The GIGO in Full Swing in America

The American GIGO Syndrome in Full Swing
October 15 2009

Author’s note: although acronym GIGO was originally coined for information technology sector as Garbage In Garbage Out, meaning that the integrity of output is dependent on the integrity of input, it refers here as one accepts an erroneous or wrongful information, one gets false conclusion as the true and rightful option.
In plain terms, you discharge a pile of shits when you eat shit, or you think, talk, behave, and argue like a shit when you learn shitty stuffs.

Let’s start by saying that I have never been a rah-rah fan of the United States of America, even after Americans have elected a black President, Barak Hussein Obama.
Contrarily, World, especially the Third World, danced with abandon anticipating new era of peace, freedom, and prosperity in concert with the Obama’s “Change” slogan .
However, I, from the beginning, refused to join the “ditto-head” groups chanting “Change” and gradually realized that I was right not to endorse him blindly.

There are two major issues, among other things, that haunt and bedevil the GIGO mind of American public...the Healthcare Reform and the War in Afghanistan.

Let’s begin with the Healthcare issue.

First of all, I, as a Canadian, am baffled, dismayed, and shell-shocked over the American stupidity regarding their healthcare reform debate, as much as being perverse as the American gun laws.
Canadians admit that they would catch cold when Americans sneeze...but every Canadian knows that there are two huge differences between two nations in the Healthcare and Gun regulations.

We, Canadians, value so much about our single-payer government healthcare system that any political party, the Liberal, Conservative, or NDP (Socialist), would never dare to fiddle with it unless they would like to commit suicide, as if George W Bush attempted and eventually turned his tail to fiddle with the Social Security System.

Americans, boorishly and ignorantly, call the Canadian Healthcare system as the communistic socialized system and dubbed their first black President a Hitler (a despot), without knowing that they already have one, Medicare system for the elderly and disabled Americans is almost similar to the Canadian system.

The “public option” for the Health Insurance that Obama had initially suggested to the Americans was not so much similar to the Canadian system but simply an option for uninsured Americans to benefit the low-cost health insurance when the poor Americans can’t afford to buy the private insurance due to the exorbitant cost of the premium. .
In other words, the public option is a stop-gap solution for sickly and traumatic healthcare system that has been devastated the American society where thousands of uninsured Americans queue in the parking lots across the nation for free medical treatments.

The worst part in the American Healthcare debates is that the single-payer system was excluded totally from the every discussion meeting including the town hall debate with the President...that is, the single-payer advocates were deliberately excluded from any discussion panel or congressional debates, while many Healthcare insurance CEOes have an access to the White House meetings with the President who promised the drug industry that he would not allow the new healthcare legislation to have a bargaining power in cutting the drug price.

Most of the Western Developed Countries have enjoyed adopting the fully covered healthcare program for decades and the United States is peculiarly exceptional in refusing the universal healthcare coverage.
And Americans strangely and oddly favor to shudder dying with no doctors around in the street or going bankrupt due to the exorbitant medical costs.

Reality checks
Here is an inconvenient truth that Americans cannot dispute:

1. 47 million Americans do not have health insurance, 10 million more than whole Canadian population that every man, woman, old, young, rich, poor, beggar, homeless, are totally and unconditionally covered by the single-payer healthcare system. In addition, 25 million Americans are under-insured suffering from the unfavorable coverage such as co-payment, deductibles, and extra medical expenses.
2. Americans spend 17 percent of their GDP while Canadians use 10 percent a proportion for their healthcare, and tens of thousands of Americans go bankrupt due to the piling sky-high medical bills.
3. American doctors and hospitals are burdened with the administrative costs in dealing with various billings, and the health insurance industries and big drug companies lobby the Congress with big bucks adding enormous burden to the payments of ever-increasing premium for the consumers. For Canadian doctors and hospitals, there are no cashiers departments.
4. The Canadian system was pilloried by the US media as a Death Panel...patients wait for years to see a specialist or to have a cutting-edge procedure, while ignoring the reality that American hospitals dump the uninsured or homeless patients in the streets to die and insurance companies often refuse to cover in a timely manner the insured patients for surgery or hospitalization.
5. Hundreds of poor Americans flock to cross Canadian border to buy cheap prescription drugs because Canadian Government buy the drugs in bulk and negotiate the drug price with the pharmaceutical company.

Americans often watch the distorted, misleading, and derisive propaganda on TV paid by the Health Insurance companies about the horror stories the Canadian patients suffering from the single-payer system.
On the contrary, I had personally encountered a life-threatening situation many years ago and was immediately admitted, received a surgical implant, and discharged from the hospital without paying a penny and in timely manner.
The nurse even treated me with a dish of delicious cake before I departed for home, and I have been asked visiting the hospital every six month for checkups with no direct cash payments.

Americans mostly think that Canadians pay nothing for their healthcare system is not true...that is, Canadians pay the healthcare premium not like the insured Americans pay their premium.
We pay the premium once a year when we file the income tax return...our premiums are determined by the factor how much money a person makes a year...you pay more premium when you make more money and you pay less when you earn less.
But the premium we, Canadians, pay is not enough to cover the whole cost of the medical treatments...and the taxpayers money kicks in to cover the balance not like Americans use their tax dollars for the imperial wars to harass or kill other unfortunate fellas around the world.
Canadians spend their tax dollars for the Common Good while Americans waste it for Common Destruction.

For example, in Canada you, a homeless man, are entitled to receive a heart transplant operation with no premium payment, while a millionaire gets the same treatment with a proportional premium deduction from one’s annual income.
In America, a heart-sick millionaire with a best money-can-buy health insurance is being taken care of his sickness in the pent-house patient ward by a well-known celebrity heart surgeon, a cabal of cardiologists, highly qualified ICU nurses, and being fed daily with the high volume of vitamin-rich diet.
Then, what about a homeless man in America?
He is as dead as a door knob and Americans call it a Democracy!

In this perspective, the Canadian Healthcare System is a communistic and socialized one that the indigent American Joe-Six-Packs—I believe—love to have, if their newly elected Negro President and the corporate media tell them the truth. (Obama blushes and laughs showing his white teeth when he tells the truth.)
As of today, the public option, let alone the single-payer system, is a goner as Obama tiptoed away from it despite his promise that he would establish a new public insurance program alongside the private healthcare plan during his presidential campaign.

Afghanistan: The War of Necessity?

In his address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Obama called the Afghanistan conflict as “the war of necessity” that Americans should engage in fighting against the international terrorism in Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden calls it home, as if the crooked former President Nixon in 1970s claimed that the Southeast Asia goes red in domino effect, if Vietnam falls into the Communist hand.

In his interview with NY Times, he rejected to compare the Afghanistan conflict with the Vietnam War and he does not worry about his possible fate of repeating President Lyndon Johnson who did not seek re-election in 1968: “You have to learn lessons from history. On the other hand, each historical moment is different. You never step into the same river twice. And so Afghanistan is not Vietnam.”
And he added: the job of dismantling terrorism networks in Afghanistan can be handled by remote controlled drones and other alternatives to soldiers on the ground, so that the US do not need to sacrifice too many young men and women as in the Vietnam War.

Obama doesn’t seem to read the history correctly...his assertion itself is another expression of deranged strategy that Americans took the high kill-ratio of enemy determines the war...the more you kill the enemy with less casualty of your troops, the more you have a chance to win the war.
In the Vietnam War, Americans killed over two millions people and they still lost the war, because they were not able to buy “hearts and minds” of the occupied, as in Afghanistan, people are simply fighting tooth and nail “kicking out a hodge-podge of FOREIGNER INVADERS”, Americans, British, German, France, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Estonia, Georgia, Colombia, South Korea, etc.

It is hardly surprising that many pundits, military or political, would likely to see the Afghanistan Conflict parallel to the Vietnam War in 1970s.
In the first place, they argue that “we shouldn’t have been there”, as the Pulitzer-Prize Winning Author Stanley Karnow mentioned about the US involvement in the Vietnam War.
However, the Americans are bombarded daily with the fraudulent propaganda by the government and the mainstream media as in the same manner as during the Vietnam War that the United States is committed to bring a Democracy to the Afghanistan.

Not many Americans know the hidden reality that the US is fighting in Afghanistan to acquire and control a right of passage in Caspian oil pipeline from the Eurasia to the Indian Ocean, because it is verboten or at least self-censored for the US news media volunteering to let American people know that the Obama regime is not much different from the GW Bush regime in fighting the imperial war.
For decades, it has been well-known to the US foreign policy advisers that the Central Asia is rich in untapped oil and natural gas reserves and worth to intervene in the regional conflicts after the Soviet empire collapsed.
The 9/11 attacks provided the US the golden opportunity for getting into the region under the guise of fighting the international terrorism

From Iraq to Afghanistan, Germany, South Korea, Diego Garcia, Bosnia, The Philippines, and Japan, the United States Government issued the garden-variety of rationale to keep hundreds of the military bases around the world and to engage in the imperial aggressions...to eliminate the weapons of mass destruction, the campaign against the international terrorism, fight the war there to prevent war here, help to protect allies from the axis of evil enemies, bring a Democracy to the despotic Islamic nations, etc.

But all are nothing more than the hegemonic imperial wars that keep the whole world under the eagle-eye watch of the US imperial endeavors for centuries since late 18 century.
And the US presence in Afghanistan is not only significant to secure the strategic geopolitical location that connects the land-locked oil-rich Central Asia to the energy-hungry world, but also plays a role of the watch-tower to keep an eye on the strategic operation of the Sino-Russian cooperation.

As Sun Tzu said in his The Art of War that all war is based on deception, there is nothing new in a government lying to their people to start a war, because most people prefer living in peace to bloody and horrific death in war, any government that desires to initiate a war usually lies to their people to create the illusion that support for the war is the only possible choice they can make.

The GIGO thrives in American minds.

Garbage In, Garbage Out --- It is used primarily to call attention to the fact that computers, unlike humans, will unquestioningly process the most nonsensical of input data and produce nonsensical output.
However, the GIGO syndrome is perfectly functioning in human minds nonsensically too as with same accuracy and frequency as a computer, especially if the human mind is exposed, infected, and corrupted by the culture where the mind resides.

In the United States, the Afghanistan war is portrayed by the mainstream media and the government official circle as a gallant crusade against the international terrorism.
It also portrayed the single-payer non-profit Healthcare system as a communistic, socialized, free-booted bonanza for poor minorities and immigrants who mass-produce a litter of babies.

And as the TV commercials and newspaper editorials are inundated with this misleading information, the GIGO smoothly kicks in American minds manufacturing the nonsensical arguments as the better choices.

But the true reality is:

1. The US maintains the dozens of permanent military bases in Iraq modeled in the SOFA (State of Forces Agreement) in South Korea and Japan. As the US Military Forces have been stationing both Asian countries since WWII with no end in sight, it is a pipe dream for Americans anticipating the troop withdrawal from the strategic oil-producing Iraq.
2. Afghanistan becomes the major battle front in preparation to jumpstart the next conflict with Iran that is eager to join the nuclear power group. The nuclear-armed Israel, the satrap in the region, is not about to let Iran armed with the A-Bombs and Iran is only remaining oil-rich country in the region that defies the hegemonic US imperialism.
3. American people would get some sort of compromising Healthcare reform in the form of the Co-op that does not impinge on the profit of private health insurance company, because it is imperative for Obama to have a look-a-like if he wishes to run for second-term Presidency.
4. Historically, Americans have been easily duped, cajoled, persuaded, and influenced by the mainstream media and Government propaganda, as Ralph Nader said that the screen is the opium of the people.

The GIGO is the name of the game that prevails in the American society where people do not know they are in the game and that is a crux of the game.
Pity them!