New School Politics

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Reports of voter fraud in Florida are rampant.  Here’s an account from the Sunset Sentinel:

In northern Coral Springs, near the Sawgrass Expressway and Coral Ridge Drive, David Nirenberg arrived to vote as an independent. Nevertheless, he said poll workers insisted he choose a party ballot.

“He said to me, ‘Are you Democrat or Republican?’ I said, ‘Neither, I am independent.’ He said, ‘Well, you have to pick one,”’ Nirenberg said.

In Florida, only those who declare a party are allowed to cast a vote in that party’s presidential primary.

Nirenberg said he tried to explain to the poll worker that he should not vote on a party ballot because of his “no party affiliation” status.

Nirenberg said a second poll worker was called over who agreed that independents should not use party ballots, but said they had received instructions to the contrary.

“He said, ‘Ya know, that is kind of funny, but it was what we were told.’ … I was shocked when they told me that.” Nirenberg said he went ahead and voted for John McCain.

Hmm… can someone say that rinos are no longer an endangered species?

Popularity: 43% [?]

Normally, I’m against government in all of its forms. It taxes and spends, and uses up citizens’ money for pork spending and unnecessary “aid.” However, I believe government should expand to one area: drugs. Not drug regulation, but cultivation and sales.

Think about it this way: are people going to stop buying drugs just because they’re illegal? Of course not. All we do is foster cartels, a black market, and waste billions on anti-drug campaigns. Why don’t we just target the source?

Here’s my plan. The government creates something called the Federal Department of Hallucinogens or whatnot. They can start by getting tobacco farmers to grow drugs, which they must sell exclusively to the federal government. Failure to do so will result in confiscation of land. However, the government will pay fair prices for each kind of drug.

Then, the government will manufacture them into a usable form. Because the government is heavily regulating it, marijuana will be in a pure form, not that cocaine-spiked stuff that they give to kids these days. Likewise, meth, for one, will also be free of the useless garbage-it will be sterile and safer. Dosage can also be regulated by the government. The government can then sell drugs to druggies at a decent price, allowing them to make a profit (including all the beauracacy, farmers, regulation). They can use this money to, say, fund education.

This plan has several effects: firstly, it will cripple the drug cartels. No money = no mercenaries, guns, and therefore crime. They will be starved. Secondly, the drugs will be safer and more regulated against OD’s. This will reduce such deaths. Third, the government makes money, not spends it. We’ll save whatever we spend on drug-regulation, and make money from the selling of drugs, allowing us to cut taxes and fund other things like education. Fourthly, we get more people employed, and we can keep them happy. Finally, the government will have a large stockpile of these drugs to use for military/scientific/medical purposes. What’s wrong with this plan? Almost nothing.

Perhaps the best part is that it will give us back, on average, $30 of our taxes. This may not seem like a lot, but when you account for the 300,000,000 people in this country, and the 150,000,000 who actually pay tax (middle class always gets screwed, poor people want higher taxes cuz they don’t have to pay them and get benefits, upper classes have the means to evade taxes via switzerland, etc.) that’s a lot of money.

Popularity: 51% [?]

This is John Edwards’ Universal Healthcare Plan. I have added some comments about each of his solutions (they appear italicized).
• Promote Evidence-Based Medicine: Effective new treatments can take years to be widely adopted. For example, many patients do not receive beta blockers after heart attacks even though they are cheap and highly effective. Similarly, doctors sometimes prescribe name-brand drugs despite the availability of equally effective, less expensive generic drugs.

~Has it occurred that maybe, just maybe, there’s a reason for this? If I was a biotech company, and I had discovered a cure after spending millions on research, how would generic drugs created by some other organization/the government encourage me to do so, by siphoning my research to further their profits? I would have no incentive to find no cures if I can’t make money doing so. That’s why we’re losing out on anti-biotic research.

•  Disseminate Objective Information on Medical Advances: Edwards will establish a non-profit or public organization – possibly within the Institute of Medicine – to research the best methods of providing care, drawing upon data from Medicare and the Health Care Markets and medical experts from across the nation. ~This is such a bad idea, because it will have more bureaucrats involved whom have no idea what medicine is. We don’t have an infinite amount of doctors for this kind of low-paying, low-IQ, desk jockey work.

•  Help Doctors Implement New Advances: Edwards will support new technologies, such as handheld devices and electronic medical records, to give doctors the latest information at their fingertips.

~My local hospital already has these “new, latest technologies,” because it’s a privately run, not government baesd, hospital. Get with the program please.

•  Improve the Health Care Delivery System: Edwards will develop partnerships among academic medical centers, Medicare, and other federal agencies to make sure high-quality medicine is practiced everywhere. Improving quality is an important key to making universal health care affordable in the long run.

~As a to-be medical student, I ask you this: Why would I want to attend medical school for an extra 4 years, only to get paid the equivalent of, say, a DMV worker? I could just as easily use my skills, get an MBA in one year, and go to wall street, and make much more money. As such, why would our best students want to become doctors without any future realistic gain?

• Pioneer New Ways to Pay for Health Care: Our health care system is predominantly fee-for-service: providers are paid for each treatment, regardless of its necessity or quality. For example, a hospital that botches a surgery is often paid for the error and then paid again to fix it. Our system should pay doctors for results, encouraging better, more efficient care. Under Edwards’ plan, Medicare and the Health Care Markets will lead the way, paying higher rates to plans and providers that provide the very best care, lowering premiums for high-quality plans, and penalizing plans that fail to meet critical, easily quantifiable goals such as childhood immunization rates.
~Instead of having a federal bureaucracy ruin things by putting excess paperwork and waste time, why not just stop subsidizing the health insurance industry and let competition take its course? If an insurance agency is going to be stupid, the customers can get another insurer easily.

• Prevent Medical Errors: At least 100,000 patients die each year due to medical errors, according to the Institute of Medicine. Many other errors seriously injure patients and add to health care costs. Edwards will support public-private collaborations to reorganize patient care, improve internal communications, reduce errors through electronic prescribing, and establish basic quality benchmarks.

~Great, so now it’ll be easier for Mr. Edwards (a lawyer) to be ambulance chasing for malpractice lawsuits. And these are coming from generally our better doctors. What happens if they leave for China or Russia?

• Promote Preventive Care: Health Care Markets will offer primary and preventive services at little or no cost. Incentives like lower premiums will reward individuals who schedule free physicals and enroll in healthy living programs. Edwards will also support community efforts to improve health, such as safe streets, walking and biking trails, safe and well-equipped parks, and physical education programs for children.

~So not only are physicals free (hurting doctors and nurses), but maybe we should just give people free everything. After all, doctors would be willing to work without pay. Right?

• Improve the Treatment of Chronic Diseases: When chronic diseases are not routinely treated, they can cause emergencies that threaten patients’ health while raising costs. Health Care Markets will encourage plans to monitor patients’ health to keep them out of the emergency room. For example, plans can pay for nutritional counseling for diabetic patients to help them make healthy choices and control their blood sugar levels.

~More incursion into peoples’ lives. You can’t eat this, you can’t eat that, you need to take your pills. Give me a break. If I want to die from MDR-TB cause I hate needles, I have the right to do so. You have the right to prevent me from getting you sick. But they can’t tell people how to live their lives. That’s Soviet.

•  Empower Patients through Transparency: Finding reliable information comparing doctors and hospitals on price and performance is harder than finding it for a new car. Edwards will create a “Consumer Reports” for health care, a universal and easy-to-use report card to help Americans evaluate hospitals’ effectiveness in treating injuries and diseases. Informed patients will make better choices and drive health care providers to offer better services for lower costs.

~ Consumer Reports for doctors are like U.S. News Reports for Colleges. They use random statistics that are easily inflatable and will obviously favor those doctors whom have more connections, regardless of their capabilities. This is plainly “No Child Left Behind” for hospitals.

•  Reduce Health Disparities: People of color are more likely to be diagnosed with cancer and less likely to receive timely and effective treatment. Children of African-American mothers are twice as likely to die within their first year. In California, low-income minority neighborhoods have one-third as many doctors, as a share of their population, than other neighborhoods do. Edwards will support medical research into disparities, reduce the pollutions and toxins that disproportionately harm communities of colors, and support translation services to address language barriers. By helping all Americans get insurance, Edwards will also address disparities in health caused by disparities in insurance. [ACS, 2003; KFF, 2003; Kormaromy et. al. 1996; KFF, 2007]

~ Maybe it’s because doctors are afraid that they’ll get sued by ambulance chasers like Mr. Edwards here. Has it occurred that religion, among other things, may be affecting what doctors can do? Has it occurred that doctors, having spent thousands of dollars and years in medical school, not to mention hell via the pre-med process, might influence where they want to work? Why do you think hedge fund managers live in suburbs?

•  Improve Productivity with Information Technology: Health care administration costs more than $1,000 per American. It may be the fastest growing part of health care costs. [Woolhandler et. al., 2003]

~Exactly! Let’s exacerbate the costs even more by adding a bureaucracy.

• Adopt Electronic Medical Records: Many insurers and hospitals still rely on cumbersome paper systems and incompatible computer systems. The outdated “paper chase” causes tragic errors when doctors don’t have access to patient information or misread handwritten charts. It creates needless administrative waste recreating and transporting medical papers, performing duplicative testing, and claiming insurance benefits. Edwards will support the implementation of health information technology while ensuring that patients’ privacy rights are protected. Savings from electronic records could be as great as $160 billion a year, according to a RAND study. [RAND, 2005]

~This is of course all going to be paid by who?

• Support Local Infrastructure: Edwards will provide the resources hospitals need to implement information systems that improve patient safety and hospital efficiency. Steps include:

~Except, at this rate, we won’t have any hospitals left. In my region, three hospitals have closed down due to expensive malpractice lawsuits, leaving the hospital I attend very busy and crowded.

• New Methods of Distribution:  Adopting automated medication dispensers that can quickly and accurately fill prescriptions, freeing pharmacists to work more with patients and reducing the risk of prescription errors.
~Who’s going to pay for this?

•  Improve Communication:  Developing systems to promote patient-doctor communication, such as email and group consultations and support groups for individuals suffering from the same disorder.

~It’s called “alcoholics anonymous.”

• Creating computerized physician order entry to eliminate lost paperwork and illegible writing.

~Who’s going to pay for this?

o Developing computerized patient reminder systems to improve compliance with treatments, such as automatic phone calls home to remind patients to take needed medication to help keep them healthy and out of the hospital.
~Who’s going to pay for this?

o Using handheld devices to allow hospital staff to communicate results directly to physicians, instead of wasting time trying to find a doctor with urgent information.

~Who’s going to pay for this?

•  Protect Patients against Dangerous Medicines. Recent drug recalls such as Vioxx have raised concerns about drug safety. Edwards will restrict direct-to-consumer advertising for new drugs to ensure that consumers are not misled about the potential dangers of newly marketed drugs and strengthen the Food and Drug Administration’s ability to monitor new drugs after they reach the marketplace. He will also ensure that researchers evaluating medical devices and drugs are truly independent.

~Likewise, evolution is a “theory,” not a fact, and we need “independent, non-atheist devil-worshippers” to analyze this theory with evidence. Das Kommisar, anybody?

Popularity: 93% [?]

Liberals defend many causes. They want us to back the people of various countries by giving them aid. They also advocate wealth distribution and other socialist programs. Thirdly, they want to protect the environment.

Unfortunately, here is our problem. These all conflict with each other.

Our world population stands at about 6.7 billion people and counting. The carrying capacity (for those of you without a high school education, that means the sustainable population size of a group in an area) of Earth for humans ranges between 500 million and 3 billion. That means that about 3.7 billion people extra are alive.

To make up for this, we decide to give away our “abundance” of resources to other nations. Unfortunately, these nations percieve us Western, developed nations to be a utopia of overabundance. Thus, they consume aid faster than we can provide it in such useless things as armies, genocide, weapons, beauracracy, and unnecessary goverment programs.

Well, guess what left-wingers. We’re consuming our environment’s resources faster than it can regenerate. Thus, the environment will keep shrinking and producing less, while we consume more. At the same time, if we try to share everything, we’ll just use it up faster. Some people will consume their share immediately, while others will decide to conserve their resources. Then the have-nots will demand a share from the haves, and we will keep repeating this until eventually nobody has any resources and we leave a barren, lifeless planet behind us.

There are three ways to solve this problem.

The first way, and the one I think is most effective, useful, and least infringing on my rights, is to stop sending aid to other countries, and to stop trying to share the wealth and divide everything up. Let natural selection take its course, I say, and prevent the unproductive and the unfit from reproducing. Otherwise, we favor the people whose genes are not the innovative, the intelligent, the athletic, but rather those whom reproduce the quickest. In our society, that would be people whom I personally would not trust running our government. Not only will we be able to filter out a whole bunch of people that leech off of the productive ones, but we would also be able to help conserve our resources and let them regenerate. Think about it, the people whom keep bringing back smallpox, polio, and drug resistant tuberculosis are infringing on my right to be healthy. The reason they have these is because they were too stupid to not follow the instructions of their doctors: thus, they shouldn’t be able to remain able to spread disease to me. We should let them die off quicker, so we don’t get infected.
As for those people in other countries, they can fight amongst themselves, reducing populations for us without the expenditure of my hard-earned tax-paid resources. It will also help to filter out a new generation of intelligent, hard-working peoples, instead of a generation of druggies, gangsters, warmongers, prostitutes, religious hypocrites, idiots, and disease-spreaders.

A second way to reduce populations, of course, is mass genocide. I’m not even going to discuss this one because it is too immoral for even my tastes. It would do wonders for the environment, though-all that biomass will help propogate species.

As a side note, I, unlike other libertarian-capitalist-objectivist-neocon peoples on this blog, support the environment, because without it, I wouldn’t be able to have foods, cures to diseases, oxygen, and other necessities of life. Plus, we need it to help suppress unwanted species from growing, like poison ivy, weeds, and Homo Sapiens.

The third way to control the population is to establish space colonies. Unfortunately, all the resources that may go to that are instead going to random countries to build more weapons to kill our people. Seriously, if people want money, they’re going to have to earn it by working, not by pulling strings.

And as a side note, for those whom complain at how rich children control all of the wealth anyways, one will figure that they will squander all of their money away anyways, and help to remove their stain from our gene pool.

And that’s my Darwinistic look of our world today.

Editor’s Note: Profanity was removed from this post and it was edited for further grammatical consistency at 10:45PM on 7/4/2007.  

Popularity: 46% [?]

As a first generation immigrant, I see America as a land of double standards. Here are a few of the more prominent problems that I see in today’s society.

Females are allowed to discriminate against males and even advocate their total destruction as a gender, but males aren’t allowed to, vice versa.

We provide free tuition to illiterate, illegal immigrants, while in the meantime middle-class educate legal immigrants from Europe, Asia, and Africa are having enormous amounts of trouble trying to fill out all the paperwork, plus they have to pay large fees that may be for naught.

Calling someone a racist is now as offensive as some racist words.

We keep mentioning about a jury of our peers, yet doctors keep getting screwed over by malpractice suits because their “peers” are actually those of their victim.

We keep trying to ban guns because people use them to commit crimes. I bet that if everybody in a store/plane/school had a gun, there would be a lot less killing sprees.

We keep crying out about seperating church and state, and yet we forbid stem-cell research and the teaching of evolution.

We advocate how the family should be the most important unit in a society, and yet we keep regulating not only how the family can be created, but we do a parent’s job for them.

We try to help people in other nations with financial aid, while we also have the world’s largest national debt and an incredibly poor healthcare insurance system, as well as Social Security.

We pride ourselves on being a democracy, and yet we give a lot of power to appointed officials that did not win a single vote, but pulled the right strings.

We prosecute foreign scientists regularly, even if they’re not guilty, and yet we let all sorts of drug dealers slip under our noses.

Finally, here’s a personal anecdote, about how minorities are elevating themselves above the majority, whether they know it or not.

I was talking with one of my cousins, who was a vice president in a biotech firm. He mentioned how the company was forced to hire janitors from different underrepresented minorities. So they hired one, and this janitor, being illiterate, managed to walk through THREE LINES OF DECONTAMINATION with alarms going off and all sorts of warning signs, and failed to pay attention. He then proceeded to enter the lab, and contaminated and destroyed $50,000 worth of property. The kicker? The company wasn’t allowed to fire him because he was a minority.

This is just one of the reasons why serious change needs to be implemented in our country.

Popularity: 41% [?]

Science and Religion have been at each other’s throats for the past 400 years, ever since Galileo was arrested for thinking outside the box. Today, the battlefield is in two main areas:
The first, evolution. The second, stem-cell research.

Evolution is a theory. A theory, however, in science, means that it has been backed up with tons of evidence, experimentation, and the like. In layman’s talk, a theory is equivalent to that of a hypothesis’ value. Thus, creationists enjoy using such words to inspire doubt.

Teaching the controversy and intelligent design is basically an attempt to teach religion in science classes. This is unacceptable-it is akin to teaching children philosophy in neuroscience. It breaks church and state and essentially will dumb down the curriculum while other nations laugh at us in our ignorance.

Stem-cell research, however, is a sign of progress that is being countered. Cures for millions of people are put into doubt because an unliving thing cannot exist. The “thing” is as alive as the cells on the umbilical cord and placenta-those are property of the mother, and as such, the mother can choose what to do with the embryo. If she wishes for it to be used in stem-cells to create new organs for people (which will encourage new industry), she should be perfectly able to do so, especially as it her right to do what she wills with a fetus, not the government, and certainly not the church.

The church is a good institution that has gone wrong because mindless zealots seek to incorporate themselves into other things, and, finding them incompatible, refuse to compromise and instead attempt to suppress and bring down a totalitarian system upon us all, especially a theocracy. A Christian Theocracy of America would be as bad as the Islamic Republic of Iran. Religion should stay in religion’s realm, and science should stay in its realm.

This post was written by Ryan Chou, one of New School Politics’ new writers. As with all other articles, the above piece of writing does not mirror the sentiments of New School Politics, only those of the individual writer.

Popularity: 43% [?]