I can add on to this, as I used to work for a small player in the insurance game. The big players, your BCBS and your UHC and your Aetna -- they have price agreements with hospitals that are set in stone and you can't see them. Everyone else gets "the bullshit."

Examples of "the bullshit" - X-Rays for three or four thousand dollars (anything over a couple hundred should be a crime), Observation (literally sitting alone in a room) for $2,000 per hour, overnight hospital stays for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If you're outside those networks (where they pay literally pennies on the dollar if not less) then the hospital will try to nail you to the wall. Franciscan hospitals out of Indianapolis are the WORST. It's a non-profit Catholic hospital that will demand full payment on admission if you're outside of their cartel.

Because they believe in a nihilistic philosophy (postmodernism).

I was actually surprised to see this posted in /r/facepalm on the old Spezzit. Of course, I can't reply to any comments because I was mass banned...

"forparticipating [sic] in r/nonewnormal, which is known for being a disease vector to other subreddits and society."

Anyway, it's unfortunate because I really wanted to earn my ban by saying "I'm honestly shocked this isn't in ___ ___ twitter in a thread that rhymes with "bountry blub" -- the idiots on that site and their ability to keep their heads in the sand is truly inspiring.

Yep. Bad men rule by physical force. Bad women rule by manipulation.

Also compounding this is the push for "equity" -- women are less likely to be good leaders. It doesn't mean it's impossible, it just means the more we push it towards 50/50 the more leadership positions are being occupied by vapid, petty tyrants without any leadership qualities at all.

One of the most visible female "leaders" in the current zeitgeist is CDC Director Walensky. Just try to imagine her taking responsibility for anything - it's impossible because she's proven herself incapable.

At the risk of sounding like Imp...

...the female imperative is truly an infection on our culture.

This is definitely true of things like Top Gun as well. People are hungry for something new and good, and are willing to settle for decent.

Its probably a "broken clock is right twice a day" thing but I really enjoyed CODA, the best picture winner. It is a bit formulaic, yes, but it did a magnificent job of showing that family dynamic of "we hate each other sometimes, but we sacrifice for each other without (much) resentment" -- characters are fully fleshed out, even the mother who could have very easily teetered into "dumb jealous bimbo."

I hope that some day we look back on the Marvel Age and see it as the wasteland of originality that it really and truly was.

In all seriousness if we are going to be realistic humans are always going to have a degenerate streak. Most animals do.

Part of what makes us different is that we put our ugliness aside to participate in wider society

Psychiatrists are a joke of a profession.

Did you know these vaunted mental health professionals rarely take more than a single MH seminar in medical school?

The logic is in the same vein of: dress for the job you want. You wouldnt expect to earn promotions wearing dirty sweatpants every day.

No one, and I mean NO ONE truly gives a shit what you do in your private life as long as you don't hurt anyone. Just please stop rubbing your degeneracy in our face.

Maybe I am the weird one. It doesn't demoralize me. Yeah, they may make life shitty for a bit, but it will pass. Spring will come again.

These motherfuckers are nihilists. The most productive thing they will ever do is fertilize the ground.

And I don't think the author intended it. Lord knows she had no idea what to do with books 2 and 3. Its just an observation that the elites are trying to live life like a fucked up bacchanalia.

I tried to broach this topic with a Canadian acquaintance of mine. He flipped out about how irresponsible this is and how he can't protect his toddler and how the shots will keep his kids (<5) out of the ''cemetery."

Friendly reminder that the Branch Covidians will never ever admit they were duped

No. She is of the sacred skin color that absolves all personal responsibility. How could she have possibly known not to do that?

It's like that Dave Chappelle joke about Chip but in reverse.

Oh and reminder: she's a nurse. I wonder how many patients she's killed.

Yes, most of the ones you are talking about will take any provocation as an excuse to get violent. I dunno if you remember that macy's employee who got sucker punched because a feral human within earshot thought he said the word.

His excuse was "what was I supposed to do?" Like it was an acceptable defense. And to the left it is because they are so bigoted they don't think blacks can control themselves.

I have so many thoughts on this, but this seems to be the most important:

"The 13 prior crashes should have alerted (suspect) to the dangers of reckless driving" -- NO. It should have alerted a competent society that she didn't deserve a fucking driver's license ever again.

I assume because of the rampant crime. I had to leave my bag in a room full of bags behind the desk.

There were no cameras in there, so thieves could theoretically go through anyone's bags, but at least the hostel wouldn't have their bargain bin shit stolen? Idk to be honest, Paris was comically bad from beginning to end.

I still don't understand how a major tourist city like Paris can have a subway system that is entirely and exclusively in French. I had just come from Seoul and Tokyo and couldn't fathom how Paris's transport system was.

I have been lucky to travel across the globe. Haven't even sniffed 90% of the world but I have a good sample.

Paris is the only place I ever went where I firmly decided never to return. Couldnt even get off the train platform before being accosted by a gypsy scam and I wasn't allowed to bring my bag up to my room in the hostel I booked. City smelled like piss, Parisians lived up to their reputation, too.

I ended up going to the airport a day early and just hanging out.

God, FUCK Paris.

(The rest of France was nothing but enjoyable, for the record. The folks down in Bayonne were particularly friendly and hospitable)

He absolutely does. Do you remember how hard they had to cheat to steal 2020?

Fuck that.

He neutered himself last time trying to reach across the aisle / work with establishment hacks in his own party. I understand why and probably supported doing so at the time.

But not anymore. Burn it all to the ground. Fire every person you can on Day 1 and bring in true loyalists.

There's one thing that needs to be made clear:

Leftists, liberals, and democrats see themselves and everyone under their tent as "the good guys" and everyone else as "the bad guys." They also believe the ends always justify the means.

It doesn't take a genius to see where that mindset will lead.

Well yes, of course. 100% agree. I just never expected to see MERS-level hysteria here in the US (having lived through the insanity of being locked out of work in Jeonju because someone's grandpa had it in Seoul was an... experience).

This all feels so incompetent, though. Its like 'they' (Congress, WHO, EU, China, Australia... literally fill in the blank on 'they') didn't realize that everything was in a deceptively tenuous balance. Now every 'correction' makes the problem worse in another way. The only way out is to rip the bandaid off and try to control the economic collapase or continue to bury their heads in the sand until something REALLY BAD happens.

With the white house diversity hire press sec claiming the economy has 'never been stronger' we know what their 'strategy' is.

Again, I am a layperson and likely an idiot.

But, China's response to the pandemic has puzzled me more and more as the months and years have dragged on. What they have done doesn't make any sense if they released or accidentally leaked the virus. They locked down HARD when they were positioned to benefit the most by staying open for business. Even now they are locking down whole cities for a virus that doesn't pose a major threat anymore.

There was also the statement of the bat lady scientist who claimed this wasn't one of their projects and she was relieved. Its possible she's lying (she is CCP after all) but... what if it wasn't?

All i know is that the official story doesn't make any sense. And the dems were the only direct beneficiaries of the pandemic's first year.

The more I think about it, that whole period was weird. Remember Pelosi ripping up the SOTU speech? What a bizarre thing in hindsight - it's almost like she knew she didn't have to hide her disdain anymore.

Obviously I'm just an idiot layman, but it's looking more and more like:

1. The US funded unethical gain of function research in China to evade laws here.

2. The US released or facilitated the leaking of the virus in or around Wuhan, China. Either directly from the lab or at the world military games in Wuhan in late 2019.

3. China acted predictably and stifled news of the disease until it was too late -- whereupon they enacted draconian measures that still haven't been lifted (and indeed may still be accelerating).

4. The virus and the reactions to it shut down the global economy, fully destabilizing wide swaths of the world.

All of this to regain power in the US.

Remember - the democrats coalesced around the potato mere days before the world shut down. A contentious primary just... ended abruptly right before chaos erupted.

The flagrant law violations in several battleground states exclusively benefitted the Democrats.

Seriously, who won from 2020? China? No, they locked down too hard to capitalize on the chaos (which never made sense to me if they were behind the whole thing). The only winner in 2020 was the DNC.

I laughed when China was frantically pointing fingers at the US during the summer of 2020, but now I suspect they were right all along.

What we're looking at now is essentially Pandora's Box on a global scale. The economic reaction to the virus release is just going to continue to spiral out of control until something breaks irreparably. We all can see it coming now, it's just a matter of which domino is first.

But that says a lot more about the failures of the media than it does about Comedy Central. That's my point.