Category: Uncategorized

Paglia on health care

The last of the open-minded liberals can see what’s coming:

That there are serious deficiencies and injustices in the U.S. healthcare system has been obvious for decades. To bring the poor and vulnerable into the fold has been a high ideal and an urgent goal for most Democrats. But this rigid, intrusive and grotesquely expensive bill is a nightmare. Holy Hygeia, why can’t my fellow Democrats see that the creation of another huge, inefficient federal bureaucracy would slow and disrupt the delivery of basic healthcare and subject us all to a labyrinthine mass of incompetent, unaccountable petty dictators? Massively expanding the number of healthcare consumers without making due provision for the production of more healthcare providers means that we’re hurtling toward a staggering logjam of de facto rationing. Steel yourself for the deafening screams from the careerist professional class of limousine liberals when they get stranded for hours in the jammed, jostling anterooms of doctors’ offices….

It’s as if liberals are starry-eyed dreamers lacking the elementary ability to project or predict the chaotic and destabilizing practical consequences of their utopian fantasies.

Well, yeah, that last description sums it up accurately enough. I haven’t written much about Obamacare for much the same reason that I don’t write about driving into trees. There’s simply not much to say beyond the fact that it’s a really bad idea, it’s expensive, destructive, and runs high risk of getting people killed. As I told one radio interviewer today, the health care act and the cap-and-trade carbon emissions program are both likely to have a more negative effect on the U.S. economy than the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff ever did.

And, of course, I can’t disagree with La Paglia’s characterization of Richard Dawkins as an overrated psychotic. One certainly does wonder “what drives obsessive denigrators of religion”, especially in light of the indisputable evidence that it is not and has never been a primary source of human conflict.

Green shoots!

One of the economic measures I track actually showed signs of life! Total loans and leases at commercial banks increased by $12.4 billion the week of October 28th, the first weekly increase since May 27th. Of course, that little uptick was only a two-week rise of $15.7 billion and preceded a five-month, $451.4 billion decline, so I would be hesitant to put too much confidence into it. It will require an increase of at least $250 billion to be meaningful in any way, but it only seemed fair to point out that for at least one week, the credit contraction process appears to have reversed itself.

Of course, more debt can’t possibly solve any of the myriad economic and financial problems, but let’s not bicker and argue over esoteric theory. GDP is up! Debt is growing! And how about that Dow! It’s a bull market straight to 36,000! Unemployment? Lagging indicator. Now, wait a minute, this suddenly all sounds very familiar….

Slippery slope or cliff-jumping

Government goes vertical:

But what about the slippery slope? Well, it went totally vertical. On the very day that the government czar announced that he would cut the pay of companies that received taxpayer bailouts, the Federal Reserve announced that it would start regulating compensation at the thousands of banks that it regulates, as well as American subsidiaries of non-U.S. financial companies. Some state regulators said they planned to issue similar requirements for state-regulated banks not covered by the Fed plan.

All of this is being done without any legitimate power under the Constitution, and much of it without even the authorization of Congress. Congress refused to bail out the auto companies, so Bush did it on his own authority. Congress never authorized the Federal Reserve to regulate the pay of bank employees.

This is not a slippery slope. This is falling off a cliff. As one news story pointed out: “The restrictions were the latest in more than a year’s worth of government intervention in matters once considered inviolable aspects of the country’s free-market economy and represent a signal moment in the history of the American economic experiment.”

It’s amazing that the lesson so many Americans took from the fall of the Soviet Union appears to have been: “Well, if giant government worked for them….”

The tide flows out

Guess who’s naked now?

A widening gap between data and reality is distorting the government’s picture of the country’s economic health, overstating growth and productivity in ways that could affect the political debate on issues like trade, wages and job creation.

The shortcomings of the data-gathering system came through loud and clear here Friday and Saturday at a first-of-its-kind gathering of economists from academia and government determined to come up with a more accurate statistical picture.

The fundamental shortcoming is in the way imports are accounted for. A carburetor bought for $50 in China as a component of an American-made car, for example, more often than not shows up in the statistics as if it were the American-made version valued at, say, $100. The failure to distinguish adequately between what is made in America and what is made abroad falsely inflates the gross domestic product, which sums up all value added within the country…. Grappling with these blind spots, nearly all of the 80 experts at the conference, which was sponsored by the Upjohn Institute and the National Academy of Public Administration, agreed that the statistics now published tend to overstate the strength of the economy.

If you’re only watching GDP, you are getting an increasingly inaccurate picture of the economic situation. There is no way that economic activity is growing in a credit-based economy where credit is contracting. It’s like watching a football game where the team fails to get into the end zone, but somehow racks up 28 points on the scoreboard. As I’ve shown in RGD, the variance in reports for the same quarter is not infrequently larger than the average growth reported.

It’s interesting that they should finally admit these statistical problems now, just as the gap between reported growth and reported employment is becoming apparent to the casual observer.

WND column

Vibrancy at Fort Hood

I don’t mind admitting that I mindlessly accepted the diversity propaganda when I was younger. Granted, this was before it became so frantic and overbearing that you couldn’t walk onto a college campus without three very earnest people sitting down to lecture you upon the extreme importance of diversity at all times and in all places.

As a white 100-meter sprinter in high school whose primary competition was with black sprinters from the nearby inner city schools, I was a firm believer in the idea that all cultures were created essentially equal. Since I had friendly relations with the brothers from North, South and Roosevelt against whom I ran, I couldn’t understand how anyone could deny the obvious truth that people are simply people regardless of their color, culture or creed. So, why should it be that you and I should get along so awfully?

The OC on time and things

Things

I’m on a road trip this weekend, to Colorado, to finish cleaning out Emily’s apartment and deal with her things. Good gosh, she’s got a lot of things.

Had. Sorry, I’m still thinking of her in the present tense. I’m at the point now where it seems as if—oh, that she’s just on a somewhat longer than usual vacation, and any minute now she’ll walk through that door, or call my cellphone. And then I remember: no, she won’t.

Read it. And then spend some time with someone who will value it.

VPFL Week 8

83 Greenfield Grizzlies (2-6)
71 Judean Front (6-2)

70 Alamo City Spartans (6-2)
58 Winston Reverends (4-4)

76 Mounds View Meerkats (5-3)
56 Black Mouth Curs (4-4)

70 Masonville Marauders (4-4)
40 Burns Redbeards (2-6)

50 Bane Silvers (3-5)
45 Valders Valkyries (4-4)

Please regard this as your weekly NFL open thread

On Macintossers

And here you thought I hated Macs.  But then, the British always do this sort of thing best:

PCs are the ramshackle computers of the people. You can build your own from scratch, then customise it into oblivion. Sometimes you have to slap it to make it work properly, just like the Tardis (Doctor Who, incidentally, would definitely use a PC). PCs have charm; Macs ooze pretension. When I sit down to use a Mac, the first thing I think is, “I hate Macs”, and then I think, “Why has this rubbish aspirational ornament only got one mouse button?” Losing that second mouse button feels like losing a limb. If the ads were really honest, Webb would be standing there with one arm, struggling to open a packet of peanuts while Mitchell effortlessly tore his apart with both hands. But then, if the ads were really honest, Webb would be dressed in unbelievably po-faced avant-garde clothing with a gigantic glowing apple on his back. And instead of conducting a proper conversation, he would be repeatedly congratulating himself for looking so cool, and banging on about how he was going to use his new laptop to write a novel, without ever getting round to doing it, like a mediocre idiot.

Cue 10 years of nasal bleating from Mac-likers who profess to like Macs not because they are fashionable, but because “they are just better”. Mac owners often sneer that kind of defence back at you when you mock their silly, posturing contraptions, because in doing so, you have inadvertently put your finger on the dark fear haunting their feeble, quivering soul – that in some sense, they are a superficial semi-person assembled from packaging; an infinitely sad, second-rate replicant who doesn’t really know what they are doing here, but feels vaguely significant and creative each time they gaze at their sleek designer machine. And the more deftly constructed and wittily argued their defence, the more terrified and wounded they secretly are.

And here I was only addressing the techno-fascist design philosophy.  Far be it from me to delve into the psyches of Macintossers….  Anyhow, I’m a gamer.  So, of course I have no use for Apple products.  What gamer does?  If Steve Jobs ever works his magic and produces the Ultimate Portable Game Machine, then I’ll buy an Apple product for my own use, but probably not until then.  (Full disclosure: there is a MacBook in the house.  And an iPod.  I don’t use either and my experiences with the former have not altered my opinion of Apple in the slightest.)

But if losing a button feels like losing an arm, imagine how good it would feel to gain 16 more arms!  Okay, on the other hand, maybe that is kind of creepy.