Postscript To: "Where's MY Death Panel?"

In my previous post I mentioned a story getting a lot of coverage by conservatives soon after Duh-duh-DUHHHH!!!! Obamacare went into affect, about a man who said he has leukemia, said he was born poor, said he now runs two companies, and said he may have to get another job because his out-of-pocket for medical treatment has gone from $4500 to $26,000, because of Obamacare.

Fact Check cleared this one up very quickly, although it seems that Fox News and the Heritage Foundation weren't so energetic about publicizing the corrections.

The true story is that he ending keeping his doctor and paying less for insurance from another company. In a response to Fact check, he still blamed Obama for having to change insurance companies:

“The health insurance industry certainly needed to be put in check, and we certainly needed to provide affordable care for low income earners. But, I should not have had a product that I was willing to pay for, and that I had been very happy with, taken away from me by a government mandate and then taxed…er, I mean fined…if I chose not to replace it with a product I don’t like.”

But the Federal government didn't tell his previous, more-expensive insurer, Celtic, to drop him. And Celtic didn't get back to Fact check to tell their side of the story.

But, clearly, it feels to a lot of people like Obama is screwing them over whenever anything bad happens to them. Even when, as in this case, Obama has actually come to their rescue and made things better after someone else has screwed them over.

Feelings
Nothing more than
Feelings
Trying to
Forget myyyyyyy...

And it feels to me like the GOP and right-wing media aren't falling all over themselves to, uh, you know... to check their facts, and stuff.

In conclusion, France is a land of contrasts, and this whole story is 3 years old.

Old And New Theological Nonsense

The people who wrote the Old and New Testaments and the Koran all thought that God was a being who looked like a man, who lived in the sky and watched us, and so did almost all practicing Jews, Christians and Muslims until a couple of centuries ago. Those Christians and Muslims, plus those of the practicing Jews who believed in life after death (never a unanimous belief among Jews) believed that Heaven was up in the sky where God lived, and that Hell was deep underground. They believed that angels and demons, who looked somewhat like people except that they had wings and the angels had halos and demons had horns, were flying around us all the time, the angels having come down from the sky and the demons up from deep underground. They believed that Satan, an angel who used to live in the sky with God and the other angels, had been thrown out of Heaven and now operated from Hell, deep underground.

All of those paintings and sculptures made over thousands of years' time of God and angels and demons and Satan and Heaven and Hell -- they weren't symbolic presentations of principles of physics which weren't elaborated until long after they were painted or carved -- they were realistic depictions of what people believed literally existed. People claimed to have seen God and/or Jesus and/or angels, and these people weren't thought to be liars or hallucinating or over-imaginative -- and they damned well weren't thought to have been speaking in parables either. What they said was taken literally and they were thought to be blessed.

The many people accused of witchcraft by the Inquisition and Protestant witch-trials, most of them women, were usually thought to have literally had sex with horned flying demons, as part of Satan's master-plan to conquer the world with evil.

Now, a few people still believe in all of the above. When "progressive" theologians say that those people are misunderstanding things which were never meant to have been taken literally, they're full of shit. It's as simple as that. When they say that the bible and Koran weren't meant by their authors to be taken literally, they're full of shit. When they say that God is physics or love or some kind of principle of idea, they're saying something completely different than the Bible and Koran authors. They've had the good sense to reject the literal existence of all of those supernatural things in the Bible and in all of those religious pictures, but if they remain practicing Jews or Christians or Muslims, then they hardly ever have the intellectual honesty to admit that they believe in things which are completely different than the things in their holy books. They've switched from the nonsense of preaching the literal belief in all of those things to the nonsense of preaching that those things weren't literally believed in for the great majority of the history of they claim are their religions. It's maddeningly seldom that a contemporary theologian will talk sense about the theology of past eras.

Charles Koch's Positive Remarks About Bernie Sanders

This is truly Bizarro-World stuff: Charles Koch says that he agrees with Bernie Sanders about income equality, and that both parties are to blame for this inequality.

I hope that Bernie doesn't accept Charles' compliments, and takes this opportunity to make it as plain as can be that Charles Koch is a huge part of the problems Bernie wants to solve. If he throws this right back in Koch's face, with no if's, and's or but's, I might even consider voting for Bernie in the primary instead of Hillary.

Probably not. But I would be impressed.

Sanders wants to raise the minimum wage. Way up. Koch wants lower wages. Sanders wants incentives for solar and wind energy. Koch has successfully killed legislation for some of these incentives. If they'd passed they would have increased the competition against the coal Koch sells to utilities. Sanders wants much, much more government regulation concerning pollution and the financial sector. Koch wants much, much less.

(By the way, Hillary wants all of those things that Bernie wants. And she's much better equipped to actually get legislation passed as POTUS, which is why I already take back what I said above about considering voting for Bernie. Demagogues talk a good game. Good politicians actually get things done. And painting Hillary as a Republican or a monster or anything other than a liberal is just as Bizarro-World as what Koch just said about Sanders.)

This Is Why I Tend To Avoid Amazon Marketplace

Amazon Marktplace is when you buy stuff on the Amazon website from someone other than Amazon.

Like I did on January 6th. Reluctantly. I always buy directly from Amazon if I can. In this case I almost considered contacting Amazon and asking if there were any possibility of my obtaining the item in question directly from them. But I went ahead and purchased from an Amazon Marketplace seller, from a 3rd party. I did this in part because the item listing said "ships from (a part of the US very near where I am.)"

Well, it's 11 days later, and I don't have the item. I was thinking that maybe this seller was the sort of class act that ships a 10-ounce package on a $60 order by parcel post in order to save $1.13.

Oh, if only. Today I got an email from Amazon saying:

Shipping information has been updated for your order, placed with ************ on January 6, 2016 [...] Shipping Carrier: DHL Global mail Ship Date: January 6, 2016 Shipping Speed: Standard Carrier Tracking ID: ******************************

I'm not exaggerating, they gave me a tracking number that's 30 digits long. (Of COURSE DHL has never heard of it.)

Would they use DHL Global Mail to ship a package a short distance within the US? Is it POSSIBLE to use DHL Global Mail for something like that? I'm guessing it's more likely that the package is shipping from somewhere like Kyrgyzstan, and that DHL didn't bother to give it a tracking number for 11 days because anyone familiar with how it's being shipped (and that sure aint me) knows that there's absolutely no way it's going to be anywhere near its destination within 11 days.

One thing seems pretty sure: the Amazon Marketplace seller lied to me. They said the package would be coming from nearby, and it's not. Well, two things: they didn't waste any money on express postage, because these days an express package won't take 11 days to ship from Kyrgyzstan to Amurrka's heartland.

And it's not the first time an Amazon Marketplace seller has screwed me over like this. And I want them to pay -- pay money, because I think they're the sort of company that knows the value only of money, and not of things like honesty, reliability and customer service.

And for all I know, it could be the same company doing the same thing to me for not the first time, pretending to be more than one Amazon Marketplace seller. Maybe they wait until their customer ratings on Amazon are too poor to go on anymore, and then change their name and pretend to be another company.

Amazon -- do you want to be doing business with people like this? Honestly.