As an INTJ I really want honesty to be honest. I want people to be rational, to say things the way they actually are instead of being “nice” and trying not to hurt.
I also want to be free and live on my own terms and conditions without no one telling me who, what, when, where, why I do whatever the hell I do in my life.
I also want to know EVERYTHING, good and bad about this world. I feel like TOO MUCH things are hidden from us and though the reality might not be all pink vanilla roses, i’d rather know everything than blindly and illogically believe what people want me to believe.
I also want to be understood more. Very few people understand me and most just say I’m crazy… for what?
So yeah and unfortunately, that’s the sort of thing I may never get.
Proclamation of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam
Compatriots of the entire nation assembled:
All people are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of the French Revolution made in 1791 also states: All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights.
Those are undeniable truths.
Nevertheless, for more than eighty years, the French imperialists, in the name of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow citizens. They have acted contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice.
In the field of politics, they have deprived our people of every democratic liberty.
They have enforced inhuman laws; they have set up three distinct political regimes in the North, Center, and South of Vietnam in order to destroy our national unity and prevent our people from being united.
They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly slaughtered our patriots; they have drowned our uprisings in bloodbaths.
They have fettered public opinion; they have practiced obscurantism against our people.
To weaken our race they have forced us to use opium and alcohol.
In the field of economics, they have fleeced us to the backbone, impoverished our people and devastated our land.
They have robbed us of our rice fields, our mines, our forests, and our raw materials. They have monopolized the issuing of bank notes and the export trade.
They have invented numerous unjustifiable taxes and reduced our people, especially our peasantry, to a state of extreme poverty.
They have hampered the prospering of our national bourgeoisie; they have mercilessly exploited our workers.
In the autumn of 1940, when the Japanese fascists violated Indochina‘s territory to establish new bases in their fight against the Allies, the French imperialists went down on their bended knees and handed over our country to them. Thus, from that date, our people were subjected to the double yoke of the French and the Japanese. Their sufferings and miseries increased. The result was that, from the end of last year to the beginning of this year, from Quảng Trị Province to northern Vietnam, more than two million of our fellow citizens died from starvation.
On March 9 [1945], the French troops were disarmed by the Japanese. The French colonialists either fled or surrendered, showing that not only were they incapable of “protecting” us, but that, in the span of five years, they had twice sold our country to the Japanese.
On several occasions before March 9, the Việt Minh League urged the French to ally themselves with it against the Japanese. Instead of agreeing to this proposal, the French colonialists so intensified their terrorist activities against the Việt Minh members that before fleeing they massacred a great number of our political prisoners detained at Yên Bái and Cao Bằng.
Notwithstanding all this, our fellow citizens have always manifested toward the French a tolerant and humane attitude. Even after the Japanese Putsch of March 1945, the Việt Minh League helped many Frenchmen to cross the frontier, rescued some of them from Japanese jails, and protected French lives and property.
From the autumn of 1940, our country had in fact ceased to be a French colony and had become a Japanese possession. After the Japanese had surrendered to the Allies, our whole people rose to regain our national sovereignty and to found the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
The truth is that we have wrested our independence from the Japanese and not from the French.
The French have fled, the Japanese have capitulated, Emperor Bảo Đại has abdicated. Our people have broken the chains which for nearly a century have fettered them and have won independence for the Fatherland. Our people at the same time have overthrown the monarchic regime that has reigned supreme for dozens of centuries. In its place has been established the present Democratic Republic.
For these reasons, we, the members of the Provisional Government, representing the whole Vietnamese people, declare that from now on we break off all relations of a colonial character with France; we repeal all the international obligation that France has so far subscribed to on behalf of Viet-Nam, and we abolish all the special rights the French have unlawfully acquired in our Fatherland.
The whole Vietnamese people, animated by a common purpose, are determined to fight to the bitter end against any attempt by the French colonialists to reconquer the country.
We are convinced that the Allied nations, which at Tehran and San Francisco have acknowledged the principles of self-determination and equality of nations, will not refuse to acknowledge the independence of Vietnam.
A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eighty years, a people who have fought side by side with the Allies against the fascists during these last years, such a people must be free and independent!
For these reasons, we, the members of the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, solemnly declare to the world that:
Vietnam has the right to be a free and independent country—and in fact it is so already. And thus the entire Vietnamese people are determined to mobilize all their physical and mental strength, to sacrifice their lives and property in order to safeguard their independence and liberty.
What Wall Street Doesn’t Want You to Know About Hospital Emergency Rooms
Yves here. We’ve written regularly on Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt’s important investigations into how private equity has taken over more and more of hospital staffing, including of emergency rooms. This in turn has allowed them to override patient efforts to have only in-network doctors assigned to their case, as well as to engage in other practices that greatly inflate patient charges (so-called surprise billing).
The legal fig leaf that allows private equity firms like Blackstone and KKR to play doctor is that their deals are structured so that MD or group of MDs is the nominal owner of the specialty practice, even though the business is stripped of its assets and the operating contracts are widely believed to strip them of any say. The now-notorious incident of Blackstone’s TeamHealth firing whistleblower Dr. Ming Lin confirms who is really in charge.
By Eileen Appelbaum, the Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and visiting professor, School of Management, University of Leicester, UK and Rosemary Batt, the Alice Hanson Cook Professor of Women and Work, Cornell University ILR School. Produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute
Doctor Ming Lin is the first emergency room doctor to be fired for going public with his concerns about poor hospital emergency room safety practices and shortages of medical supplies and protective gear for health workers. He won’t be the last.
Like many hospitals in the US, PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center in Bellingham Washington, where Ming Lin worked for the past 17 years as an emergency room doctor, has outsourced the management and staffing of its emergency rooms. So, Lin works on-site at the hospital’s emergency room, but he is employed by a physician staffing firm that runs the emergency room. These staffing firms are often behind the surprise medical bills for emergency room services that patients receive after their insurance company has paid the hospital and doctors, but not the excessive out-of-network charges billed by these outside staffing firms.
About a third of hospital emergency rooms are staffed by doctors on the payrolls of two physician staffing companies—TeamHealth and Envision Health—owned by Wall Street investment firms. Envision Healthcare employs 69,000 healthcare workers nationwide while TeamHealth employs 20,000. Private equity firm Blackstone Group owns TeamHealth, Kravis Kohlberg Roberts (KKR) owns Envision.
Care of the sick is not the mission of these companies; their mission is to make outsized profits for the private equity firms and its investors. Overcharging patients and insurance companies for providing urgent and desperately needed emergency medical care is bad enough. But it is unconscionable to muzzle doctors who speak out to advocate for the health of their patients and co-workers during the global pandemic that is rapidly spreading across the US.
Yet, that is what Blackstone-owned TeamHealth just did. Why would an experienced emergency room doctor be fired in the middle of a pandemic? One clue may be that Blackstone’s CEO, Stephen A. Schwarzman, is part of President Trump’s inner circle. He may not want to risk that relationship by allowing TeamHealth’s doctors to inform the public about Washington’s mishandling of the allocation of supplies and protective gear. The President might conclude that TeamHealth doctors didn’t appreciate him enough, and where would that leave Schwartzman?
PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center may have the distinction of being the first hospital to have a doctor outsourced from a physician staffing firm unceremoniously fired for telling the public the truth. But it won’t be the last. Hospitals are now telling doctors treating coronavirus patients they will be fired if they speak to the press.
The American Academy of Emergency Medicine protested Dr. Lin’s ouster and questioned how TeamHealth is allowed to provide hospital services when the law requires that physician practices must be owned by a licensed medical practitioner. TeamHealth skirts the law by owning all the assets of the physician practices it acquires—the real estate, offices, equipment, supplies, inventory, and even accounts receivable.
On paper, the physician practices are owned by a doctor-led organization that TeamHealth has set up to comply with the law. But what does it mean to own a physician practice if the practice has no assets and no possibility to exist on its own?
The furor over patients hit by surprise medical bills revealed that TeamHealth controls the billing for the doctors it supplies to hospital emergency rooms. The firing of Doctor Ming Lin pulls back the curtain and reveals that TeamHealth controls the doctors as well.
Anne Applebaum, “Red Famine”
A columnist for The Washington Post and author of the Pulitzer-winning Gulag, Applebaum has been writing about Russia since the 1990s. Her fifth book is a detailed study of Stalin’s 1929 policy of agricultural collectivization, which set off the worst famine in European history. Some five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. Of these, roughly three million were Ukrainians, and Applebaum definitively shows that they died due to deliberate government policy. Drawing on newly opened archives and personal accounts not previously translated, Applebaum substantiates the stories that Stalin suppressed Ukrainian uprisings by closing the borders, stopping food shipments, and letting the rebellious peasants starve.
(32 min): wrote about the Ukranianism of American politics with Paul Manafort
Search out far left and far right. They don’t invent, but they do fund.
Question: how do we divide people.
38:12
[Stalin] writing in private you know what he
writes to Kaganovich and these other
sidekicks he believes his ideology and
one of the things that’s important about
them about the Bolsheviks is they
believed that Marxism wasn’t just some
kind of theory and it could be money
they believed that it was a science and
it was true and it’s even more common
because it’s science and it’s true and
we define what it is and that means that
whatever we’ve said you know is true and
this is this is how things are going to
be and if it doesn’t work out in reality
the way we thought it was going to then
somebody else is responsible and who’s
responsible saboteurs wreckers kulaks
enemies of the people enemies of the
state you know and I actually believe
now that a lot of the you know a lot of
the violence the kinds kind of cycles of
violence you have in the Soviet Union
1932 and 33 you had the famine a few
years later you had the purges of 1937
and you have cyclical violence and
that’s almost always a response to
policy failure you know it hasn’t worked
the revolution hasn’t brought prosperity
and made us happy there has to be a
reason for it
okay you know let’s find the let’s find
the the parasites who are sucking the
blood of the revolution and get rid of
them and so that was you know and so the
so so your point you know your logical
point okay well look this agricultural
policy hasn’t worked let’s change it
that’s not how they thought you know it
wasn’t let’s change it love wheat you
know it’s not our policy that needs to
change it’s you know
the people in reality that has to adjust
our way of thinking and anyways I said I