glans

yo i am probably going to need a surgery and I noticed I was referred to a religious hospital by default and am not sure what to do about it. I haven't gone there yet. I don't know if I should just ignore that religiousness of it. I was kind of shocked to get a letter in the mail addressed to me with a big ol cross on the envelope.

how do you feel about hospitals (and other health care organizations) that have some tie to religion? I guess a lot of them used to be totally run by churches or whatever but have become somewhat secularized over time. now they get funding from taxes, non profits, insurance companies or whatever.

In my experience it is usually catholic with other christian denominations showing up and many major cities having at least one jewish hospital.

In terms of the anglosphere are there any other religions that have hospitals? I have never heard of a muslim, hindu or buddhist hospital in "the west" though these of course exist elsewhere. do they exist in the US? has anyone ever tried to start one?

In terms of your own (or your family's care)

• do you judge them on their own merits?

• Prefer/boycott them compared to others?

• LGBTQ+++ people: do you trust them?

• women: do you trust them? if you were choosing to carry a pregnancy would you have doubts about going to such a place when the time came?

• religious people: do you trust the ones of other religions? or your own?

• atheists: do you trust them?

• indigenous people: do you trust them?

What kind of hiring practices do these places have? I remember hearing about Salvation Army being anti-queer in hiring. Are they generally allowed to discriminate in accordance of their religious bigotries?

Any other general political ideas too.

Is there any reason these places should be allowed to exist?

there's a few versions out there. linked is "REMIX - Rebel Diaz ft. Dead Prez and Rakaa Iriscience"

Florence Reece wrote the original in 1931. 93 years later still a question worth asking.

August 16, 2024

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The top United Nations court announced Friday that public hearings will open Dec. 2 in a landmark case seeking a non-binding advisory opinion on “the obligations of States in respect of climate change.”

The U.N. General Assembly sent the case to the International Court of Justice last year, with Secretary-General António Guterres saying at the time that he hoped the opinion would encourage nations “to take the bolder and stronger climate action that our world so desperately needs.”

The court said it had received written comments from 62 nations and organizations related to 91 written statements on the issue it had earlier received. Under the court’s rules, the written filings are confidential. The court can decide to make them public once the hearings open in early December.

The U.N, court’s panel of 15 judges from around the world will seek to answer two questions: What are countries obliged to do under international law to protect the climate and environment from human-caused greenhouse gas emissions and what are the legal consequences for governments where their acts of lack of action have significantly harmed the climate and environment?

Here is the ICJ page for the case: Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change

COVID started in 2020 and now it is 2024. Most jurisdictions, organizations and structures having a nominally democratic process will have had at least 1 round of elections since that time.

Has anyone done analysis of what effects COVID has had?

for example

• were incumbent candidates more/less successful than excepted?

• were parties in power at the time more or less likely to stay in power compared to expected?

• moving to the left, moving to the right?

• differences depending when the democratic processes took place, e.g. elections in 2020 vs 2023

• were any effects seen at local levels compared to national?

• overall an change in voter turnout or public participation?

Probably lots of other interesting questions that could be asked. These are just examples to explain what I'm getting at.

I was listening to recent true anon with Tom O'Neill. It sounded like he said that chapo got him on joe rogan. it was kind of mumbly and there was noise in the background where I was at so not sure if I heard it properly. something about jfk stuff.

the impression i got is that cth made an introduction or something.

are they friends

I found a way to retrieve the text of comments deleted by user or mod. I don't think it is an issue of federated instances not respecting the deletion.

Is it a bug?

Or is "deleting" always really just "hiding"?

For years I thought "Bring Em Young University" was a joke about the mormon practice of marrying girls to old men. Come to find out the religion was started by a guy "Brigham Young" after whom an actual university is named and nobody thinks that's weird at all.

I thought "Joe Mansion" was some kind of bizarro world "Joe the Plumber". Maybe joking about rich conservatives putting on affectations of being working class. He is actually a politician and his name is spelled "Manchin" and some people seem to think he's on the left.

For a long time I hated markdown.

Now I love it.

What do you think?

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

Wed, Apr 10th 2024 05:29am - Karl Bode

However terrible telecom monopolies are in the free world, they’re arguably worse in prisons. For decades, journalists and researchers have outlined how a select number of prison telecom giants like Securus have enjoyed a cozy, government-kickback based monopoly over prison phone and teleconferencing services, resulting sky high rates (upwards of $14 per minute at some prisons) for inmate families.

Most of these pampered monopolies have shifted over to monopolizing prison phone videoconferencing as well. And the relationship between government and monopoly is so cozy, several of these companies, like Securus, have been caught helping to spy on privileged attorney client communications.

There’s not much in the way of oversight, so the problem just keeps evolving. Case in point: Ars Technica notes that a civil rights group has filed a two new lawsuits against two Michigan counties, two county sheriffs, and two prison monopolies, Securus and Viapath (formerly known as Global Tel*Link Corporation, or GTL.

The lawsuits allege that Michigan banned in-person visits in order to maximize revenue from voice and video calls as part of a “quid pro quo kickback scheme” with prison phone companies. It’s something the group states has become increasingly common over the last decade as telecom monopolies lobby governments and private prison contractors to ban in-person visits to make more money:

“Why has this happened? The answer highlights a profound flaw in how decisions too often get made in our legal system: for-profit jail telecom companies realized that they could earn more profit from phone and video calls if jails eliminated free in-person visits for families. So the companies offered sheriffs and county jails across the country a deal: if you eliminate family visits, we’ll give you a cut of the increased profits from the larger number of calls. This led to a wave across the country, as local jails sought to supplement their budgets with hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from some of the poorest families in our society.”

Much like telecoms out in the broader free world, government has such a cozy relationship with telecom monopolies, the incentive to hold them accountable for much of anything is largely muted. In instances like domestic surveillance, it’s often impossible to determine where government ends and private monopolies like AT&T begin.

One lawsuit documents how Securus lobbied to have in-person visits eliminated and video kiosks installed where in-person visitation centers used to be. A contract was signed that doled out kickbacks to government so they got a big chunk of the revenue, incentivizing prisons to keep inmate populations high:

“Securus pays the County 50% of the $12.99 price tag for every 20-minute video call and 78% of the $0.21 per minute cost of every phone call. The contract promises the County an entirely new revenue stream, as well as a minimum guaranteed annual payment of $190,000 paid up front. And the contract gives Securus the right to terminate its video call service or pay the County less money if the jail population decreases by more than 5% or if
the jail fails to ensure a minimum number of monthly paid video calls.”

Much with the broader prison industrial complex, it’s not hard to see how perverse financial incentives point in all the wrong directions. It’s also not hard to see how this sort of relationship can easily be sold to cash-hungry counties and municipalities as more profitable, safer, and more secure. A win all around, unless you’re a poor inmate family member with limited resources and no personal lobbyists.

Efforts to do something about prison telecom monopolies were scuttled by FCC boss Ajit Pai, whose former clients included Securus. Pai not only routinely opposed efforts by ex-FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn to drive change in the prison telco sector, one of his very first acts as FCC boss was to pull the rugs out from underneath his own lawyers as they tried to support those reforms in court (they, as intended, lost).

An undercover unit of the Metropolitan Police, together with MI5, for decades monitored and infiltrated the Socialist Workers Party while, by contrast, a “high level policy decision” was taken not to infiltrate the neo-Nazi National Front.