Saturday, February 23, 2013

It is Starting: Florida doesn't have enough doctors for Medicaid expansion

It is Starting: Florida doesn't have enough doctors for Medicaid expansion

TALLAHASSEE, FL

 Brace yourself for longer lines at the doctor's office.

Whether you're employed and insured, elderly and on Medicare, or poor and covered by Medicaid, the Florida Medical Association says there's a growing shortage of doctors — especially specialists — available to provide you with medical care.
And if the Florida Legislature goes along with Gov. Rick Scott's recommendation to offer Medicaid coverage to an additional 1 million Floridians — part of the Affordable Care Act that takes effect next January — the FMA says that shortage will only get worse

Bottom Line: Why We Must Stop Deficits NOW

Bottom Line: Why We Must Stop Deficits NOW

These are the major spending items in the US Budget, from 1980 to today. I am ignoring all the ones that don't matter, and I'm also intentionally leaving in one foil often used by both sides of the debate for scale purposes (Education.)
Of particular interest (and alarm) is Welfare, which doubled from 2007 to 2010. But -- it appears to have come down some in the least two years and change. Therefore, while this is a problem, it is not the emergent one.
Those are the three categories on the top -- Pensions (Social Security, mostly), Health Care and Defense.
One of them is discontinuous -- Defense. It is possible that the rough tripling from roughly 1998 to today has stopped. If so then its impact on what is to come is not material.
Before you protest, please read the rest of this.
That leaves two categories -- "Pensions" and "Health Care".
Note the right scale graph, the purple dashed line. This is the reason that the so-called pundits, from Bernanke on down, all argue that we must deal with this sometime in the reasonable future, but right now we're not about to hit the wall. That is, GDP is rising in rough conformance with those three major contributors to the government's spending profile. And it is GDP (in one form or another) upon which all taxes are levied. Therefore, by first appearance, they argue, we are not about to have an imminent crack-up.
They're wrong.
Note the category called "interest" and that it has been rising much slower that has the debt over the last few years. It tracked the debt growth until approximately 1996.
This is when active manipulation took hold by both The Fed and Government.
It is when, approximately, we transferred from growth in the economy to debt-financing for consumption.
Now I want to project out a few other assumptions just a couple of years.
First, I will project forward both Pensions and Health Care to 2015, along with the Debt.

Friday, February 22, 2013

How to Keep the Sabbath - Life, Hope & Truth

How to Keep the Sabbath - Life, Hope & Truth

White Rose: The Germans who tried to topple Hitler

White Rose: The Germans who tried to topple Hitler


Lilo Furst-Ramdohr in 1942 - and today (picture: Domenic Saller)


Seventy years ago today, three German students were executed in Munich for leading a resistance movement against Hitler. Since then, the members of the White Rose group have become German national heroes - Lilo Furst-Ramdohr was one of them.

In 1943, World War II was at its height - but in Munich, the centre of Nazi power, a group of students had started a campaign of passive resistance.

Liselotte Furst-Ramdohr, already a widow at the age of 29 following her husband's death on the Russian front, was introduced to the White Rose group by her friend, Alexander Schmorell.

"I can still see Alex today as he told me about it," says Furst-Ramdohr, now a spry 99-year-old. "He never said the word 'resistance', he just said that the war was dreadful, with the battles and so many people dying, and that Hitler was a megalomaniac, and so they had to do something."


What was the White Rose?


Hans and Sophie Scholl, members of the White Rose resistance group

  • Resistance group formed in 1942 by group of Munich University students and their professor
  • Horrified by Nazism, they wrote and distributed leaflets urging Germans to oppose Hitler's regime
  • Also painted anti-Nazi slogans on buildings around Munich
  • Produced six leaflets before their arrest


Schmorell and his friends Christoph Probst and Hans Scholl had started writing leaflets encouraging Germans to join them in resisting the Nazi regime.

With the help of a small group of collaborators, they distributed the leaflets to addresses selected at random from the phone book.

Furst-Ramdohr says the group couldn't understand how the German people had been so easily led into supporting the Nazi Party and its ideology.

"They must have been able to tell how bad things were, it was ridiculous," she says.

The White Rose delivered the leaflets by hand to addresses in the Munich area, and sent them to other cities through trusted couriers.

Furst-Ramdohr never delivered the leaflets herself but hid them in a broom cupboard in her flat.

She also helped Schmorell make stencils in her flat saying "Down with Hitler", and on the nights of 8 and 15 February, the White Rose graffitied the slogan on walls across Munich.

Furst-Ramdohr remembers the activists - who were risking their lives for their beliefs - as young and naive.

One of the best-known members of the group today is Hans Scholl's younger sister Sophie, later the subject of an Oscar-nominated film, Sophie Scholl: The Final Days. Furst-Ramdohr remembers that Sophie was so scared that she used to sleep in her brother's bed.


'Fight against the Party!'

The sixth leaflet produced by the White Rose was smuggled out of the country and scattered over Germany by Allied planes.
The day of reckoning has come, the reckoning of German youth with the most repellent tyranny our nation has ever seen...
For us there is only one slogan: Fight against the Party! Get out of the party hierarchy, which wants to keep us silent!
The German name will be dishonoured forever if German youth does not rise up, to revenge and atone at once, to destroy their tormentors and build up a new spiritual Europe. Students! The German nation looks to us!
Translation: Lucy Burns


"Hans was very afraid too, but they wanted to keep going for Germany - they loved their country," she says.

On 18 February, Hans and Sophie Scholl set off on their most daring expedition yet. They planned to distribute copies of their sixth - and as it would turn out, final - leaflet at the University of Munich, where students would find them as they came out of lectures.

The siblings left piles of the leaflets around the central stairwell. But as they reached the top of the stairs, Sophie still had a number of leaflets left over - so she threw them over the balcony, to float down to the students below.

She was seen by a caretaker, who called the Gestapo. Hans Scholl had a draft for another leaflet in his pocket, which he attempted to swallow, but the Gestapo were too quick.

The Scholl siblings were arrested and tried in front of an emergency session of the People's Court. They were found guilty and executed by guillotine, along with their friend and collaborator Christoph Probst, on 22 February 1943.

Hans Scholl's last words before he was executed were: "Long live freedom!"

A copy of the sentences against members of the White Rose at the Munich district court The Scholls were tried at the People's Court of Law, now Munich's district court

The rest of the White Rose group was thrown into panic. Alexander Schmorell went straight to Lilo Forst-Ramdohr's flat, where she helped him find new clothes and a fake passport. Schmorell attempted to flee to Switzerland but was forced to turn back by heavy snow.

Returning to Munich, he was captured after a former girlfriend recognised him entering an air raid shelter during a bombing raid. He was arrested, and later executed.

Lilo Furst-Ramdohr was herself arrested on 2 March. "Two Gestapo men came to the flat and they turned everything upside down," she says.

"They went through my letters, and then one of them said 'I'm afraid you'll have to come with us'.

"They took me to the Gestapo prison in the Wittelsbach Palais on the tram - they stood behind my seat so I couldn't escape."


Find out more


Sophie Scholl's grave
Lucy Burns interviewed Liselotte Furst-Ramdohr for the BBC World Service programme Witness


Furst-Ramdohr spent a month in Gestapo custody. She was regularly interrogated about her role in the White Rose, but eventually released without charge - a stroke of luck she puts down to her status as a war widow, and to the likelihood that the Gestapo was hoping she would lead them to other co-conspirators. After her release she was followed by the secret police for some time.

She then fled Munich for Aschersleben, near Leipzig, where she married again and opened a puppet theatre.

The final White Rose leaflet was smuggled out of Germany and intercepted by Allied forces, with the result that, in the autumn of 1943, millions of copies were dropped over Germany by Allied aircraft.

Since the end of the war, the members of the White Rose have become celebrated figures, as German society has searched for positive role models from the Nazi period.

But Furst-Ramdohr doesn't like it. "At the time, they'd have had us all executed," she says of the majority of her compatriots.

She now lives alone in a small town outside Munich, where she continued to give dancing lessons up to the age of 86.

Her friend Alexander Schmorell was made a saint by the Russian Orthodox church in 2012.

"He would have laughed out loud if he'd known," says Furst-Ramdohr. "He wasn't a saint - he was just a normal person."

Lucy Burns interviewed Liselotte Furst-Ramdohr for the BBC World Service programme Witness. Listen via BBC iPlayer or browse the Witness podcast archive.

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Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Amazing Drone Technology

Amazing Drone Technology

Death from a swarm of tiny drones: U.S. Air Force releases terrifying video of tiny flybots that can can hover, stalk and even kill targets

  • Air Vehicles Directorate at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, is already developing prototypes of tiny drones that can hover
  • The Micro Air Vehicles will work in swarms to provide complex surveillance of a battlefield
  • They can also be armed with incapacitating chemicals, combustible payloads or even explosives 'for precision targeting capability'


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2281403/U-S-Air-Force-developing-terrifying-swarms-tiny-unmanned-drones-hover-crawl-kill-targets.html#ixzz2LVFMKl3o

Here IT Comes - The Fed Knows...

Here IT Comes - The Fed Knows...

THE RECOGNITION THAT THIS PATH WON'T WORK BECAUSE IT CAN'T BY THE MARKET HAS BEGUN. IT HAS BEEN SERIALLY RUN TWICE PREVIOUSLY WITH THE INTERNET AND HOUSING BUBBLES AND HAS SERIALLY FAILED TWICE! EVERYONE INVOLVED IN DOING IT, FROM THE PRESIDENT TO CONGRESS TO THE FED, KNOWS DAMN WELL THAT IT WON'T WORK BECAUSE IT HAS NOT IN THE PAST -- ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD -- EVER, BECAUSE IT CAN'T.
You're seeing the start of what happened in the early part of 2007, and rather than address this head-on our government is going to the exactly wrong thing and refuse to address it, and as a consequence we're going to get another collapse into already-depressed and therefore non-functional intervention capacity on the part of government and The Fed.

Read More:    Here IT Comes - The Fed Knows...

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