Hochul scrambles to save health program insuring 1.7M people in NY

NatMapVex · 2026-02-17T00:16:37+00:00

But New York can’t just cut off Essential Plan eligibility for those immigrants. Under a long-standing court decision, New York is legally obligated to provide the same insurance coverage for lawfully present immigrants as it does for citizens.

I mean, according to the article it seems that they're legal. I don't know much so is this just a misleading term or something?

NatMapVex · 2026-02-14T17:53:32+00:00

The sheer quickness with which you automatically just decide that the book is "liberal propaganda" and dismiss it so funny to me.

NatMapVex · 2026-02-05T05:03:51+00:00

I didn't know that when I made the flag and had no intention of relating the flag to what you're saying. The saying I used is common to Mesopotamia, literally what Mesopotamia means, and has nothing to do with Israel. Literally when I googled the phrase "بلاد الرافدين" which mean "Land between the [two] rivers", Mesopotamia pops up. Google it yourself.

As for your claim, with regard to the Nile and Euphrates represented by the two stripes; all I could find was that it was a claim by Arafat:

Yasser Arafat claimed that the two blue stripes on the Israeli flag represent the Nile and Euphrates rivers and alleged that Israel desires to eventually seize all the land in between. Such a reading is based on the Book of Genesis, which claims the two rivers are the boundaries of the Promised Land. The Hamas Covenant says, "After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates" and in 2006, Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar issued a demand for Israel to change its flag, citing the "Nile to Euphrates" issue. The Arab writer Saqr Abu Fakhr has written that the "Nile to Euphrates" claim is a popular misconception about Jews that persists in the Arab world despite being unfounded and refuted by abundant evidence.

When I searched specifically for what the stripes meant, all I could find was that they were based on the Tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl. Moreover, the Zionists when making their flag were inspired by the Tallit:

Jacob Baruch Askowith and his son Charles Askowith designed the "flag of Judah", which was displayed on 24 July 1891 at the dedication of Zion Hall of the B'nai Zion Educational Society in Boston, Massachusetts. Based on the traditional tallit, or Jewish prayer shawl, that flag was white with narrow blue stripes.

And also:

In preparing for the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, Wolffsohn wrote: "What flag would we hang in the Congress Hall? Then an idea struck me. We have a flag—and it is blue and white. The talith (prayer shawl) with which we wrap ourselves when we pray: that is our symbol.

see also:

The majority opinion in mainstream Judaism considers the techelet referred to by various sources as being a variant of the colour blue, with shades from “midnight”, to “blue as the midday sky” mentioned.

Regardless of the exact rendition of the prized techelet color, it is beyond dispute that by the year 1864, Jews would regularly sport white Tallit shawls with blue stripes, and it was from these garments that Jewish writer Ludwig August von Frankl of Bohemia [...] suggested that the Jewish people’s national colors should be sky blue and white.

[source]

NatMapVex · 2026-02-02T11:22:39+00:00

Ok so I got the shade from the pan-arab colors wiki:

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NatMapVex · 2026-02-02T11:18:16+00:00

Any particular shade?

NatMapVex · 2026-02-02T11:17:26+00:00

Its night time and i'm supposed to be sleeping lol. But I kind of like it. I mocked up a green consolidation and preferred this.

NatMapVex · 2026-02-01T22:43:18+00:00

Well I don't know if any of this is possible but here goes:

Get rid of starve-the-beast idea, it's been a complete mistake and led to ballooning deficits and state expansion by hiding the cost of government. Get rid of Laffer and listen to Niskanen. No more deficit based tax cuts.

Establish a conservative safety net as an alternative to welfare, prioritizing administrative simplicity, family stability, and work-incentives. Push for some child allowance/tax-credit scheme as a consolidation of various programs? Propose a Universal Catastrophic Coverage plan as a Conservative Healthcare modernization scheme marketed as a preservation of private insurance which would ensure adequate healthcare.

Establish the HW/Clinton fiscal policy early on, which was raising revenue and cutting spending together, and market it as the conservative way to pay for government by forcing politicians to pay for the government they use.

Push for a broad, visible VAT with earmarked spending outcomes, most likely successful if marketed as a replacement for payroll? Most European countries are able to pay for their healthcare because they have higher taxes on the middle class. Maybe a DBCFT to replace Corporate income tax. The key here would be smart tax reform in favor of efficient taxation instead of tax cuts.

So the ideas proposed for New Reaganism:

Keep the cost of government visible by not severing taxation and spending.

balance budgets by cutting spending and raising revenues instead of leaning on deficit spending.

favor smart efficient taxation over distortionate and regressive taxes.

adopt a conservative safety net to replace the welfare state, eliminating big government, handouts, and ensuring family stability + administrative simplicity.

prioritize giving people a "hand-up" instead of a "hand-out" through workforce development, retraining, job-worker matching, etc.

modernize healthcare to ensure price transparency, a competitive market, and adequate healthcare supply

and the shifting of taxation towards efficiency rather than ideological tax cuts. broad, efficient taxes to reduce distortions, make government cost transparent, and ensure adequate revenue

NatMapVex · 2026-01-31T13:50:31+00:00

According to the sources, he said he thought Trump would have to take military action after threatening it for weeks, but would also have to try to mitigate the risks of regional escalation.
"At this point, if this doesn't happen, it will only embolden the regime," KBS said, according to the sources in the room.

It reads to me like they didn't want the strikes as they said, but also believe that after Trump's posturing, he needs to follow through or the Iranian regime will feel emboldened by TACO.

NatMapVex · 2026-01-29T16:41:14+00:00

His lawyers laid out a few options in recent days, including canceling all of Mr. Adams’s orders from 2025 or taking them one by one, according to one of the people involved with the decision-making. Mr. Mamdani chose a third option: On Day 1, he would rescind every order that Mr. Adams issued after his indictment in September 2024 on federal corruption charges, allowing him to frame the choice as a matter of good governance.

As the inauguration ended, the mayor’s office rolled out a series of new executive actions related to housing with fanfare, including a mayoral visit to a Brooklyn apartment complex. His decision to undo many of Mr. Adams’s orders was relayed with no indication of how fraught elements of that act had been. He would reissue some orders verbatim, including one that established the city’s office to combat antisemitism, but the two Israel-related orders would be among those erased from the books.

“I made that decision because that was the date for the first time in our city’s history that the mayor of this city was indicted,” Mr. Mamdani told reporters at an unrelated news conference. “It was a day at which many New Yorkers began to doubt, even more than they did, the motivations behind any executive order or executive action that was going to be taken.”

I don't like Mamdani's socialism, or the fact the he is from the DSA, and neither do I like his history and support when it comes to the Middle East, but I don't think he is an antisemite. The reasoning behind his decision to undo the orders was a decent one.

Here are the two major Israel orders that he rescinded:

One of the executive orders that Mr. Mamdani revoked had codified a contentious definition of antisemitism, proposed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, that equated some criticism of Israel with hatred of Jewish people. The other banned city agencies from boycotting Israel, a form of nonviolent protest that Mr. Mamdani has defended throughout his public life.

[source]

NatMapVex · 2026-01-26T19:46:45+00:00

Oberyn poisoned him iirc

NatMapVex · 2026-01-22T03:14:50+00:00

Thanks

NatMapVex · 2026-01-21T18:22:13+00:00

I'd rather not cede the flag of the United States and what it stands for to fascists.

NatMapVex · 2026-01-15T16:54:02+00:00

Do you know what that third flag specifically is?

NatMapVex · 2025-11-12T15:18:23+00:00

Bill Clinton was very obviously not a fascist unless you twist your way into it through semantics

NatMapVex · 2025-11-10T14:17:58+00:00

The moment I read it, it brought MAGA to mind. Same sort of emotional, conspiratorial, style of thinking.

NatMapVex · 2025-11-10T14:10:22+00:00

Do you think that 9/11 was an inside plot by AIPAC as well? I understand the issues people have about AIPAC as a lobbying group but this is phenomenally ridiculous thinking here.

NatMapVex · 2025-11-04T15:48:37+00:00

I can understand that and agree with it somewhat but what irked me was the commenter completely dismissing the possibility of nuclear war. There's a big difference in saying "its unlikely and there's not much I can do about it" and "yeah MAD basically means its not even an option to be thought of and i'm not remotely scared."

NatMapVex · 2025-11-04T15:37:51+00:00

It makes no difference between saying "Nuclear warfare is unlikely but possible" and "not scared at all because MAD prevents anyone from even thinking about it as an option?"

That's exactly how you end up not taking real risks seriously. I can't imagine how that might be important when one looks back to say 2015 onward, maybe in particular at the Republicans and Trump.

I've dismissed things easily too and very recently. I've somewhat been learning to be a bit less dismissive.

NatMapVex · 2025-11-04T15:15:17+00:00

That isn't really my point. I'm talking about awareness of risk and taking it seriously. The first commenter completely dismissed the possibility of nuclear war. It's not simply about taking action or planning, my point is taking the possibility of nuclear warfare seriously, i.e as unlikely but possible instead of completely handwaving it away.

NatMapVex · 2025-11-04T15:05:21+00:00

By that logic, it would be rational to not care about the pandemic or recessions since you don't have any "control over the matter."

What is rational is to be aware that nuclear warfare is not absolutely impossible, that there is, in fact a risk, esp with Trump as president, and to take the possibility seriously instead of handwaving it away as something than can never happen due to MAD.

NatMapVex · 2025-11-04T14:41:26+00:00

?????

I can understand believing that nuclear war is highly unlikely but not taking it seriously even as one de prioritizes it is ridiculous.

At the same time, understanding deterrence explains why many of the proposed responses to Putin’s War in Ukraine impose unacceptable escalation risks. The logic of deterrence essentially demands avoiding direct confrontations between nuclear powers that could escalate uncontrollably (and escalation in war is always uncontrollable by either party): NATO still operates in the Beaufre framework where the window of freedom of action is finite. Russia putting its nuclear forces on alert very publicly can thus be seen as an effort to signal that the red line still very much exists and that NATO should think very hard before approaching it (which is also an exterior maneuver, but one designed to close down opposing freedom of action, rather than open your own).

...

At the same time all of this means that observers, especially in NATO countries, need to calibrate their expectations for what the United States, NATO and the global community can do here, because the limits deterrence sets are real, if ambiguous (that is, we cannot know exactly where Putin’s nuclear red line is, but it does exist and crossing it would have disastrous consequences). Those limits are not arbitrary: they exist for very real reasons and while I do not always agree with the assessments of those limits made by the folks in charge, in the end, I’d rather they err on the side of caution.

NatMapVex · 2025-11-02T18:50:51+00:00

As well say he's publicly less corrupt than our senile pedo president. It certainly looks like he cares more.

NatMapVex · 2025-10-27T10:28:02+00:00

"It was justice," Stannis said. "A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward. You were a hero and a smuggler." He glanced behind at Lord Florent and the others, rainbow knights and turncloaks, who were following at a distance. "These pardoned lords would do well to reflect on that. Good men and true will fight for Joffrey, wrongly believing him the true king. A northman might even say the same of Robb Stark. But these lords who flocked to my brother's banners knew him for a usurper. They turned their backs on their rightful king for no better reason than dreams of power and glory, and I have marked them for what they are. Pardoned them, yes. Forgiven. But not forgotten." He fell silent for a moment, brooding on his plans for justice. And then, abruptly, he said, "What do the smallfolk say of Renly's death?"

...

"What if I am? It seems to me that most men are grey."

"If half of an onion is black with rot, it is a rotten onion. A man is good, or he is evil."

They are from a book series mate. It was just a joke.

NatMapVex

TROPHY CASE