Amaryllis, from Charly, click for full size!
© Charly, all rights reserved.
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
Amaryllis, from Charly, click for full size!
© Charly, all rights reserved.
From Ice Swimmer, stunning shots! The island in the photos is Harakka (“magpie”) photographed in May, February and March. The photo taken last May is from a sightseeing boat, the rest are from Uunisaari island, to which there’s a bridge in wintertime. Click for full size!
© Ice Swimmer, all rights reserved.
Goldfinch, click for full size.
© C. Ford.
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) speaks during a health care news conference to oppose Republicans’ effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci.
Okay, ready for all the bad? Here’s the current reading list:
Trumpcare could cost 24 million people their insurance, government analysis finds.
The Congressional Budget Office released its long awaited analysis of Trumpcare on Monday afternoon, and its findings were grim.
The CBO found that 14 million fewer Americans would be insured by 2018 under the House GOP’s health care plan. By 2026, a full 24 million people would have gone uninsured relative to the number of people expected to be insured under the Affordable Care Act. The increase stems mostly from Trumpcare’s repeal of the individual mandate and changes to Medicaid.
White House analysis finds Trumpcare is even worse than the CBO estimated.
An internal White House analysis concluded that House Republicans’ Obamacare replacement bill, called the American Health Care Act, will cause up to 26 million people to lose their insurance coverage over the next decade, according to a copy of the analysis obtained by Politico.
Here’s how many people could die if Trumpcare becomes law.
Approximately 17,000 people could die in 2018 who otherwise would have lived if a House Republican health proposal endorsed by the Trump administration becomes law. By 2026, the number of people killed by Trumpcare could grow to approximately 29,000 in that year alone.
Determining the exact number of deaths that could occur each year due to a lack of access to insurance is not an exact science. But ThinkProgress calculated these estimates by examining two sources.
Premiums under Trumpcare would be lower for all the wrong reasons.
Despite the fact that a CBO report projected that 24 million more people would be uninsured under Trumpcare, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R) is bragging about its lower premiums. But premiums would be lower because people would buy less generous plans and fewer older people would be able to buy coverage. […] But the premiums are lower because insurance would be so expensive for older people that they would exit the market and become uninsured. Under the House GOP plan, insurance companies would be allowed to charge five times more for older enrollees. Under the ACA, they could only charge three times more for older enrollees than younger people. This means there would be a larger share of younger people in the nongroup market and a smaller share of older people.
Trump signals his willingness to put even deeper cuts into Trumpcare.
Trumpcare is bleeding out.
Democrats oppose the bill en masse. Members of the Tea Party Caucus are deriding it as “Obamacare Lite.” And the more centrist wing of the Republican Party feels queasy at the prospect of voting for a bill that, according to Congressional Budget Office projections, would cause 24 million people to go without insurance over the next decade.
Virtually no one likes the proposed Obamacare replacement, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and President Donald Trump aside. And so Trump, the dealmaker in chief, is reportedly looking to modify the legislation in order to win over a handful of new allies.
Specifically, he’s looking to his right.
Just hours after the CBO released its projections, Politico reported that the White House wants Trumpcare amended so that it will appeal to the House Republicans’ Tea Party wing. Among other things, that would mean phasing in the bill’s Medicaid cuts next year, rather than putting them off until 2020 as the legislation currently does.
Also, an anguished fucking climate change! For a few brief days, the weather here was unseasonably warm, and there were actual bare spots of ground to be seen here and there. It was enough to trick the Lilac into budding prematurely. The snow came back, and with it, freezing weather. All the noise about an hour ago prompted me to look out my studio window, where there were many goldfinches gorging themselves on the buds. Click for full size.
Published on Jan 7, 2017Support it on Kickstarter! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/…
“Attack of the Cyber Octopuses” is a retro-futuristic cyberpunk short film. The aim is to recreate the look and feel of the Eighties Sci-fi classics, without using CGI nor chroma key.
official website: http://www.chaosmonger.com/aotco/
making of blog: http://cyberoctopuses.blogspot.com
facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cyberoctopuses/
instagram: https://www.facebook.com/cyberoctopuses/
twitter: https://twitter.com/CyberOctopuses
Make has an interview about how the Cyber Octopuses were made, which makes for fun and interesting reading!
Over at Pharyngula, PZ has a post up about the recent, appalling Nazism of Rep. Steve King. Part of my comment was:
D’ya suppose any of these gits realize that they are adherents of Charles Manson? I guess that wouldn’t bother them much.
At the time I wrote it, I wondered if people would get that reference at all, because Manson was a long time ago, along with his attempt at inciting a race war, whereupon all the brown peoples would destroy one another, leaving all the white people triumphant. I’m more than pleased to see that I wasn’t all alone in that thought jumping into my head:
@CNN sounds like something CharlesManson would say
— Oswald Rojas (@mrpresident650) March 14, 2017
@jbouie this is Manson-level racist delusion, the suit-wearing version of "whites dig a hole in the desert, hide, then emerge to rule."
— Robin Kimball (@RobinKimball) March 14, 2017
And they weren’t the only ones, either.
You can read more at Raw Story.
Oh, politicians and their email. If one is guilty of committing an email no-no, they all are. Honestly, it’s when politicians try to be smart that they plumb the depths of stupid. Emailitis is doing the rounds of many new appointees. We’ll start with Wayne Tracker, also known as Rex Tillerson. What a tangled web we weave, when we first practice to deceive.
Another alias email account — that of “Wayne Tracker”— is poised to cause problems for a high-level official, this time former Exxon CEO and current Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
Tillerson used an alias email account from at least 2008 to 2015 to discuss climate change, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office said in a court filing Monday.
Schneiderman, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, and the Securities and Exchange Commission are currently investigating whether Exxon defrauded the public by engaging in a campaign to discredit climate science, propping up the value of its oil and gas reserves. The Wayne Tracker email account — Tillerson’s middle name is Wayne — was discovered in the course of the investigation, known as the Exxon Knew case.
“This is a significant development in Schneiderman’s investigation into what Exxon knew about climate change, when it knew it, and what the company did to conceal it,” Naomi Ages, Greenpeace’s lead on the climate liability project, said in a statement. “Was Rex Tillerson that worried about climate risks for Exxon? Or was he more worried about the risk of revealing them to his shareholders and to the public? Or was it both?”
Documents uncovered in 2015 suggest that as far back as the 1970s, Exxon scientists knew that burning fossil fuels were the primary contributor to climate change.
Environmentalists have long been saying that to prevent catastrophic climate change, humanity needs to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels. But Exxon — as well as the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel interests — have worked against that effort, funding attempts to discredit the theory of global warming.
It is illegal for a company to withhold liability risks from its shareholders.
[…]
It has come to light that, as governor of Indiana, now-Vice President Mike Pence conducted official business via an AOL account that was subsequently hacked.
[…]
EPA head Scott Pruitt’s emails are also under scrutiny. His former office, the Oklahoma Attorney General, is currently embroiled in a lawsuit to force the release of emails between Pruitt, his deputies, and oil and gas interests. Pruitt also used a private email account to conduct official business, a fact he denied during his Senate confirmation hearing.
For all the people screaming over Hillary Clinton using a private, secured server for emails, to the point of wanting her locked up, where’s all the yelling over Pruitt, Pence, and Tillerson? Why is it their particular fuck-ups and deliberate obfuscation and lying is okay? It’s not even making minor scandal points among the Trumpholes, which goes to show, I suppose, they never actually gave one tiny shit about Ms. Clinton’s emails, they simply used it as an excuse, and unfortunately, it’s one that worked, as we now find ourselves neck deep in a corrupt regime.
Pat McCrory.
There are times schadenfreude is ever so sweet, and this is one of them. Pat McCrory, that eternal bigot, is now whining that his bigotry is interfering with him finding a job. It turns out that a lot of people aren’t terribly interested in hiring an attention-pandering bigot. Who knew?
In an interview with the Raleigh News & Observer, McCrory complained that his decision to champion HB2 — the infamous “bathroom bill” that banned transgender people from using the bathrooms of their choice — was hurting his career prospects.
“People are reluctant to hire me, because, ‘oh my gosh, he’s a bigot,’” McCrory explained to the newspaper. “Which is the last thing I am.”
Unfuckingbelievable. He still clings to this insistence that he’s not a bigot, oh no, why he’s a champion superhero, protecting peeing people!
McCrory said that while he’s been considered for part-time teaching positions at some universities, campuses have been reluctant to hire him over fears that he might spark a backlash among students, who would then respond with disruptive protests.
“That’s not the way our American system should operate – having people purged due to political thought,” he complained.
Oh no, don’t be dishonest, Pat. This isn’t a case of thought crime. You did much more than have an unpopular, stupid, bigoted political thought. You drove the bigoted HB2 at any and all cost, even when your own constituents stood against it, and you were costing your state millions upon millions of dollars. That’s different from having a political thought. Our ‘American’ system should not be stuffed to the rafters with incompetent bigots, either, but it is, and people have the right to oppose them, which they did. You lost your job through your own actions, and you have not taken one step back on your draconian views.
McCrory’s complaints echo similar comments he made recently during a podcast interview in which he claimed that “if you disagree with the politically correct thought police on this new definition of gender, you’re a bigot, you’re the worst of evil.”
Oh For Fuck’s Sake! You godsdamned piece of shit masquerading as a human being! Such a fucking liar. This has absolutely nothing to do with political correctness, nor thought police, nor a ‘new’ definition of gender, and you are a fucking bigot, a terrible, toxic, venomous one, and yes, you are on the side of evil. Someone should have, at some point, taught you there are consequences to both speech and actions. There are *four* pages on Affinity, all posts about McCrory’s evil legislation, and yet all he can manage to do is whine about what a victim he is. And here I thought it was only us SJW snowflakes who did that. Tsk.
Via Raw Story.
but it wouldn’t have been much of a party without all you wonderful people who bother to read and comment here. You are what keeps me going, and you have provided a great deal of support through many dark days. You have also provided me with a wealth of content, my profuse thanks for that, too! So…
And Happy Anniversary to us all!
:D
A long exposure of ‘Ocean Wave’.
This is a stunning art piece, and watching the video, oh, there’s immense joy and delight in it. Watch, then go over to The Creators Project to read all about it!
Joe Baker, Room 101.
…Part of 1984‘s appeal is the language Orwell developed for identifying fascist control methods that are increasingly visible today. Power structures like the Ministries of Truth, Peace, Plenty, and Love—each of which represents the opposite of its title—are reflected in an Environmental Protection Agency led by a climate change denier, and an education department run by someone who prefers “charter” to public education. Conway’s “alternative facts” sound a lot like the book’s “Newspeak,” the simplification and rebranding of common language, and “Doublethink,” whereby the government controls historical records and the news, sounds an awful lot like Breitbart retellings of current events.
With 1984‘s popularity, the constant debate about whether our current world is more like Orwell’s dystopia or the one described in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World has resurfaced as well. Both books warn of the dangers their authors perceived was on the horizon, but the living legacy of 1984 is its mark on language, so Creators asked artists to illustrate the terms and concepts from the book that they see reflected in today’s society.
Alex Gamsu Jenkins, Two Minutes of Hate.
You can see the rest of the fabulous artwork, along with each artist’s statement at The Creators Project. Fantastic work!