Friday, October 31, 2008

Random but not trivial trivia...

  • "While New York City is the most populous city in the United States, Sitka, Alaska is the largest city in area. Sitka includes a whopping 2874 square miles of incorporated area. The city is larger than the state of Delaware! ... Jacksonville, Florida is the largest city in area in the contiguous 48 states at 758 square miles."
-- http://geography.about.com/od/specificplacesofinterest/a/sitkaarea.htm

  • "In 2007, Jacksonville ranked as the United States' twelfth most populous city, with 805,605 residents. ... In 2008, Jacksonville was ranked as the third cleanest city in the United States by Yahoo! Real Estate and fourth best outdoor city by Forbes."
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacksonville

People Overall Jacksonville Crime Index (2006)
  • Jacksonville per 100,000 People 6253.4
  • National per 100,000 People 4479.3

Jacksonville Violent Crimes Index
  • Jacksonville per 100,000 People 837.2
  • National per 100,000 People 553.5

Jacksonville Property Crimes Index
  • Jacksonville per 100,000 People 5416.2
  • National per 100,000 People 3906.1
-- http://jacksonvillefl.areaconnect.com/crime1.htm

  • "The end of Soviet subsidies forced Cuba to face the real costs of its health care system. Unwilling to adopt the economic changes necessary to reform its dysfunctional economy, the Castro government quickly faced a large budget deficit. In response, the Cuban Government made a deliberate decision to continue to spend money to maintain its military and internal security apparatus at the expense of other priorities--including health care.

    "According to the Pan American Health Organization, the Cuban Government currently devotes a smaller percentage of its budget for health care than such regional countries as Jamaica, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic. ...

    "...the Cuban Government has chosen to develop a two-tiered medical system--the deliberate establishment of a kind of "medical apartheid"--that funnels money into services for a privileged few, while depriving the health care system used by the vast majority of Cubans of adequate funding."
-- http://www.canf.org/Issues/medicalapartheid.htm

  • "I [Katherine Hirschfeld] have tried to illustrate that material shortages are endemic to all centralized, planned economies, and that in addition to devoting resources to hospital construction and expansion of the health sector, ideocratic states often use very authoritarian tactics--tactics that individual doctors and patients can subjectively experience very negatively--to create and maintain favorable health statistics. When issues of state power and social control are factored into the analysis, it becomes possible to see how Cuba’s health indicators are at least in some cases obtained by imposing significant costs on the Cuban population--costs that Cuban citizens are powerless to articulate or protest, and foreign researchers unable to empirically investigate."
-- http://www.miscelaneasdecuba.net/media/pdf/Article-Hirschfeld-Press.pdf

  • "'Wrote the Cuban source, babalublog.com[,] 'Every single time the island of Cuba and Fidel Castro's revolution are covered anywhere in the media, one of the points always mentioned is Cuba's free healthcare. You can practically time it. If it's in print, you get the lead issue in the first and second paragraph, a mention of Fidel Castro or one of his cronies in the third paragraph, and then the plug for the lauded free healthcare available to Cubans in the fourth. I don’t think I've ever read an article about Castro or Cuba where the "healthcare" isn’t mentioned.

    "'Every single Castro supporter clings to this healthcare thing like it is some kind of holy grail. In a debate, the fact that Cuba has the most political prisoners in the world is ignored. The fact that Cubans on the island lack even the most basic of necessities is ignored. Tourism apartheid is ignored. Everything is ignored save for the free healthcare and 100% literacy.

    "'Of course, none of these "free healthcare!" cheerleaders have ever been to a Cuban hospital. They've never been to a Cuban clinic. Hospitals and clinics serving the average Cuban, that is.'"
--http://www.papillonsartpalace.com/acclamime.htm

  • "In 1962, President Harry S. Truman informed some people in the press that his middle initial 'S' should not have a period after it because the 'S' didn't really stand for anything. The middle name of S was chosen by his parents so they didn't have to offend either of his grandfathers, who both had names beginning with the letter S.

    "After the press reported this information it set off a controversy on how editors and writers should handle the spelling of his name. Some people still insist that his name should be spelled Harry S Truman (without the period).

    "There is much evidence to indicate that President Truman used the period after the 'S' both before and after his 1962 remark."
-- http://everything2.com/node/125702

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