elfs | Brains, Now With The Consequences of Free Healthcare (Reply)

Friends of mine who were praising the Cuban health care system last week had best consider this Washington Post article this morning:

Twenty-six patients at Cuba's largest hospital for the mentally ill died this week during a cold snap, the government said Friday.

Human rights leaders cited negligence and a lack of resources as factors in the deaths, and the Health Ministry launched an investigation that it said could lead to criminal proceedings.

...

Communist Cuba provides free health care to all its citizens but, though the quality of its medical system is celebrated in leftist circles around Latin America, it is also plagued by shortages. Patients are expected to bring their own sheets and towels and sometimes their own food during hospital stays.

But, hey, at least it's free, right?

All the Linux Format magazine's Gimp tutorials in one file!

Color Theory in one beautiful poster

jQuery Plug-In Design Patterns. Essential reading if you work with jQuery and end up doing a lot of unobtrusive work.

The Truth about the Uncanny Valley (hint: We get over it pretty quick once we've processed the encounter well enough to realize that what we are talking to is not a sick or deformed human being.)

They can't vote. They can't go to jail. Some of them are hundreds of years old. And even though they can fuck you hard, they're not human. Why do non-human entities have free speech rights? Lawrence Lessig says it's time to reconsider the personhood of corporations.

And finally, Andrew Sullivan on recent developments:

So, we have a government fused with corporations, a legislature run by corporate lobbyists who have just been given a massive financial gift to control the process even more deeply; we have a theory of executive power advanced by one party that gives the president total extra-legal power over any human being he wants to call an "enemy combatant" and total prerogative in launching and waging wars (remember Cheney did not believe Bush needed any congressional support to invade Iraq); we have a Supreme Court that believes in extreme deference to presidential power; we have a Congress of total pussies on the left and maniacs on the right and little in the middle; we have a 24-hour propaganda channel, run by a multinational corporation and managed by a partisan Republican, demonizing the president for anything he does or does not do; we have the open embrace of torture as a routine aspect of US government; and we have one party urging an expansion of the war on Jihadism to encompass a full-scale war against Iran, an act that would embolden the Khamenei junta and ensure that a civilizational war between the nuttiest Christianists in America and the vilest Islamists metastasizes to Def Con 3.

There's a word that characterizes this kind of polity. It's on the tip of my tongue ..