k9dog1 said:

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"and people who have experienced (and/or lived under) both that system and the American system find it hard to understand how Americans can continue to tolerate such a comparatively barbaric and grossly inefficient system as prevails here."

Not sure if I buy that statement as I have cousins who live in Canada and have vacation home in Arizona. They tell me all the time how they prefer the US healthcare system. But hey to each his own.

Go Bears!

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Go!Bears said:

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My experience is very different. Wife's family lives there, including her 93 year old father who is 93 because of the excellent care.

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bearchamp said:

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By the way, "Trumpian" in the last enquiry means "bombastic, exaggeration unsupported and unsupportable by facts".

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Civi said:

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Percentage of Americans over the age of 90: 4.4% https://www.thoughtco.com/living-past-90-in-america-3321510

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stu said:

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Civi said:

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Percentage of Americans over the age of 90: 4.4% https://www.thoughtco.com/living-past-90-in-america-3321510

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I think that article is referring to 90+ as a percentage of Americans over 65, not as a percentage of all Americans.

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Civil Bear said:

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Go!Bears said:

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My experience is very different. Wife's family lives there, including her 93 year old father who is 93 because of the excellent care.

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Yes, Canadians can live to be 93.

Percentage of Canadians over the age of 85: 2.2% https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/as-sa/98-200-x/2016004/98-200-x2016004-eng.cfm

Percentage of Americans over the age of 90: 4.4% https://www.thoughtco.com/living-past-90-in-america-3321510

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Go!Bears said:

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Wife's family lives there, including her 93 year old father who is 93 because of the excellent care.

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helltopay1 said:

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mr. cohen is an old-school lefty who would complain about the lack of health care if he were in heaven...

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SFCityBear said:

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bearchamp said:

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By the way, "Trumpian" in the last enquiry means "bombastic, exaggeration unsupported and unsupportable by facts".

---

And you don't think the post to which I was replying, which said our healthcare system is "comparatively barbaric and grossly inefficient," was "bombastic, exaggeration unsupported and unsupportable by facts"?

How come you don't ask Mike Cohen for facts to back up his wild exaggerations? I gave you some facts already. The Canadian healthcare system is good as long as you are a white person living in cities, suburbs, and rural areas, and not out in the bush like a Cree or in the frozen north like an Inuit. Their healthcare system does an awful job with their indigenous Canadians. You ever been in northern Saskatchewan? It is primitive living. I've been there, spent time there. You ever been to Northern Manitoba? The town of Flin Flon had horrible air pollution, but the government wouldn't do anything about it, because the sulfur plant is the biggest employer in town. There is still a bounty for hunting and killing wolves in Canada, for goodness sake. Living in Canada in the bush is like living in the wild west of the USA 150 years ago. Anything goes in terms of environmental abuse. You want facts? I gave you facts. Here is one to back up my claim about the Inuit and Cree and national healthcare, from the Washington Post quoting studies in the British Medical Journal, the Lancet (neither one a recognized "Trumpian" news source)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/02/23/canadas-health-care-system-is-a-point-of-national-pride-but-a-study-shows-it-might-be-stalled/

I'm happy to give you facts. Just ask Mike to go first with his facts.

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stu said:

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Go!Bears said:

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Wife's family lives there, including her 93 year old father who is 93 because of the excellent care.

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IMHO the fraction of the population reaching advanced ages is not the best measure of healthcare quality. That statistic depends on many other factors, for example birthrate. If the birthrate is lower then the population will be older, in the extreme case of no births (or immigration) the entire population will eventually be old.

I think life expectancy would be a better (though still imperfect) measure of health care quality. That also varies by income as indicated here for the USA and here for Canada which gives some indication of health care accessibility. These data show the USA has higher overall life expectancy but Canada has lower variation by income.

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SFCityBear said:

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stu said:

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Go!Bears said:

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Wife's family lives there, including her 93 year old father who is 93 because of the excellent care.

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IMHO the fraction of the population reaching advanced ages is not the best measure of healthcare quality. That statistic depends on many other factors, for example birthrate. If the birthrate is lower then the population will be older, in the extreme case of no births (or immigration) the entire population will eventually be old.

I think life expectancy would be a better (though still imperfect) measure of health care quality. That also varies by income as indicated here for the USA and here for Canada which gives some indication of health care accessibility. These data show the USA has higher overall life expectancy but Canada has lower variation by income.

---

You make a good point. Physicians also tell us that life expectancy and health depend a lot on genetics, environment, lifestyle choices along with the the other things that have been mentioned.

Statistics can be cherry-picked or manipulated to bolster an argument. I feel the anecdotal personal experiences are perhaps more meaningful for the individual than looking at the cold statistics. I think Civil Bear is speaking from the heart when he describes his family's experience in both health care systems. GoBears' relative's experience is good for him in that it gives him confidence in the Canadian system, but one can't read too much into one relative's experience to extrapolate that out to mean the Canadian system is good for everyone. No system is, and no system is perfect. Everything usually depends on the the individual's outlook and will to live, along the above factors and also with the skill and caring that is given him by his doctors and nurses.

I had a massive heart attack 18 years ago. I'm a survivor. Everything the doctors and PMTs and nurses did was perfect. My cardiologist thinks I am a miracle. 12 years ago I had prostate cancer and had the prostate removed. I survived that as well (BTW, prostate cancer 10 year survival rate in Canada is 91%, and 98% in the US) I believe the operation was poorly done, because even though I am so far cancer-free, I had some bad side effects and had to have 3 more operations since to correct things. I have talked with other urologists and they all tell me that the nerve cut in my operation could happen to anyone. I have seen less competent doctors in America, who mis-diagnose things, but they have been few. I have seen incompetent nurses as well, but again they have been few. I would say that if you or someone you are caring for is in a hospital, you need to be very pro-active and take control of your case. Get hold of the head nurse and make your needs known, if you have any, and report every mistake in your care. The squeaky wheel gets the most grease, goes the saying.

I think America has an advantage in equipment and technology over Canada, but that is a guess. America is at the cutting edge of technology, I think, but that does not assure a cure for what ails the patient.

I have sought treatment at times outside our system, and used traditional Chinese medicine. Effective for some things. It is a much less invasive form of treatment, with few or no side effects, compared with Western drugs and surgeries. And I have seen incompetent doctors in that system as well, and suffered some because of it, but again they were few.

I never had much respect for Kaiser. 9 months ago, my cousin, a life-long Kaiser subscriber, took her daughter a 2 grandsons on a vacation to Australia and Fiji. After 2 weeks in Australia, they flew to Fiji. My cousin went wading in the surf on a beach there, on a very calm day. Suddenly a big wave came, lifted her up, and slammed her into a rock. She had a severe back injury and severe injuries to her face and one eye. She was underwater and unable to breathe, and paralyzed. Luckily her grandsons pulled her from the water. They got her to a hospital, but in Fiji the economy is so bad and the health system in trouble as well, that she was required to pay cash first, before being admitted to the ER. Luckily they all had credit cards and there were ATMs so they had to withdraw cash every day to give to the hospital. After 2 weeks, there was no improvement, so Kaiser decided she would get better care in Australia, so they air-lifted her to Sydney. She was 2 months in the hospital in Sydney, and then Kaiser airlifted her back to the USA, to a therapy facility in San Jose for intense therapy. After a month there she went to live at her daughter's home and Kaiser provided round the clock care, along with therapist visits. After another two months she returned home, and Kaiser continued to provide care for her. Gradually, with a lot of intense work she was able to walk again and has begun to drive her car a little. She will need an operation to repair her broken nose, and maybe more. I am amazed at how she is being taken care of by Kaiser. This does not relate to the Canada discussion, but it is an example of how good private insurance and Medicare combined can be for an American citizen injured overseas.

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mikecohen said:

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SFCityBear said:

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bearchamp said:

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By the way, "Trumpian" in the last enquiry means "bombastic, exaggeration unsupported and unsupportable by facts".

---

And you don't think the post to which I was replying, which said our healthcare system is "comparatively barbaric and grossly inefficient," was "bombastic, exaggeration unsupported and unsupportable by facts"?

How come you don't ask Mike Cohen for facts to back up his wild exaggerations? I gave you some facts already. The Canadian healthcare system is good as long as you are a white person living in cities, suburbs, and rural areas, and not out in the bush like a Cree or in the frozen north like an Inuit. Their healthcare system does an awful job with their indigenous Canadians. You ever been in northern Saskatchewan? It is primitive living. I've been there, spent time there. You ever been to Northern Manitoba? The town of Flin Flon had horrible air pollution, but the government wouldn't do anything about it, because the sulfur plant is the biggest employer in town. There is still a bounty for hunting and killing wolves in Canada, for goodness sake. Living in Canada in the bush is like living in the wild west of the USA 150 years ago. Anything goes in terms of environmental abuse. You want facts? I gave you facts. Here is one to back up my claim about the Inuit and Cree and national healthcare, from the Washington Post quoting studies in the British Medical Journal, the Lancet (neither one a recognized "Trumpian" news source)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/02/23/canadas-health-care-system-is-a-point-of-national-pride-but-a-study-shows-it-might-be-stalled/

I'm happy to give you facts. Just ask Mike to go first with his facts.

---

A few facts:

Medicare is more efficient than private insurance in a number of ways:

A doctor (or healthcare providers in general) have to have major administration to be able to handle the numerous unique and proliferant administrative requirements of the numerous different insurance companies. The administrative requirements for a healthcare provider dealing with Medicare are reduced to one system.

I don't know of any Medicare patient with a long-wait-time problem.

Medicare doctors I know of have developed systems (regarding which there is still plenty of room for growth and improvement towards even greater efficiency) for Physician's Assistants, and various levels of skilled nursing (all with electronic system help) to handle the flow of patients who present with routine issues, freeing the doctor to deal with anything that begins to look problematic - AND those systems and beginning to delve into establishing ways of educating their patients toward preventative life choices (I would say the area of medicine with the greatest room for improvement).

The drain on our economy of employers having to pay for the health insurance of their employees has always seemed to me to be massive and unjustified. Indeed, the whole point of health insurance is the economy of scale, which government health insurance (with the proper attitude - not the Republican attitude of everything government is bad, and therefore needs to be starved of resources, like, for example, public education) has more promise of --- although, having said that, I'm still not on the side of abolishing private health insurance. One of the great virtues of capitalism is its flexibility, nimbleness, creativity, freedom, etc. One of the great drawbacks of law-tethered systems is their woodenness, i.e.,t their very weakness in those areas of capitalist strength; and the future (as Yogi Berra said) is unpredictable enough that those capitalist virtues will not only be meaningful but necessary.

Further, the particularly American idea of "Checks and Balances" is particularly well served by the creative tension between the public and private sectors.

On the other hand, as can be seen by our society's circling the drain toward ever-unsustainable mal-distribution of wealth and (concomitantly) opportunity, Capitalism is particularly bad at distributing the wealth that it creates, because of its inexorable tendency toward competitive accumulation which, inexorably and constantly eliminates the competition (because, if you don't win, you die); and other forces are necessary to counteract that insanity, so that, for example, you don't end up without any customers, and without insufficient intellectual competition due to the inbreeding that comes from fewer and fewer students having the opportunity to obtain the education necessary to enter the competition of ideas.

Obviously, our government, even in its current parlous state, has gone very far (since the original "Gilded Age" toward establishing and nurturing both public and private counter-forces to allow the maximum human development to the maximum number that Capitalism is so ill-suited to provide. But it is also obvious that the trend lines in all this (at least too many of them) are going the wrong way; and burdening the people in all walks of life here, much more than necessary (let alone desirable), to the advantage of the few.

A word about immigration: Keep in mind that, in this country, there is a direct correlation between concentration of immigrants and local economic growth and health. This has recently been demonstrated in West Virginia (close to, if not the,poorest state in the union. Recently, there has been a conscious effort to welcome immigrants in certain locales there, with the (by now, utterly predictable) result that those locales are beacons of economic activity amidst the general economic malaise in that state. -- and IIRC, the same is true in Mississippi.

As a separate issue, the barbaric side of western medicine (which might well be shared in Canada for all I know), as well as the un-bedside-manner deficiencies that SF City Bear points out, in my mind, are also economically based, because, as SF City Bear points out, doctors don't have the time to get into the real issues of numerous ailments (such as those I am particularly familiar with, i.e., "soft-tissue injuries" that maybe most often don't show up on x-rays or MRIs, but which dog people for the rest of their lives, no matter at what age they occur (although they wouldn't have to, if the health solutions which work could become systematized, but most people don't get to and western medicine haven't figured out how to make a part of the system). So, by and large, what western medicine offers for those and a lot of other medical conditions (don't get me started on mental, or spiritual, health) is a one-size-fits-all regimen of (a) pills (NSAIDS, muscle relaxants, and pain killers), (b) physical therapy (of which enough is never available to the normal patient), and (c) surgery (which is an answer in only the most extreme of extreme cases.

Also to SF City Bear: If he thinks that the Canadian system majorly discriminates against the indigenous people there, he should take a look at the statistics of the maldistribution of health care (and its destructive effects on individuals) in this country to poorer people on every side of the political aisle, poor city dwellers and rural people in general. Indeed, as an aside, in those areas, often the ONLY hope for those people (rural or urban poor) are the odd immigrant doctors who see the opportunity to establish themselves there, because no other doctors are willing or financially able to do so. This, of course, is majorly exacerbated in right wing states where the governors (for no other reason that makes sense other than outright cruelty) refused to implement the expansion of government health care which the ACA made free to any state that implemented it, depriving I don't know the massive number of Americans any possibility of regular healthcare other than the way-more-expensive E.R., or death and financial destruction.

There's probably more; but I need to get back to work.

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SFCityBear said:

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mikecohen said:

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SFCityBear said:

---

bearchamp said:

---

By the way, "Trumpian" in the last enquiry means "bombastic, exaggeration unsupported and unsupportable by facts".

---

And you don't think the post to which I was replying, which said our healthcare system is "comparatively barbaric and grossly inefficient," was "bombastic, exaggeration unsupported and unsupportable by facts"?

How come you don't ask Mike Cohen for facts to back up his wild exaggerations? I gave you some facts already. The Canadian healthcare system is good as long as you are a white person living in cities, suburbs, and rural areas, and not out in the bush like a Cree or in the frozen north like an Inuit. Their healthcare system does an awful job with their indigenous Canadians. You ever been in northern Saskatchewan? It is primitive living. I've been there, spent time there. You ever been to Northern Manitoba? The town of Flin Flon had horrible air pollution, but the government wouldn't do anything about it, because the sulfur plant is the biggest employer in town. There is still a bounty for hunting and killing wolves in Canada, for goodness sake. Living in Canada in the bush is like living in the wild west of the USA 150 years ago. Anything goes in terms of environmental abuse. You want facts? I gave you facts. Here is one to back up my claim about the Inuit and Cree and national healthcare, from the Washington Post quoting studies in the British Medical Journal, the Lancet (neither one a recognized "Trumpian" news source)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/02/23/canadas-health-care-system-is-a-point-of-national-pride-but-a-study-shows-it-might-be-stalled/

I'm happy to give you facts. Just ask Mike to go first with his facts.

---

A few facts:

Medicare is more efficient than private insurance in a number of ways:

A doctor (or healthcare providers in general) have to have major administration to be able to handle the numerous unique and proliferant administrative requirements of the numerous different insurance companies. The administrative requirements for a healthcare provider dealing with Medicare are reduced to one system.

I don't know of any Medicare patient with a long-wait-time problem.

Medicare doctors I know of have developed systems (regarding which there is still plenty of room for growth and improvement towards even greater efficiency) for Physician's Assistants, and various levels of skilled nursing (all with electronic system help) to handle the flow of patients who present with routine issues, freeing the doctor to deal with anything that begins to look problematic - AND those systems and beginning to delve into establishing ways of educating their patients toward preventative life choices (I would say the area of medicine with the greatest room for improvement).

The drain on our economy of employers having to pay for the health insurance of their employees has always seemed to me to be massive and unjustified. Indeed, the whole point of health insurance is the economy of scale, which government health insurance (with the proper attitude - not the Republican attitude of everything government is bad, and therefore needs to be starved of resources, like, for example, public education) has more promise of --- although, having said that, I'm still not on the side of abolishing private health insurance. One of the great virtues of capitalism is its flexibility, nimbleness, creativity, freedom, etc. One of the great drawbacks of law-tethered systems is their woodenness, i.e.,t their very weakness in those areas of capitalist strength; and the future (as Yogi Berra said) is unpredictable enough that those capitalist virtues will not only be meaningful but necessary.

Further, the particularly American idea of "Checks and Balances" is particularly well served by the creative tension between the public and private sectors.

On the other hand, as can be seen by our society's circling the drain toward ever-unsustainable mal-distribution of wealth and (concomitantly) opportunity, Capitalism is particularly bad at distributing the wealth that it creates, because of its inexorable tendency toward competitive accumulation which, inexorably and constantly eliminates the competition (because, if you don't win, you die); and other forces are necessary to counteract that insanity, so that, for example, you don't end up without any customers, and without insufficient intellectual competition due to the inbreeding that comes from fewer and fewer students having the opportunity to obtain the education necessary to enter the competition of ideas.

Obviously, our government, even in its current parlous state, has gone very far (since the original "Gilded Age" toward establishing and nurturing both public and private counter-forces to allow the maximum human development to the maximum number that Capitalism is so ill-suited to provide. But it is also obvious that the trend lines in all this (at least too many of them) are going the wrong way; and burdening the people in all walks of life here, much more than necessary (let alone desirable), to the advantage of the few.

A word about immigration: Keep in mind that, in this country, there is a direct correlation between concentration of immigrants and local economic growth and health. This has recently been demonstrated in West Virginia (close to, if not the,poorest state in the union. Recently, there has been a conscious effort to welcome immigrants in certain locales there, with the (by now, utterly predictable) result that those locales are beacons of economic activity amidst the general economic malaise in that state. -- and IIRC, the same is true in Mississippi.

As a separate issue, the barbaric side of western medicine (which might well be shared in Canada for all I know), as well as the un-bedside-manner deficiencies that SF City Bear points out, in my mind, are also economically based, because, as SF City Bear points out, doctors don't have the time to get into the real issues of numerous ailments (such as those I am particularly familiar with, i.e., "soft-tissue injuries" that maybe most often don't show up on x-rays or MRIs, but which dog people for the rest of their lives, no matter at what age they occur (although they wouldn't have to, if the health solutions which work could become systematized, but most people don't get to and western medicine haven't figured out how to make a part of the system). So, by and large, what western medicine offers for those and a lot of other medical conditions (don't get me started on mental, or spiritual, health) is a one-size-fits-all regimen of (a) pills (NSAIDS, muscle relaxants, and pain killers), (b) physical therapy (of which enough is never available to the normal patient), and (c) surgery (which is an answer in only the most extreme of extreme cases.

Also to SF City Bear: If he thinks that the Canadian system majorly discriminates against the indigenous people there, he should take a look at the statistics of the maldistribution of health care (and its destructive effects on individuals) in this country to poorer people on every side of the political aisle, poor city dwellers and rural people in general. Indeed, as an aside, in those areas, often the ONLY hope for those people (rural or urban poor) are the odd immigrant doctors who see the opportunity to establish themselves there, because no other doctors are willing or financially able to do so. This, of course, is majorly exacerbated in right wing states where the governors (for no other reason that makes sense other than outright cruelty) refused to implement the expansion of government health care which the ACA made free to any state that implemented it, depriving I don't know the massive number of Americans any possibility of regular healthcare other than the way-more-expensive E.R., or death and financial destruction.

There's probably more; but I need to get back to work.

---

I'm a little confused, so before I attempt to answer some of this, I need to ask, when you use the word "Medicare," are you referring to Medicare in America or Medicare in Canada? The Canadian Healthcare system as a whole is usually called "Medicare" by Canadians, and applies to everyone, as I understand it. Medicare is just one part of the American healthcare system, and applies to seniors over 65, younger persons with disabilities, and those with end stage renal disease.

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helltopay1 said:

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Dear Stu: i used to be an "old-school lefty." then, as the saying goes, " I was mugged by reality." Reagan used to be an old-school lefty too...then he went to Hollywood and saw first-hand the tremendous influence Communists were having in Hollywood, and, of course, potentially on our culture. so----I have come to my beliefs honestly-------i used to be a card-carrying member of the left...just thought you would like to know about my political evolution..sf city bear......so sorry to hear about your medical travails..I do wish you the best..

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BearGreg said:

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Just posted some interesting updates on the Haas Pavilion board.

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SFCityBear said:

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helltopay1 said:

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Dear Stu: i used to be an "old-school lefty." then, as the saying goes, " I was mugged by reality." Reagan used to be an old-school lefty too...then he went to Hollywood and saw first-hand the tremendous influence Communists were having in Hollywood, and, of course, potentially on our culture. so----I have come to my beliefs honestly-------i used to be a card-carrying member of the left...just thought you would like to know about my political evolution..sf city bear......so sorry to hear about your medical travails..I do wish you the best..

---

Helltopay1,

I have a similar evolution, but for me it was sudden and shocking. I was a typical flaming Leftist coming out of Berkeley, a participant in FSM and involved with SDS. I was in the engineering school and we had one course supposedly to make up for our lack of liberal arts courses, and it was called "Social Science". It was a blatant propaganda course in the virtues of Communism, and we read Marx, Engels and Mao. We watched movies of all the happy, singing Chinese communists who got up at 6AM and washed down their streets. There no longer was any opium in China. We saw movies of cops with dogs, beating up freedom riders in the Democrat-run South. I swallowed all of it.

Then I went to the East, and joined the Anti-war march on the Pentagon in 1968. It was a hot humid day as 500,000 of us marched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon. There is nothing on the way to the Pentagon. No water, no food, no toilets. The crowd was getting restless. My companion insisted on going to the front of the mob to see what was happening. We reached the front line which was at the foot of a few steps leading to a small plaza and the front doors of the the building. There were two armored personnel carriers full of troops parked on the plaza. On the roof above the Pentagon doors, two soldiers had set up a .50 caliber machine gun and pointed it away from the crowd below. On the either side of the steps were two concrete walls, and atop each wall sat a lone communist agitator with a bull horn, and they started to urge the crowd to push forward and get into the Pentagon. Suddenly, an officer gave an order for the troops to leave the vehicles. The soldiers who all carried rifles rushed to man positions on the steps and block our path. The Communists stepped up their rhetoric and tone. The crowd behind us who could not see the danger in the situation, began to push us forward. The soldiers were just kids, mostly young black teenagers, with fear in their eyes. As the tension grew, the officer gave the order for the soldiers to fix bayonets. Then the soldiers on the roof swung the machine gun around, and trained it on the crowd. There was no way for us to get out. The Communists with the bullhorns kept yelling for us to "Charge, and take the Pentagon." I realized right there what Communism was all about. Those two guys wanted the confrontation to escalate to where one or some of us were killed, and become martyrs for their cause.

Somehow, some hippies managed to get into the Pentagon foyer by a side door, and they were running around the lobby, yelling, "Where's the War Room?" Everyone started to laugh, the soldiers and the crowd, and just like that the whole situation was defused. The crowd dispersed and went home, and I figure I was damn lucky not to get killed, and become a martyr for some communist. A few months later, at Kent State, that communist got his wish to come true as some students got shot by the National Guard in a demonstration. At that moment the country and the politicians lost their stomach for the Vietnam war and ended it, although slowly.

I was apolitical for years after that, but I'm a conservative now. Conservative values today are more like the values of my youth, which were liberal values, even a lot like the Democrat party of Adlai Stevenson and Pat Moynahan. The Democrat Party of today is almost completely hijacked by the far Left, and sounds to me a lot like those two guys with the bullhorns.

---

BeachedBear said:

---

SFCityBear said:

---

helltopay1 said:

---

Dear Stu: i used to be an "old-school lefty." then, as the saying goes, " I was mugged by reality." Reagan used to be an old-school lefty too...then he went to Hollywood and saw first-hand the tremendous influence Communists were having in Hollywood, and, of course, potentially on our culture. so----I have come to my beliefs honestly-------i used to be a card-carrying member of the left...just thought you would like to know about my political evolution..sf city bear......so sorry to hear about your medical travails..I do wish you the best..

---

Helltopay1,

I have a similar evolution, but for me it was sudden and shocking. I was a typical flaming Leftist coming out of Berkeley, a participant in FSM and involved with SDS. I was in the engineering school and we had one course supposedly to make up for our lack of liberal arts courses, and it was called "Social Science". It was a blatant propaganda course in the virtues of Communism, and we read Marx, Engels and Mao. We watched movies of all the happy, singing Chinese communists who got up at 6AM and washed down their streets. There no longer was any opium in China. We saw movies of cops with dogs, beating up freedom riders in the Democrat-run South. I swallowed all of it.

Then I went to the East, and joined the Anti-war march on the Pentagon in 1968. It was a hot humid day as 500,000 of us marched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon. There is nothing on the way to the Pentagon. No water, no food, no toilets. The crowd was getting restless. My companion insisted on going to the front of the mob to see what was happening. We reached the front line which was at the foot of a few steps leading to a small plaza and the front doors of the the building. There were two armored personnel carriers full of troops parked on the plaza. On the roof above the Pentagon doors, two soldiers had set up a .50 caliber machine gun and pointed it away from the crowd below. On the either side of the steps were two concrete walls, and atop each wall sat a lone communist agitator with a bull horn, and they started to urge the crowd to push forward and get into the Pentagon. Suddenly, an officer gave an order for the troops to leave the vehicles. The soldiers who all carried rifles rushed to man positions on the steps and block our path. The Communists stepped up their rhetoric and tone. The crowd behind us who could not see the danger in the situation, began to push us forward. The soldiers were just kids, mostly young black teenagers, with fear in their eyes. As the tension grew, the officer gave the order for the soldiers to fix bayonets. Then the soldiers on the roof swung the machine gun around, and trained it on the crowd. There was no way for us to get out. The Communists with the bullhorns kept yelling for us to "Charge, and take the Pentagon." I realized right there what Communism was all about. Those two guys wanted the confrontation to escalate to where one or some of us were killed, and become martyrs for their cause.

Somehow, some hippies managed to get into the Pentagon foyer by a side door, and they were running around the lobby, yelling, "Where's the War Room?" Everyone started to laugh, the soldiers and the crowd, and just like that the whole situation was defused. The crowd dispersed and went home, and I figure I was damn lucky not to get killed, and become a martyr for some communist. A few months later, at Kent State, that communist got his wish to come true as some students got shot by the National Guard in a demonstration. At that moment the country and the politicians lost their stomach for the Vietnam war and ended it, although slowly.

I was apolitical for years after that, but I'm a conservative now. Conservative values today are more like the values of my youth, which were liberal values, even a lot like the Democrat party of Adlai Stevenson and Pat Moynahan. The Democrat Party of today is almost completely hijacked by the far Left, and sounds to me a lot like those two guys with the bullhorns.

---

Good stories. I'm younger than SFCB and H2P and older than my college graduated children, but this tale reflects a lot of frustration I have today with semantics and the lack of rational discourse. That is; that many polarizing terms get conflated with each other: Liberal/Conservative, Left/Right, Democrat/Republican (all of which should have different meanings and contexts, but often are conflated as in SFCB's tale above), Terrorist/Patriot, Demonstrator/Agitator, Revolutionary/Defender are more inflammatory, but often differ based on what side you are on. Anyway, I find I'm often caught in the middle of these arguments saying things like "I don't think conservative means to your daughter, what it means to your mother" and so forth. All very entertaining, but often frustrating.

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SFCityBear said:

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helltopay1 said:

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Dear Stu: i used to be an "old-school lefty." then, as the saying goes, " I was mugged by reality." ...

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I have a similar evolution, but for me it was sudden and shocking. ...

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BeachedBear said:

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SFCityBear said:

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helltopay1 said:

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Dear Stu: i used to be an "old-school lefty." then, as the saying goes, " I was mugged by reality." Reagan used to be an old-school lefty too...then he went to Hollywood and saw first-hand the tremendous influence Communists were having in Hollywood, and, of course, potentially on our culture. so----I have come to my beliefs honestly-------i used to be a card-carrying member of the left...just thought you would like to know about my political evolution..sf city bear......so sorry to hear about your medical travails..I do wish you the best..

---

Helltopay1,

I have a similar evolution, but for me it was sudden and shocking. I was a typical flaming Leftist coming out of Berkeley, a participant in FSM and involved with SDS. I was in the engineering school and we had one course supposedly to make up for our lack of liberal arts courses, and it was called "Social Science". It was a blatant propaganda course in the virtues of Communism, and we read Marx, Engels and Mao. We watched movies of all the happy, singing Chinese communists who got up at 6AM and washed down their streets. There no longer was any opium in China. We saw movies of cops with dogs, beating up freedom riders in the Democrat-run South. I swallowed all of it.

Then I went to the East, and joined the Anti-war march on the Pentagon in 1968. It was a hot humid day as 500,000 of us marched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon. There is nothing on the way to the Pentagon. No water, no food, no toilets. The crowd was getting restless. My companion insisted on going to the front of the mob to see what was happening. We reached the front line which was at the foot of a few steps leading to a small plaza and the front doors of the the building. There were two armored personnel carriers full of troops parked on the plaza. On the roof above the Pentagon doors, two soldiers had set up a .50 caliber machine gun and pointed it away from the crowd below. On the either side of the steps were two concrete walls, and atop each wall sat a lone communist agitator with a bull horn, and they started to urge the crowd to push forward and get into the Pentagon. Suddenly, an officer gave an order for the troops to leave the vehicles. The soldiers who all carried rifles rushed to man positions on the steps and block our path. The Communists stepped up their rhetoric and tone. The crowd behind us who could not see the danger in the situation, began to push us forward. The soldiers were just kids, mostly young black teenagers, with fear in their eyes. As the tension grew, the officer gave the order for the soldiers to fix bayonets. Then the soldiers on the roof swung the machine gun around, and trained it on the crowd. There was no way for us to get out. The Communists with the bullhorns kept yelling for us to "Charge, and take the Pentagon." I realized right there what Communism was all about. Those two guys wanted the confrontation to escalate to where one or some of us were killed, and become martyrs for their cause.

Somehow, some hippies managed to get into the Pentagon foyer by a side door, and they were running around the lobby, yelling, "Where's the War Room?" Everyone started to laugh, the soldiers and the crowd, and just like that the whole situation was defused. The crowd dispersed and went home, and I figure I was damn lucky not to get killed, and become a martyr for some communist. A few months later, at Kent State, that communist got his wish to come true as some students got shot by the National Guard in a demonstration. At that moment the country and the politicians lost their stomach for the Vietnam war and ended it, although slowly.

I was apolitical for years after that, but I'm a conservative now. Conservative values today are more like the values of my youth, which were liberal values, even a lot like the Democrat party of Adlai Stevenson and Pat Moynahan. The Democrat Party of today is almost completely hijacked by the far Left, and sounds to me a lot like those two guys with the bullhorns.

---

Good stories. I'm younger than SFCB and H2P and older than my college graduated children, but this tale reflects a lot of frustration I have today with semantics and the lack of rational discourse. That is; that many polarizing terms get conflated with each other: Liberal/Conservative, Left/Right, Democrat/Republican (all of which should have different meanings and contexts, but often are conflated as in SFCB's tale above), Terrorist/Patriot, Demonstrator/Agitator, Revolutionary/Defender are more inflammatory, but often differ based on what side you are on. Anyway, I find I'm often caught in the middle of these arguments saying things like "I don't think conservative means to your daughter, what it means to your mother" and so forth. All very entertaining, but often frustrating.

---

stu said:

---

SFCityBear said:

---

helltopay1 said:

---

Dear Stu: i used to be an "old-school lefty." then, as the saying goes, " I was mugged by reality." ...

---

I have a similar evolution, but for me it was sudden and shocking. ...

---

My evolution went in the opposite direction, possibly a generational thing since I graduated in 1970. I grew up in an all-white suburb populated mostly by better-off members of my parents' generation. The prevailing political opinion was Republican, of the "I like Ike" variety. That included me until late in high school when the Vietnam War was blowing up. In that area politicians both Republican and Democrat seemed unable to tell the truth, exhibit any moral fiber, or even display basic competence. With that and other generational issues I became more anti-establishment than left or right After the war I've been concerned about the future and the common good, so I guess that makes me more of a liberal than a conservative.

Coming of age at Cal in Berkeley was also a powerful influence - the education both on and off campus was fantastic. I've never worked in Hollywood, or for any significant time in the private sector. Just public education and non-profits, so I haven't experienced the same "real world" most others have. Since leaving that homogeneous suburb I've met all sorts of interesting people, However as far as I know I've never met a communist, anarchist, Nazi, KKK member, or other political extremist. But I do notice the company different politicians keep and that colors my opinions.

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SFCityBear said:

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Well, I tried not to conflate, but I guess I failed. My view is that politics is constantly in a state of flux, and many politicians themselves change like chameleons when they get caught leaning too far one way or another for their audience. . . .

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BeachedBear said:

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Back to Real Information about Mens basketball. From what I've gleamed from various sources (public and private), the staff is much more cohesive and organized and the players are responding very well to it. ...

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SFCityBear said:

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BeachedBear said:

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SFCityBear said:

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helltopay1 said:

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Dear Stu: i used to be an "old-school lefty." then, as the saying goes, " I was mugged by reality." Reagan used to be an old-school lefty too...then he went to Hollywood and saw first-hand the tremendous influence Communists were having in Hollywood, and, of course, potentially on our culture. so----I have come to my beliefs honestly-------i used to be a card-carrying member of the left...just thought you would like to know about my political evolution..sf city bear......so sorry to hear about your medical travails..I do wish you the best..

---

Helltopay1,

I have a similar evolution, but for me it was sudden and shocking. I was a typical flaming Leftist coming out of Berkeley, a participant in FSM and involved with SDS. I was in the engineering school and we had one course supposedly to make up for our lack of liberal arts courses, and it was called "Social Science". It was a blatant propaganda course in the virtues of Communism, and we read Marx, Engels and Mao. We watched movies of all the happy, singing Chinese communists who got up at 6AM and washed down their streets. There no longer was any opium in China. We saw movies of cops with dogs, beating up freedom riders in the Democrat-run South. I swallowed all of it.

Then I went to the East, and joined the Anti-war march on the Pentagon in 1968. It was a hot humid day as 500,000 of us marched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon. There is nothing on the way to the Pentagon. No water, no food, no toilets. The crowd was getting restless. My companion insisted on going to the front of the mob to see what was happening. We reached the front line which was at the foot of a few steps leading to a small plaza and the front doors of the the building. There were two armored personnel carriers full of troops parked on the plaza. On the roof above the Pentagon doors, two soldiers had set up a .50 caliber machine gun and pointed it away from the crowd below. On the either side of the steps were two concrete walls, and atop each wall sat a lone communist agitator with a bull horn, and they started to urge the crowd to push forward and get into the Pentagon. Suddenly, an officer gave an order for the troops to leave the vehicles. The soldiers who all carried rifles rushed to man positions on the steps and block our path. The Communists stepped up their rhetoric and tone. The crowd behind us who could not see the danger in the situation, began to push us forward. The soldiers were just kids, mostly young black teenagers, with fear in their eyes. As the tension grew, the officer gave the order for the soldiers to fix bayonets. Then the soldiers on the roof swung the machine gun around, and trained it on the crowd. There was no way for us to get out. The Communists with the bullhorns kept yelling for us to "Charge, and take the Pentagon." I realized right there what Communism was all about. Those two guys wanted the confrontation to escalate to where one or some of us were killed, and become martyrs for their cause.

Somehow, some hippies managed to get into the Pentagon foyer by a side door, and they were running around the lobby, yelling, "Where's the War Room?" Everyone started to laugh, the soldiers and the crowd, and just like that the whole situation was defused. The crowd dispersed and went home, and I figure I was damn lucky not to get killed, and become a martyr for some communist. A few months later, at Kent State, that communist got his wish to come true as some students got shot by the National Guard in a demonstration. At that moment the country and the politicians lost their stomach for the Vietnam war and ended it, although slowly.

I was apolitical for years after that, but I'm a conservative now. Conservative values today are more like the values of my youth, which were liberal values, even a lot like the Democrat party of Adlai Stevenson and Pat Moynahan. The Democrat Party of today is almost completely hijacked by the far Left, and sounds to me a lot like those two guys with the bullhorns.

---

Good stories. I'm younger than SFCB and H2P and older than my college graduated children, but this tale reflects a lot of frustration I have today with semantics and the lack of rational discourse. That is; that many polarizing terms get conflated with each other: Liberal/Conservative, Left/Right, Democrat/Republican (all of which should have different meanings and contexts, but often are conflated as in SFCB's tale above), Terrorist/Patriot, Demonstrator/Agitator, Revolutionary/Defender are more inflammatory, but often differ based on what side you are on. Anyway, I find I'm often caught in the middle of these arguments saying things like "I don't think conservative means to your daughter, what it means to your mother" and so forth. All very entertaining, but often frustrating.

---

Well, I tried not to conflate, but I guess I failed. My view is that politics is constantly in a state of flux, and many politicians themselves change like chameleons when they get caught leaning too far one way or another for their audience. I am sure Democrats will find my characterization of the Democratic Party today as offensive, and I do exaggerate some, usually to make a point. But my view of that party today is that there are these main wings: traditional liberals in the Pat Moynahan model, very kind and caring about the poor and disadvantaged and having solid solutions for that, and (2) traditional big city machine Democrats in the Mayor Daly of Chicago or the Tammany Hall model, often corrupt, and (3) the extreme Leftists, unafraid to put forth the policies and use the vicious methods of Marxists such as Lenin to achieve the destruction of our American society, culture and our capitalist system. In my opinion, the liberals are less in the public view, and the extremists gaining more voice and power in Democrat Party. The so-called progressives in the Democrat party, again in my opinion, are mostly older machine politicians like Pelosi and Biden, but trying to hang on to power and having to accede to the wishes of the more extreme crowd of young Leftist Democrats to do it. The issues and platform of the Democrat Party today is not as concerned with the worker, especially the blue collar worker, and it was labor union support which helped Trump win his election. The party has a lot more billionaires and multi-millionaires than it used to have. he party is more concerned with fantasies like unprovable catastrophic man-made climate change, or claims of racism, or sexism or the other isms, all of which occur from time to time, but are not provable to be any worse than in the past, and in my opinion, our citizens of all colors are not as bad as extremists of any kind make them out to be.

The Republicans on the other hand are also changing from the party of Ike or the party of Reagan. I believe it is a much bigger tent than the Democrat party, which is moving hard Left, based on the candidates they are running for President, and the policies they espouse, or lack of them. The Republican accept most anyone. They have a large conservative wing, but even there they are divided into fiscal conservatives and social conservatives. There are the old machine-type Republicans who hang out in country clubs, and there are a lot of liberals now. It used to be the party of Big Business, but it has morphed into the party of small and mid-sized business, with and eye to supporting workers in those businesses. There is a sizeable Libertarian wing in the party, complete with support for decriminalizing marijuana. With the arrival of Trump, there is now a powerful wing of nationalists in the party. And many of the people working to bring Donald Trump down are Republicans. Republicans are mostly pro life, but there is a sizeable number on the pro choice side. There is much support for fighting man made climate change and many who are skeptics. It is true for many issues. There are some Trump supporters, but most Republicans don't like him. They are as divided as ever, which results in ineffective government.

It was Frederick Douglas, the great black orator and politician, and a close friend of Abraham Lincoln, when asked about how he felt about the Democrats and the Republicans once said, "The Republicans, they don't do much for us, but the Democrats, they kill us." The Republicans still don't do enough for us, especially blacks, and I think the Democrats are still killing us - not literally, but I think their policies, such as aid to families with dependent children have destroyed the black family. Their persecution of churches, and promotion of secularism has destroyed much of our culture. Their medicare has caused medical costs to rise astronomically. They have pumped trillions and trillions of dollars into the ghettos, and what do we still have? Ghettos. And now with moving further left, toward socialism and its extremist cousin, communism, they risk destroying our society and economic system altogether. Douglas didn't like the choices much 150 years ago, and I don't like the choices today any better.

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Big C said:

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SFCityBear said:

---

BeachedBear said:

---

SFCityBear said:

---

helltopay1 said:

---

Dear Stu: i used to be an "old-school lefty." then, as the saying goes, " I was mugged by reality." Reagan used to be an old-school lefty too...then he went to Hollywood and saw first-hand the tremendous influence Communists were having in Hollywood, and, of course, potentially on our culture. so----I have come to my beliefs honestly-------i used to be a card-carrying member of the left...just thought you would like to know about my political evolution..sf city bear......so sorry to hear about your medical travails..I do wish you the best..

---

Helltopay1,

I have a similar evolution, but for me it was sudden and shocking. I was a typical flaming Leftist coming out of Berkeley, a participant in FSM and involved with SDS. I was in the engineering school and we had one course supposedly to make up for our lack of liberal arts courses, and it was called "Social Science". It was a blatant propaganda course in the virtues of Communism, and we read Marx, Engels and Mao. We watched movies of all the happy, singing Chinese communists who got up at 6AM and washed down their streets. There no longer was any opium in China. We saw movies of cops with dogs, beating up freedom riders in the Democrat-run South. I swallowed all of it.

Then I went to the East, and joined the Anti-war march on the Pentagon in 1968. It was a hot humid day as 500,000 of us marched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon. There is nothing on the way to the Pentagon. No water, no food, no toilets. The crowd was getting restless. My companion insisted on going to the front of the mob to see what was happening. We reached the front line which was at the foot of a few steps leading to a small plaza and the front doors of the the building. There were two armored personnel carriers full of troops parked on the plaza. On the roof above the Pentagon doors, two soldiers had set up a .50 caliber machine gun and pointed it away from the crowd below. On the either side of the steps were two concrete walls, and atop each wall sat a lone communist agitator with a bull horn, and they started to urge the crowd to push forward and get into the Pentagon. Suddenly, an officer gave an order for the troops to leave the vehicles. The soldiers who all carried rifles rushed to man positions on the steps and block our path. The Communists stepped up their rhetoric and tone. The crowd behind us who could not see the danger in the situation, began to push us forward. The soldiers were just kids, mostly young black teenagers, with fear in their eyes. As the tension grew, the officer gave the order for the soldiers to fix bayonets. Then the soldiers on the roof swung the machine gun around, and trained it on the crowd. There was no way for us to get out. The Communists with the bullhorns kept yelling for us to "Charge, and take the Pentagon." I realized right there what Communism was all about. Those two guys wanted the confrontation to escalate to where one or some of us were killed, and become martyrs for their cause.

Somehow, some hippies managed to get into the Pentagon foyer by a side door, and they were running around the lobby, yelling, "Where's the War Room?" Everyone started to laugh, the soldiers and the crowd, and just like that the whole situation was defused. The crowd dispersed and went home, and I figure I was damn lucky not to get killed, and become a martyr for some communist. A few months later, at Kent State, that communist got his wish to come true as some students got shot by the National Guard in a demonstration. At that moment the country and the politicians lost their stomach for the Vietnam war and ended it, although slowly.

I was apolitical for years after that, but I'm a conservative now. Conservative values today are more like the values of my youth, which were liberal values, even a lot like the Democrat party of Adlai Stevenson and Pat Moynahan. The Democrat Party of today is almost completely hijacked by the far Left, and sounds to me a lot like those two guys with the bullhorns.

---

Good stories. I'm younger than SFCB and H2P and older than my college graduated children, but this tale reflects a lot of frustration I have today with semantics and the lack of rational discourse. That is; that many polarizing terms get conflated with each other: Liberal/Conservative, Left/Right, Democrat/Republican (all of which should have different meanings and contexts, but often are conflated as in SFCB's tale above), Terrorist/Patriot, Demonstrator/Agitator, Revolutionary/Defender are more inflammatory, but often differ based on what side you are on. Anyway, I find I'm often caught in the middle of these arguments saying things like "I don't think conservative means to your daughter, what it means to your mother" and so forth. All very entertaining, but often frustrating.

---

Well, I tried not to conflate, but I guess I failed. My view is that politics is constantly in a state of flux, and many politicians themselves change like chameleons when they get caught leaning too far one way or another for their audience. I am sure Democrats will find my characterization of the Democratic Party today as offensive, and I do exaggerate some, usually to make a point. But my view of that party today is that there are these main wings: traditional liberals in the Pat Moynahan model, very kind and caring about the poor and disadvantaged and having solid solutions for that, and (2) traditional big city machine Democrats in the Mayor Daly of Chicago or the Tammany Hall model, often corrupt, and (3) the extreme Leftists, unafraid to put forth the policies and use the vicious methods of Marxists such as Lenin to achieve the destruction of our American society, culture and our capitalist system. In my opinion, the liberals are less in the public view, and the extremists gaining more voice and power in Democrat Party. The so-called progressives in the Democrat party, again in my opinion, are mostly older machine politicians like Pelosi and Biden, but trying to hang on to power and having to accede to the wishes of the more extreme crowd of young Leftist Democrats to do it. The issues and platform of the Democrat Party today is not as concerned with the worker, especially the blue collar worker, and it was labor union support which helped Trump win his election. The party has a lot more billionaires and multi-millionaires than it used to have. he party is more concerned with fantasies like unprovable catastrophic man-made climate change, or claims of racism, or sexism or the other isms, all of which occur from time to time, but are not provable to be any worse than in the past, and in my opinion, our citizens of all colors are not as bad as extremists of any kind make them out to be.

The Republicans on the other hand are also changing from the party of Ike or the party of Reagan. I believe it is a much bigger tent than the Democrat party, which is moving hard Left, based on the candidates they are running for President, and the policies they espouse, or lack of them. The Republican accept most anyone. They have a large conservative wing, but even there they are divided into fiscal conservatives and social conservatives. There are the old machine-type Republicans who hang out in country clubs, and there are a lot of liberals now. It used to be the party of Big Business, but it has morphed into the party of small and mid-sized business, with and eye to supporting workers in those businesses. There is a sizeable Libertarian wing in the party, complete with support for decriminalizing marijuana. With the arrival of Trump, there is now a powerful wing of nationalists in the party. And many of the people working to bring Donald Trump down are Republicans. Republicans are mostly pro life, but there is a sizeable number on the pro choice side. There is much support for fighting man made climate change and many who are skeptics. It is true for many issues. There are some Trump supporters, but most Republicans don't like him. They are as divided as ever, which results in ineffective government.

It was Frederick Douglas, the great black orator and politician, and a close friend of Abraham Lincoln, when asked about how he felt about the Democrats and the Republicans once said, "The Republicans, they don't do much for us, but the Democrats, they kill us." The Republicans still don't do enough for us, especially blacks, and I think the Democrats are still killing us - not literally, but I think their policies, such as aid to families with dependent children have destroyed the black family. Their persecution of churches, and promotion of secularism has destroyed much of our culture. Their medicare has caused medical costs to rise astronomically. They have pumped trillions and trillions of dollars into the ghettos, and what do we still have? Ghettos. And now with moving further left, toward socialism and its extremist cousin, communism, they risk destroying our society and economic system altogether. Douglas didn't like the choices much 150 years ago, and I don't like the choices today any better.

---

Since you seem to be something of an admirer of his, I will point out that it is "Frederick Douglass".

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59bear said:

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stu said:

---

SFCityBear said:

---

helltopay1 said:

---

Dear Stu: i used to be an "old-school lefty." then, as the saying goes, " I was mugged by reality." ...

---

I have a similar evolution, but for me it was sudden and shocking. ...

---

My evolution went in the opposite direction, possibly a generational thing since I graduated in 1970. I grew up in an all-white suburb populated mostly by better-off members of my parents' generation. The prevailing political opinion was Republican, of the "I like Ike" variety. That included me until late in high school when the Vietnam War was blowing up. In that area politicians both Republican and Democrat seemed unable to tell the truth, exhibit any moral fiber, or even display basic competence. With that and other generational issues I became more anti-establishment than left or right After the war I've been concerned about the future and the common good, so I guess that makes me more of a liberal than a conservative.

Coming of age at Cal in Berkeley was also a powerful influence - the education both on and off campus was fantastic. I've never worked in Hollywood, or for any significant time in the private sector. Just public education and non-profits, so I haven't experienced the same "real world" most others have. Since leaving that homogeneous suburb I've met all sorts of interesting people, However as far as I know I've never met a communist, anarchist, Nazi, KKK member, or other political extremist. But I do notice the company different politicians keep and that colors my opinions.

---

Me too. I grew up in small, rural community where the only daily newspaper makes Fox News look positively liberal. Through college (and early adulthood) I was staunchly Republican though I drew the line at Goldwater. Started to swing away as Viet Nam got messier and, ultimately, untenable. My brother flew for Pan Am on some charter flights taking military personnel in country and developed serious questions about the legitimacy of our mission there based on what he observed during layovers. Over the last 50 years, I've drifted from far right to center left, am a political independent and wonder regularly about things like "Who put us in charge of the world?". Frankly, I'm thoroughly disgusted by the cycle of hyper-partisanship that we seem unable to escape. I have to seriously question if a society that could elect a Donald Trump to lead it is capable (or deserving) of survival. If we really want to put America first, it seems to me we'd be better off dealing with education, health care, gun violence, the environment and infrastructure at home and stop seeking unwinnable foreign military engagements. End of rant.

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