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communistkenobi · 12 days ago

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There is a baseline transmedicalism in framing transition as a purely medical process. “transition” is synonymous with medically transitioning, with taking hormones and having “corrective” surgery. This is a framing that largely comes from cissexual doctors and psychologists, but it has also been taken up in mainstream trans discourse by many trans people. It reduces the concept of “changing sex” to a medical procedure, and as a result, reaffirms the idea of sex as a purely biological category. It doesn’t account for the fact that you are also administratively and socially trans-sexual - some of the most intensely transgender moments in my life have been signing forms to change my name with yet another governmental department, with sending human rights complaints to my phone company because they refused to accept my name change documentation, with booking an appointment with a lawyer to notarise an application to change my sex marker on my birth certificate, with emailing my employer for the fourth time to PLEASE change my name in their internal emailing system. Administrative transition isn’t just simply updating a record here or there, you are comprehensively, administratively altering your position within the family, within marriage, within insurance claims, within census data, within the state itself. To use a phrase by Stryker & Sullivan, you are petitioning the king to correct the record of your own life. There’s nothing biological about that

and yes, these administrative and social transitions are often legitimatised through medical transition - you frequently need a psychiatric diagnosis to “prove” you need to change your sex marker, you need a doctor to affirm you’ve been on hormones for X number of months in order to get a replacement government ID or get put on a surgery waiting list. I had to have a specific surgery so I could fit into men’s clothing. Medical transition allows you to move through cis social spaces while being recognised as your gender. And also like, medical transition feels good! I love taking testosterone, I’m happy with my top surgery scars. I like being treated like a man by other people & medical transition has helped me achieve that. But there’s nothing inherently biological about this arrangement - the authority of the doctor and psychiatrist is what gets you legitimacy. I didn’t have to send pics of my top surgery to the federal government to change my ID, I needed the signature of a doctor. And this updated ID means my landlord and employer and bank and phone company and the cashier selling me alcohol all gender me correctly. No biology involved here!

#even old new york was once new amsterdam

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kitkatt0430 · 6 months ago

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do you have a favorite season or episode of Leverage? i love seeing you post about this show :)

Leverage is one of those shows that it's so hard to pic favorites because it's all so incredibly, satisfyingly good.

The first season is probably the worst which is still putting it head and shoulders over the best season of so many other shows that I love. It was hurt by being aired out of order, which thankfully the other seasons didn't suffer from, but it has so many little details in there that become running gags throughout the series. Plan M, Hardison dies. Let's steal an <X>. Parker stabbing a guy with a fork. Hardison's stories about his Nana. Eliot's very specific catchphrase. Sophie's struggle with being an actress vs being a grifter. Alice White. Hurley. Sterling. Old Nate.

I think the Pilot and the two-part finale are my favorites from that season though it is a very close call with basically every other episode.

The Pilot of course gives us the crew and becomes incredibly important to understand the motivations of the final villain of S4. So, so much is established in this episode. The heist at the start, the mini-con at the hospital, and the main con to get their revenge. The walk-away where they all fail to walk away.

And then the two part finale. Nate's ex wife shows up and everyone basically falls in love with Maggie because she's awesome. Sterling truly establishing the Sterling always wins rule with his second win. Nate being able to punch - in the face - the guy who turned down the insurance claim for the medical procedure that might have saved Nate's dying son. Sophie trying to have her cake and eat it too, only to ultimately chose the team over herself. Old Nate becoming the Leverage mascot (to real Nate's chagrin).

Season 2 is probably my second least favorite because I think Sophie leaving the team is somewhat... mishandled? Overall they handled the actress needing time off while pregnant well, but she leaves the team to find herself but is upset that Nate gives her that space and encourages the team to do so as well? Like, yeah, he needs to be better at asking for help and it's his big failing this season but he's very much trying to respect what Sophie asked for and given shit about it. But this is quite possibly the only overarching storyline the show fumbled which is sooooo impressive. (Glances at the Flash and it's many fumbled storylines.)

The first episode of this season is hands down favorite. The team gets back together. Parker as a lock picking nun. The Team taking over Nate's apartment (and then refusing to leave for three seasons). The fact that this episode sets up the series finale. Because it does. The whole reason Nate decides to give in and rejoin the team for more than just this one job at the end? Is because this is where he realizes what really happened behind the scenes of the 2007-08 financial crisis, which leads directly to the target of The Long Goodbye Job.

(holy shit is this show amazing at callbacks and maintaining continuity)

I also really love the Two Live Crew Job for introducing Chaos and The Lost Heir Job for bringing in Tara for the rest of the season (only complaint is we barely get any more of her after this season). Though if I were to pick a second favorite episode of the season it'd be The Bottle Job because I love them saving the bar together and it has the first hints of Jimmy Ford being revealed (explaining further why Nate is the way he is).

I think Season 3 and 4 tie for me as second favorite seasons. S3 has the plot with the Italian and finally stops using Nate's personal failings as the driving impetus of the season finale. Eliot being so very ashamed of the man he used to be is incredibly touching (someone hug this man) and makes it all the more impressive what kind of man he's become now.

I love The Inside Job for putting Parker front and center. Introducing the man who raised her, but also failed her in a way that makes Nate quite likely want to punch Archie in the face. The show never outright calls Parker autistic, but she is. She so clearly is. And it's very plain to see that was factored into the set design for where Parker lives. It was part of Archie's reasoning for keeping her separate from his family - though he can say 'she wouldn't fit in' all he wants, the truth is clear in how he says it. But despite how he failed her, the episode is about showing that Parker does have a family now. The Leverage Crew. And they love her because she is the way she is. Because if she were any different, she wouldn't be their Parker. And they are willing to fight for her and trust her and follow her lead.

I love any episode where Hardison gets to be artsy, so The Scheherazade Job is beloved. How dare he be so talented? So, so, so multi-talented.

The Studio Job gives us Eliot's softer side and Christian Kane's wonderful country singing voice.

The Three Card Monte Job introducing Jimmy Ford in the flesh and giving us the wonderfully fucked up relationship he has with Nate. They love each other but they're too much alike to get ever get along. Each one has a very different code of ethics that clash irreconcilably.

The Rashoman Job is just incredibly well played, with the actors in the flashbacks being slowly updated as it's revealed this person or that person was actually one of the Leverage Crew pre-show. Sophie's accent in the flashbacks getting increasingly incomprehensible until she's basically speaking what the wingdings fonts look like when you try to type normally with them.

The King George Job giving more artsy Hardison who hacks history and probably needs a nap. Sophie's complicated backstory and her realization that cons where she thought no one really got hurt may have actually gotten people hurt after all - a character story beat that Leverage Redemption picked up for her and continued beautifully.

The San Lorenzo Job is absolutely stunning. Sophie shines here (and yet again does not know how to keep out of sight at her own funeral) absolutely stunningly as she builds herself up as a sort of Princess Diana/Evita type before her "assassination" that helps seal the deal of their election theft scheme.

Season 4 tying itself so neatly back to the job that started it all when it turns out the rich dude trying to manipulate them is working with Dubenich. It's impressive how well they pull off the reveal. But he's not the only big call back to Season One we get here. Parker's Alice White persona and the friend she made - Peggy - come back. Hurley comes back.

The Van Gogh Job is the best, best, best of the season. It doesn't pull any punches in saying "hey, this romance we're doing between a white girl and a black man? that used to be illegal. It is in living memory that these relationships could get black men lynched by racists with little to no repercussions. And talented black men would have their achievements handed to white men because 'that's the way it was.'" It puts the main actors into the roles of characters in the past just to make sure it hits hard because we know these faces. We're emotionally attached to them. Holy shit this episode.

The Hot Potato Job where the problem kid of the school field trip Nate and Parker hijack just needed people to treat him like a person, not a problem, to behave well. The way he bonds with Hardison and helps them smuggle the potato out at the end? I love this kid, I want to learn he's working for Leverage International one day.

The Carnival Job where the mark's kid is kidnapped and they burn their con because a child's life is more important. Eliot fighting concussed and with his eyes shut because he will be damned if he fails to save this little girl.

The Grave Danger Job managing to be the best 'buried alive' plot I have ever seen on a tv show (and it is a staple plot of tv shows from the 90s/early 2000s). They steal a police car and an ambulance for the sirens. It gets series with Parker calling Hardison 'Alec' and being at the most emotional we've seen her all show.

The Office Job being done in the style of The Office (and then the mockumentary follow up in the behind the scenes featurettes) is just priceless.

The Girls Night Out/The Boys Night Out Jobs being so perfect in how they intertwine over the course of the same night.

The Radio Job showing us just how much Jimmy Ford loves his son.

The Last Dam Job giving us "my son would be ashamed of me for killing someone. My father? My father would buy me an ice cream." Dubenich ultimately destroying himself while Nate walks away.

Season 5 is my favorite season, though. It's the culmination of where the show was heading from the start. Parker has grown so much from the first season that she's able to run her own con - something Sophie and Hardison have both attempted and failed - and with the rest of the team out of town to boot. Parker and Hardison clearly got the brew pub as a gift for Eliot, while realizing he'd never accept if they don't reverse psychology him into it. Sophie buying the theater and finally discovering her talent for directing as well as overcoming the blocks that kept her from bringing her prodigious acting talent to the stage floor. Nate achieving the goal that's driven him since the start of Season Two.

I love the French Connection Job for giving us more Chef Eliot. His relationship with food is lovely and this is my favorite exploration of it. Parker finally learning to appreciate beauty in art because of how she grows to understand how Eliot connects with cooking and learns to appreciate the artistry that goes into food.

The Gimme a K Job hits home personally for me - one of my sister's best friends (who was also the older sister of one of my best friends) was a cheerleader who hit her head in a cheer stunt gone wrong where the spotter messed up. It took a very, very long time for her to truly recover from that concussion (and thus why I know tv shows are bullshit for having people just walk that off) and knowing her injuries might have been less severe if cheerleading safety were taken more seriously...

The DB Cooper Job being another excellent episode built around Flashbacks staring the main cast in different roles. Agent McSweeten has to know something is up with the Leverage Crew, but he clearly respects and admires all of them. Especially Parker.

The Broken Wing Job giving us Parker on her own putting together a temporary crew from the wait staff and pulling off a con all on her own, while injured. (The whole reason why she wasn't with the team, in fact.) And it's so damn impressive of her.

The Rundown Job being as close to confirmed Eliot/Parker/Hardison as we're going to get outside of word of god (which we have!!!!) and it's beautiful to watch them work together without Nate and Sophie. It's also foreshadowing for them working together when Nate and Sophie retire.

Similarly, The Frame Up Job gives us how far Nate and Sophie have come as a couple and is as close to Nate/Sophie/Sterling as we'll probably ever get. (No word of god on this one, just me being overwhelmed by Nate and Sterling's impressive divorced-couple vibes. They're more divorced than Nate and Maggie, who are actually divorced.)

The White Rabbit Job where they almost push too far with their gaslighting routine but Parker is able to save the day by connecting to their mark in a way she didn't know how to when the show began. Her character development is such a highlight of she series so the repeated payoffs in this season are just... golden.

Every single thing about The Long Goodbye Job. Once again, all the callbacks to previous seasons. Eliot/Parker/Hardison being heavily hinted at again. Sterling letting Nate go because Nate was right, no matter what the law says. Parker inheriting the lead of the team from Nate. Sophie performing on stage the same play from the pilot, but being excellent at it this time. The episode's whole plot - again, cannot stress this enough - being a callback/having been foreshadowed by the season 2 premiere.

As you can tell, I love this show. It's beautiful and incredible and I was so, so relieved when Leverage Redemption premiered and I could instantly see that they'd done the impossible all over again. They'd recaptured the magic of the original show.

#kitkatt0430 answers #kitkatt0430 rambles #thank you so much for asking #i love leverage soooo much #leverage #fandom meta #leverage meta

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lol-jackles · 7 months ago

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Something I've been wondering with this lawsuit going on pertaining to Danneel and Jensen... given CMP was in a contract with WB at the time Bryan was struck by lightning, even though they were all listed individually, does it fall on WB to foot the whole bill if Brian were to settle or are all of them individually responsible since they were named individually?

WB and CMP will settle with Bryan. CW will likely get out of the lawsuit because it's the studio runs the set, not the network.

WB is among the worst studio for set conditions. Combined with a production team with almost no experience, constant reshoots due to poor control quality, leading to them getting really behind and being under pressure to make it up. All the ingredients for disaster. They're lucky no one died.

Producers would be liable and partially responsible because they should be aware of safety complaints on set. Production companies have insurance for these kind of things because they are naturally the target for liabilities. Even if Jensen wasn't on the set or we don't know how involved he is with the production, he and Danneel were on their social media accounts posting about this regularly when the show was aired.

I'm sure WB will claim that they did not oversee or control any aspect of The Winchesters and it was CMP who hired the director Showalter who made the call to film in bad weather, that all they did was cut a check, and all responsibility should fall to CMP and any other production companies behind the show. Bryan's lawyer will say it's ridiculous to say that WB's investment involves not oversight on how their money was being used. CMP's lawyer will likely say that it the studio's own production coordinator and safety officers that gave bad advice. Either way, both WB and CMP/Jensen will settle with Bryan.

#CMP #Chaos Machine Productions

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beguines · 2 months ago

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Plant scientists have noted that under similar environmental conditions, and with all sprayers adjusted properly, herbicide drift is "generally greater from aerial application than from ground application," and that the use of ground-based field crop sprayers through tractors reduces the likelihood of extensive drift. In an investigation I led with the team at Forensic Architecture, with close consultation and research supervision by Eyal Weizman, we were able to show that once sprayed, the herbicidal toxins sprayed by the IOF along the border are carried by the wind deep into Gaza—with wind speed and direction relative to the flight path as key environmental factors in determining the final impact of herbicidal spraying. But here too, environmental factors coincide with an apartheid structure for protection, recognition, and compensation that underpins the State of Israel. The colonial erasure of Palestinian existence through herbicidal warfare became further apparent after a confirmed the spraying by the Israeli army in 2015, Israeli residents of Kibbutz Nahal Oz living immediately on the other side of the Gazan border experienced unexpected agricultural loss and damage. On 16 November 2015, spraying for sterilization of agricultural land was carried out by the Northern Battalion of the Gaza Division of the army for operational purposes. Wheat crops sown in October 2015 in that area were scorched and dried up with no ability for growth on a land spanning 50 dunams. The toxicity of this spraying also prevented the Kibbutz from planning watermelons for the following season. Demanding compensation "following unsupervised spraying activity on active agricultural lands," the MOD paid the Kibbutz 61,900 NIS under a compromise agreement.

The case of Kibbutz Nahal Oz reaffirms that spraying herbicides by air is an inaccurate and less readily controllable method of application. The damages also confirm that low-growing crops are more vulnerable to this poison in various harvest periods as the toxins remain in the soil across seasons. However, while Israeli-Jewish farmers qualify for compensation, Palestinian farmers a few hundred meters on the other side of the border perimeter fall under the legal framework of Israeli military law and are denied the same protections and accountability. In June 2016, a claim on behalf of eight farmers in Gaza was filed by Al-Mezan, Gisha, and Adalah, seeking compensation for damages caused by aerial crop-spraying by the Israeli army in al-Zanna and Abasan al-Jadeda, in the border area east of Khan Younes. The complaints amounted to a total affected land area of 81.3 dunams, with an immediate loss for farmers estimated at $14,550, plus approximately $18,500 in water costs required for irrigation and replanting of the destroyed fields. In one of the complaints put forth, the herbicides reached a four-dunam agricultural plot farmed by Abu Ta'aymeh approximately 700 meters from the buffer zone inside Gaza, reportedly destroying the harvest and causing significant harm to the land itself. The petition held that the Israeli military's aerial spraying of herbicides constitutes a violation of both Israeli constitutional and administrative law, as well as of international humanitarian and human rights laws. According to the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949) and Additional Protocols (1977), parties to a conflict must protect civilians and humanitarian interests during wartime and occupation, must refrain from causing harm or damage to civilian targets such as agricultural lands, and must respect the right of protected civilians to access food. The Israeli military's spraying of herbicides on agricultural crops which serve as a basic food source, while also taking into account the ongoing closure of Gaza, constitutes a violation of Article 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Yet, on 2 November 2017, the Insurance and Compensation Section of the Israeli MOD notified the human rights organizations of its decision not to provide compensation or reparations to Gazan farmers. Although recognizing its involvement in the spraying, the MOD does not hold itself accountable to the civilian population in Gaza, nor is it willing to provide reparations in accordance with its international obligations. Moreover, Gisha reports that the MOD has "failed to explain why the spraying was carried out, and why the same result could not be achieved using less destructive methods." To date, no Palestinian farmers have ever been compensated for damages to their crops resulting from herbicide spraying.

Shourideh C. Molavi, Environmental Warfare in Gaza: Colonial Violence and New Landscapes of Resistance

#shourideh c. molavi #environmental warfare in gaza

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polifyxapp · 10 months ago

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#insurance claim complaints

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f--e-u-e-r-t-r-u-n-k-e--n · 1 year ago

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The End of the World or the End of Capitalism?: Colletion of Notes.

>"Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action". -Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? >[Capital] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation -Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei.

>"In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci said that in periods of crisis the old is dying and the new is not yet born. While Gramsci drew attention to the morbid symptoms of such a situation (in 1930) our crisis is different, and I want to draw attention to more hopeful symptoms (waiting to be born) of our present crisis of capitalist hegemony. The viability of initiatives trying to avoid competition with the market and escape from the hierarchic state rests on many untested assumptions. The first assumption is that those who do essential day-to-day tasks would continue to do their jobs in a PCC in preference to large corporations and their local affiliates: a multitude of people who now work in private or public sectors, directly or indirectly, establishing PCCs in their local communities producing food, organizing transport, setting up places of learning and transmission of skills, providing healthcare, running power systems, and so on. PCCs already do this all over the world on a small scale but such initiatives struggle within capitalist markets. Community-Supported Agriculture schemes in various parts of the world represent a first step on a long and difficult road to self-sufficiency in this sphere". - Leslie Sklair, The End of the World or the End of Capitalism? >"In 1869, New York neurologist George Beard used the term "neurasthenia" to describe a very broad condition caused by the exhaustion of the nervous system, which was thought to be particularly found in "civilized, intellectual communities." In 1998, Swedish psychiatrists Marie Åsberg and Åke Nygren investigated a surge of depression health insurance claims in Sweden. They found that the symptoms of many cases did not match the typical presentation of depression. Complaints like fatigue and decreased cognitive ability dominated, and many believed their working conditions to be the cause" >"The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation". -Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. >"Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality, of engendering dreams. It is a matter not only of plastic articulation and modulation expressing an ephemeral beauty, but of a modulation producing influences in accordance with the eternal spectrum of human desires and the progress in realizing them. The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be a means of knowledge and a means of action." -Ivan Chtcheglov, Formulary for a New Urbanism

>"To you, this gathering is just one more boring event. The Situationist International, however, considers that while this assemblage of so many art critics as an attraction of the Brussels Fair is laughable, it is also significant.

Inasmuch as modern cultural thought has proved itself completely stagnant for over twenty-five years, and inasmuch as a whole era that has understood nothing and changed nothing is now becoming aware of its failure, its spokesmen are striving to transform their activities into institutions. They thus solicit official recognition from the completely outmoded but still materially dominant society, for which most of them have been loyal watchdogs.

The main shortcoming of modern art criticism is that it has never looked at the culture as a whole nor at the conditions of an experimental movement that is perpetually superseding it. At this point in time the increased domination of nature permits and necessitates the use of superior powers in the construction of life." -The Situationist International, Action in Belgium Against the International Assembly of Art Critics >"Karoshi (Japanese: 過労死, Hepburn: Karōshi), which can be translated into "overwork death", is a Japanese term relating to occupation-related sudden death.

The most common medical causes of karoshi deaths are heart attacks and strokes due to stress and malnourishment or fasting. Mental stress from the workplace can also cause workers to commit suicide in a phenomenon known as karōjisatsu (過労自殺)" >"The limits of capitalism are not fixed by fiat, but defined (and redefined) pragmatically and improvisationally. This makes capitalism very much like the Thing in John Carpenter's film of the same name: a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact. Capital, Deleuze and Guattari says, is a ‘motley painting of everything that ever was'; a strange hybrid of the ultra-modern and the archaic. In the years since Deleuze and Guattari wrote the two volumes of their Capitalism And Schizophrenia, it has seemed as if the deterritorializing impulses of capitalism have been confined to finance, leaving culture presided over by the forces of reterritorialization.

This malaise, the feeling that there is nothing new, is itself nothing new of course. We find ourselves at the notorious ‘end of history' trumpeted by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyama's thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a ‘terminal beach' was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche's most prescient pages are those in which he describes the ‘oversaturation of an age with history'. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism', in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering', a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche's Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness." -Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

>The Socialist Patients' Collective (German: Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv, and known as the SPK) is a patients' collective founded in Heidelberg, West Germany, in February 1970, by Wolfgang Huber (born 1935). The kernel of the SPK's ideological program is summated in the slogan, "Turn illness into a weapon", which is representative of an ethos that is continually and actively practiced under the new title, Patients' Front/Socialist Patients' Collective, PF/SPK(H). The first collective, SPK, declared its self-dissolution in July 1971 as a strategic withdrawal but in 1973 Huber proclaimed the continuity of SPK as Patients' Front.

The SPK assumes that illness exists as an undeniable fact and believe that it is caused by the capitalist system. The SPK promotes illness as the protest against capitalism and considers illness as the foundation on which to create the human species. The SPK is opposed to doctors, considering them to be the ruling class of capitalism and responsible for poisoning the human species. The most widely recognized text of the PF/SPK(H) is the communique, SPK – Turn illness into a weapon, which has prefaces by both the founder of the SPK, Wolfgang Huber, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Rejecting the roles and ideology associated with the notion of the revolutionary as scientific explainer, they stated in Turn Illness into a Weapon that whoever claims they want to "observe the bare facts dispassionately" is either an "idiot" or a "dangerous criminal."

#anti capitalism #leftblr #SPK #Mark Fisher #Leslie Sklair #the international situationist #guy debord #end of the world #postmodernism #postmodern #marxism #socialism #capitalism #Colletion of notes #Colletion of Notes #Collection of Notes

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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Private equity finally delivered Sarah Palin's death panels

Tonight (Apr 26), I’ll be in Burbank, signing Red Team Blues at Dark Delicacies at 6PM.

Remember “death panels”? Sarah Palin promised us that universal healthcare was a prelude to a Stalinist nightmare in which unaccountable bureaucrats decided who lived or died based on a cost-benefit analysis of what it would cost to keep you alive versus how much your life was worth.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

Palin was right that any kind of healthcare rationing runs the risk of this kind of calculus, where we weight spending $10,000 to extend a young, healthy person’s life by 40 years against $1,000 to extend an elderly, disabled person’s life by a mere two years.

It’s a ghastly, nightmarish prospect — as anyone who uses the private healthcare system knows very well. More than 27m Americans have no health insurance, and millions more have been tricked into buying scam “cost-sharing” systems run by evangelical grifters:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/02/health/christian-health-care-insurance.html

But for the millions of Americans with insurance, death panels are an everyday occurrence, or at least a lurking concern. Anyone who pays attention knows that insurers have entire departments designed to mass-reject legitimate claims and stall patients who demand that the insurer lives up to its claim:

https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/khn-podcast-an-arm-and-a-leg-how-to-shop-for-health-insurance-november-24-2021/

The private healthcare sector is designed to deny care. Its first duty is to its shareholders, not its patients, and every dollar spent on care is a dollar not available for dividends. The ideal insurance customer pays their premiums without complaint, and then pays cash for all their care on top of it.

All that was true even before private equity started buying up and merging whole swathes of the US healthcare system (or “healthcare” “system”). The PE playbook — slash wages, sell off physical plant, slash wages, reduce quality and raise prices — works in part because of its scale. These aren’t the usual economies of scale. Rather the PE strategy is to buy and merge all the similar businesses in a region, so customers, suppliers and workers have nowhere else to turn.

That’s bad enough when it’s aimed at funeral homes, pet groomers or any of the other sectors that have been bigfooted by PE:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken

But it’s especially grave when applied to hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#looted

Or emergency room physicians:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/14/unhealthy-finances/#steins-law

And if you think that’s a capitalist hellscape nightmare, just imagine how PE deals with dying, elderly people. Yes, PE has transformed the hospice industry, and it’s even worse than you imagine.

Yesterday, the Center for Economic and Policy Research published “Preying on the Dying: Private Equity Gets Rich in Hospice Care,” written by some of the nation’s most valiant PE slayers: Eileen Appelbaum, Rosemary Batt and Emma Curchin:

https://cepr.net/report/preying-on-the-dying-private-equity-gets-rich-in-hospice-care/

Medicare pays private hospices $203-$1,462 per day to take care of dying old people — seniors that a doctor has certified to have less than six months left. That comes to $22.4b/year in public transfers to private hospices. If hospices that $1,462 day-rate, they have lots of duties, like providing eight hours’ worth of home care. But if the hospice is content to take the $203/day rate, they are not required to do anything. Literally. It’s just free money for whatever the operator feels like doing for a dying elderly person, including doing nothing at all.

As Appelbaum told Maureen Tkacik for her excellent writeup in The American Prospect: “Why anybody commits fraud is a mystery to me, because you can make so much money playing within the guidelines the way the payment scheme operates.”

https://prospect.org/health/2023-04-26-born-to-die-hospice-care/

In California, it’s very, very easy to set up a hospice. Pay $3,000, fill in some paperwork (or don’t — no one checks it, ever), and you’re ready to start caring for beloved parents, grandparents, sisters, brothers, aunts and uncles as they depart this world. You do get a site inspection, but don’t worry — you aren’t required to bring your site up to code until after you’re licensed, and again, they never check — not even if there are multiple complaints. After all, no one at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has the job of tracking complaints.

This is absolute catnip for private equity — free government money, no obligations, no enforcement, and the people you harm are literally dying and can’t complain. What’s not to like? No wonder PE companies have spent billions “rolling up” hospices across the country. There are 591 hospices in Van Nuys, CA alone — but at least 30 of them share a single medical director:

https://auditor.ca.gov/reports/2021-123/index.html#pg34A

Medicare caps per-patient dispersals at $32,000, which presents an interesting commercial question for remorseless, paperclip-maximizing, grandparent-devouring private equity ghouls: do you take in sick patients (who cost more, but die sooner) or healthy patients (cost less, potentially live longer)?

In Van Nuys, the strategy is to bring in healthy patients and do nothing. 51% of Van Nuys hospice patients are “live discharged” — that is, they don’t die. This figure — triple the national average — is “a reliable sign of fraud.”

There are so many hospice scams and most of them are so stupid that it takes a monumental failure of oversight not to catch and prevent them. Here’s a goodun: hospices bribe doctors to “admit” patients to a hospice without their knowledge. The hospice bills for the patient, but otherwise has no contact with them. This can go on for a long time, until the patient tries to visit the doctor and discovers that their Medicare has been canceled (you lose your Medicare once you go into hospice).

Another scam: offer patients the loosest narcotics policy in town, promising all the opioids they want. Then, once their benefits expire, let them die of an overdose (don’t worry, people who die in hospice don’t get autopsies):

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/12/05/how-hospice-became-a-for-profit-hustle

You can hire con artists to serve as your sales-force, and have them talk vulnerable, elderly people into enrolling in hospice care by convincing them they have nothing to live for and should just die already and not burden their loved ones any longer.

Hospitals and hospices also collude: hospitals can revive dying patients, ignoring their Do Not Resuscitate orders, so they can be transfered to a hospice and die there, saving the hospital from adding another dead patient to their stats.CMS’s solution is perverse: they’re working with Humana to expand Medicare Advantage (a scam that convinces patients to give up Medicare and enrol in a private insurance program, whose private-sector death panel rejects 13% of claims that Medicare would have paid for). The program will pay private companies $32,000 for every patient who agrees to cease care and die. As our friends on the right like to say, “incentives matter.”

Appelbaum and co have a better idea:

Do more enforcement: increase inspections and audits.

Block mergers and rollups of hospices that make them too big to fail and too big to jail.

Close existing loopholes.

They should know. Appelbaum and her co-authors write the best, most incisive analysis of private equity around. For more of their work, check out their proposal for ending pension-plan ripoffs by Wall Street firms:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/05/mego/#A09948

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Burbank, Mountain View, Berkeley, San Francisco, Portland, Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[Image ID: An industrial meat grinder, fed by a conveyor belt. A dead, elderly man is traveling up the conveyor, headed for the grinder's intake. The grinder is labelled 'HOSPICE' in drippy Hallowe'en lettering. It sits in a spreading pool of blood.]

Image: Seydelmann (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GW300_1.jpghttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GW300_1.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #cepr #medicare advantage #medicare #hospice #aca #aging #death panels #fraud #california #preying on the dying

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conradscrime · 10 months ago

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The Twisted Crimes of Catholic Priest Hans Schmidt

January 28, 2024

Hans Schmidt was born in 1881 in a Bavarian town called Aschaffenburg. It was said that both of Hans' parents sides of the family had struggled with mental illness.

Hans was beaten by his father as a child and often watched his mother get beaten too. Hans also had a fascination with drinking blood and was interested in bisexuality. He was also fascinated with the death of animals, often watching farm animals die at the village slaughterhouse.

Hans was ordained as a Catholic priest on December 23, 1904 by Bishop Kirstein, despite many people believing he did not have the proper morals or mental capacity to do this kind of work.

Hans began molesting altar boys, was having affairs with various women, and was involved with sex workers. Many fellow priests complained to the Bishop about Hans, and eventually he had to move to the US in 1909, as they stopped giving him parish assignments due to the complaints.

He was assigned to St. John's Roman Catholic Church in Louisville, Kentucky, but was soon transfered to St. Boniface's Church in New York as he got into it with a senior pastor.

Hans met a woman named Anna Aumüller in New York in 1912. She was the housekeeper of the church and had emigrated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1910. Hans later claimed he had heard a "voice from God" telling him to love Anna. Anna originally turned down Hans, but eventually engaged in a sexual relationship with him.

In December 1912, Hans began a secret sexual relationship with a New York dentist named Ernest Muret. The two men began operating a counterfeiting ring together.

Hans was then transfered to another church in Harlem but it did not stop him from keeping his secret relationship with Anna. The two even got married secretly, a ceremony Hans performed.

During sex with Anna, Hans later said he received a command from God, telling him Anna needed to be sacrificed. Hans said it was very persistent so he told Anna and she called him crazy. Anna began pregnant shortly after this.

On September 2, 1913, Hans went to the apartment him and Anna had been pretending to live in as a married couple. Hans slit Anna's throat while she was sleeping and then drank her blood. He also raped her while she bled and dismembered her body, throwing pieces of it into the river.

Anna's torso washed up on Cliffside Park and Weehawken, New Jersey. Hans had used a pillowcase to wrap part of Anna's body and there was still a tag on it. This was traced to Hans, after he had bought the pillowcases on August 26, 1913 using the name A. Van Dyke.

Police staked out the apartment for three days, but Hans did not return so they broke into the apartment to search it. The floors had recently been scrubbed, but dried blood was found on the walls. A bloody knife was found in the kitchen. Men's clothing with the name A. Van Dyke sewn into the clothes were found, but letters in the apartment were addressed to Hans Schmidt.

Lots of the letters were sent from women in Germany, but most of them were sent from Anna. This led the police to the address Anna had provided, but she was not there. They traced everything back to Hans who had admitted immediately that he killed Anna.

Hans plead guilty by reason of insanity. Due to his family's history with mental illness many thought he was insane. However, many people who interacted with Hans did think he was sane. This led to a hung jury in December 1913.

The second trial began two weeks later and it was found that Hans had actually taken out a $5000 life insurance policy in a woman's name of Bertha Zech, who was posing as Anna.

On February 5, 1914, after three hours, the jury found Hans guilty of first degree murder. He was sentenced to death. In December 1914, Hans admitted he was faking being insane during the trials. He also accused Ernest, the dentist he was having an affair with of accidentally killing Anna while performing an abortion.

On February 18, 1916, Hans went in the electric chair at Sing Sing. In a muffled voice, his last words were saying goodbye to his mother. Hans' family wanted to ship his body to Germany, but because of World War I it was impossible to do so. Hans was buried in New York, but his family requested that the location be a secret.

Hans has been suspected in at least 4 other murders. He had been seen with a woman named Helen Green, who then disappeared. She was never found. Hans was also seen with a woman he claimed was his wife when he first moved to the US. This woman disappeared.

The apartment Hans lived in he was seen with a 5 year old boy in his living room by the owner of the building. Hans said the boy was his son, but he then disappeared. He told the owner his son's name was August Van Dyke.

Hans was a suspect in the murder of 9 year old Alma Kellner, whose body was found burned in the basement of St. John's Church in Louisville, Kentucky, which he worked. Her body had been burned and the killer attempted to dismember her.

It was eventually discovered that the church janitor, Joseph Wendling was responsible. He was sentenced to life in prison, but Alma's uncle requested for him to be pardoned and he was deported to France in 1935.

#true crime #crime #unsolved mysteries #unsolved #murder #homicide #unsolved murder #unsolved case #solved #mystery #kentucky #killer #serial killer

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mybskindia · 1 year ago

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#complaints against insurance companies #claim rejection-related issues #grievance redressal process #claim settlement

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propaganda-inc · 1 year ago

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Thought I'd post some more propaganda, since people are really getting mad at ONLY /u/Spez for this. For the people in the back that are still using Reddit- this is ultimately the reason why I left Reddit.

TL;DR: Yes, /u/spez is the CEO of Reddit, but now he's beholden to the true owners of Reddit- Literal white supremacists, Chinese businesses looking to subvert American democratic values, and businesses that are desperately looking for new ways to make money after a pandemic has gutted the people dry of all the money it could take.

Let's get a little Pepe Silvia in here, shall we? Setting mood music:

youtube

Reddit was originally founded by /u/Spez (real name Steve Huffman), Alexis O'Hanion, and Aaron Swartz (RIP). In 2006, Conde Nast bought Reddit. So, if you read Vogue, Pitchfork, Wired, Vanity Fair, & the New Yorker, you may have gotten some of the same content owned by the same company- just through a magazine rather than Reddit. Also, since June 2020, Conde Nast has claimed that their advertising revenue has gone down 45% have gone down dramatically since the pandemic, alongside the cancellation of major publications by Conde Nast. Buut in 2017, Reddit was made into an independent subsidiary by Advance Publications. Sounds like an innocent enough name, until you look at which companies these lovely people own:

That Charter Communication, is just a fancy name for the lovely ISP known as Spectrum- Better known to some of our older folks as Time Warner Cable. You know, one of the ISPs so hated in the United States that they actively changed their name so that people wouldn't recognize them doing their dirty work again?

Isn't it interesting that one of the main complaints by Huffman is that Reddit isn't getting it's due in advertising revenue? Huh. I wonder where he's getting that from. But that's only one section of the shit sandwich. Let's talk about some of the lovely* investors that Reddit's had on aboard since 2006. The list is.... interesting. 2014: A group of investors, including Marc Andressen (an investor in nearly all of the major social media networks that exist), Peter Thiel (a literal white supremacist), and for some reason, Snoop Dogg and fucking Jared Leto. 2017: Advance Publications buys Conde Nast and subsequently Reddit, raising its valuation to about $1.8 billion. 2019: Tencent (you know, the CHINESE VIDEO GAME COMPANY THAT HAS BANNED PLAYERS FROM THEIR GAMES FOR SUPPORTING HONG KONG DEMOCRACY DEMONSTRATIONS) buys a 5% stake in the company. Did I mention that Tencent is also the largest gaming company in the world? 2021: Fidelity Investments(??? an insurance firm and mutual fund????) decides to add another $700 million to the pot, giving them a whole stake as well too. So, let's tie this all together. Yes, /u/spez is the CEO of Reddit, but now he's beholden to the true owners of Reddit- Literal white supremacists, Chinese businesses looking to subvert American democratic values, and businesses that are desperately looking for new ways to make money after a pandemic has gutted them dry. Of course Huffman is going to stay the course on this one- his job literally depends on it in the first place. All of the people that make this site (what other social media network do you know that doesn't pay it's mods and is valued at $10 billion dollars) ? have been tossed to the side in favor of making money. Remember this:

Reddit and its investors do not give a fuck about their community.

They do not give a fuck about their moderators. They do not give a fuck about disability rights. Most of all? They don't give a fuck about you.

#reddit api #reddit refugee #reddit blackout #reddit protest #r/196 #pepe silvia #conspiracy #Youtube

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mariacallous · 4 months ago

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The imposition of the largest sanctions program since the Second World War in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine remains a key tool for limiting the Kremlin’s war machine. But it has inadvertently also had substantial secondary and tertiary effects, from the rewiring of European energy networks to myriad lawsuits over what insurers should have to pay for the Kremlin’s seizure of over 400 Western aircraft.

These unintended consequences have garnered far less attention than the intended ones, but the former are still multiplying and there are tens of billions of dollars already at stake in them. While sanctions rightfully continue to be tweaked to maximize their impact, policymakers have not paid due attention to the legal spats and sanctions challenges that have already arisen in their wake. Their outcome will greatly determine the effectiveness of the sanctions and the extent to which the Kremlin or the West will bear their cost.

This is not the first time the West has had to deal with such issues. At the outbreak of the war with Japan in 1941, the U.S. seized assets and businesses owned by Japanese nationals on its soil, acting under the Trading with the Enemy Act. These actions, while directed primarily at the war-time adversary, inevitably wrought a lot of collateral damage, as investors in Japanese enterprises, their creditors, or depositors in Japanese-owned banks, were often the American public.

It took years to untangle the resulting mess. And yet, when all was said and done, the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress acted to protect the interests of these investors, and ensure both the orderly liquidation and the equitable distribution of proceeds to those affected. Thus, the depositors of Yokohama Specie Bank, had their claims on the “yen certificates” preserved in a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967, allowing the certificate holders to recover at least some economic value from proceeds of the bank’s liquidation.

In short, there is a blueprint for handling the legal spats that result from waging economic war. That blueprint, in broad terms, is to act forcefully against the economic interests of the enemy, yet make full use of the institutions of law and justice for the interests of affected parties at home.

Today, as Russia and the West remain engaged in a full-scale economic war, this blueprint seems largely ignored. What we see instead, is perhaps the opposite: The adversary ruthlessly subverting the toolkit of the “rules-based international order” for its benefit with lawsuits that seem to lead Western institutions down the path of treading softly where Russian interests are concerned, while Western investors and, of course, Ukraine take the brunt of the costs and receive little or no protection.

Consider the June G-7 summit, where member states united on a plan for using the returns earned by Russia’s $300 billion in frozen sovereign assets to aid Ukraine, of which $200 billion are held as cash and securities at the Belgian financial company Euroclear. Leaders of the G7 have agreed to effectively monetize the future income flow on the frozen assets, and turn it into an immediate $50 billion in loans to Ukraine. This is as stark an acknowledgement as possible that Russia’s assets will not be returned to it any time soon, even if outright seizure is off the table for now following a chorus of complaints that doing so would not be compatible with international law.

Nevertheless, Brussels has insisted Kyiv will not receive any of the five billion euros that the frozen assets have generated thus far and continues to tread softly against Russia and its proxies. The reason: Euroclear itself is worried about lawsuits brought by Russia over this action and its freezing of other securities affected by the Western sanctions regime.

According to Euroclear, it is facing “a significant number of legal proceedings…almost exclusively in Russian courts,” where “the probability of unfavourable rulings is high since Russia does not recognize the international sanctions.”

This reveals a fundamental flaw in the arguments made by proponents of the so-called “rules-based international order.” Russia can appeal to its structures too—and, slowly but surely, make sanctions even less effective than they already are. Meanwhile in the West, the powers that be continue to dither, and ignore the blueprints for economic confrontation from the past.

Russia’s efforts here are already advancing: thus the suits against Euroclear, and the efforts of Mikhail Fridman—the sanctioned Russian oligarch—to return the nearly $16 billion of his former assets through an arbitration claim under the Soviet-Belgium-Luxembourg Bilateral Investment Treaty. As its name gives away, the pact actually even predates Russia’s establishment as an independent state and was inherited from the Soviet Union. It has not been updated since, but cannot be so easily unwound—its final clause notes that it applies to investments made before its hypothetical abrogation for 15 years thereafter.

It is also this treaty that Russia would ultimately use to try and have its domestic court rulings against Euroclear and other Western institutions enforced. We can be sure that there is more to come: Russia has already promised “endless legal challenges” if its assets or the income on these assets are seized. One of the largest such clashes is likely imminent, and will require politicians decide how to proceed. On 7 June the Permanent Court of Arbitration awarded Uniper, which was taken over after being bailed out by the German state, €13 billion in damages from Gazprom over Putin’s decision to toggle Europe’s gas taps in 2022, which forced Germany to bail out Uniper. A Russian arbitration court, on the other hand, has awarded Gazprom €14 billion from Uniper in the dispute. Berlin aims to re-IPO Uniper but will hardly be able to do so with such an albatross hanging above it.

It is therefore all the more remarkable that Western policymakers have not yet addressed how they intend to overcome such risks, nor why Russia remains permitted to take advantage of Western legal system under circumstances of a full-scale economic warfare.

Potential vulnerability to legal action by Russia and its proxies, and a lack of credible or coherent response by the West appears to have led Euroclear to take a number of actions that are clearly not in the Western interest and are often inconsistent with its past practices.

The clearing house has, for example, refused to label a number of securities as being in default in cases where the underlying entity has chosen to default rather than being forced to into default by sanctions. This has not just affected Russian corporate borrowers but even the debts of the government of neighboring Belarus. Belarus’ sovereign Eurobonds that were due to be repaid in early 2023 and are still unpaid, and thus in “default”; but Euroclear has instead designated these as “matured”. This semantic choice has significant implications, blocking the clearing and settlement of these bonds and thus impacting Western creditors – while Belarus, a key ally to Russia in its war, remains (intentionally or not) shielded from the full consequences of its default.

Good explanations for these actions are lacking, but it does appear that Euroclear has, in effect, accepted Belarus’ purported excuse: that sanctions prevent it from paying. But not all sanctions are a barrier to payment—certainly not those that have been imposed on Belarus. Notably, the Development Bank of Belarus, which faces a similar sanctions regime as the sovereign government, successfully made its coupon payment in November 2022, which was, albeit with delay, passed on to the bondholders by Euroclear. Suspension of payments, then, is simply a policy choice, and indeed, the Development Bank ultimately followed the sovereign and suspended payments as well, and this year failed to repay its Eurobonds at maturity. Euroclear took the same action with respect to the Development Bank’s bonds: they are marked as “matured” instead of “in default”.

This sort of leniency, and, seemingly, a fear of calling a “default” on a Russian ally, is without precedent, and completely at odds with the approaches by rating agencies, investors, the World Bank, the ISDA Determinations Committee (as it relates to Russia) and Euroclear’s own actions as to other sovereigns. In the recent past, the defaulted bonds of Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Zambia are all correctly marked by Euroclear as “in default” and continue to settle.

For Western creditors of Belarus, its Development Bank and the similarly placed Russian corporate borrowers, the block on trading and settlement by Euroclear is clearly harmful. For Russia and its ally, the lack of a “default” label by a key player in the Western financial infrastructure looks oddly protective. It also makes a mockery of the fact that sanctions are meant to constrain the inflow of funds to Russia and its allies instead of limiting their outflow and reducing the resources available to Russia and its allies to pursue an unjust war.

How should Western policymakers respond to these challenges? Firstly, by looking at the existing playbook for economic war, and treating as many claims as standard defaults and bankruptcies as possible. Secondly, by recognizing that the “international rules-based order” is in fact largely a set of established norms, particularly when it comes to creditor disputes, and that Russia has spent at least the last decade seeking to undermine these—beginning with its attempt to muck up Ukraine’s restructuring in 2014, something that continues to wind its way through the English courts.

That is the least that can be done to protect Western interests, free up more funds for Ukraine, and defang the Kremlin’s attempts to weaponize international law and institutions.

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