Surely a citizenry that makes Chinese slave labor, SUburban assault Vehicles, violent cartoons, snuff films masquerading as religion, and gangsta TV profitable is capable of making responsible choices at the polls! My neighbors have allowed themselves to be dumbed down so significantly that they don’t believe that their behavior even has consequences, nevermind the specific irresponsibility that has led to this election.

Arundhati Roy describes the current choices more eloquently than I ever could:

“There are differences in the I.Q.s and levels of ruthlessness between this year’s U.S. presidential candidates. The anti-war movement in the United States has done a phenomenal job of exposing the lies and venality that led to the invasion of Iraq, despite the propaganda and intimidation it faced.

This was a service not just to people here, but to the whole world. But now, if the anti-war movement openly campaigns for Kerry, the rest of the world will think that it approves of his policies of “sensitive” imperialism. Is U.S. imperialism preferable if it is supported by the United Nations and European countries? Is it preferable if UN asks Indian and Pakistani soldiers to do the killing and dying in Iraq instead of U.S. soldiers? Is the only change that Iraqis can hope for that French, German, and Russian companies will share in the spoils of the occupation of their country?

Is this actually better or worse for those of us who live in subject nations? Is it better for the world to have a smarter emperor in power or a stupider one? Is that our only choice?”

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=6087

MAKE THE DIFFERENCE!!

From electoral-vote.com:

From The Los Angeles Times: “Nationwide, at least two polls in the last week showed that newly registered voters favored Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry by double-digit margins. The Massachusetts senator holds an even greater lead, the polls found, among voters 29 and younger… The conclusion is that the new voters and younger voters favor Kerry by a large margin, but historically they don’t actually bother to vote. If they do this time, it could make a big difference.

Come on people––your vote is essential!

THERE’S STILL TIME TO REQUEST YOUR ABSENTEE BALLOT in many states if you are registered to vote!
It’s easy; it’s online.

Absentee Ballot information online:
http://www.rockthevote.com/rtv_primaries.php

GET TO THE POLLS AND VOTE ON TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 2ND!!

Please e-mail this information to all of your friends!

AND VOTE FOR KERRY!!!!

Your future depends on it!

VOTE FOR KERRY!!!!

nqn, doesn’t Philip saying: “If nobody had health insurance hospitals and doctors would start to pay more attention to the patient experience” kind of prove your point?

If think he means to say: “if health insurance weren’t an issue (ie: universal health care) hospital’s would be nice to patients instead of those footing the bill”. I read it as a sharp criticism to the system in general.

But maybe I read it all wrong. Philip?

Phil,

Many years ago, when we first met, you had recently spent several days as a guest of Her Majesty’s Government-provided health service, after you developed the bends. I quote

More important than the money was the warmth of the staff at Townsville General. They ordered lunch for me the first day without being asked. They anticipated my questions and needs. There were no lengthy bureaucratic waits or procedures. The staff tend to dress casually and don’t try to distance themselves from the patients. It sucks to be ill (you can’t say “sick” in Australia because it means vomiting) but if you’re going to be ill there really isn’t a better place than the hyperbaric unit at Townsville General Hospital.

(Snipped from http://www.photo.net/webtravel/diving/decompression-illness)

You can’t claim that having a third party payer leads to the poor treatment that you get, when you were treated by a hospital at which you did not have insurance, and did not know if you were able to cover the charges racked up (I have seen illegal immigrants treated for many thousands of dollars at my hospital), and lived to praise the experience.

Outrageous.

The Pacific phase of World War II was the result of Japanese aggression against China, which began in Manchuria in 1931 and was directed against the rest of China later in the 1930s (the 1937 Rape of Nanking was part of this aggression). FDR directed a policy to try to halt Japan’s aggression against China. An additional factor was Stalin’s desire to deflect Japanese aggression away from Siberia, a policy which culminated in a Soviet-Japanese nonaggression pact in April, 1941. (Had the Japanese invaded Siberia in 1941 Stalin would not have been able to withdraw Zhukov’s forces from Siberia to defend Moscow.) The diplomatic failure was a missed opportunity for an agreement for Japan to withdraw from China which fell through because Japan was unwilling to give up Manchuria and no one in Roosevelt’s administration took the trouble to clarify just how much of China Japan would have to give up. On the day of the Pear Harbor attack the Japanese launched offensive operations over thousands of miles of territory and a negotiated settlement would have been impossible because the militarists running Japan weren’t about to quit while they were scoring spectacular wins. Paul Johnson provides an excellect discussion of the Japanese strategy in “Modern Times.”

The Japanese militarists refused to accept defeat, and they held little regard for the lives of their people. They still wanted to continue the fight after the bombing of Nagasaki, but the Emperor put a merciful stop to the carnage. Had he not done so there would have been millions of more deaths. An important point here is that the U.S. had at least four more A-bombs and they would have been used in support of an American invasion of Japan. The Japanese surrender also kept Stalin from occupying Northern Japan and installing a Communist regime there.

The key point for understanding World War II in Europe is that Hitler wanted a war and that Stalin gave him one when he signed the notorious pact of August 23, 1939 in hopes of deflecting German aggression to Western Europe. Given the fact that Hitler had told the German Reichstag on January 30, 1939 that he would destroy the Jews if war broke out, Stalin probably knew that he was starting the Holocaust when he signed the pact. Stalin’s regime never told the Russian people that the 1941 Germans were entirely different from the relatively benign Germans of 1914.

Neither Kennedy nor Johnson “started” the Vietnam War. This honor goes to one Nguyen That Than (final revolutionary name Ho Chi Minh, “He Who Enlightens,” an allusion to a form of Buddhist saint) and his inner circle. The key point here is that Ho was a life-long Communist who founded the Indochina Communist Party in 1930 on orders from the Comintern and aspired to place all of Indochina under the hegemony of his Party. Like most of the Communist dictators (Lenin is the principal exception) Ho was both a nationalist and a socialist just like Hitler. Ironically, his Party was operating under the name Vietnam Workers Party, evocative of National Socialist German Workers Party, during Vietnam War. Both the First Indochina War and the Second Indochina War were the result of this ambition. The Vietnamese Communists operated in much the same way as the Japanese militarists–with complete contempt for human life. The Communists killed more civilians than the Americans did in the Vietnam War, and they picked up the pace when it ended, particularly in Cambodia, as one would expect in a socialist revolution. The order to start construction of the Ho Chi Minh Trail was issued in 1959 by the Vietnamese Communist Politburo, well over a year before Kennedy was inaugurated.

The Vietnamese Communists achieved their objective of hegemony over Indochina when they took control of Cambodia away from the Communist Party of Kampuchea (“Khmer Rouge,” i.e., Red Khmer) at the end of 1978 in the Third Indochina War. Ironically, the CPK would have never come to power without the assistance of the Vietnamese Communists (Ben Kiernan’s “The Pol Pot” regime points out in “The Pol Pot Regime” that the Vietnamese Communists manned the heavy weapons in the final seige of Phnom Penh.)

The notion that the U.S. is more violent than other countries flies in the face of reason. The American people have always preferred peace. They thought they were voting for peace in 1916, 1940, and 1964, but each time the man they elected was unwilling or unable to deliver. Note that in each of these cases hostilities had been underway for some time before the U.S. entered the conflict.

In sharp contrast, since 1918 most of the major wars were started by socialist regimes (including the German National Socialists). Furthermore, the twentieth century was one in which more people were killed by their own government (including occupation governments) at the time of the publication of the French edition of “The Black Book of Communism” the various Communist regimes had killed 85 million (the low number, the high number being 100 million. As I have related earlier, the German National Socialists would not have been able to kill their 18 million (from an appendix in Alan Bullock’s “Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives”) without the help of Stalin.

The simple truth is that anti-American sentiment is socialist sentiment based on some form of Lenin’s theory of imperialism. The worst variety is that expressed in that work that was popular with Sixties radicals, Franz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth,” which hold that white people are responsible for all the evil in the world. If you substitute the term “Jews” for “white people” you have the German National Socialists’ rationale for the Holocaust.

This history of the twentieth century has shown that socialism is a false science which was a colossal failure and caused incalculable human misery. No educated person should believe in it.

“[I did catch up by skimming the transcipt of the debate later. My favorite thing that was said was from Bush: "the actual user of health care is not the purchaser of health care." This is what distinguishes a visit to a hospital emergency room from a visit to McDonald's. Even if you don't have health insurance and are going to be reamed out of $2000 for a simple X-ray the experience is pure Third World. As far as the staff is concerned you are not their customer. Insurance companies, Medicare, and Medicaid are the customers. If an executive from Blue Cross showed up at the hospital she would not be kept in a waiting room overflowing with the sickest most contagious SARS-ridden people in the metropolitan area. If nobody had health insurance hospitals and doctors would start to pay more attention to the patient experience.]”

Very well said Phil. Funny how the responders all chose to enter a pissing contest about war brutality. The health care system is one or our ‘real’ problems here in the states. It’s near impossible to even get price quotes from doctors. I have no health inusrance by choice, as I have factored that it’s cheaper for me to pay out of pocket. I usually can get a cash discount, but some doctors and staff look at you crazy when you ask if there is a cash discount. And when you tell them you’re a “self-payer” they give you that painfull look of pity- “Poor lad doesn’t have health insurance”.
Health care doesn’t look at us as the sevice consumers and they the service providers. Instead they are the “Lords of mercy and miracles”, and we the poor huddled masses.
It’s always a formula for disaster when there is a disconnect between people and their money. The health insurance co’s have to act as the gatekeepers now, keeping the health care system in check. Better than nothing, but not nearly the same were it the “consumers” themselves watching over their health care expenditures.

Stella: The fact that the Japanese were reluctant to unconditionally surrender even after an atomic bomb attack in 1945 does not mean that they, in 1941, desired a war to the bitter end or were enthusiastic about fighting Americans for the sake of fighting. Pearl Harbor was a high-stakes gamble that didn’t pay off partly because the aircraft carriers were out at sea on December 7 and partly because the U.S. turned out to be unwilling to negotiate.

Europeans: On the issue of European populations cooperating with Nazi Germany… I was only pointing out that those countries that were early partners with Hitler, e.g., Vichy France, fared better than those that resisted, e.g., Czechoslovakia. If Germany had refrained from attacking Russia and declaring war on the U.S., at least until England was conquered, it might have enjoyed a long domination of Western and Central Europe in which the cooperating countries would have had comfortable roles. This is what the French were counting on at the time and you can see it in some of their contemporary documentaries (see the DVD “Eye of Vichy”). From the perspective of 2004 we can say that it was obvious that the Germans would lose in the long run and therefore all of the Europeans who cooperated with them were fools but presumably it was not obvious to the French circa 1940, for example.

I’m Portugues, and I don’t know the history of Democrats or Republicans. The point is not that, the point is George W Bush! You had good presidents from both sides, but this one, is bad, it does’t matter the party he is.

Joh:
“The Japanese had already surrendered when the first nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima”

- Uh no, read your history books. An unconditional surrender was not proffered up until the second bomb was dropped – and that was only upon the interventon of Hirohito. The Japanese military leaders wanted to continue the fight.

The Japanese had already surrendered when the first nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, it was an excuse to test it and more importantly to send a message to the Soviets that the US had the bomb. It’s on public record.