Maria devastates Puerto Rico; Paul Manafort sends SEEKRIT CODE messages to Russians: Today in Tweets

I now have no sympathy for Liam Gallagher and I still don’t know who he is.

I now have no sympathy for Liam Gallagher and I still don’t know who he is.

A really whiny musician?

And now I can’t stop wondering what word Liam Gallagher used that was bleeped out considering how all the other strong language remained uncensored. Must have been really offensive…

God, how I love Melbourne right now. All tucked away down at the bottom of the world where ISIS and North Korea and Randroids and Mother Nature don’t notice it…

If any Mammothers are affected by any of this shit going on themselves, I am so, so sorry for you. I wish you could live here.

Pregnancy
-Newborn care
-Mental health services
-Prescription drugs
-Rehab
-Birth control

Uh. So what do they cover? And aren’t these people “pro-life”? They are aware what the word “pro” means?

Admittedly, birth control isn’t covered in Germany either and I’ve always felt that was okay-ish (I have much more of a problem with pads and stuff, but mens cups fix that relatively nicely), but the rest? How is this still a debate or considered a good and valid idea by anyone except the gop and insurance companies? And why isn’t there an insurance company simply offering all those benefits anyway? They’d have clients all over, not to mention money if they play it right.
What’s wrong with a sizeable amount of the people in your country?

Okay, tomorrow I’m Resistbotting the fuck out of my Congresscritters to fucking give Puerto Rico and the USVI some fucking aid. I’m part of the 53 percent that does know they’re part of the US and they’re predicting the power will be out in PR for four to six months. Not days or weeks. Months.

That shit should not fly.

If Congress has so much vim, vigor, and money aimed at trying to kill the mainland, they can at least redirect some of that towards not trying to kill our possessions and territories so quickly.

And the death of the Cassini spacecraft a few days ago made me realize that the Marmalade Turd and his cronies also don’t give a flying shit about giving any support to NASA and to further projects to explore our solar system. These are people with fundamentally no curiosity or wonder about the larger universe. They have no nobler drives other than the basest of the animal urges. If they can’t eat it, exploit it, sleep on it, fuck it, or shit it, they don’t care. And it makes me so angry. I’m so sick of these people and what they’re doing to us and our humanity.

Fuck these people, really. Fuck them very much.

@Zaunfink
Hey, I live in Berlin and my birth control was either free or heavily subsidized depending on what I chose. If you are a woman your Frauenarzt might be able to help find cheaper options.

I’m going to have a baby in around 6 weeks, and am still reeling that I’ve moved to a country with 6 weeks pre birth leave and 14 months combined parental leave after. (That’s paid, me and my husband can take a combined 3 years if we are prepared to do some unpaid). No costs at all for me for my regular checkups, my numerous ultrasounds, my Hebamme ( a trained midwife who gives you lots of reassurance and childcare counseling and after the birth comes to your house every day for a few weeks if you want to train you and your partner in breastfeeding and baby care ( and will also look out for symptoms of post-natal depression).

I did have to pay a bit extra for specialist diagnostic tests that got recommended on account of various risk factors, but not the prices I’d expect in the US

I have been told if I want to have a IUD fitted after the birth it’s up to €400 depending on what type, but that includes all costs of purchase and implementation . That is so staggeringly cheap compared to other places I have lived.

This is not to gloat or anything, but to say the US can do this! Germany spends less on health care per capita, and it is so much ch better. The maternal death rate is less than half the US. It still has innovation and medical research and choice, although possibly less quackery and pushes for you to try expensive possible cures.

It’s universal but not quite a single payer system, instead it’s an elaborate structure of state supported insurance companies plus a few wholly private ones for expats that provide a shitty service for cheap. The reason for the latter is that your employer pays the companies regular premiums, or the state if you are below a certain point income, but if you are a contractor or business person you can choose to either pay the expensive public premiums or pay one of the cheap, mostly expat focused companies which expect their customers to be young and well off and most probably male. I think a universal single payer system is morally better, but surely the US could cope with this variation!

@ pie

they still seem to be doing OK vote wise.

When Theresa May decided to throw away a guaranteed landslide it’s a toss-up as to the cause between the fox hunting thing or suggesting wealthy people contribute towards their own care costs.

So I think any suggestion of undermining the ‘free at the point of delivery’ element is still political suicide here; and long may that continue.

@Alan Robertshaw

When Theresa May decided to throw away a guaranteed landslide it’s a toss-up as to the cause between the fox hunting thing or suggesting wealthy people contribute towards their own care costs.

And so despite showing no particular leadership ability or much in the way of political sense, she still clung on to power.

So I think any suggestion of undermining the ‘free at the point of delivery’ element is still political suicide here; and long may that continue.

The approach seems to be simply to starve the NHS by underfunding whilst simultaneously burying it under colossal amounts of debt, and then setting the economy on fire and pushing it off a cliff so there simply won’t be any money left for bailouts. Oh, and Jeremy Hunt is still health secretary, isn’t he?

Uh. So what do they cover?

As far as I could tell, the last bill only explicitly covered one thing, and I have no reason to believe that this one’s any different.

That one thing: Viagra.

I’m not kidding.

@PeeVee Looks like they are (playfully I hope) choking each other!

I must admit, I still can’t believe that KKK titles like “Grand Imperial Wizard” and “Grand Dragon” are a real thing. I mean, I know they are, I just can’t understand that they call themselves that with a straight face. No wonder they got ridiculed after Kennedy’s exposure; those titles are the kind of things a joker might make up to discredit them.

@ jesalin

you don’t kill someone and cement them into a wall because you are a domestic violence victim.

I’ll try not to turn this into a seminar, but how people react after domestic murders is quite a hot topic in legal circles. For example, it’s very common for women to tidy up afterwards. That used to be seen as trying to cover up the crime forensically; but now it’s generally recognised that it’s knowing lots of people are now going to be coming into the house and not wanting people to think it’s messy. I’ll leave it as an excercise for the reader as to what it says that women can be less embarrassed about a killing than people thinking they don’t keep a clean house. Similarly women were often portrayed as cold and calculating because they’d do things like prepare sandwiches for the kids’ lunch. But again it’s now been recognised that this is just a practical thing.

As for the burying, well in the UK it’s a bit of a cliché because of a TV programme called Brookside (that featured such an incident), but it’s not uncommon for people to panic after a killing. Although I’ll repeat the statistic that in 60% of murders it’s the murderer who calls the police. And it’s even higher in domestic murders.

I’m trying not to fall into stereotyping in looking at this as different because it’s a guy (although I do find that difficult because of my thing about MF violence being very different from FM violence). But I’m having to remind myself of a court martial I once did. It was a ‘conduct unbecoming’. Basically my guy had had a brief affair with someone. But the background was very interesting. My chap taught combat survival skills to special forces. He was your proverbial tough guy super soldier. Looked like something off a recruiting poster. But it wasn’t in dispute that his tiny wife was battering the fuck out of him on a regular basis (hence the affair, it was more of a therapy thing really). But there was much disbelief and incredulity about that (“But he’s massive…” sort of thing). There was also quite the lack of sympathy. There was some kudos for the fact he hadn’t retaliated physically, but also a sort of general disdain that he put up with it.

Gender expectations eh?