Slick Gets Some British Coverage

Former Miss Arkansas Sally Miller says Bill Clinton was so-so in bed | Daily Mail Online:



Yes, Slick Willie -- only the prudish right wing sorts care about such prurient details,. Oh sure, she claims that her life was threatened, but nobody but "the vast right wing conspiracy" would even give such things the time of day!



Looks like the "vast conspiracy" is world wide!



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Hillary Barks Like A Dog!

Truth is stranger than fiction -- although Hillary certainly DOES do a LOT of fiction!

Here is Bill Murray in "Caddy Shack" showing us how we ought to respect "barking like a dog"

The cause of the subprime crisis was a Carter era program called "The Community Reinvestment Act" designed to give home loans to people that couldn't really qualify. What could go wrong with THAT? A bit more on that here ... 

So Hillary the dog barks just as untruthfully as she talks, but what does one expect of a dog? If you can't stomach the whole tape (and it IS hard), the woofin is at the end!

Was there ever any doubt she was a REAL (linguistic definition) Bitch ?? !

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MNsure, "Free" Still Not Free

Some shocked by estate claims after signing up with MNsure | Duluth News Tribune:

Since we live under the rule of bureaucracy, reading the whole linked article is probably worth it, though it is longer than it needs to be.

Bottom line, in the machinations of BOcare, MNsure and Minnesota Care, the "asset test" for MNsure was taken away because there is none for BOcare and you are REQUIRED to purchase health insurance by law now.

But Minnesota failed to add a form to the tall stack of forms that lets you know that they are putting a lien on any assets you have for the cost of your "free insurance".

My Dad is in a nursing home for at least awhile -- got to sit through a discharge from one facility under Medicare and into another where a "supplemental" was involved. Stacks of papers, lots and lots of questions -- the wheels of government grind the lives and fortunes of us all, but they make sure they gather a lot of data while they do it.

Freedom has never been free -- and the cost of tyranny is still infinite.

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Scalia Spectacle

Scalia, the Senate and the Media: A time for hypocrisy | Fox News:

We have no respect for even the dead -- be they babies torn from their mother's womb, or great jurists that come along only once ever few decades. Scalia was a mind and a spirit so far above the "average" that all those scurrying about braying nonsense about "replacing him" are cast in clear light as mental pygmies!

There is no "replacement" for Scalia! There wasn't for Reagan, for Churchill, for Einstein, or for other such giants. An infinite God gifts us with a few great men, and when they pass, we need to have a reasonable time to bless the gift and mourn the loss. We live in a fallen world that is temporal because it is fallen. Scalia understood that -- in his very soul. The most important thing that happens here is infinitely less important than  anything that happens in the spiritual realm! I wrote a bit about Scalia here, and there is a link in that post to an excellent interview with him. One little quote from that interview ...

Isn’t it terribly frightening to believe in the Devil?
You’re looking at me as though I’m weird. My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It’s in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.

I'm not sure that the interviewer was convinced that there were currently or certainly in the past, any people more intelligent than him. Maybe Einstein -- but that is probably just a sop to false humility. It is left wing dogma that "all are equal" -- removal of standards and hierarchy enables them to replace all the wonderful complex relationships of family, friendship, community, nation and religion with raw unmitigated power. A day listening to NPR is enough to convince anyone with a shred of faith in God left that the Devil is alive and well and having a field day!

Where do Republicans get such ham handed disgusting politicians as Mitch McConnell? Kentucky I guess. He needed to say something nice about Scalia, that was all. Let BO make the first move! Sure, I'd assume that he will nominate someone too far left to be a replacement that a Republican controlled Senate should accept. SUPER ... drag out the confirmation hearings and reject them in "August"! Then it WILL be too late!

I got to listen to a lot of NPR yesterday. When a nation has been destroyed it has no memory or attention span. I must have heard the "precedent" of Justice Kennedy being confirmed in an election year 20 times. I maybe heard the name Bork twice, but it wasn't connected with the Kennedy confirmation. The Democrats owned the Senate and they forced Reagan to accept a very moderate justice that is now a "swing vote" after rejecting Bork in one if not THE battle that soured politics in the US to it's current sorry state. I answered my own question -- we get guys like McConnell because we have made politics into the most dishonorable profession possible!

The nations memory goes as it is destroyed because memory becomes tragic and painful. When a Republican is making a nomination -- even when they are in control in the Senate, the media spends much time and ink on the extremely important issue of "balance in the court" and "no litmus tests" and the CRITICAL importance of "Stare Decisis" (precedent). For NPR and the NY Times, these STRONG principles are most holy when a Republican is making a nomination!

Yesterday it was made clear multiple times that BOTH Hillary and BS would demand that any nomination they made would absolutely vote to overturn Citizens United!

Well, we got no class, and we got no principles ! Perhaps we need to replace the old national anthem with this ... more appropriate to what we are now!

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Dilbert On Trump

Scott Adams Blog:

I used to love the Adam's cartoon strip, "Dilbert" when  I worked at IBM. It was almost spooky how well he understood the typical mindless inanity of modern corporate life. He understood it because he was an engineer at AT&T and at least smart enough to make "Mensa" ... so maybe not a genius, but smart.

He opens with the following:

It isn’t unusual for members of the public to hate politicians. For example, lots of people hate President Obama. Some of that hatred is because of his policies, some is because of racism, and I assume there are a few other reasons. But I have never seen anyone who was literally afraid of him on a visceral level. 

Trump, on the other hand, actually scares people. I have seen people’s bodies twist up and go into full panic at the thought of him being president. I’m talking about actual, literal, bodily fear, as if a monster is already in house and you don’t know where it is hiding. Even professional members of the media feel this fear. 

And yet I feel none of that fear – not even a trace amount. To me, Trump looks like the safest candidate in the history of presidential elections, and I don’t even share his politics on a number of topics. So I have to ask myself why I have zero fear of Trump while so many others are in full panic mode. Should I be more afraid?

Adams never seems to "figure it out" in the column ... as an intelligent engineer, he is trying to be logical. Fear may have a logical basis, but it is only an emotion.

People that hated W or hate BO are not afraid that either of them would directly take them on and cut them down to size if they tried to heckle them. People DID fairly regularly scream things at W, and I'm not sure he ever took on a heckler.

If you hate Trump, unless you have a BIG ego and lots of skills, loud voice, etc, it is nearly certain that if you took your hatred up against him, he would chew you up and spit out out like used sunflower seeds! So they feel fear!

The other aspect I think is that Trump is an "unknown". I certainly was very concerned about what BO would do, and unfortunately those concerns proved to be largely founded -- BOcare, gigantic debt, disregard for the Constitution. loss of US stature around the world, terrible economy, and awful decrease in number of Americans working. I'm concerned about Trump, but policy wise, mostly because he is unknown.

I strongly dislike Trump because he is obnoxious, has no conservative credentials that I can identify, is more concerned about himself than anything else, and he coarsens an  already nasty US political stage.

The column is a worthy read though -- Adams is not the only very intelligent person that I know that is excited about and backing Trump. I think their hopes are FAR too high, in a very similar way to the hopes that the Obama Zombies had in '08.

Human "saviors" are never real!

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Debate Into Darkness

Nobody Won the South Carolina Debate -- Conservatism Lost:

The linked column is unfortunately a very worthy read. I don't watch the debates, I read the analysis. As created and typically executed for the Republicans, they are made for TV spectacle, not reasoned exchange with ideas rather than egos at the center.

When a nation is destroyed, EVERYTHING gets destroyed -- especially if it is a nation founded on IDEAS. I'm sure  the Trump supporters feel completely justified in the Star Wars "release your anger" approach to this election. Conservatives are human, so we ALL understand that feeling ... the problem is that is the DARK SIDE!

It's short, just read it, this is the closing.

On a day when an American lost a great patriot — a Supreme Court justice who defended the Constitution and upheld its vital principles until the very day that he died — it was particularly sad to see the hijacking of constitutional conservatism in a race that is quickly degenerating into a dangerous farce at the very time when the nation so desperately needs principled, courageous leadership. Dear candidates, if you can’t win, step aside. If you can win, step up. Otherwise, we are lost.

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5 Unarmed Black Men Shot Within Days

5 U.S. law enforcement officers shot dead within days - CNN.com:

Suppose that headline might get some attention? It was 5 Law Enforcement Officers ... never mind.

There are about 21M black men in the US, with about half of them (49%) being aged < 34 ... so 10.5 million. If 5 of them had been shot it would be 5 out of 10.5 million.

There are something a bit less then a million police officers ... 900K is a common number. So the 5 officers shot is 5 out of a million (I'm being generous here).  One doesn't have to be much of a statistician to arrive at "10x the problem".

Of course if the young black men were the headline, the outcry would defy imagination.

Yes, the link is from CNN, it **IS** being covered, but looking at both CNN and Fox this AM, it isn't visible on either of their front pages, nor is it available on my supposedly "popularity based" Google News clipping service.

Naturally you don't have to look very long in conservative media to read about it -- this one being about the obvious difference in BO response to Ferguson, Baltimore, etc rather than to police being gunned down.

However, there is another interesting aspect here, as there commonly is in "conservative media". True conservatives are very aware that reality is not ideologically based! There are MANY sides, one of which was covered in a great article over at NRO in 2014 that I happened to recall ..

Imagine if I were to tell you there is a large group of government employees, with generous salaries and ridiculously cushy retirement pensions covered by the taxpayer, who enjoy incredible job security and are rarely held accountable even for activities that would almost certainly earn the rest of us prison time. When there is proven misconduct, these government employees are merely reassigned and are rarely dismissed. The bill for any legal settlements concerning their errors? It, too, is covered by the taxpayers. Their unions are among the strongest in the country.  

No, I’m not talking about public-school teachers. I’m talking about the police.

The article DOES point out the fact that many / most officers are excellent, and why conservatives have a knee jerk response to support them for good reason (order vs chaos), but gives ample food for thought.

The nation was founded by brilliant and COMPLEX men. Men that knew that living, leading and thinking in the real world required assimilation of many views and paradoxes and seeing to apply timeless principles to their ordering while even considering "the human element" ... emotion, intuition and perhaps revelation.

Nothing ... or at best (worst?), very little, is simple. Humility an important place to start. I also often find that an "opposite shift of perspective ... black vs white, democrat vs republican, female vs male, atheist vs christian, christian vs muslim ... can help to clear the fog of bias and ideology.

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Trump/Sanders -- Magic In BO Hell

Sanders and Trump: Magic sells - The Washington Post:

There is Bipartisan  agreement that current America is a disaster. BS carefully avoids who is at fault, but he is absolutely clear on how bad it is. Hillary isn't clear on anything other than  she is woman so should get the job via affirmative action, the same way BO did. Here is Charles on the subject ...

But the starting point of the bipartisan critique is the social, economic and geopolitical wreckage all around us. Bernie Sanders is careful never to blame President Obama directly, but his description of the America Obama leaves behind is devastating — a wasteland of stagnant wages, rising inequality, a sinking middle class, young people crushed by debt, the American Dream dying. 

Take away the Brooklyn accent and the Larry David mannerisms and you would have thought you were listening to a Republican candidate. After all, who’s been in charge for the last seven years?

Who indeed -- if you listen to BO or the media, it is either W or the evil Rs in congress.

The added factor is the Obama effect, the depressed and anxious mood of a nation experiencing its worst economic recovery since World War II and watching its power and influence abroad decline amid a willed global retreat.

The result is a politics of high fantasy. Things can't get any worse, we hear, so why not shake things up to their foundation? Anyone who thinks things can't get any worse knows nothing. And risks everything.

I think the point Sir Charles misses is that for the vast majority of relatively non-political Americans, they can't IMAGINE how it could get worse. Since '10, when the R's took over congress, the media and BO have been in full throat demonizing them -- but they returned them to power in '12 and '14 ... in '14 with the biggest R majority in the house in 75 years.

Sure the press gives BO all the support it can, but the economy sucks, America is obviously losing on the world stage on a number of fronts, and BO's constant scolding only really resonates with the 20% core Democrat zombies.

So "magic" sells better than "scolding" ... and certainly better than "4 more years" (Hillary), or "Something like the congress you see in the presidency (Rubio).

My hope at this point is for Cruz who DOES have some real plans -- but BOTH the MSM and the Republican establishment hate him, and he isn't Trump!

Cruz vs Sanders would give America the most choice we have had in a long time -- but I'm starting to think it will be Trump / Sanders ... dueling sorcerers!



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Gold, Goldman Sachs, Hillary as "Goldmember"

You’ll Never Guess the Other Time Hillary Wore That Same Gold Top | Mediaite:

So she wore the same top to go speak to Goldman Sachs. Is this like her SELECTING a bunch of e-mails off her server, claiming that NONE contained anything secret, and then having like 40 show up as TOP SECRET?

Is this the criminal returning to the scene of the crime to get caught, or is the the addicted shoplifter that just wants to pull it off again for the thrill?

I'm assuming that she IS a woman and is actually a mother. Given that, having been around women and having lived with one for over 30 years, are we to believe she pays no attention to what she is wearing when she goes on a nationally televised debate? I mean, she keeps claiming that women HAVE to vote for her, and Madeleine Albright even claims they will "go to hell" if they don't support Hillary! Is not paying attention to what you are wearing something a woman does?

So that outfit looks like: a). Something done by Kim Jong's tailor that he refused to wear.  b). Something worn by a low budget humanoid alien on Star Trek c). Stolen from Austin Powers "Goldmember" wardrobe.

Add to it that she wore it to Goldman Sachs, which gave her $640K, and doesn't it HAVE to mean something? I mean, if a woman pulls out an unusual outfit that you have only seen her in once, doesn't she ALWAYS have a message?

My view ... she is letting us know she is lesbian and "wears the pants".

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Teachers Imperfect Climate Indoctrinators

How teachers are getting it wrong on climate change - The Washington Post:

Thirty-one percent of teachers also said that they include both the scientific consensus position — that global warming is human-caused — but then also a “natural causes” position that contradicts it, thus presenting “both sides,” in the study’s words.

I've covered before how our current school systems were engineered to create at the start of the 20th century using principles from guys like Taylor and Dewey to make "compliant workers and consumers" for the industrial manufacturing world.

The fact that such people operate best in totalitarian systems was just a bonus!

The linked article is not "in your face", but it makes it pretty clear that there needs to be a national top-down agenda for getting our "numbers" up to "where they need to be" on Climate Change.

The study also found that most teachers are unaware of the strength of the scientific consensus about the human causes of climate change. The survey asked them “what proportion of climate scientists think that global warming is caused mostly by human activities?” For middle school teachers, 30 percent chose the option “81 to 100%,” which the researchers identified as the correct answer. High school teachers were only a little better, at 45 percent.

The highlight is the big "tell" that we are dealing with totalitarian ideology. In teaching "science", polls of how many people believe whatever would have been SCIENTIFIC SACRILEGE even back when I was in school. We were far too close to the Nazi politicization of science and Lysenkoism in the USSR, PLUS, we were a country GOING TO THE MOON! Things like going to the Moon require REAL SCIENCE, not political ideology.

The "correct answer" was 81-100% ... but the REAL answer is closer to 40%! However, the REAL PROBLEM is that we are doing "Family Feud Science" ( Survey Says!) indoctrination.

Which brings us to:

Teachers who espoused conservative ideological beliefs about government’s role in people’s lives tended to be more likely to present an “on the one hand, on the other hand” version of the climate issue in class.

I'd love to see that percentage ... I'm guessing it wasn't very high!

The ideology which may not be named as "ideology" because it is the dominant one we are soaking in ("liberalism"), is actively working to stamp out any presentation of an alternate view. Meanwhile that which is strongly labeled as "ideology" is in the business of presenting facts and alternatives and allowing for a public to think and make up their own minds!

**IF** we were ever to return to being a nation of freemen, one of the highest priorities would be to demand and constantly monitor so that our schools turn out INDEPENDENT, reality-based,  CRITICAL THINKING students rather than mindless totalitarian ideological automatons!

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BO Better Judge Than God

Scandal of the Day Christian Heidi Cruz Says Christian Things:



The left is all up in arms because Ted Cruz and his wife are Christians and that affects their world view. The BO spokesman response to some comments:

Thomas Jefferson envisioned a wall of separation between Church and State. Ted Cruz envisions that wall being torn down entirely. He’s not judging, he just thinks people who disagree are wrong and bad.

How many times have we listened to BO pontificate about how anyone questioning Climate Change, his give nukes to Iran deal, his "red line", his JV team, his "you can keep your healthcare ..." ... my fingers are tired ... were "wrong, bad, misguided, partisan, foolish, lying, racist, etc" ???



So the almighty BO stands up and judges everyone on the basis if his worshipful intellect or intestinal gas, that is a thing of beauty, but if anyone wants to use Judeao-Christian values that are thousands of years old and are the entire basis for Western civilization, THAT is somehow against a letter that Jefferson sent to a Baptist church!



At least they didn't try to claim it is in the Constitution, THAT would be RICH, considering that they have shredded that so bad it basically doesn't exist!



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The Spotted Cow Felony

Maple Tavern owner, manager charged with felonies for selling 'Spotted Cow' beer - Story | KMSP:

You may be thinking "Onion", but no, this is government reality.

A former Minnesota bar owner and manager are each being charged with a felony for running “Spotted Cow” beer out of Wisconsin and selling it at their restaurant, the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office announced Wednesday.

"Why" you might legitimately ask ... here you go:

While there is humor to this story of beer-smuggling and a sense of state pride with New Glarus Brewery’s “Only in Wisconsin” sales stance, this is also a story of just how screwed up the alcohol wholesale market is. Since the repeal of prohibition most states have operated what is called a “Three-Tier Alcohol Distribution System.” Wisconsin is no different.

The REAL bottom line is "taxes and fees". The government makes A LOT of money from alcohol ... MN is #13 highest, WI is #40 ... bit of differential there!

I am a BIG believer in "States Rights" -- that one of the BIGGEST things our founders wanted to enable is the chance to have "50" (their number was less) separate laboratories of "what works and what doesn't" inside a very limited federal system.

SO ... I believe that states SHOULD be able to do different things. "Felony" sounds like wacko enforcement to me for CERTAIN ... make the punishment fit the crime. FINE them enough so it is cheaper for them to obey the law than not.

I believe states ought to have the right to regulate things like alcohol, drugs, commerce, etc in very different manners within their borders, and obviously, that means that there will be these kinds of issues. I consider that a reasonable price to pay to allow people to have choices beyond "leaving the country".

Oh, and BTW, you MIGHT look at that chart and assume liquor prices are cheaper in WI. You would not be wrong ... a case of Leinies runs like $13 a lot of places.

If you are not offended by the F word, and things that are "inappropriate" you might also check this out ... I'm embarrassed to find it funny, but it DOES have a good deal to say about WI. (you may want to enjoy it with a Brandy Old-Fashioned).

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Gravity Waves Detected, Spacetime Scanner?

Gravitational Waves Exist: The Inside Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them - The New Yorker:

This is really big news in physics. Yet ANOTHER area that Einstein and his General Theory of Relativity have been proven right!

I like their little "story" that they introduce the detection with because unlike pseudo science like AGW, it puts this into context. Billions of years since the event, over 100 years in the making, false alarms, failures, big investments, and finally ...

Just over a billion years ago, many millions of galaxies from here, a pair of black holes collided. They had been circling each other for aeons, in a sort of mating dance, gathering pace with each orbit, hurtling closer and closer. By the time they were a few hundred miles apart, they were whipping around at nearly the speed of light, releasing great shudders of gravitational energy. Space and time became distorted, like water at a rolling boil. In the fraction of a second that it took for the black holes to finally merge, they radiated a hundred times more energy than all the stars in the universe combined. They formed a new black hole, sixty-two times as heavy as our sun and almost as wide across as the state of Maine. As it smoothed itself out, assuming the shape of a slightly flattened sphere, a few last quivers of energy escaped. Then space and time became silent again. 

The waves rippled outward in every direction, weakening as they went. On Earth, dinosaurs arose, evolved, and went extinct. The waves kept going. About fifty thousand years ago, they entered our own Milky Way galaxy, just as Homo sapiens were beginning to replace our Neanderthal cousins as the planet’s dominant species of ape. A hundred years ago, Albert Einstein, one of the more advanced members of the species, predicted the waves’ existence, inspiring decades of speculation and fruitless searching. Twenty-two years ago, construction began on an enormous detector, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Then, on September 14, 2015, at just before eleven in the morning, Central European Time, the waves reached Earth. Marco Drago, a thirty-two-year-old Italian postdoctoral student and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, was the first person to notice them. He was sitting in front of his computer at the Albert Einstein Institute, in Hannover, Germany, viewing the LIGO data remotely. The waves appeared on his screen as a compressed squiggle, but the most exquisite ears in the universe, attuned to vibrations of less than a trillionth of an inch, would have heard what astronomers call a chirp—a faint whooping from low to high. This morning, in a press conference in Washington, D.C., the LIGO team announced that the signal constitutes the first direct observation of gravitational waves.

The biggest IMMEDIATE effect is just yet another confirmation of General Relativity as correct. The hope is that this is a new way of seeing the universe that we have now just barely established as "possible".  Gravity waves are ripples in the actual fabric of the universe -- spacetime! All the other electromagnetic radiation -- light, radio, infrared, gamma, x-ray, etc travel through space. We now have a form of wave that might "illuminate" even dark matter.

We don't really know how gravity waves might be "used" -- but we now are pretty certain that they do exist! It MIGHT be that like telescopes, radio telescopes, etc gravity waves will in the future be one of the major ways that we observe the universe.

Exciting stuff!

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Socialism, When Your Grandchild Dies

Drug Shortages Forcing Hard Decisions on Rationing Treatments - The New York Times:

If we were still a nation that was able to understand enough to self-govern, this is a story that ALL ought read and at least have the tradeoffs explained. In a conservative or engineering universe, EVERYTHING has a cost, and there are ALWAYS tradeoffs. When you vote in socialism you give up your ability to have any control in trying to make life better for those you hold most dear -- in my case, my granddaughter, but you can pick your own. You "outsource" your power and responsibility.

In a "liberal" or utopian universe, "all things are possible" -- perfection is always one more program, tax, regulation, law or "blue ribbon committee" away. The only thing really holding up nirvana are those damned reactionary conservatives!

“It was painful,” said Dr. Yoram Unguru, an oncologist at the Children’s Hospital at Sinai in Baltimore and a faculty member at the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. “We kept coming back to wow, we’ve got that tragic choice: two kids in front of you, you only have enough for one. How do you choose?”

The article makes it clear that we are ALREADY at "triage" for even critical drugs for children in medicine. We have regulated, "negotiated", "optimized", drug manufacture to the point where profit margins are razor thin (at best).  Before the move to socialized medicine got it's first purchase in the US with the advent of Medicare in the '60s, the rest of the world could do socialized medicine and have the US as a "market driven backup". That backup is on life support at best now.

The canary is dead folks. (they used to use a canary in coal mines ... if the canary died, it was time to make like a priest and get the flock out of there!).

We have had AMPLE warnings on how socialized anything works. East / West Germany, USSR vs US, current Venezuela, current N vs S Korea. The US was the huge "backstop" that allowed Japan and Europe to go socialist without having to "go gulag". When "regulation" fails to produce what is required, shortages result, and there is no market operating anywhere, then the ONLY choice is "forced labor". The government must FORCE some company to produce the drug at some stated price (to start) ... but after a bit, why should they pay them anything? FORCE them to produce what has been declared as "required" by the centralized power. We KNOW how that "works" ... it doesn't.

When you see critical drugs being rationed for children HERE, then you have NO EXCUSE to not realize that the effects of socialism are not changed by some magic of being applied in this area of N America!

Vote BS, but hoard toilet paper!

In recent years, shortages of all sorts of drugs — anesthetics, painkillers,antibiotics, cancer treatments — have become the new normal in American medicine. The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists currently lists inadequate supplies of more than 150 drugs and therapeutics, for reasons ranging from manufacturing problems to federal safety crackdowns to drugmakers abandoning low-profit products. But while such shortages have periodically drawn attention, the rationing that results from them has been largely hidden from patients and the public.

The NY Times naturally LOVES socialism, they are not going to go ALL the way to making the connection for you, but that paragraph does pretty well. The next one adds a bit more ... "economic incentives" ... we are still more fascist than socialist, so those are still involved. Why not just FORCE them to produce what is required? That would get us to "real socialism", which is basically communism. Remember gas lines? Carter was going to "control the price" -- which naturally controls the SUPPLY as well!

Many drugs are made by only one manufacturer, so production or safety problems at a single plant can have big effects. For another company to begin making the products and getting them approved by regulators requires the right combination of manufacturing capabilities and economic incentives.

So, when socialism produces shortages, as it always does, then what is needed is "fairer / more expert / "enlightened" allocation of the now scarce resource. Oh, and they "advised" it ought to be "made public".  Potentially, while there is still enough private pharmaceutical industry left to blame things on, that might be a political winner, but when the last vestige of that is gone and we all KNOW that it is the government making all these production / rationing decisions? Hillary's e-mails are WAY more "public" than that information will be then!

The effort, led by Dr. Unguru, the Baltimore oncologist, recommended that the drugs be rationed based on the ability to save lives or years of life, including curability of a child’s cancer and the importance of the drug in improving the chances. It also recommended that children participating in clinical research should not get priority over those who are not, because of concerns about coercing families into trials. The group also advised that allocation decisions be public.

"The banality of evil" rears it's head again -- THIS is how socialism works! "The vagaries of distribution" indeed! Profit is the price paid for supply meeting demand! Regulate that away and numbers coursing their way through an endless myriad of bureaucratic "clearing houses", "agencies", "offices" and "czars" are supposed to match supply to demand, but never do. Eventually, those "numbers" are people, and they are dispensed with using the same cold logic and pseudo "efficiency" as mere numbers.

The vagaries in distribution and inconsistencies in rationing have led to calls for change. Doctors and others have suggested the creation of a clearinghouse of scarce drugs and voluntary sharing to promote equitable access for patients. Others argue that there should be a registry of patients given nonstandard treatments so the results can be tracked.

Dr. Lurie, the federal health official in charge of emergency preparedness and response, said that the government was working to encourage hospitals to conserve and substitute drugs to avoid a crisis and trying to fill gaps in manufacturing. Steps taken by the Food and Drug Administration have also helped reduce the number of shortages, she said.

IF any Sanders supporters have read this far, I'm sure they are saying, "yeah, sure ... and "capitalism", "freedom", etc are PERFECT!

NO, THEY ARE NOT! That is precisely the point -- they admit that they are NOT PERFECT, but at least they don't institutionalize evil! They KNOW and admit that. The market doesn't have to "wait 4 years to make a change" and you get to "vote" (by buying and selling) typically many times a day!

Brooks Misses Scent of BO

http://www.vox.com/2016/2/9/10950922/david-brooks-i-miss-obama?ref=yfp

David Brooks is a smart guy -- I've read a couple of his books, some of his articles are quite good. His world view is however left / statist / "liberal" / "progressive" ... whatever you want to call it.

From, "Ideas Have Consequences" -- "It is easy to be blind to the significance of a change because it is remote in time and abstract in character. Those who have not discovered that world view is the most important thing about a man, as about the men composing a culture, should consider the train of circumstances which have with perfect logic proceeded from this".


One of the more dangerous things of our current largely left wing media is using a "liberal in conservative clothing" as a "stalking horse". Brooks fills this role A LOT. He is on NPR weekly as the supposed "flip side" of EJ Dionne of the WaPo -- in reality, a classic case of covering "both the left and the FAR left"!

People are lulled to believe that they have heard a "reasonable conservative view", when actually they have heard another left wing view dressed up as being conservative.

Both the Vox article and the column are factually useless, but useful as an excellent example of just how deeply the left wing bias is embedded in our media. A sample ...

Despite his self-identification as a conservative, David Brooks has long been considered the Obama White House's favorite columnist, becoming a regular at off-the-record events and dinners. Even when he's criticized the administration he's stayed in its good graces. In 2009, when he criticized Obama's spending plans, the White House sent him a chart debunking his claims on which Obama himself wrote, "Dear Comrade Brooks."

So it's perhaps unsurprising to see Brooks return the favor in his column Tuesday, titled,"I Miss Obama." Brooks contrasts the president's restrained, cerebral demeanor (one of "good manners") with that of the 2016 presidential field and finds his potential successors lacking:

BO is no doubt well aware how useful it is to have someone well known nationally as a "conservative" as cover for his radicalism. Perhaps David will be signing on to BS (Bernie Sanders)  soon and get over missing BO!
Posted By Blogger to Moose Tracks at 2/10/2016 01:33:00 PM