Minnesota’s top health insurance regulator says the state’s individual market is in “an emergency situation” amid big rate increases for next year.
Department of Commerce Commissioner Mike Rothman said Friday that the five companies offering plans through the state’s exchange or directly to consumers were prepared to leave the market for 2017. He said big rate increases were the tradeoff to convince all but one company to remain for now.
Rate increases finalized this week range from a 50 percent average hike for HealthPartners plans to a 67 percent jump on average on UCare.
But Rothman called it a temporary fix and called on lawmakers to make reforms before the market collapses.
It’s rather fascinating to see how one institution after another is collapsing like dominoes while everyone wanders aimlessly around wringing their hands and wondering how this could have happened.
It tends to remind me a little of when a girl in my class and a boy the class below me died in separate, but similarly stupid, easily avoidable accidents. I kept my mouth shut out of respect for everyone else’s feelings, of course, but it was occasionally difficult when a plaintive “why?” would be uttered in conversation.
Now, there are certainly times when one genuinely wonders why something bad came to pass, believe me, it’s a question I have found myself asking from time to time. But there are also times when the answer is completely obvious and totally undeniable. I mean, if you absolutely must point an apparently gun at yourself and pull the trigger to impress your friends, maybe, just maybe, you might want to check the chamber as well as eject the magazine.
The USA is collapsing because it is not the United States of America anymore. Its human and military capital have been considerably drawn down. The people who are the posterity of the Founders have been invaded and overrun, the various propositions and creeds that made their culture exceptional have been rejected by nationals, citizens, and invaders alike, and the remnants of their religion is a watered-down, treasonous, pharisaical Judeo-Churchianity that is a pale shadow of the unadulterated Christianity that once fearlessly proclaimed “No King but Jesus” to the English Crown.
Now they are afraid to call abomination and adultery sin. Instead, they preach against masculinity and nationalism.
So, what else would you expect? I mean, seriously, what other outcome could there possibly be?
Do you not see that the pace of the financial rapine has increased as well? That’s the elite, desperately attempting to make hay while the setting sun still shines.
At least one person is dead and more than 100 people hurt when a NJ TRANSIT train crashed into the station in Hoboken, causing serious damage and snarling train service during the Thursday morning rush.
Earlier reports indicated that three people had been killed in the crash. But Assemblyman Raj Mukherji, who represents Hoboken, said transit officials told him only one person had died and two were critically injured.
“We’re just praying at this point that the death toll doesn’t rise,” Mukherji told CBS2.
The exact extent of the other victims’ injuries is unclear. A number of area hospitals have been treating the victims, including at least 40 people who were taken to Jersey City Medical Center.
It’s still unclear what exactly caused the train to crash. Images from the scene posted to social media showed mangled metal, wires, concrete and other debris scattered all over the floor. It appears part of the ceiling also collapsed.
“It simply did not stop,” WFAN anchor John Minko, who witnessed the crash, told 1010 WINS. “It went right through the barriers and into the reception area.”
We’ll see whether human error or instrument failure or something else was the reason for the crash, but I can’t help but think of the fact that failing infrastructure is a predictable consequence of lower average IQ.
To grasp what’s really going on behind the endless recriminations, we need to understand that the Obama administration has abandoned its original plan to oust Syrian President Bashar al Assad, and moved on to Plan B; partitioning the country in a way that establishes a separate Sunni state where US troops will be based and where vital pipelines will be built to transfer natural gas from Qatar to the EU.
This ambitious plan is more than a redrawing of the Middle East and a pivot to Asia. It is a critical lifeline to a country whose economic prospects are progressively dimming, whose credit card is maxed out, and who is counting on a Hail Mary pass in Syria to save itself from cataclysmic economic collapse and ruination. Washington must succeed in Syria because, well, because it must, because the red ink has finally penetrated the pinewood hull and is fast filling the galley. A defeat in the Middle East could be the straw that broke the camel’s back, the tipping point in the agonizingly-protracted unipolar-new-world-order experiment. In other words, it’s Syria or bust.
There is a long tradition of democratic empires failing as a result of unnecessary military adventures, dating back to the Athenian disaster in Syracuse. It’s much too soon to tell, but the continuing US failure in Syria does tend to smack of a potential turning point with regards to the imperial USA.
Note for the historical ignorati: before you start arguing that the USA cannot be an empire despite its military occupation of more than 70 countries around the world because democracy, I suggest you read about the Athenian empire.
I, like some of the Ilk, live in North Carolina and riots have recently occurred in Charlotte.
For more information – the area they rioted at is by the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and has such dangerous neighborhood dwellings as Ikea and World Market. Home Depot is the shabbiest part of the area where they rioted. They lit bonfires on the highway so trucks would have to stop, and they were subsequently looted.
Insight into CMPD is that they are kind of like the Detroit PD, as they take care of business when necessary, but are often pretty diligent in avoiding “Ferguson” type scenarios.
Looking at all this, this was not a “burst of spontaneous vibrant anger,” but something planned. Often there is discussion of this kind of thing on your site in the comments, but I this is a pretty clear example of what we talk about and are wary of with regards to civil unrest in the US.
It’s reasonably apparent that the Soros money is now being utilized to stir up racial conflict, although it’s hard to imagine precisely what the man’s desired end game is. Sufficient unrest to justify military intervention? What would that change?
A pipeline that carried 40%+ of the gasoline for the southeast and east ruptured last week. No quick fix due to the quarter million gallons of gasoline that spilled and is held in a retention pond. I’ve thought for years that this pipe would be a good terrorist target and, though this isn’t terrorism, it’s going to wreck havoc in the southeast and east. Nashville is already out of gas and it’s going to cascade. This could end up being a huge election issue given Obama’s stopping new pipeline construction during his entire term.
If you Google the story the American media is almost silent, covered by British and RT. That won’t last for long. [Redacted] lives in Nashville. I gave her a heads up yesterday so they could get topped off and this morning 80 percent of the stations are closed in her area.
If you’re in the southeast, fill up your gas tanks now and lay in some supplies.
UPDATE: The story is now public: Alabama, Tennessee, & Georgia Declare States Of Emergency As Gas Shortages Loom After Pipeline Leak
UPDATE: North Carolina has declared a state of emergency too.
This was my first political column, written in response to the 9/11 attacks 15 years ago. It led to a regular op/ed column on WorldNetDaily, national syndication by Universal Press Syndicate, and eventually, this blog.
Unfortunately, in the intervening time, events within the USA have gone largely as I feared they would, with the federal government using the attacks to rationalize more government violations of the unalienable rights of Americans. Even worse, the immigration crisis and the subsequent demographic corruption have combined with the expansion of central state power with the global economic depression to imperil the stability of the US as a unitary state entity. I also think it is interesting to note that even then, before I had become familiar with the concepts of 4GW and non-Trinitarian war, it was readily apparent to that conventional war would not suffice to subdue the latest wave of Islamic expansion.
In response to a number of questions inspired by last week’s column, we were working on a piece related to PC security, specifically the sort offered to one’s e-mail communications by various encryption technologies, when we were interrupted by the horrifying events of Tuesday. The fatal hijackings and subsequent media response has been difficult to dismiss from our mind, so we have tabled the usual technology review for a week in favor of some reflections on these recent events.
One of the many troubling aspects of the hijackings is the brutal demonstration that we, as a people, have received very little of the security we were promised in return for the many violations of personal freedom and civil liberties that have been enacted over the past decade. We would go so far as to raise the question if this had not been a fool’s bargain, wherein we have given up something of precious value in return for … arguably, nothing. It is bad enough that we allow the FBI to filter our e-mails and record our keystrokes, that we permit the National Security Agency to intercept every electronic communication floating through the aether, but it is even worse that we have done so without realizing that which we hoped to gain.
Just as the drug war has not reduced the amount of illegal drugs used in this country, the sacrifice of our civil liberties on the altar of national security has not brought us security. Keep this in mind, as the inevitable drumbeat begins for more sacrifices, as the calls begin for Americans to give up even more of their hard-won freedoms. National security cannot seriously be cited any longer in the attempts to ban personal encryption technology, not when, as WorldNetDaily reported yesterday, far better forms of communications encryption have already been delivered to terrorist-sponsoring states like Syria with the full approval of the previous administration.
It is said that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, but that vigilance must be applied within as well as without. A thousand suicide bombers could not destroy America, but America is quite capable of destroying itself in the pursuit of any number of false idols, among them wrongheaded and illusory notions of security at any price. Individual privacy, like private property, is one of the foundations of our freedom, and it must not be thrown away out of fear. Anonymous cell phones or encrypted e-mail missives could be used by a terrorist, true, but the same is also true of a razor blade or a flight simulator.
What our leaders must realize is that personal technology is not a foe, but a powerful ally. The enemy we face can be subdued and contained by soldiers, bombs and a strong national will, but it cannot be ultimately defeated through conventional war. But satellite transmissions and the Internet know no borders, nor does the concept of freedom. Our enemies recognize this, which is why they fearfully denounce every sign of American influence as decadence, because they well know that they cannot raise another generation of suicide warriors if that generation is allowed to partake of the dangerous and forbidden fruit of freedom.
Some have protested that America must not strike back, that doing so will only perpetuate the “cycle of violence,” that others will only rise up to replace those we strike down. But this is demonstrably untrue, as no German ever rose up to replace Hitler, nor does a Japanese war party trouble us today. It is appropriate for a nation to fight a war in its own defense, especially when war has been openly declared upon it. But in doing so, we must resolutely resist the call to sacrifice that which makes the United States of America a country worth defending – our inalienable rights and our individual freedom.
I don’t know who “Publius Decius Mus” is, except in the Samnite War sense, but this is the best article I have ever read at the Claremont Institute. It very clearly makes the case for the need for the Alt-Right, if not for the Alt-Right per se. And in doing so, it also underlines the petty narcissism of the dwindling #NeverTrump crowd:
If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff.
But it’s quite obvious that conservatives don’t believe any such thing, that they feel no such sense of urgency, of an immediate necessity to change course and avoid the cliff. A recent article by Matthew Continetti may be taken as representative—indeed, almost written for the purpose of illustrating the point. Continetti inquires into the “condition of America” and finds it wanting. What does Continetti propose to do about it? The usual litany of “conservative” “solutions,” with the obligatory references to decentralization, federalization, “civic renewal,” and—of course!—Burke. Which is to say, conservatism’s typical combination of the useless and inapt with the utopian and unrealizable. Decentralization and federalism are all well and good, and as a conservative, I endorse them both without reservation. But how are they going to save, or even meaningfully improve, the America that Continetti describes? What can they do against a tidal wave of dysfunction, immorality, and corruption? “Civic renewal” would do a lot of course, but that’s like saying health will save a cancer patient. A step has been skipped in there somewhere. How are we going to achieve “civic renewal”? Wishing for a tautology to enact itself is not a strategy.
Continetti trips over a more promising approach when he writes of “stress[ing] the ‘national interest abroad and national solidarity at home’ through foreign-policy retrenchment, ‘support to workers buffeted by globalization,’ and setting ‘tax rates and immigration levels’ to foster social cohesion.” That sounds a lot like Trumpism. But the phrases that Continetti quotes are taken from Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, both of whom, like Continetti, are vociferously—one might even say fanatically—anti-Trump. At least they, unlike Kesler, give Trump credit for having identified the right stance on today’s most salient issues. Yet, paradoxically, they won’t vote for Trump whereas Kesler hints that he will. It’s reasonable, then, to read into Kesler’s esoteric endorsement of Trump an implicit acknowledgment that the crisis is, indeed, pretty dire. I expect a Claremont scholar to be wiser than most other conservative intellectuals, and I am relieved not to be disappointed in this instance.
Yet we may also reasonably ask: What explains the Pollyanna-ish declinism of so many others? That is, the stance that Things-Are-Really-Bad—But-Not-So-Bad-that-We-Have-to-Consider-Anything-Really-Different! The obvious answer is that they don’t really believe the first half of that formulation. If so, like Chicken Little, they should stick a sock in it. Pecuniary reasons also suggest themselves, but let us foreswear recourse to this explanation until we have disproved all the others.
Whatever the reason for the contradiction, there can be no doubt that there is a contradiction. To simultaneously hold conservative cultural, economic, and political beliefs—to insist that our liberal-left present reality and future direction is incompatible with human nature and must undermine society—and yet also believe that things can go on more or less the way they are going, ideally but not necessarily with some conservative tinkering here and there, is logically impossible.
Let’s be very blunt here: if you genuinely think things can go on with no fundamental change needed, then you have implicitly admitted that conservatism is wrong. Wrong philosophically, wrong on human nature, wrong on the nature of politics, and wrong in its policy prescriptions. Because, first, few of those prescriptions are in force today. Second, of the ones that are, the left is busy undoing them, often with conservative assistance. And, third, the whole trend of the West is ever-leftward, ever further away from what we all understand as conservatism.
One thing that I expect has become clear to most readers here, whether of the Alt-Right or the conservative persuasion, is that conservatism is utterly unequipped to deal with the current situation. Even if conservatism were a coherent ideology – it isn’t, read Cuckservative – or if it were not partially culpable for the current situation – and it is – conservatives are both intellectually unarmed and emotionally unprepared to deal with the ongoing transition from ideology politics to identity politics.
A favorite phrase of mine is, “let reason be silent when experience gainsays its conclusions.” Conservatives correctly point out the ways in which American liberalism, Leftism, and progressivism all fail the test of experience. However, conservatives completely fail to recognize their own pie-in-the-sky thinking when they appeal to Magic Dirt, Magic Words, and the Zeroth Amendment. They do not understand the significance of the Supreme Court’s version of the US Constitution not being the same as the original written version of the Constitution, they are unaware that most immigrants, children of immigrants, and grandchildren of immigrants neither know nor care what any version of “the Constitution” is, says, or represents, and they ignore the very purpose of the Constitution as laid out in the Preamble.
Most importantly, they elevate a single phrase from the Declaration of Independence, a meaninglessly utopian piece of rhetoric which is not only contradicted by the Preamble, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and the acts of the First Congress, but by subsequent phrases in the Declaration itself, and proclaim it to be the foundational core of both state and nation. To conservatives, “all men are created equal” is a Magic Spell of unlimited potency that is not only, contra literally ALL the evidence, historically definitional, but can even be invoked to instantly transform any individual, tribe, people, or nation into Americans.
However, neither the Magic Spell nor the Magic Words prevented the Civil War, or if you prefer, the Second War for Independence. And the Magic Words will not prevent Round Two, or if you prefer, the Third War for Independence, or what is considerably more likely to be the free-for-all that follows the general collapse of the US central state. Very few saw the Soviet collapse coming, and I expect even fewer genuinely see the US collapse coming, despite the profiteering of opportunistic media doomsayers who have never seen an Apocalypse, a Ragnarok, or a Rapture they didn’t like.
Where conservatism has proven intrinsically fragile and self-contradictory, the Alt-Right is anti-fragile and intellectually consistent. A nation has considerably more ruin in it than a state; the state cannot survive long without a single dominant nation but as the Jews, the Kurds, and many other peoples have proved, a nation can survive indefinitely without a state. The architects of 4GW theory and the globalists alike have chronicled the way in which we are coming to the end of the Westphalian period where the state held a monopoly on violence. Therefore, it should surprise no one that as the international state system is in the process of coming to an end, the ideology politics that arose within it and subsequently dominated it should also be in decline.
So, conservatism is not merely incoherent, it is now as entirely irrelevant as a biplane during the Battle of Britain. Neither a Balanced Budget Amendment nor pledging undying loyalty to AIPAC nor deciding to “rededicate ourselves to the notion of liberty for which generations of Americans fought and died” are going to even begin to address the implications of the post-Westphalian shift to identity politics, much less prevent the collapse of the USA.
The media-politico complex is deeply, deeply concerned about people being provided any reason to trust their own eyes regarding Hillary Clinton’s health, which is why Dr. Drew appears to have some concerns about his own:
Dr. Drew Pinsky is so afraid of Hillary Clinton and her supporters, he won’t blame them for the cancellation of his show on HLN, the sister channel of CNN.
“No, no, no. I just want them to go away!” he told one friend.
“Dr. Drew” was canceled eight days after Pinsky discussed Clinton’s health on a radio show, saying he was “gravely concerned not just about her health, but her health care.”
“CNN is so supportive of Clinton, network honchos acted like the Mafia when confronting Drew,” a source told me. “First, they demanded he retract his comments, but he wouldn’t.”
What followed was a series of nasty phone calls and e-mails. “It was downright scary and creepy,” a source close to Pinsky said.
The Clinton campaign increasingly reminds me of Robert Silverberg’s Majipoor Chronicles, in which it is revealed that the ruler of the massive planet, the Pontifex, is a comatose elderly man whose life is being artificially sustained by technology, while the Coronal, ostensibly his vice-executive, rules publicly in his place.
Seriously, though, what are they going to do for the next four years if Hillary somehow avoids the coming Trumpslide and actually wins the election? They can barely wheel her out in public once every few weeks as it is.
In 2013, Yahoo announced that it would begin scanning its users’ e-mail for targeted advertising purposes—just as Google does. As is par for the course, class-action lawsuits were filed. The Silicon Valley media giant, according to one of the lawsuits, was violating the “personal liberties” of non-Yahoo Mail users. That’s because non-Yahoo Mail users, who have sent mail to Yahoo mail users, were having their e-mail scanned without their permission. … The suit, which was one of six that were co-mingled as a single class action, demanded that a judge halt the scanning and award each victim “$5,000 or three times actual damages” in addition to “reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs.”
Fast forward three years. The case is now closed. Days ago, a Silicon Valley federal judge signed off (PDF) on a settlement (PDF). The lawyers won, they were awarded $4 million (£3 million), and the public got nothing. What’s more, the settlement allows Yahoo to continue to scan e-mails without non-Yahoo users’ consent.
It’s almost as though class-action suits have become nothing more than shakedown operations for lawyers.
We will, of course, spare Dr. Reynolds as the proverbial exception to the rule and award him his pick of his former colleague’s estates.
It would be in the definite interest of the American people to pass a law that forbids lawyers to collect more than 10 percent of any settlement or court-dictated award. Unfortunately, the lawyers in Congress are very unlikely to ever permit the passage of anything that would restrain the rapacious predation of their colleagues.
Fantastic and irrational too is the philosophy of the alt-right with their smarmy pseudo-intellectual white isolationism (it’s their make-believe belief that white people aren’t necessarily better than other people, but only have an equal right to protect their “white” culture and territory). The alt-right website Vox Populi roundly declares “The Alt Right believes Western civilization is the pinnacle of human achievement and supports its three foundational pillars: Christianity, the European nations, and the Graeco-Roman legacy.” What blithering silliness.
Should we leave aside the fact that these nationalist anti-semites revel in the worship of a globalist Jew? Nah, let’s pause here to mock them for it. And these European nations that form one of their “pillars:” since those nations have been at war with one another for the last two thousand years, it seems important to ask which one they mean? The industrious Germans or the delightfully carefree Italians? The Spanish with their part-Muslim inheritance or the English with their pagan Viking mix? And while we’re at it, which one of each of these people is representative? Is Hitler more Aryan than Thomas Mann who detested him? Is John Keats or John Christie the more exemplary Englishman?
The best reason to judge people, actions and belief systems individually is to keep from talking crap. I too believe that Western culture from around 1500 to 1915 was one of the pinnacles of human achievement. Part of its genius — I would say the core of it — lay in the loving universalism of its religion which ultimately led its free nations to welcome all people willing to participate in the secular version of that creed.
The genius of the West is not, and has never been, “the loving universalism of its religion”. Klavan’s grasp of the West doesn’t even rise to the level of Wikipedia.
Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization, Western world, Western society or European civilization is a term used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, belief systems, political systems, and specific artifacts and technologies that have some origin or association with Europe. The term is applied to European countries and countries whose history is strongly marked by European immigration, colonisation, and influence, such as the continents of the Americas and Australasia, whose current demographic majority is of European ethnicity, and is not restricted to the continent of Europe.
Ancient Greece is considered the birthplace of Western culture, with the world’s first democratic system of government and major advances in philosophy, science and mathematics. Greece was followed by Rome, which made key contributions in law, government and engineering. Western culture continued to develop with the Christianisation of Europe during the Middle Ages, the reform and modernization triggered by the Renaissance, and with globalization by successive European empires, that spread European ways of life and European educational methods around the world between the 16th and 20th centuries.
Christianity. The European nations. The Graeco-Roman legacy. Such “blithering silliness”. Anyhow, it’s clear that the cuckservatives and their (((friends))) are running with “the West is universal” theme in order to sell their globalist anti-nationalism.
And as for his notion of Jesus Christ as “a globalist Jew”, it sounds to this Christian as if Mr. Klavan is more than ready to bow down and worship Antichrist, should he appear and dangle the prospects of world peace in front of everyone.
