiation risks of TSA’s airport body scanner program. The documents include agency emails, radiation studies, memoranda of agreement concerning radiation testing programs, and results of some radiation tests. One document set reveals that even after TSA employees identified cancer clusters possibly linked to radiation exposure, the agency failed to issue employees dosimeters – safety devices that could assess the level of radiation exposure. (Read more from epic.org)
Our psychopathic politicians and technocrat army will look at this and say “See? We need government healthcare now!”
2:00 — Dr. Burgess explains his “awakening”: Two tier systems developed in many countries with nationalized healthcare. Clintons were fearful of this, so they sought to criminalize any practice of medicinie outside their system.
13:10 — Dr. Orient describes working for the VA: Very bad idea to work too hard because you don’t get paid more, everyone resents you, and there is a greater possibility of making a mistake. Weekends and Federal holidays all free! No need for malpractice insurance. Eligibility for treatment rigidly pre-determined. Can’t critizise the government.
At the VA’s monthly administrative meeting a nurse suggested playing a recording of last week’s meeting and going to the canteen instead.
(Dr. Orient’s whole talk is outstanding)
25:40 — Dr. Amerling
27:00 — more and more residents are trying to stay on instead of enter private practice. There’s a mass migration from established private practices into hospital. This is driven by money. Practice expenses are rising while medicare / medicade payments are not rising with inflation.
32:00 — wonderful anecdote about the consequences of doctors working at fixed salary regardless of how many patients they see.
Obamacare penalizing hospitals for patient re-admittence.
Federal guide lines are driven by medical industry lobbies which always advocate aggressive treatment. In 2006 guidelines for anemic patients were written based on casual observation. This was dramatically refuted by more rigorous experiments. Patients were harmed.
From my friend Drew: One is from New York , another is from Tennessee and the third is from Florida.
All three go with a White House official to examine the fence. The Florida contractor takes out a tape measure and does some measuring, then works some figures with a pencil. “Well,” he says, “I figure the job will run about $900: $400 for materials, $400 for my crew and $100 profit for me.”
The Tennessee contractor also does some measuring and figuring, then says, “I can do this job for $700: $300 for materials, $300 for my crew and $100 profit for me.”
The New York contractor doesn’t measure or figure, but leans over to the White House official and whispers, “$2,700.” The official, incredulous, says, “You didn’t even measure like the other guys! How did you come up with such a high figure?” The New York contractor whispers back, “$1000 for me, $1000 for you, and we hire the guy from Tennessee to fix the fence.” “Done!” replies the government official.
And that, my friends, is how government contracting works!
20 minute lecture
by Twila Brase, President of Citizens Council for Health Freedom
Hippa is not a privacy law, but a disclosure law. Over two million entities have access to your records without your knowledge.
Doctors being scored on compliance with gov’t issued protocols. They’re scored on % of people vaccinated in their clinic.
Vast majority of preventive measured do not save money. (New England Journal of Medicine) Nevertheless, government is going full steam ahead, placing preventive medicine requirements on doctors.
More dependent on government = less concerned about their health
Three recommendations
1) Bring market prices back to medicine.
2) Restore health insurance to true insurance. Get rid of entitlement care. Let individuals own their policies.
3) Repeal healthcare reform law, prohobition against catastrophic insurance, and ability of gov’t to tell us what to buy.
***
15 minute talk
Alieta Eck, MD, President-elect of Association of American Physicians and Surgeons
* Nixon poured a lot of federal $$$ into HMOs for prevention & “health maintenance”
* Government supervision / evaluation of doctors make very sick patients the enemy for fear of bad ratings. In Florida doctors refuse to treat some very sick or uncooperative patients.
* Doctor being sued by patient for not recommending colon screening. Doctor hadn’t seen patient in 18 years. Doctors should not also be made liable for not recommending preventive stuff.
* Mark 2:17 On hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Luke 5:31 Jesus answered them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.”
Matthew 9:12 On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.
***
Q&A
* Doctors support for 2 reasons
– it feels good to claim federal programs on your resume and on your behalf.
– They’re caught up in doing well in the scoring system. (MN scoring system on five things: A1C, Cholesterol, Blood Pressure, Whether stops, smoking, whether patient takes asprin every day.)
* 10 Doctor practice hiring 7 people to manage mandated electronic records!!! This is the cost of government programs.
* “Evidence Based medicine” kills innovation. Doctors need to spend time explaining why they aren’t taking the government’s one-size-fits-all solution to a medical problem. Instead of physicians practicing medicine, it is bureucrats (who don’t see patients) practicing medicine.
Dozens of pro-Palestinian activists have been refused permission to board a flight from Paris’ Charles De Gaulle airport bound for Israel where they were due to stage a protest.
(Read more from euronews.net)