The British NHS vs. US health system

Stephen Fry narrates a comparison of the two health care systems and shows clearly why the British National Health Service is vastly superior to the ghastly system that we have here that works only for those with tons of money.

It is clear that the likely new prime minister of the UK will be Boris Johnson and that he wants to take the UK out of the EU even with no Brexit deal. He will then be desperate to carve out new trade deals with other countries and the US will be the main target, since he seems to view Donald Trump as a soul mate even though Trump will treat him like a lackey.

But the US will demand that for any deal to be made, he must first set about dismantling the NHS, reducing price controls on drugs, and allowing private health insurance companies to play a much greater role. You can be sure that the medical-pharmaceutical-health insurance industries are salivating at the prospect of gouging an entirely new population of people.

(Via Cory Doctorow)

More tales of the greedy rich

The state budget for Ohio should have been approved before July 1 but this year there was an impasse and it got delayed while the legislature and the governor tried to arrive at a compromise. A deal was finally agreed upon and the budget was due to be sent to the governor for his signature. But today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer (no link unfortunately) has a story about how at the last minute, a new provision was secretly introduced into the 3,000 page budget document without debate that would have reduced the taxes paid by the wealthiest suburb of Cleveland (called Hunting Valley) to the schools.
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Talia Lavin is tired of Jews being used as a shield

Donald Trump’s recent Twitter rant against four congresswomen of color where he told them to ‘go back where they came from’ has created much discussion about the use of this racist trope. This is a well-known xenophobic slur that pretty much anyone who can be seen as a non-white and non Anglo-Saxon ‘other’ by virtue of skin color, dress, accent, or name has at one time been subjected to. The New York Times asked its readers to recount incidents of this sort and got 16,000 responses (!) of which they published 67.
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Sofi’s choice

Some of you may have read the novel Sophie’s Choice by William Styron or seen the film starring Meryl Streep that was based on it. It was based on events in Nazi Germany and the event that gave rise to the title was when Sophie, a Polish Catholic, was sent to Auschwitz and the doctor in the camp forced her to choose to send either her son or her daughter to be gassed immediately, while the other child would be permitted to remain in the concentration camp.
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Jeffrey Epstein’s jail conditions

Jeffrey Epstein faces a fairly long period in pre-trial detention period in jail, now that his request for bail and to be under house arrest has been denied. Since the crimes with which he is charged are so awful and the judge found that he is obviously both a flight risk and a potential danger to other people, the denial of bail is not unreasonable. I became curious about what kind of conditions he faces while facing trial since we know that even after his conviction of sex crimes in 2009 in Florida, he was only assigned to the local country jail and was allowed out six days a week to continue his business, whatever that was, returning to the jail only at night.
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Brace yourself for a massively racist election

With his tweets demanding that four congresswomen of color go back to where they came from, and presiding over a rally where his supporters chanted “Send her back” about one of them Ilhan Omar while he looked on, Donald Trump has gone into full-bore racist mode and it is clear that almost all Republicans are still supporting him but are desperately trying to avoid answering whether his tweets are racist

It should be clear to everyone that Donald Trump’s re-election strategy is to go full-bore racist. The hard-core racists are loving it. His manifest lie, again caught on tape, that he tried to stop the chants is designed to give his kinda-sorta racist supporters an excuse that they can believe in and continue to support him while denying that they themselves are racist.
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Epstein denied bail

In a ruling that should not have been a surprise convicted sex offender, and all-round creep Jeffrey Epstein’s request for bail was denied because the judge thought he not only posed a credible flight risk but also posed a threat to the community. This is a man who should not be allowed anywhere near young girls and women.

“The government has established danger to others and to the community by clear and convincing evidence,” the Manhattan federal court Judge Richard Berman said on Thursday. “I doubt that any bail package can overcome a danger to the community.”
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But prosecutors portrayed Epstein as posing a risk. Authorities found possibly thousands of photographs in Epstein’s home showing young women, and “at least one individual in those photos … has self-identified as a victim of the defendant,” prosecutor Alex Rossmiller told Berman during Monday’s bail arguments.

“Just this morning, the government became aware that in a locked safe in the defendant’s mansion there were piles of cash, dozens of diamonds, and a passport appearing to be issued from a foreign country with a photo of the defendant and a name on that passport that is not the defendant’s name,” Rossmiller also said.

If an extremely wealthy person facing a possible lifetime in prison with multiple lavish homes in several countries and private jets and even his own damn island is not a flight risk, then the term would have ceased to have any meaning.

So now he will have plenty of time to reflect on the utter misery he has caused to so many women.

Should this result about poker be a surprise?

I am a terrible poker player, losing every time even when the other players are also novices. (Bridge is my favorite card game.) I long felt that the reason I lose at poker is because I lack a ‘poker face’ (one that reveals nothing to the other players) and am also bad at reading other players’ faces, mannerisms, and body language that reveal something about the strength of their hands. In the language of the game, I think I have many ‘tells’ that other players pick up on while I fail miserably in detecting any tells that they may have. I was under the impression that these factors play an even more important role than knowledge of the odds, such as the likelihood of drawing an inside straight or filling a full house.
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Learning from Nigeria on battling the anti-vaxxers

Nigeria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan were three countries where anti-vaccination campaigns led by Muslin clerics and fanatics seriously set back the very real chance to globally eradicate polio. But Shobana Shankar writes that a vigorous campaign waged by Nigeria to combat the anti-vaxxwers provides useful lessons to the US as it finds itself having to deal with its own anti-vaxxers.

To consider that Nigeria, infamous for anti-vaxx campaigns leading to polio outbreaks, has any lessons for Americans may be shocking.

But as measles cases in the U.S. climb to an all-time high after the disease was declared eliminated in 2000, U.S. public health officials have been looking for ways to address the problem.

As a researcher on religious politics and health, I believe that Nigeria’s highly mobilized efforts to eliminate polio can teach America how to reverse the increase in measles cases and shore up its public health infrastructure. Working with international partners, Nigerians have combated misinformation, suspicion of vaccine science and religion-based boycotts to go from ground zero for polio on the African continent in 2003 to nearly polio-free in 2019.
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Nigerians understood that simply ostracizing religious communities would not work. Anti-vaxx politics tapped into mistrust of government and “others” that ran deep in a diverse but divided society, where religious, regional and ethnic loyalties took priority over national unity.
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The polio infrastructure in Nigeria immerses experts and local communities in an ongoing relationship. It is an elaborate multilayered surveillance system, with many strategies and functions, from mundane visits to weekly record reviews at health centers in polio-affected areas.
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Nigeria spent over US$8 million on surveillance alone and expanded polio capabilities to fight other diseases like measles and rubella. While the system puts a heavy workload on health officials, it points the way for how the American public health system can reshape existing structures for the current era. America led international health partnerships for decades, but the time has come to follow other countries’ lead.

The big problem is persuading Americans that we can learn from other countries. After all, aren’t we the greatest?