What Would YOU do?

Glenn Greenwald who writes now for The Guardian penned an opinion today which I believe is quite profound. It is about a new film released to selected theaters entitled "Compliance." He says in part:

Indie film Compliance recalls notions that the past decade's worst events are explained by failures to oppose authority.

ne can object to some of its particulars, but Frank Bruni has a quite interesting and incisive New York Times column today about a new independent film called Compliance, which explores the human desire to follow and obey authority.

Based on real-life events that took place in 2004 at a McDonalds in Kentucky, the film dramatizes a prank telephone call in which a man posing as a police officer manipulates a supervisor to abuse an employee with increasing amounts of cruelty and sadism, ultimately culminating in sexual assault – all by insisting that the abuse is necessary to aid an official police investigation into petty crimes.

That particular episode was but one of a series of similar and almost always-successful hoaxes over the course of at least 10 years, in which restaurant employees were manipulated into obeying warped directives from this same man, pretending on the telephone to be a police officer.

Bruni correctly notes the prime issue raised by all of this: "How much can people be talked into and how readily will they defer to an authority figure of sufficient craft and cunning?" That question was answered 50 years ago by the infamous experiment conducted by psychologist Stanley Milgram, in which an authority figure in a lab coat instructed participants to deliver what they were told were increasingly severe electric shocks to someone in another room whom they could hear but not see. Even as the screams became louder and more agonizing, two-thirds of the participants were induced fully to comply by delivering the increased electric shocks.

If this interests you as it does me I suggest you read the rest of his article here or below and then ask yourself the question: what would I do?



http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/276-74/13143-focus-the-perils-of-blind-obedience-to-authority

10 Things you should know now that Obamacare survived

Now that the Republican Party of Insanity's convention is about to get underway (more or less) I want to remind you what will happen if you allow these reactionary know nothing LOW information voters to have their way in November. Get down on your hands and knees and yes pray this never happens. Forward this to whomever you like.

If you think that the Grand Old Party has such a grand old idea killing so called Obamacare aka the Affordable Care Act here are 10 simple things you should know and pass on how this president's signature health care law will impact the healthy and sick, young and old, rich and poor.

They are the following:

1) Insurance companies can no longer impose lifetime coverage limits on your insurance. Never again will you face the risk of getting really sick and then, a few months in, having your insurer tell you, "Sorry, you've 'run out' of coverage." Almost everyone I've met knows someone who had insurance but got really, really sick (or had a kid get really sick) and ran into a lifetime cap.

2) If you don't know someone who has run into a lifetime cap, you probably know someone who has run into an annual cap. The use of these will be sharply limited. (They'll be eliminated entirely in 2014.)

3) Insurers can no longer tell kids with preexisting conditions that they'll insure them "except for" the preexisting condition. That's called preexisting condition exclusion, and it's out the window.

4) A special, temporary program will help adults with preexisting conditions get coverage. It expires in 2014, when the health insurance exchanges—basically big "pools" of businesses and individuals—come on-line. That's when all insurers will have to cover everyone, preexisting condition or not.

5) Insurance companies can't drop you when you get sick, either—this plan means the end of "rescissions."

6) You can stay on your parents' insurance until you're 26.

7) Seniors get $250 towards closing the "doughnut hole" in their prescription drug coverage. Currently, prescription drug coverage ends once you've spent $2,700 on drugs and it doesn't kick in again until you've spent nearly $6,200. James Ridgeway wrote about the problems with the doughnut hole for Mother Jones in the September/October 2008 issue. Eventually, the health care reform bill will close the donut hole entirely. The AARP has more on immediate health care benefits for seniors. Next year (i.e., in nine months), 50 percent of the doughnut hole will be covered.

8) Medicare's preventive benefits now come with a free visit with your primary care doctor every year to plan out your prevention services. And there are no more co-pays for preventative services in Medicare.

9) This is a big one: Small businesses get big tax credits—up to 50 percent of premium costs—for offering health insurance to their workers.

10) Insurers with unusually high administrative costs have to offer rebates to their customers, and every insurance company has to reveal how much it spends on overhead.

UPDATE: Here's one more big benefit we've found out about since the ACA passed:

11) Free birth control and other preventative services for women, unless you work for a faith-based organization that opposes birth control.

These are only SOME of the things the Obama Administration has done that will help EVERYONE and why it is 100% mandatory that President Obama be re-elected in November and why the election of Elizabeth Warren to the US Senate is so necessary.