The ‘Bizzaro World’, Jack-Booted, Freak-Show Of HHS Sec. Kathleen Sebelius

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Image Credit: itmakessenseblog.com

The ‘Bizzaro World’, Jack-Booted, Freak-Show Of HHS Sec. Kathleen Sebelius

Kathleen Sebelius appears before Congress – Let the ‘Bizzaro World’, jack-booted, freak-show begin:

The Madame Secretary Kathleen Sebelius began her answers by proposing that the regulation that amends the law that insurance companies could not longer carry the policies they currently have with consumers – or face penalty – did not allow these consumers to have a policy. The fact remains that consumers could no longer KEEP the policy they had as the President promised.

After blaming the sub-contractors for all of the website problems, Kathleen Sebelius was asked for the name of who was responsible for the debacle – it took Health and Human Services Secretary Sebelius over 3 minutes to finally place herself as the person who was ultimately responsible after trying to lay the responsibility at the feet of the sub-contractors.

Friends, meet your new ‘DADDY’ and decision-making ruler over the care for your life. We no longer can make any decisions on whither to expend effort and our own resources on health insurance – YOU MUST buy health insurance – and relinquish the specific decisions that effect the depth and level of actual care in our lives. The Government calls this LAW the Affordable Care Act … we call it ObamaCare.

It took the Madame Secretary nearly a half an hour to point out that the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) was, in fact, the LAW which we must all comply.

The Madame Secretary loved using the term ‘consumers’ for people having to purchase these Government mandated insurance plans – let’s just use the proper term of SUBJECTS! When it is the LAW we all must purchase the few plans (not tailored directly to our needs) mandated by a Government and not available on an open and free market basis, we are no longer customers or consumers.

Further, the Madame Secretary Kathleen Sebelius also loved using the term ‘Health Security’ to explain a benefit of the Affordable Care Act/ObamaCare. These are two words that do not belong together under any philosophical construct. Our individual health and its care is never secure for it is at the will of God, genealogy, and the strength of our own habits – for a Government to assume it can MAKE health and its care ‘secure’ is a tyrannical joke.

Madame Secretary Kathleen Sebelius asserted that consumers/subjects are full of anticipation over the ability to review and purchase their new insurance plans – Anticipation? Let’s just say ANXIETY-riddled fear.

Lastly, there is no security over the information that is shared with any of the healthcare.gov websites – NONE! If there is no security over the government computers that hold the information held that WIKILEAKS exposed, how can anyone assume that their personal information is secure with an UNTESTED and transforming website that did not work since its launch on October, 1, 2013?

Health care is not a right as the politically progressive love to assert, it is only a process – at best.

This very ugly chapter in the history of our radically oriented Personal-Rights and Personal-Freedom based country is just beginning. It is pretty tough when the Supreme Court will not even affirm the basic tenants of the United States Constitution, let alone to have ANY political party stand for them - Democrat or Republican.

Presently - The Obama Administration dictates what constitutes a "grand-fathered" insurance plan ... you know "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan" ... all plans that deviate by as little as one dollar offered by a free-market insurance company to an individual is deemed CANCELLED. Whereas, a plan, no matter how it may change, sold to members of specific organized Unions are deemed "grand-fathered".

We are living in a non equal-access ‘Bizzaro World’, jack-booted, freak-show of a centralized government paradigm.

Cuba's IT Underground - It's On The Stick!

Having a USB memory stick is like carrying a portable hard drive the size of a packet of chewing gum. USB memory sticks are the fastest in the flash memory card industry with transfer rates up to 60MB/s and capacities ranging from 64MB to 4GB. Caption & Image Credit: mediaheaven.co.uk

Cuba's IT Underground - It's On The Stick!

Necessity is the mother of invention – or in this case adaptation. Information technology in Cuba, with its heavy-handed Communist/Socialist oversight of human activity, is in a process of breaking out of the grip of the government sanctions against the freedom of information sharing and publishing.

News, information, and entertainment media in Cuba, is hard to come by unless one is able to afford the time to log on to a computer in one of the few “Cyber Cafés”, have access to a tourist hotel internet portal, is a student, or has access to a smuggled dish and secretly grab the information for later viewing and sharing - OFFLINE!

Dutch made , USB Memory sticks manually selected for their natural beauty, and professionally handmade into unique and personal USB memory sticks. From ooms. Order Online - 256 MB - 45 Euro 1GB - 70 Euro. Caption & Image Credit: oooms.nl

OFFLINE in Cuba is an intranet (an in-country internet) patched together through a “postal service” email communication connection that the government is having trouble shutting down. The “Whack-A-Mole” process the government is left with can not stop the viral sharing aided with the use of USB memory sticks.

At an e-mail center in Havana, customers work under an employee’s watchful eye. Old Havana has only one true Internet cafe, down from three a few years ago. Caption & Image Credit: Jose Goitia - The New York Times

This excerpted from The New York Times -

Cyber-Rebels in Cuba Defy State’s Limits
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. - New York Times, HAVANA - March 6, 2008

A growing underground network of young people armed with computer memory sticks, digital cameras and clandestine Internet hookups has been mounting some challenges to the Cuban government in recent months, spreading news that the official state media try to suppress.

Last month, students at a prestigious computer science university videotaped an ugly confrontation they had with Ricardo Alarcón, the president of the National Assembly.

Mr. Alarcón seemed flummoxed when students grilled him on why they could not travel abroad, stay at hotels, earn better wages or use search engines like Google. The video spread like wildfire through Havana, passed from person to person, and seriously damaged Mr. Alarcón’s reputation in some circles.
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“It passes from flash drive to flash drive,” said Ariel, 33, a computer programmer, who, like almost everyone else interviewed for this article, asked that his last name not be used for fear of political persecution. “This is going to get out of the government’s hands because the technology is moving so rapidly.”

Cuban officials have long limited the public’s access to the Internet and digital videos, tearing down unauthorized satellite dishes and keeping down the number of Internet cafes open to Cubans. Only one Internet cafe remains open in Old Havana, down from three a few years ago.

Hidden in a small room in the depths of the Capitol building, the state-owned cafe charges a third of the average Cuban’s monthly salary — about $5 — to use a computer for an hour. The other two former Internet cafes in central Havana have been converted into “postal services” that let Cubans send e-mail messages over a closed network on the island with no links to the Internet.
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Young people here say there is a thriving black market giving thousands of people an underground connection to the world outside the Communist country.

Swiss army knife with USB memory stick Memory size: 128MB 256MB 512MB 1GB 2GB 4GB 8GB. Caption & Image Credit: sz-wholesale.com

People who have smuggled in satellite dishes provide illegal connections to the Internet for a fee or download movies to sell on discs. Others exploit the connections to the Web of foreign businesses and state-run enterprises. Employees with the ability to connect to the Internet often sell their passwords and identification numbers for use in the middle of the night.

Hotels catering to tourists provide Internet services, and Cubans also exploit those conduits to the Web.

Even the country’s top computer science school, the University of Information Sciences, set in a campus once used by Cuba’s spy services, has become a hotbed of cyber-rebels. Students download everything from the latest American television shows to articles and videos criticizing the government, and pass them quickly around the island.
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The video of Mr. Alarcón’s clash with students was leaked to the BBC and CNN, giving the world a rare glimpse of the discontent among the young with the system.
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Another event many people witnessed through the digital underground was the arrival in the United States of Carlos Otero, a popular television personality and humorist in Cuba who defected in December while on a trip to Toronto.

Illegal antennas caught signals from Miami television stations, which youths turned into digital videos and shared. Though the event smacked more of celebrity news than politics, it would never have been shown on the official media.

Some young journalists have also started blogs and Internet news sites, using servers in other countries, and their reports are reaching people through the digital underground.

Yoani Sánchez, 32, and her husband, Reinaldo Escobar, 60, established Consenso desde Cuba , a Web site based in Germany. Ms. Sánchez has attracted a considerable following with her blog, Generación Y, in which she has artfully written gentle critiques of the government by describing her daily life in Cuba. Ms. Sánchez and her husband said they believed strongly in using their names with articles despite the possible political repercussions.

Shortly before Raúl Castro was elected president last week to replace his ailing brother, Fidel, Ms. Sánchez wrote a piece describing what sort of president she wanted. She said the country did not need a soldier, a charismatic leader or a great speaker, but “a pragmatic housewife” who favored freedom of speech and open elections.

Writing later about Raúl Castro’s first speech as president, she criticized his vague promises of change, saying they were as clear as the Rosetta Stone was when it was first found. Both essays would be impossible to publish in Cuba.
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Because Ms. Sánchez, like most Cubans, can get online for only a few minutes at a time, she writes almost all her essays beforehand, then goes to the one Internet cafe, signs on, updates her Web site, copies some key pages that interest her and walks out with everything on a memory stick. Friends copy the information, and it passes from hand to hand. “It’s a solid underground,” she said. “The government cannot control the information.”

It is spread by readers like Ricardo, 28, a philosophy student at the University of Havana who sells memory sticks to other students.
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Like many young Cubans, Ricardo plays a game of cat and mouse with the authorities. He doubts that the government will ever let ordinary citizens have access to the Internet in their homes. “That’s far too dangerous,” he said. “Daddy State doesn’t want you to get informed, so it preventively keeps you from surfing.”

Pedro, a midlevel official with a government agency, said he often surfed Web sites like the BBC and The Miami Herald at work, searching for another view of the news besides the ones presented in the state-controlled media. He predicted that the 10,000 students studying the Internet and programming at the University of Information Sciences would transform the country over time, opening up more and more avenues of information.

“We are training an army of information specialists,” he said.
Reference Here>>

Fairness Doctrine vs Citizen Journalism

Recognizing the threat of China's growing online community, Chinese President Hu Jintao called in January for the Internet to be "purified", and the government has since launched a number of online crackdowns. Image Credit: AFP

Fairness Doctrine vs Citizen Journalism

Here in the good ol’ USA, we have members of our congress walking the halls complaining about the success of “Talk Radio” and how it needs to be regulated. A recent account observed that senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Hillary Clinton (D-CA) were conversing about how the “Fairness Doctrine” needs to re-implemented in order to curb the free market influences that rule the popularity of this broadcast and communications medium.

This doctrine grew out of concern back in 1949 because of the large number of applications for radio station being submitted and the limited number of frequencies available. Broadcasters had to make sure they did not use their stations simply as advocates with a singular perspective. Rather, they had to allow all points of view. That requirement was to be enforced by FCC mandate. With the deregulation sweep of the Reagan Administration during the 1980s, the Federal Communications Commission dissolved the fairness doctrine.

It is funny how our currently elected leadership waxes philosophical regarding the limitation of free speech in the face of the communications landscape that exists today. The focus on the success of Talk Radio and the Fairness Doctrine leaves behind the rest of the singularly liberal forces that exist with mainstream broadcast television, newspaper print media, and the educator class that run our universities.

Oh!, And let us not forget the freedom of speech and communication that has become the “Wild West” landscape of the internet. How will our elected leaders like Boxer and Clinton address the internet in light of this concept of the “Fairness Doctrine”? … Maybe they can draw on the experience the political leaders in China.

Excerpts from Agence France-Presse via Breitbart -

'Citizen journalism' battles the Chinese censors
AFP - Jun 24 11:44 PM US/Eastern

In the strictly controlled media world of communist China, "citizen journalism" is beating a way through censorship, breaking taboos and offering a pressure valve for social tensions.

In one striking example this month, the Internet was largely responsible for breaking open a slave scandal in two Chinese provinces that some local authorities had been complicit in.

A letter posted on the Internet by 400 parents of children working as slaves in brickyards was the trigger for the national press to finally report on the scandal that some rights groups say had been going on for years.

The parents' Internet posting was part of a growing phenomenon for marginalised people in China who can not otherwise have their complaints addressed by the traditional, government-controlled press.

"The phenomenon of 'citizen journalism' suddenly arrived several years ago," said Beijing-based dissident Liu Xiaobo, who was one of the student leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen democracy protests.

"Since the appearance of blogs in particular, every blog is a new platform for the spread of information."

He cited the example of a couple in the southwestern city of Chongqing who became known as the "Stubborn Nails" in April because they refused to leave their home until they received adequate compensation from the property developer who wanted them out.
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"That case was first revealed through blogs," Liu said.

Also in Chongqing, parts of the city were this month set on fire following the beating of flower sellers by the "chengguan", city police charged with "cleaning up" the city's roads.

Witnesses to the beatings had appealed to local television journalists, but nothing was broadcast.

The incident only became known outside the city thanks to photos and stories published on the Internet, sparking anger among China's netizens.

"It's fascism," said one, while another mocked: "The inhabitants of Chongqing are truly naive, the Chinese media is all controlled by the Communist Party, they decide what people know."
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Recognising the threat of China's growing online community, Chinese President Hu Jintao called in January for the Internet to be "purified", and the government has since launched a number of online crackdowns.

"The department of propaganda has sent out regulations to try and control the opinions being spread on the Internet, but every citizen has the right to criticise or to take part in public affairs on the Internet," said Zhu Dake, a professor at Shanghai Tongji University.

"The government has to accept the criticisms of the people, it can no longer react crudely like in the past."

Julien Pain, who monitors Internet freedom issues for Reporters Without Borders, is less optimistic.

"One cannot truly say that the Internet in China is becoming more and more free, because at the same time as the development of citizen journalists, the government finds ways of blocking or censoring content," Pain said.

Reporters Without Borders, which labels the Chinese government an "enemy of the Internet," says about 50 cyber dissidents are currently behind bars in China.
Reference Here>>

At least here in America, we have the First Amendment in our Constitution.

Even Senators John Kerry, Dick Durbin, and Diane Feinstein and their wishes to stop the "hyperbole" coming from a free and open media with a fairness doctrine ... will not be able to "purify" the American communications landscape.
(ht: The Museum of Broadcast Communications and Fox News)

The Real Survivor Fiji - Frank Hates People's Opinions

Commodore Frank Bainimarama, Commander of the Republic of Fiji Military Forces - Image Credit: Wikipedia

The Real Survivor Fiji - Frank Hates People's Opinions

In a move that can only mean the worst has yet to come, the self-appointed (he would never have been elected - not bright enough) leader of the nation of freedom loving island peoples, Fiji, is attempting to shut down the ... get this ... The Internet!

Of course, this act is beyond hubris. It reminds me of the boast that Al Gore made during the run up to America's 2000 presidential elections (to paraphrase) "I invented the Internet!"

What does Commodore Frank Bainimarama plan to say ... "I killed the Internet!"???

To which the collective response should be ... "Was that before or after you killed the country and peoples you forcibly took rule over?"

Frank hates people's opinions so that is why we at MAXINE do not really care for Frank.

This from All Headline News -

Fiji Military Moves To Close Down Blogging Sites
Richard Bowden - AHN Staff Writer - May 11, 2007 7:01 p.m. EST

Suva, Fiji (AHN) - The Fijian ruling military junta has moved to close down blog sites critical of the regime after unsuccessful attempts to find those responsible for the sites.

Senior military commander Colonel Pita Driti told Pacific Radio Friday that access to the sites would be closed yesterday.

A spokesman for Fiji's only internet provider FINTEL confirmed they had been asked to shut down the web sites by the Government "for security purposes."

"They asked us to address a few things. We have given them some options to consider, because we can't just go into the web and stop access. It would be unfair to the general public," the spokesman said.

He said if the military directed them to block the offending web sites the provider would have no choice but to agree.

"If the directive is to block, then we have no other option but to comply. ... we are seeking authorization on that from our administration," he said.

Three blog sites which have published stories which have embarrassed the military Government since their coup in December 2006 are Intelligentsiya, Resist Frank's Coup and Discombobulated Bubu.
Reference Here>>

Hey Frank! ... BLOCK THIS!

Security reasons ... who's security, Frank?

And Frank thinks to himself, "This is all such an embarrassment."

Hey Frank, GET OVER IT!

To the folks over at Intelligentsiya, Resist Frank's Coup, and Discombobulated Bubu - If you all get shut down, write to MAXINE and we will publish what you have to say. Frank can't shut us down here in the sunny Southland of the good ol' USA!

UPDATE May 17, 2007:

Fijian free speech websites have been inactive for approximately one week. Maybe the writers have "gone to ground" or is Frank and his weak kneed military followers slamming the free speech door shut?

This from Fijilive.com -

Anti-military blogsites become inactive
Thursday May 17, 2007

All activity on the controversial "resistfrankscoup" blogsite has stopped with the last entry now glaringly standing at May 9.

Last week, the Fiji Military Forces had said it was talking with Fiji International Telecommunications Ltd (FINTEL) to stop blog spots on the Internet which it claimed were a threat to national security.

But FINTEL spokesperson Iowane Koroivuki says they haven't done anything to the blogsite.

"If somebody has done something, then it is not us. It has got nothing to do with FINTEL," he said.

"If we had done something we would have told the truth anyway."

The army commander Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama told Fijilive.com that he has informed his people not to waste their time on blogs.

"The blog will take you back its not going to do any good for us.

"It's meant to depress us, it's meant to tell people anti-military stories. It's all lies and there is no use reading it," said Bainimarama.

Another blog site "Intelligentsia" shows no activity either.

Last week, Land Force Commander, Colonel Pita Driti had said they were trying to close all anti military sites namely, Intelligentsia.com, Resistfrankscoup and Fijishamelist.

He claimed the blog spots have continued to annoy the public with their lies and racists comments and they must be stopped.

"We are doing everything we can to put an end to these deceitful rumors by people behind this blogs because they are creating more problems for us and the country," he had said.

"How can we move forward when we have people like this destroying the peace and citizens of this country would be stupid to read their site and fall into their trap?"
Reference Here>>

WHAT TRAP??

You, Frank, have taken upon yourself to DEPRESS the future of your whole country by force and you think, through your EGO colored glasses, ALL decisions and opinions that are made by you are the ONLY opinions that are valid.

Very sad, this!

We, at MAXINE, say - Frank is the problem and as his name suggests --- Frank IS the BAIN of the Fijian people!