This is their goal. Via Comrade Sisko 🖖🏾✊🏿 @Pinko69420 (and here):
Prepare and respond appropriately.
Communists Being Commies
The View From North Central Idaho
Ramblings on explosives, guns, politics, and sex by a redneck Idaho farm boy who became a software engineer living near Seattle.
What is the penalty for conspiring to commit murder?
Seems to me this is prima facie evidence that Caucasian executives of any gender require the means to respond to deadly force.
Send a stack of these posters and angry tweets to Trump along with a request to enact National Carry Reciprocity as soon as possible!
If it saves just one life…
Is this wanted poster an example of the “stochastic terrorism” the Leftoids are always accusing of of?
Commies always believe Utopia is one genocide away
Wow, communists are into suppressors? And here they been telling us for years how bad they were. Go figure. It’s also good to hear the commies claiming the hit.
And the fact he used a suppressor for murder tells us all we need to know about stopping criminals, and communists acts through prohibition laws.
I for one would like to thank the communists on this one for proving conclusively our forefathers were absolutely correct in writing the 2A.
And showing us that society can only be maintained through “manly firmness”. (I think that was the term they used.)
It’s also good to hear the communists have gone from open subterfuge to open declared hot war on capitalism. Finally! And openly drawing first blood.
It certainly makes the job easier.
(And just so you commie bitches know, he was a Wall streetier, not a capitalist. Kill all you want.)
But none the less, your terms are acceptable.
It was interesting to see the comment from NYC mayor Adams that this was the first time ever in his law enforcement career that he’d seen a crime where a suppressor was involved.
Also interesting was the fact that the WSJ, in the article where that quote appeared, described “silencers” as devices that reduce the sound of gunfire. Not bad, especially given how rapidly the WSJ news pages are moving leftward.
Could be the first time we all have “seen” an assassination on video too.
But just like Vegas, I’m sure it will be used by the ATF and government to justify keeping the NFA. Or even trying to expand it. Offence being the best defense, and all.
Granny use to say, “believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see.”
And she’s been dead 40 years. So not much has changed.
Jack Ruby would like a word.
Ya, I forgot about that one. Think we’ll ever get the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth on that one either?
Supposedly, Trump and RFK have a deal to release the remaining files. However, there have been many years to destroy awkward ones. I actually saw Ruby live.
But those aren’t capitalists, those are just rentiers.
The goal of real capitalism is efficiency and the best possible allocation of resources. Health insurance companies exist for the opposite of that: to reduce the allocation of capital going to an end use of healthcare, and increase its allocation to their profit margin. It’s the very definition of rentier philosophy, not capitalism.
We seem to have lost the plot on what real capitalism is for, and are now substituting “any extraction of capital for profit” in its place.
Health insurance is also a fascist collusion of government and employers coercing the employed population into a toxic “business relationship” that couldn’t even exist in a purely voluntary and free environment.
A true insurance model means shareholders are those who contribute premiums, not those who bought into the grift at a brokerage.
It was a way to evade wage control during WW2 that proved so popular they couldn’t get rid of it after the war.
Some health insurance companies are non-profit organizations.
Not on that wanted poster they’re not…
But their incentives are perverse.
There is no money in dead people.
There is no money in healthy people.
Profits are capped to a percentage of total revenues.
The sweet spot is chronically ill people who are buying expensive treatments covered by corporate-paid insurance, not cures.
:
:
…[vaccine has entered the chat]
[processed food manufacturer has entered the chat]
[pharma has entered the chat]
They are all non-profit in the sense that even the “for profit” ones don’t actually make any money off health insurance. They make their money from investments using the money they hold as reserves. Any competent plan sponsor squeezes reserves as much as they can. Alas there are few competent sponsors in the private sector and almost none in the public sector.
Decades of running such plans convinced me that the abusers are not the insurance companies but the providers. However, when you have a giant insurance company as part of an even bigger provider corporation, the conflict of interest is pretty obvious. I assume this is a part of the anti-trust case against them. A classic vertical monopoly.
UHC extracted $16 billion from its customers and gave it to its shareholders rather than investing in better healthcare. How exactly do you get to “the abusers are not the insurance companies but the providers?”
Like I said, decades of running plans for employers and tracking the problems.
I was hoping for a bit more than “because I say so.” Do you have any specific data to share, ’cause AFAIK my GP isn’t making billions off his work.
I cited 2 articles to support my background.
?
Not seeing any citations.
$16 billion in divedends? What year was this?
2024 annual. 2023 annual was $22 billion. No, not just dividends, share price acceleration and stock buybacks.
I question why stock price increase is considered extracting money from the customers.
Next question: How many customers? Then, average dollars per customer went to stock holders? Then, I don’t expect a definitive answer on this one. How many customers are also stockholders? And shouldn’t the money gained by stock owning customers be subtracted from your $16 or $22 billion extraction claim?
Stock buybacks, for example, are not an attempt at greater efficiency, or delivering greater value, or investing in the business, they’re simply a way of extracting more of the profits out of the business and sending them to the shareholders. UHC has done buybacks quite regularly, and let’s remember they used to be illegal, because back in olden times, before Gordon Gekko, we thought greed was a bad thing. The Catholics even refer to it as one of the 7 deadly sins. I don’t like Catholicism, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day….
Unrestrained extraction of capital != capitalism.
Notice that I did not object to the stock buybacks.
Also, I did notice you did not make mention of the points I did make.
Well, as for your other questions, I think you’re well aware nobody outside of UHC can answer those, that data’s not publicly available. But I also wonder why you want to argue those elements. Do you think they actually alter the basic thrust of the argument, that favoring unfettered extraction of capital for stockholders over investment in efficiency and cost-effectiveness is a bad thing, and fundamentally anti-capitalist? Do you think Milton Friedman would support a scenario where companies ignore long term efficiency in favor of short term gains?
The point is the numbers you supplied are deceptive. And after an attempt at deception, I don’t have much interest in discussing the topic with you.
The numbers I supplied are public record, the ones you ask for are not. Not sure how me not providing data that isn’t available is an “attempt at deception.”
Because the $16/$22 billion numbers are huge, scary, and meaningless with knowing how many customers they have. You also said the money was extracted from customers. This almost for certain is not entirely true. Insurance companies don’t just hold onto cash until claims are made. They invest it. What part of those billions were from investments versus “extracted from customers.”
The wording is deceptive by ommission and tone.
Well, I guess if I were here for the first time spouting off I could maybe understand an assumption of ill intent, though I’d think one would apply Hanlon’s razor first…MTHead certainly does whenever we get into it. But having posted so many times and had actual conversations with you, I’m surprised you think I’m trying to be deceptive. I’m not. You can assert that my argument is hand-wavy and that might be somewhat accurate (I’m not defending a Ph.D thesis here), but it’s not an attempt at deception.
Okay. But you appeared to presume “malice” (for a loose definition of malice) in regards to the financial numbers of United Healthcare.
I have a bit of a bias as well. I know United is competitive in the same markets as a non-profit provider. If UH is providing similar coverage at competitive prices, then I concluded there was something fishy with your assertions.
On the contrary I think Hanlon’s Razor is very much in effect with this whole area. I think Brian Thompson, UHC CEO, now deceased, probably thought he was doing perfectly good work and playing by the rules and just being a good soldier for his definition of capitalism. I don’t know the guy, so if he was acting in malice, I’m not aware of it. I think more likely is that he simply wasn’t smart enough to understand that what he was doing was highly corrosive to the society he lived in. I think that of most CEOs. To my mind his murder is just Darwin in action. Or the scientific practice of “fuck around and find out.” At some point people pushing the limits of any rule set are going to find out where the boundary is, and some are going to find out the hard way.
I think you are missing the real story here.
This is the equivalent of the anti-smoking campaign during the Nineties. The real purpose of that campaign had nothing to do with smoking. It was to set a precedent for lawfare against gun manufacturers in order to get the gun control they couldn’t get Congress to pass. Since tobacco companies are unpopular, they chose them as their initial target.
Similarly, the powers that be are picking an unpopular business in order to set things up for the murders they really intend: gun manufacturers, and Second Amendment activists. They intend to scare people away from the Second Amendment.
Possible and your history is correct. However, I think they are mostly motivated by a desire for a National Health Service so they have total control over that portion of our lives.
Interesting article about this and much more in RCP today. It involves the tobacco settlement, the Bidens, pardons, Medicare billing fraud by providers, the Mafia, battalions of really sleazy lawyers and politicians and even a gift of a gun from a sleazy lawyer to a sleazy politician. The gun was described as registered with the ATF and the subject of a safe storage inspection so it would have to be an NFA item.
Interestingly… it appears that our CEO, and other members of his board, sold a bunch of stock the day before the shooting…. causing some to speculate that he could still be alive….
Clown world is *complicated*…. apportion your attention carefully, it’s a limited resource.
They were indicted or under investigation for insider training since they knew of the anti-trust case before it was public. I find it difficult to believe that such people didn’t know the rules about that so there must be some technicality about the rules. Or maybe they just thought they were Nancy Pelosi.
I do not endorse what was done, but not everyone who has been wronged by insurance companies is a communist.
Insurance companies kill people all the time (or leave them to die, anyway). Nothing personal, strictly business.
Assuming something like that was involved in this case, it’s really difficult to be all that sympathetic. If anything I’m surprised it took this long.
I’m not saying it’s right…but I understand.
Ladies and gentlemen, the difference between a comedian like Chris Rock and a garbage person falls down to knowing when a joke is on the edge, and so far over the edge that you wonder if they are psychopathic.
The rain it raineth on the just
And also on the unjust fella
But mostly on the just, because
The unjust hath the just’s umbrella.
As many are wont to say…. This was not a condonable act. But it WAS an understandable one. Health insurance executives commit some pretty heinous acts in the name of profit. Kind of hard to generate any sympathy for them when they suffer retribution of some kind.
The government is the primary villan in the healthcare/health insurance mess. With out all the asinine regulations artificially strangling supply and subsidies artificially exploding demand, health care could operate freely and respond appropriately to market forces. Insurance would be reserved for large expenses and priced accordingly. The poor could be effectively cared for by charaties. While there are undoubtedly terrible things insurance companies do, they are merely a symptom of government interference. This is misdirected rage.
Remember also that the government’s “health” bureaucracies are directly responsible for many deaths.
The Covid-19 vaccine approval process was a case in point. The stated benefit was that it would prevent most deaths. Let’s stipulate that is so. (I don’t want to get into that debate.) The approval process, from the filing of the final paperwork to the rubber stamps being applied by the Feds, took — if I remember correctly — roughly 30 days. The death rate at the time was about 3k per day. So that delay translates to 100k additional deaths, directly attributable to the fact that government bureaucrats thought it was reasonable to dally for 30 days in approving a life saving treatment.
For most cases, the Feds are far, far worse than that.
And who’s to say it wasn’t his understudy just making upward mobility possible? I’m sure people have been killed for less.
And let’s face it, they are in a business whose business model pretty much works just like that.
Or maybe he was going over to the Trump side with some inside juice?
The guy had to be privy to secrets and crimes a lot of elites would not want exposed.
Lot of reasons for that guy to get whacked. And attention diverted to something else.
As with many things in this clown-world shitshow.
What we can be sure about, is that we’re never going to be sure about the true, why. And if we do it won’t be for many years to come.
They should put Dafna Yoran on the case. The guy appears to be white after all.
@Joe There is a limitation in your comment platform which prevents replies after several have occurred. Problem in long threads like this one with a lot of back and forth.
Speaking of commies, you seem to have a number right here.
I upped the comment replies to depth from five to 10.
Unfortunately that’s not a good idea because of the formatting inflicted by the platform. Once they get that deep, the column width reduces to half an inch or so, and the text becomes quite illegible.
More of a problem with phones than with laptops.
https://notthebee.com/takes/we-all-got-suckered-into-a-media-blitz-that-forced-an-insurance-company-to-reverse-course-lets-talk-about-it
Here is another related insurance company story.
Guy arrested had a suppressor, the fake ID, and an anti-capitalist manifesto on his person. I guess that answers the motive question. Why that particular target is a detail.
He also came from a wealthy family, and had surgery to correct severe scoliosis. He was never denied necessary treatment by an insurance company; at worst, they had to pay more than they expected.
Reports speak of a “ghost gun” and add “possibly 3d printed”.
Ghost gun, as in made from an 80% (or 0%) starting piece, maybe. A GhostGunner CAD machine could be involved, or maybe just a CNC mill marketed for general machining purposes. 3d printed? Not likely, not for 9 mm ammo. At least not unless they meant 3d printed metal, which is possible but seems highly unlikely given the expense of those machines.
Then again, some wild stories were going around, one of them suggesting a veterinarian euthanasia gun, which apparently has an integral suppressor. But that one is bolt action, which obviously was not what we saw on the video.
The suppressor is curious. One wonders why he would use that.
The question on “ghost gun” is where did he get the frame. The rest is available on open market without restriction. Everyplace the guy had lived prohibits making guns in home workshops so the frame would have to be some sort of black market.
No matter the circumstances or the equipment procured and used.
Our message should be the same.
Ghost gun and suppressors laws obviously don’t stop criminals, do they?
Legal or illegal. Didn’t stop anything. And he could have just as easily been stabbed to death with the pencil the guy wrote his manifesto with.
Then you don’t need a gun to defend yourself. Just use a pencil.
😉