Quote from: TDoS on Dec 12, 2024, 08:50 AM

Quote from: K-Dog on Dec 10, 2024, 10:01 PMLeonard Peltier Denied Parole After Nearly 50 Years In Prison
Shit happens.  A country that claims not to have political prisoners is the worst place for a political prisoner to be.  And you can put that in your Funk & Wagnalls.

Just to be clear, as my history memory isn't near as good as my technical one, what political crime was Leonard convicted of? Or is this another case of...interesting....political claims that upon examination don't always look to be as political as claimed?

For example, no one has yet explained why American communists can get million dollars homes and luxury autos for everyone in the family while past examples of communist countries get gruel, block housing, and public transporation?

I find the ever changing definitions and outcomes of relative concepts like politics to be just so...tricky.

Leonard Peltier is a Native American activist and a member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) who was convicted of two counts of first degree murder in the deaths of two Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents in a June 26, 1975, shooting on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He was sentenced to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment and has been imprisoned since 1976.  Peltier became eligible for parole in 1993.


Herbie Waters reads a message from political prisoner and elder Leonard Peltier marking 2024 National Day of Mourning.  Eight days ago.




There is no proof Leonard was the shooter that day.

Quote from: TDoS on Dec 12, 2024, 08:57 AM

Quote from: K-Dog on Dec 10, 2024, 11:04 AMI could have done without the rant about the evil weed.

Why? Weed enthusiasts sound like they can suffer consequences...makes me worry about the link before doomer madness and Weed Disease. I mean, Doomers and Weed might contribute to why they think collapse is happening...and when it doesn't ....keep thinking the same thing for decades in the future?

I object to Krystal Ball diagnosing the cause of Luigi's actions as resulting from your alleged disorder without evidence.

Stoners are just going to sit on a couch and bitch about health care before their attention drifts elsewhere.  They are not going to have the focus or desire to print a gun, bus to Gotham City, and then kill someone.



Would Batman get stoned?

Not much, people are always doing bad shit and the city never sleeps.  That does not leave a lot of time to get baked.

But connecting your soul to the universe from time to time is not a bad thing.

As long as Batman is not played by Poison Ivy.

Quote from: K-Dog on Dec 12, 2024, 09:13 AMLeonard Peltier is a Native American activist and a member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) who was convicted of two counts of first degree murder in the deaths of two Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents in a June 26, 1975, shooting on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He was sentenced to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment and has been imprisoned since 1976.  Peltier became eligible for parole in 1993.

There is no proof Leonard was the shooter that day.

Two salient points.
1) 12 jurors who's job it was to determine the facts of the matter disagree with you, at least in terms of him being guilty of murder. It is possible to be convicted of murder while just hanging around with the people doing the murdering. So Leonard might not have been the shooter, but he was wrapped up deep enough in it to be part of the gang held responsible.
2) No political crimes at all, just typical murdering and stuff.

I just finished up nearly 2 weeks as a juror in a murder trial. It was the most amazing experience. In the end, it was just little ol' me and a guy with a PhD doing advanced research with large language models, having a BLAST going over the jury instructions, debating the meaning of words, when is a robbery perhaps not a robbery, the nuance was wonderful and it was the best intellectual exercise I've had in months.

In this case there were 7 people in a room about the size of what any good communists living room in any million dollar home looks like. One person fired a gun. One died. No one saw who fired the gun. All were arrested ultimately except the wife of the deceased.

We did this cool thing, examining the evidence, understanding the perspective of all the witnesses (4 of the 7 testified, one refused to testify, one died, and the defendant wasn't talking), used our brains and stuff, no one was allowed to be smoking hallucinagenic substances because we were, you know, supposed to do that thinking thing, etc etc.

According to someone trying to duck the murder charge...NO PROOF!!!

I completely agree with my original statement that Leonard wasn't convicted of any political crimes. I heartily recommend not murdering people, and if one does, don't get caught.

Delay Deny Depose.

MOFO gets what I saved and earned in a lifetime in less than a week.  For supporting a system that exploits and kills. A system based on financial violence and financial murder..





When a stubborn pain in Nick van Terheyden's bones would not subside, his doctor had a hunch what was wrong.

A blood test in the fall of 2021 confirmed the doctor's diagnosis, and van Terheyden expected his company's insurance plan, managed by Cigna, to cover the cost of the bloodwork. Instead, Cigna sent van Terheyden a letter explaining that it would not pay for the $350 test because it was not "medically necessary."

The letter was signed by one of Cigna's medical directors, a doctor employed by the company to review insurance claims.

Something about the denial letter did not sit well with van Terheyden, a 58-year-old Maryland resident. "This was a clinical decision being second-guessed by someone with no knowledge of me," said van Terheyden, a physician himself and a specialist who had worked in emergency care in the United Kingdom.

Without enough vitamin D in the blood, the body will pull calcium from the bones. Left untreated, a vitamin D deficiency can lead to osteoporosis.

The vague wording made van Terheyden suspect that Dr. Cheryl Dopke, the medical director who signed it, had not taken much care with his case.

Van Terheyden was right to be suspicious. His claim was just one of roughly 60,000 that Dopke denied in a single month last year, according to internal Cigna records reviewed by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum.

The rejection of van Terheyden's claim was typical for Cigna, one of the country's largest insurers. The company has built a system that allows its doctors to instantly reject a claim on medical grounds without opening the patient file, leaving people with unexpected bills, according to corporate documents and interviews with former Cigna officials. Over a period of two months last year, Cigna doctors denied over 300,000 requests for payments using this method, spending an average of 1.2 seconds on each case, the documents show. The company has reported it covers or administers health care plans for 18 million people.

Before health insurers reject claims for medical reasons, company doctors must review them, according to insurance laws and regulations in many states. Medical directors are expected to examine patient records, review coverage policies and use their expertise to decide whether to approve or deny claims, regulators said. This process helps avoid unfair denials.

But the Cigna review system that blocked van Terheyden's claim bypasses those steps. Medical directors do not see any patient records or put their medical judgment to use, said former company employees familiar with the system. Instead, a computer does the work. A Cigna algorithm flags mismatches between diagnoses and what the company considers acceptable tests and procedures for those ailments. Company doctors then sign off on the denials in batches, according to interviews with former employees who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"We literally click and submit," one former Cigna doctor said. "It takes all of 10 seconds to do 50 at a time."

Not all claims are processed through this review system. For those that are, it is unclear how many are approved and how many are funneled to doctors for automatic denial.

Insurance experts questioned Cigna's review system.

Patients expect insurers to treat them fairly and meaningfully review each claim, said Dave Jones, California's former insurance commissioner. Under California regulations, insurers must consider patient claims using a "thorough, fair and objective investigation."

"It's hard to imagine that spending only seconds to review medical records complies with the California law," said Jones. "At a minimum, I believe it warrants an investigation."

This is one of those situations where EVERYBODY KNOWS it's a racket, but the insurance companies simply pay lawyers to come up with new fine print or new procedures to circumvent regulations designed to protect the policy holders.  Then a couple of years are spent in litigation about the claim adjusting policies, and if they are found in violation they pay a fine and rewrite their procedures and go right back to denying claims based on the new system until somebody sues again, then rinse and repeat the whole game.  Meanwhile a few dozen people die, the company rakes in millions in premiums, the lawyers and managers get fat paychecks and the shareholders get a nice dividend.  Thus explaining why some policy holders have given up on getting help from the legal system and are investing in 3D Printers (ones that actually work).


RE

If one doctor is rubber stamping 60,000 denials in one month, more than a dozen people are dying each rinse and repeat cycle.  Your math is a bit off.

QuoteTheir wealth has completely distorted their perception of reality.  And while they might pay lip
service to our concerns in order to placate us, never forget that their interests are fundamentally at odds with ours.

Quote from: K-Dog on Dec 10, 2024, 11:04 AMPropaganda of the deed could easily be generated by pain. 

Use of the weed could easily have generated the deed.

That explains it.  Health care executives earning billions by being assholes and running a system of institutionalized murder has nothing to do with it.  That is a bridge too far.  The idea of someone not thinking that American health care must be the best in the world.  Preposterous.  Only madness can explain this mental delusion, and the source of madness must itself be explained!

Meanwhile the search for the magic that will make women cry for it goes on.

Quote"Yes, I condemn murder, and that's why I condemn America's broken, vile, rapacious, bloodthirsty, unethical, immoral health care industry and I condemn every one of the CEOs who are in charge of it and I condemn every politician who takes their money and keeps this system going instead of tearing it up, ripping it apart, and throwing it all away,"

And now after several more years of American being boned by CEOs and boot licking politicians of the two party duopoly a few people in the FSOA are actually getting pissed.

QuoteThe notion that reading a shooter's statement will cause people to snap to attention and become homicidal maniacs, like some kind of Manchurian Agent trigger word, is media paternalism at its worst. (Somehow this phenomenon does not apply to members of the media, who happily circulated copies of the manifesto among themselves.) More importantly, the news media is not a public safety organization. The fact that it's increasingly behaving like one is alarming. The First Amendment doesn't have an exemption for speech that might inspire bad things, nor should it.

Regarding Luigi's manifesto which was published here earlier.

Why stay in a place where heartless dumb idiots controlled by money, create doom for the rest of us.

I'll have two plain McSnitches and medium fries please.  And no I will not use your fucking app.




I said plain McSnitches.  I do not want your goop on top.

In the largest corruption case in China's history, the Chinese government executed Li Jianping on Tuesday. Jianping, a former official in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, was sentenced to death after being found guilty of embezzling over three billion yuan (approximately $421 million).

The execution was ordered by China's Supreme People's Court and carried out by a court in Inner Mongolia, according to the Xinhua News Agency. Jianping, 64, had served as secretary of the Communist Party working committee for the Hohhot Economic and Technological Development Zone. His death sentence was initially issued in September 2022 and upheld on appeal in August 2024.

Since coming to power in 2012, President Xi Jinping has made anti-corruption a key part of his governance. Official reports state that over a million party officials, including two defence ministers and several military leaders, have been punished or prosecuted under the campaign.

In a speech to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection plenary session in January, excerpts of which were published in the party's theoretical magazine Qiushi, Xi called on officials to take a bold stance against corruption. He warned against interest groups undermining the Communist Party and emphasised the need for what he termed the party's self-revolution.