Month: August 2014

So, How is that Whole Efficiency of the Whole Profit Driven Market Based Thing Working In Healthcare?

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It turns out as more and more for-profit hospices are entering the market, more and more of hospice patients are leaving those hospices under their own power, largely because the for-profit hospices are taking non-terminal patients, and driving out expensive terminal ones, in order to maximize their bottom line:

At hundreds of U.S. hospices, more than one in three patients are dropping the service before dying, new research shows, a sign of trouble in an industry supposed to care for patients until death.

 When that many patients are leaving a hospice alive, experts said, the agencies are likely to be either driving them away with inadequate care or enrolling patients who aren’t really dying in order to pad their profits.

 It is normal for a hospice to release a small portion of patients before death — about 15 percent has been typical, often because a patient’s health unexpectedly improves.

 But researchers found that at some hospices, and particularly at new, for-profit companies, the rate of patients leaving hospice care alive is double that level or more.

 The number of “hospice survivors” was especially high in two states: in Mississippi, where 41 percent of hospice patients were discharged alive, and Alabama, where 35 percent were.

 “When you have a live discharge rate that is as high as 30 percent, you have to wonder whether a hospice program is living up to the vision and morality of the founders of hospice,” said Joan Teno, a Brown University hospice doctor and researcher and the lead author of the article published in the Journal of Palliative Medicine. “One part of the reason is some of the new hospice providers may not have the same values — they may be more concerned with profit margins than compassionate care.”

(emphasis mine)

When people call for “Market Based Solutions,” this is what you get.

Grifting from the Rick Scotts* of the world.

*While head of Columbia/HCA, the current governor of governor’s company engaged in activities leading to their having to pay nearly a billion dollars to the government for Medicare fraud.

Well, Waddya Know? Facebook has a Redeeming Social Function

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It turns out that it’s a giving an opportunity for ignorant bigots to out themselves:

There are plenty of reasons to loathe Facebook. There’s the new messenger app that they’re making users install if they want to chat on their mobile devices. There’s the way they screwed around with users’ feeds, just as a little experiment. There’s the overall way it makes people unhappy. If you see it as a community, it’s pretty terrible. But if you instead choose to view it as the world’s most effective bozo-disclosing app, it’s rather brilliant.

Your mouth to God’s ear, Mary Elizabeth Williams.

On Wednesday alone, two outspoken Facebook users found themselves facing abrupt ends to their jobs after realizing too late that other people can actually see what you post in public. First, Virginia state Republican Party treasurer Bob FitzSimmonds resigned after controversy erupted when he declared on Facebook that Barack Obama’s recent comments on the achievements of Muslim Americans were “pure nonsense,” and asked, “Exactly what part of our nation’s fabric was woven by Muslims? What about Sikhs, Animists, and Jainists? Should we be thanking them too?” FitzSimmonds also drew ire earlier this year when he referred to Fairfax County Delegate Barbara Comstock as a “twat.” And in 2012, he raised eyebrows for speculating about when Obama “dies and goes to hell.” In a resignation letter he submitted to the State Central Committee this week, he said, “After discussion with several party leaders it seems clear that I will either need to stop posting on social media or step down from my party office.” While another, brighter individual might have chosen the former – to simply ease off on saying idiotic and offensive things in public — fortunately for FitzSimmonds’ colleagues, he chose the latter.

Also on Wednesday, a Texas police detective was fired after posting a Facebook tirade about the local “useless lazy turdbags” with “thousands of dollars of ink have adorning their unclean bodies” on government assistance. In his recent post, Detective Rob Douglas vowed, “I promise, if I ever snap and go on a killing spree, it will be in a supermarket on the first.” When announcing the decision to terminate Douglas, Marlin Police Chief Darrell Allen called the comments “inappropriate and troubling.” And yet, they did help take an resentful, angry cop off the streets, so they’ve got to be at least a little good for something.

In its relatively short lifespan, Facebook has proven itself the downfall of countless racists, sexists, homophobes and straight-up dopes. Turns out there’s always somebody willing to log on and do something regrettable. Earlier this summer, an Illinois woman was arrested for shoplifting – after posting selfies of her new merchandise on her page. And last month, after bragging on Facebook that “Y’all will never catch me,” Baltimore police did just that to Roger Ray Ireland after he violated his probation. And on Aug. 5, a Swedish politician abruptly ended his campaign shortly after referring on Facebook to “the Jewish pigs.” Reminder: This is all just in the past few weeks.

These days, Facebook is the “Maccaca Moment” Generator of choice.

I Honestly Do Not Know if this is Cute or Terrifying

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But a 2 m tall penguin weighing 115 kg could play outside linebacker in the NFL:

A penguin species that lived millions of years ago would have dwarfed today’s biggest living penguins and stood as tall as most humans, according to analysis of fossils by a team of researchers from the La Plata Museum in Argentina.

 Palaeeudyptes klekowskii has already been dubbed the “colossus penguin”, and is the most complete fossil ever uncovered from the Antarctic. The unearthed bones are 37m years old and include the longest recorded fused ankle-foot bone as well as parts of a wing bone.

 From those bones, researchers estimated the species would have stood 2m tall from toe to beak tip, and weighed as much as 115kg. Standing normally, beak down, the penguin would have be around 1.6m tall, the team reported in the journal Geobios.

 By comparison, the tallest and heaviest living species, the emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri), stands 1.1m high and weighs just under 50kg.

This is like Ted “The Mad Stork” Hendricks in a tuxedo.

Unreal.

There is No Light at the End of the Tunnel. We are Just Digging a Deeper Hole.

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The usual suspects are arguing that killing of General Green in Afghanistan means that we should double down on the forever war going on there:

An insider attack against international and Afghan forces in Kabul that killed a U.S. general has renewed questions about the Obama administration’s exit strategy from Afghanistan and the country’s security.

 ………

 Republican lawmakers critical of Obama’s withdrawal plan pointed to the insider attack as a reason to change course. In May, Obama announced plans to reduce U.S. troop strength to 9,800 by the end of this year and to half that number in late 2015. Only a small security assistance force at the U.S. embassy would remain by the end of 2016, as Obama prepares to leave office.

I’m beginning to think that we need a constitutional amendment requiring that all children of Congressmen between the ages of 18 and 40 be required to serve as active duty service members.

I expect to hear from John McCain arguing for moar woar on the Sunday shows in 4 days.

Remember When I Said that Newspapers Should Fact Check Their Own OP/EDs?*

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Well, it’s finally happened, and the paper was to do it was the Kansas City Star, an unlikely journalistic innovator, but they fact checked the editorial they published from Stephen Moore, head economist at the frequently fact challenged Heritage Foundation, † and discover that he is lying through his teeth:

The Kansas City Star probably thought it was on solid ground when it published an op-ed by Stephen Moore defending the draconian, and economically debilitating, tax cuts instituted by Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback. (We reported on how the tax cuts have turned Kansas into a smoking ruin here.)

Moore’s conservative credentials are impeccable: A former member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, he’s currently chief economist at the Heritage Foundation and a familiar face on Fox News and CNBC. So when his piece asserted that “over the last five years,” the no-income-tax states of Texas and Florida gained jobs while the high-tax states of New York and California lost jobs, the editors waved it through.

Moore punctuated his statistical victory over Brownback’s critics with the ironic refrain “Oops.”

Oops, indeed.

It turns out Moore’s statistics were dead wrong. He later explained that he was citing figures from 2007-2012, not the last five years. But–oops again–he got those figures wrong too. His errors were discovered by Yael T. Abouhalkah, a Star columnist, who took the simple step of cross-checking them against the source, the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In this age of the Google machine, it would be a trivial matter for a newspaper to assign a junior reporter to fact check every statistic in every editorial that they publish on their own (syndicated editorials are a more complex matter).

In fact, any decent Googler could fact check a couple of hours.

To quote the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “‘You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”

An OP/ED should not be a license to lie.
*Here is one example from juxtaposition the former Kaplan Test Prep company and Sarah Palin.
†Full disclosure: I have a personal reason for hating the ratf%$#s at the Heritage Foundation. They fired a friend of mine for having cancer.

The New York Times Compares the CIA Torture Coverup to Catch-22

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If you recall, the Times was forced to publish its story about NSA spying on Americans when their James Risen, who co-wrote this story announced that he was going to publish on its own.

The “Gray Lady” has a long history of kowtowing to the US state security apparatus, which is why we see an OP/ED by Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal invoking the seminal Joseph Heller war farce to describe the CIA’s behavior with regard the Senate Inteligence Committee’s torture report:

In Joseph Heller’s anti-war satire, “Catch 22,” the hero, Yossarian, is assigned to a censorship detail. He amuses himself by deleting all the adverbs and adjectives from soldiers’ letters, then all the articles, then everything but the articles, and so on. His job was to delete details that threatened operational security. The result was gibberish.

It seems the Central Intelligence Agency was inspired by Yossarian’s example.

The C.I.A. was given the task of censoring the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report denouncing none other than the C.I.A. for torturing prisoners, lying to its overseers in Congress about the torture, and exaggerating how much valuable information the torture provided (if any). The result was predictable and proof, if anyone still needed it, that having the subject of the report censor that report is a very bad idea.

When the White House approved the C.I.A.’s censorship (the term of art in Washington is “redaction”) and sent the report to the Hill, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, said in his usual sneering way that 85 percent of the report was intact and that half the blackouts were made to footnotes.

The issue, of course, is not merely how much is deleted, but what is deleted. On Monday, McClatchy reported that C.I.A. censors had blacked out the pseudonyms used to protect the identities of agents involved in the detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists. That, McClatchy said, rendered parts of the report unintelligible.

“Redactions are supposed to remove names or anything that could compromise sources and methods, not to undermine the source material so that it is impossible to understand,” said Senator Martin Heinrich, the New Mexico Democrat, who is a member of the intelligence committee. “Try reading a novel with 15 percent of the words blacked out.”

………

Asked about the dispute, the White House press secretary Josh Earnest, offered the usual boilerplate about national security reviews. Here’s how Yossarian might have quoted him: “It is BLANK that a BLANK process be carried out that BLANKS sources and BLANK and other BLANK that is BLANK to our BLANK BLANK.”

Let me be clear: this is not one of the unsigned Times editorials, and as such, it is not as official as that would be, but this is the f%$#ing editorial page editor of the f%$#ing New York Times, and as such, is arguably the 3rd most official statement from the paper. (something from publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. coming in at number 2).

As I have said before, Obama, and the rest of his national security troika, fetishize secrecy, and you can expect a good faith declassification from them, so the Senate Intelligence Committee should exercise its statutory authority, and declassify the report on its own.

Oh, My F%$#ing God! This is Not the Onion

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Private prison company Corrections Corporation of America, looking to expand its business. intends to open an animal shelter:

Sorry, give me a second. BREATHE JANE. BREATHE…okay. Just a few more deep breaths.

 Almost there.

 So Corrections Corporation of America — the people who brought you immigrant abuse in their private Texas prisons — want to get into the animal shelter business. In Citrus County Florida.

IT’S NOT ENOUGH that CCA is understaffing their people prisons to cut corners, resulting in higher levels of inmate violence and death. Which they then overbill for. And you can’t FOIA how many sexual assaults are happening there because as a private company they’re not responsive to FOIA requests.

 They’ve been sued for insufficiently treating inmates who have health problems because that costs money, then they pay academics from Temple University to run “astonishingly misleading” studies that say they “save money” because they don’t take into account health care costs. Which they don’t want to pay.

 They also hire people to work in prisons who have, you know, murdered people.

The most depressing thing is that we are likely to see more outrage over how CCA would treat dogs than how it would treat human beings.

Feinstein* Accuses the CIA of Using Redactions to Muzzle Torture Report

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This is what Dianne Feinstein means when she says that “certain redactions eliminate or obscure key facts that support the report’s findings and conclusions.”

I would start getting my ducks in a row about having the Senate intelligence committee releasing the report unilaterally, because it is clear that neither the CIA, nor Barack Obama have the slightest interest interest in the public’s right to know here:

The key senator behind a landmark congressional investigation into the CIA’s use of torture has rejected redactions made by the Obama administration ahead of a planned public release of the politically charged report.

 In the latest struggle between senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the intelligence committee, and the CIA, Feinstein said she would delay a heavily anticipated disclosure of portions of the report in an attempt to reverse redactions that “eliminate or obscure key facts that support the report’s findings and conclusions”.

 “Until these redactions are addressed to the committee’s satisfaction, the report will not be made public,” said Feinstein, who added that she intended to outline the committee’s desired disclosures in a private letter to President Barack Obama.

 Another powerful senator and Obama ally, Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who chairs the armed services committee and who spearheaded his own investigation into US military torture, called the redactions “totally unacceptable.”

Spencer Ackerman’s analysis at this point becomes rather chilling:

Clapper left the door open to a “constructive dialogue with the committee.” In an indication of the deep strains between the committee and the CIA, that dialogue is largely brokered by the White House, which is attempting to balance the competing interests of both powerful entities while each looks to Obama for support.

So, apparently, the f%$#ing US state security apparatus is now a branch of government coequal to the Executive and the Congress, and, if the constant assertions of the State Secrets Privilege by the DoJ, the judiciary as well.

They aren’t, and the fact that the CIA is defying the Senate committee charged with overseeing their actions is wrong from almost every perspective.

*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers, though we have never met, either in person or electronically.

Full statement from her office after the break:

Aug 05 2014
Feinstein Statement on Redactions in Detention, Interrogation Study

 Washington—Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) today released the following statement on the committee study of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program:

 “After further review of the redacted version of the executive summary, I have concluded that certain redactions eliminate or obscure key facts that support the report’s findings and conclusions. Until these redactions are addressed to the committee’s satisfaction, the report will not be made public.

“I am sending a letter today to the president laying out a series of changes to the redactions that we believe are necessary prior to public release. The White House and the intelligence community have committed to working through these changes in good faith. This process will take some time, and the report will not be released until I am satisfied that all redactions are appropriate.

“The bottom line is that the United States must never again make the mistakes documented in this report. I believe the best way to accomplish that is to make public our thorough documentary history of the CIA’s program. That is why I believe taking our time and getting it right is so important, and I will not rush this process.”

(Emphasis original)

Federal Reserve and FCIC Reject TBTF Banks’ “Living Will”

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To (mis)quote Bette Davis, “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride,” because the regulators are claiming that the big banks contingency plans are worthless and leave the taxpayers on the hook:

Congress’s overhaul of the financial system aims to reshape large banks so that if they get into trouble they can descend into an orderly bankruptcy that does not set off a wider panic.

 But on Tuesday, two regulators, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, sharply criticized the plans that the banks have prepared for winding themselves down in a controlled fashion. The F.D.I.C. said that it had determined that the so-called living wills were “not credible.”

 The agencies have sent letters to 11 banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, pointing out perceived shortcomings in the resolution plans that they submitted in 2013. The agencies demanded that the banks make improvements in living wills they submit for 2015.

 “Despite the thousands of pages of material these firms submitted, the plans provide no credible or clear path through bankruptcy that doesn’t require unrealistic assumptions and direct or indirect public support,” Thomas M. Hoenig, the vice chairman of the F.D.I.C., said in a statement.

I am so not surprised by this.

The banksters aren’t providing meaningful “Living Wills” because it is in their interest not to do so.

Having a meaningful bankruptcy wind down plan means that, if something goes wrong, their stock options becomes worthless, and they probably lose their jobs, but if Uncle Sam is forced to bail them out, there is a pretty good chance that they get to keep their jobs and their hefty pay packages.

After all, that is what happened last time around.

The regulators should get tough with the banks:

If the banks do not make satisfactory changes, the regulators could take action, including requiring banks to sell units to shrink and simplify their corporate structures if they failed to comply with other orders, officials of the agencies said.

The regulators should give a reasonable amount of time (I would suggest 4 weeks, so that Congress won’t be back in session), and if they do not see a complete and meaningful plan, they should start breaking them up.

BTW, the big problem here is what Warren Buffet calls, “Financial weapons of mass destruction,” derivatives:

In suggesting areas the banks need to focus on, the regulators highlighted derivatives, which played a central and destabilizing role in the 2008 crisis. Derivatives can complicate bank resolutions because they may require collapsing banks to make payments to derivatives holders before other clients and creditors.

Unfortunately, derivatives allows financial institution to increase their leverage while technically staying properly capitalized.

They aren’t properly capitalized, of course, which is why the US government had to bail out AIG so that it could pay their insurance claims at 100 cents on the dollar.

It’s going to happen again, and no one is going to jail, again.

It sucks.

The right thing to do is for the Federal Reserve and the FDIC to break up the banks, as it always has been, but the banks own Washington, so it ain’t going to happen.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

We Just Lost a Two-Star in AFghanistan

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Maj Gen Harold Greene was shot and killed by an Afghan soldier while visiting the Marshal Fahim National Defense University (military academy):

An Afghan soldier opened fire at a British-run military academy outside Kabul on Tuesday, killing a US major general and wounding at least 15 other troops including a German brigadier general.

The US two-star general was identified by a US official to the Associated Press as Maj Gen Harold Greene, who becomes the highest-ranking American officer killed in nearly 13 years of war in Afghanistan. The Pentagon’s press secretary said he believed the officer was the highest ranking US military casualty since 9/11.

………

Germany’s military said 15 Nato soldiers were wounded, in an assault launched “probably by internal attackers”. Kirby said the daylight incident occurred during a “routine site visit” by US officers. The wounded included a German brigadier general, who the German military said was receiving medical treatment and was “not in a life-threatening condition.”

Needless to say, this is a very big deal, and is yet another sign that we should be getting the f%$# out.

We Are Unbelievably Screwed

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If the report of massive plums of methane developing is both true, and a new phenomena driven by anthropogenic climate change, then we are already on the far side of of this disaster, and we have gone from prevention to mitigation:

This week, scientists made a disturbing discovery in the Arctic Ocean: They saw “vast methane plumes escaping from the seafloor,” as the Stockholm University put it in a release disclosing the observations. The plume of methane—a potent greenhouse gas that traps heat more powerfully than carbon dioxide, the chief driver of climate change—was unsettling to the scientists.

But it was even more unnerving to Dr. Jason Box, a widely published climatologist who had been following the expedition. As I was digging into the new development, I stumbled upon his tweet, which, coming from a scientist, was downright chilling:

If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we’re f’d.
— Jason Box (@climate_ice) July 29, 2014


Box, who is currently a professor of glaciology at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, has been studying the Arctic for decades. His accolade-packed Wikipedia page notes that he’s made some 20 expeditions to the Arctic since 1994, and served as the lead author on the Greenland section of NOAA’s State of the Climate report from 2008-2012. He also runs the Dark Snow project and writes about the latest findings in the field at his blog, Meltfactor.

………

“We are ‘sniffing’ methane,” Ulf Hedman, the science coordinator of the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat, wrote in a post highlighted by Climate Change SOS. “We see the bubbles on video from the camera mounted on the CTD or the Multicorer. All analysis tells the signs. We are in a Mega flare. We see it in the water column, we read it above the surface, and we follow it up high into the sky with radars and lasers. We see it mixed in the air and carried away with the winds. Methane in the air.”

“Methane is more than 20 times more potent than CO2 in trapping infrared as part of the natural greenhouse effect,” Box said. “Methane getting to the surface—that’s potent stuff.”

It’s especially worrying because the Arctic is warming faster than nearly anywhere else on Earth. Now, along with melting sea ice and thawing permafrost, we have to add to our list of ‘feedback loop’ concerns that warming Arctic oceans may be releasing fonts of methane. That is, the warmer the ocean gets, the more methane gets spewed out of those stores on the continental shelf, and the warmer the ocean gets, ad infinitum.

We need to get beyond the denials being driven by people who hate Al Gore and people who are making too much money on fossil fuels to allow for meaningful action to be taken, and we need to do it now.

H/t Crooks and Liars.

Another Reason to Vote Against Andrew Cuomo

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As I have noted before, Zephyr Teachout is challenging Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic Party primary for governor of New York.

What I did not know was that her running mate, Tim Wu, aka the father of net neutrality:

Tim Wu, an academic known for his work on net neutrality, is campaigning to become the Democratic nominee for the lieutenant governor of New York.

 He’s an unlikely politician. Cerebral, soft spoken, and willing to speak freely, conversation with Wu is a far cry from the stilted, shrill dialogue that makes up most of our modern political discourse.

 As next month’s primary election approaches, Wu faces a lawsuit aimed at unseating his candidacy, along with the candidacy of his running mate Zephyr Teachout.

 Robert Duffy, the current lieutenant governor of the state, is not seeking another term, pitting Wu against a fellow non-incumbent for the nomination. Teachout hopes to become the Democratic nominee for governor.

This is all kinds of awesome.

This is the Typical Result of Libertarian Bullsh%$ Like Bitcoin

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You remember the Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange?

People nearly ½ a billion dollars in Bitcoin, and now we discover that the head of the exchange was convicted of fraud in France, and had been sentenced to jail:

While Mt. Gox owner Mark Karpeles was growing what would become the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange, he should have been serving time in his home country of France. He was sentenced to a year in custody in 2010 on fraud accusations.

A newly obtained French court document shows that Karpeles has a civil and non-civil judgment pending where, in addition to custody, he also owes €45,000 ($60,000). The document is being published jointly for the first time by Ars Technica and the French publication Le Monde. (Read the French original here and an English translation here.)

The case was brought by a former employer who accused Karpeles of stealing customer user names, customer passwords, and a domain name, among other grievances. Under French law, Karpeles is not considered a criminal but rather “un délinquant,” a delinquent offender. It’s a lesser label than “criminal,” because that word is reserved only for very serious crimes within the country.

The 2010 decision shows that Karpeles lost by default, and he was found liable of “fraudulent access to an automated data processing system” and “fraudulent changes to data contained in an automated data processing system.” The document also states that Karpeles admitted to French authorities that he had “pirated” a server.

At the time, Karpeles was living in Japan. But a year after the judgment, he’d taken over Mt. Gox, well before the exchange and digital currency had become a household name. The French court documents acknowledge that he was never notified of the case and did not defend himself—hence, he lost by default. Karpeles’ own blog states he moved to Japan in 2009, and it appears he hasn’t returned to France since.

“To be honest, I was not even aware of this,” he told Ars in May regarding the sentence. “I’ll investigate and see what has to be done.” Karpeles has not responded to numerous attempts for further comment since then.

Yeah. He, “Wasn’t aware of this.”

He was questioned by police, admitted wrongdoing, got out France when the getting was good, but he “Wasn’t aware of this.”

When you take a supporting role in a libertarian wet dream, you are painting a target on your back.

Happy 9th of Av*

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Not a day to get breaking news.

Case in point, a guy who had recently been in West Africa just walked into a New York City Hospital and there are concerns that he is throwing symptoms of Ebola:

Heightened concern about the Ebola virus has led to alarms being raised at three hospitals in New York City. But so far, no Ebola cases have turned up.

The latest episode involved a man who had recently been to West Africa, and who went to the emergency room at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan late Sunday with a high fever and gastrointestinal problems, the hospital reported on Monday.

He is being kept in isolation at the hospital while tests are being done for Ebola, a deadly disease, but also for other illnesses that could have caused his symptoms.

Yeah, it would be the 9th of Av.

Remind me not to eat any bat soup.

*It is Tisha B’Av, the 9th day of the Hebrew month Av, and a small subset of the nasty bits of Jewish history follows:

  1. The report of the spies from Canaan, resulting in the people of Israel spending 40 Years in the Desert.
  2. The destruction of the 1st Temple.
  3. The destruction of the 2nd Temple.
  4. The Romans razed Betar, killing 100,000 Jews.
  5. The Romans plowed the temple mount.
  6. The start of the 1st Crusade.  (You see it as a coming together of Christendom.  I see it as a pogrom with years of murder and rape.)
  7. The expulsion of Jews from England.
  8. The expulsion of Jews from France.
  9. The expulsion of Jews from Spain.
  10. Germany entered the WW I. (Can be legitimately claimed to have directly led to the Shoah)
  11. Formal approval of the “Final Solution” by the Nazis in 1941.
  12. Deportations to Treblinka from the Warsaw Ghetto begin in 1942.

Excuse me while I find something sturdy to cover my head with.

    This is Too Awesome for Words

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    Some cops in the UK were on their way to a fancy dress party (in the US we call them a costume party), and they encounter, and apprehended a man threatening people’s lives at a super market while dressed as a zebra and a monkey:

    A pair of off-duty police officers who made an arrest while dressed as a zebra and a monkey have been commended for their bravery.

    PCs Tracy Griffin and Terri Cave were on their way to a fancy dress party when they came across a man yelling threatening abuse in a supermarket in Coventry in March 2014.

    The pair, dressed in zebra and monkey onesies, wrestled the man to the ground as he left the Co-op store and told one of the staff to ring 999.

    The man was arrested and taken into police custody on suspicion of public order offences, said West Midlands police. The PCs, who are based in Solihull, spent the rest of their evening filing reports at the police station rather than heading to the party.

    On hearing the news of the arrest, colleagues tweeted from @SolihullPolice: “Man threatening to kill people didn’t expect to be wrestled to the ground by our off-duty officer in a zebra onesie. We go that extra mile.”

    This is so awesome on so many levels.

    H/t the PBS news/comedy show Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me.