Death, Life, Politics

I’m Supposed to be Dead Today | The Resurgent:

A good column for Good Friday -- I had to look up the author, conservative NeverTrumper ... not that it matters. Here is the closing paragraph ... don't use your floor wax for a desert topping and don't use politics as your religion. You will be eternally better off.

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/shimmer-floor-wax/n8625?snl=1

"This past year, I have recognized something important. The people who have turned politics into their god are the most miserable, malcontented people I know. Not everything is political and when you think it is, you have turned politics into religion. Life is not supposed to be political and death coming to visit me showed me how much more to life there is."

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Healthcare, Universal Suffering

iCanada’s Single-Payer Health Care System: A Cautionary Tale | National Review:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2011/04/29/why-switzerland-has-the-worlds-best-health-care-system/#53dce0507d74

Healthcare is one of the most frustrating things to talk about. Some of the reasons include:

• We all have to use it, and none of us really want to use it, let alone pay for it. It is like having to fix your roof, plumbing or siding, only WORSE because it lets you feel your own mortality and vulnerability while spending money you would prefer not to spend. This sort of situation plays very well into our immature natures to throw up the hands and say "I just want this taken care of by SOMEBODY!".
• When we fall into the compliant "JUST FIX IT!" mode, politicians and other charlatans rub their hands with glee. The rubes are filing in the pen to be sheared -- there may be a lot of bleating as their funds are taken for little result, but when you are in the shearing of freedom and funds from the masses business, it doesn't really get any better than this!
• Like inflation, healthcare is tailor made for government control. They control all the statistics on costs and results, so unsurprisingly, they end up looking pretty darned good. (Hey, there is no inflation, so we don't need to give you a COLA on your FICA, nor any inflation adjustment on your "inflation protected bonds" ... trust us!) They will give you PLENTY of statistics to show you "beyond all shadow of doubt" how good a deal you are getting and how great the results are.  Go online for "rankings" and you will find "the gospel truth" from "non-partisan sources" like the Commonwealth Fund!

One primary factor that could start the journey back to America from BOistan is the old motto of IBM; "THINK!", or as put by Henry Ford "Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably why so few engage in it!"

Thinking about things that are HARD, and do not agree with our idea of pleasure, or even being on the PATH to pleasure, is especially difficult. When the majority of those around you decide to write off personal freedom and responsibility in favor of the herd, that can make it even tougher.

The two articles linked at the top provide some alternative views which I suspect we all know to be true if we just THINK rather than "feel or hope" for a few minutes ... here are the highlights. 

• The Canadian system has loads of problems, is way more expensive than is realized, and only really works because those that can afford it can go south -- Mayo in Rochester is one of the places they go. Canadian healthcare is trending just like BOistan FICA.
• Like in virtually everything else in the world, Switzerland is really number 1, and nobody on the left really wants to talk about that model very much ... lots of individual responsibility kinds of stuff. 

The Godzilla in the room that neither of the articles covers is the plight of the black population in the US. Essentially, they are living in the 3rd world, while the white population enjoys being essentially in Switzerland or Norway. I could also spend a lot of time on the fact that infant mortality is one of the big measures used for quality of healthcare, but it is also one of the areas where there are HUGE differences in how the statistics are done. This is an EXCELLENT article that points out those difficulties, however if you have already made up your mind for Universal Suffering, reading it would be too painful -- better to write it off. 

Oh, and in the interests of how bad being "taken care of by the government" works no matter what your race, it turns out that there is an epidemic of poor white people dying. Broken families, loss of community, leaving religion, welfare, not being employed, etc is just as as terminal if you are white as if you are black -- only time will tell if orientals have a stronger resistance! 

The bottom line here, that I really think we all know to be true if we calmly THINK for a few minutes is essentially this: 

• "Someone" is going to pay, and "someone" is going to decide on healthcare choices. Most of us are willing to keep up our homes and cars on our own dime and understand that the consequences of not doing so are grave. Inherently, we actually DO understand that health care is NO DIFFERENT, we just don't want to accept it!
• The majority of my acquaintances have not decided to hand over ALL of their retirement finances to the government ... nor their housing, transportation, food provisions, etc. That more of them are considering handing over their healthcare to the government is a strong sign that our ability to self govern is perilously low. In our hearts, we know that "outsourcing" really doesn't solve the problem, we just WISH it would.
• "Everyone else is doing it" is the saddest "argument" of all. In a nation that is supposed to rule itself, one of the reddest of red herring arguments would never be proffered by someone with over an 8th grade education. "Bandwagon argument", "Argumentum ad populum" -- it is such an obvious fallacy that it's use is mostly a marker for the sadness of the intellectual state of our nation. "97% of scientists agree" ... when even the fallacies become popular, you truly know that intelligent dialogue is dead.
• It has been often said that if you are not a liberal at 20 you have no heart, but if you are not a conservative by 40 you have no brain. A better way of looking at is that life used to tend to school people in reality a lot more than it does now. If you didn't work, things REALLY sucked, there were more accidents, diseases, etc that impinged on rosy views of reality -- at one time, almost everyone had to deal with the death of a child.
  
  In this vale of tears, EVERYTHING of mans creation has a dark side (not everything created by man has a light side though). Not having to live with as much pain is what we all desire, however as we are discovering with the immune system, not having to deal with as many pathogens as child results in a weaker immune system. Nietzsche was overboard on "That which does not kill you makes you stronger", but there is a nugget of real truth there. Without the struggle of escaping from the cocoon, the moisture is not worked out of the wings of the butterfly and they are unable to fly. Much of this world depends on struggle.
  
  Can human beings actually mature without adversity? Humans have both hearts and brains, and maturing both takes effort. To wish it were otherwise is to fail to understand our condition.

In my current line of work, one of the biggest mantras is NO FIXING. Our mental health system is loaded with people that have lost their ability to think independently. They have been so "fixed" by doctors, institutions, family and government that they no longer  believe they have any personal power remaining. They have stopped struggling. 

For most of those that read this blog, the struggle will not be given up -- yet. We will continue to live in private housing, tend our retirement funds, keep up our private transportation, and if the suffering of healthcare becomes "universal", we will opt out of that for a much more expensive private option as long as we can. 

Some of us may feel positive about that -- much like choosing to feel positive about paying into the giant FICA ponzi scheme in the same manner as the optimistic man having fallen off a 100 floor building yells out to the person on the 20th floor, "all good so far"! 

Does anyone with over a 100 IQ NOT understand all this? I personally don't believe that. I believe that in our bones, we totally "get it", just like we understand that we and our loved ones most certainly will die! However, we are masters of compartmentalization and when the whole government, media, education and entertainment is marketing to us to just settle back and enjoy the ride on the gravy train, it is EASY to do. 

It is easy, but of course it is deadly -- to people, to families, to nations, to civilizations. 

It certainly happens to companies -- IBM was spiraling down in the late '80s, Gerstner leveled it off and gave a little uptick in the mid '90s, but the bureaucratic forces were too strong and all that remains is the corpse of a once great company. Much like here in BOistan, the corpse of something big can hang around a long while -- sure it stinks, but much like pumping hog manure, most people get used to it!

As we say in DBT, pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. By accepting basic truths like "80-90% of people have to pull their own weight in EVERYTHING ... food, shelter, transportation, clothing, healthcare, entertainment, etc" or the system is going to break at some point., we deal with the "pain" of that truth, but we avoid the suffering of the disaster when the truth is ignored. 

When systems go the way of the US and Europe, they become corrupt as more and more seek rent from the transfer of funds from the makers to the takers and the ranks of the makers dwindle while the takers swell. Naturally, the folks doing the transfers become greedy/wealthy, so they demand that their wealth rise (see Davos, Wall Street, 4 wealthiest counties in the US suburbs of DC), thus there is less and less for the swelling ranks of the takers, while the take from the makers has to ever rise ... thinning their ranks and making their lot less and less palatable. 

Universal Suffering -- the inevitable outcome of socialism of all types in all times and places. 

(other writing on the topic). 

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Deny The Vote To White Males

Could It Be Time To Deny White Men The Franchise?:


"Although this may seem unfair and unjust, allowing white males to continue to call the shots politically and economically, following their actions over the past 500 years, is the greater injustice. "

Nah, I'm certain from your perspective it seems completely reasonable -- but why let us live? I mean, if we are so bad, why not just take us out all the way? 

The "progressive" brain is really one of the wonders of the planet, if not the entire universe. 

Lots of small details always seem to get in the way of the beautiful progressive utopia. Such a shame.

UPDATE: Power Line reports that they pulled this piece down. NOT because it was "nuts", but because it was apparently "fake". So some editor decided it was worthy to post if it came from a person with the alleged credentials ... 

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Tribal Cost Accounting

Time for some corrections! Chicago Tribune fact-checks costs of Trump travel; CNN hardest hit – twitchy.com:



It would be hard to find an issue that I care about less than the cost of presidential travel or the anount of trips and "vacation days" presidents take. Anyone that has ever worked for a major US corporation at anything above the lowest of levels (and often there as well) knows that in the digital / cell phone age, 24x7 work is highly probabable. The "office" goes everywhere ... certainly the oval one does!



This issue is hilarious because it is 100% partisan. The first time I heard about it was with Nixon going to see Bebe Rebozo in FL and out to San Clemente -- it was bad, I was a Democrat in those days, so I thought it was bad as well. Gerald Ford played too much golf (badly) according to the media, and in those days I played along. Carter was fine -- I didn't question the MSM yet, so I assumed he was fine -- Plains GA sounded pretty cheap.



Then came Reagan -- by this time, I considered myself a "non-partisan pragmatist". I voted for Reagan because he claimed that the US had a future while Carter indicated it only had a past. But the media assured us that the cost of Reagan's travel to CA was HUGE! Sometime during the early '80s I discovered National Review and the concept that like many things, the political story had AT LEAST two sides -- by later in the '80s, talk radio and then Fox news showed up, to push back on some of these stories.



Then came Slick Willie. He didn't travel all that much cuz travelling back to a trailer part in Arkansas isn't all that appealing, especially when you are ordering up pizza's and BJs in the oval office. The conservative media did report on some of his junkets to Jackson Hole, Hyannisport, the Hamptons, etc -- surprise, they were expensive, and strangely, deadly.

Lots of people had a tendency to die around the Clinton's ... Vince Foster and Ron Brown (mentioned in the previous link) were just the most famous. There was a regular cottage industry of Clinton murder mysteries -- I'm just wating to see that developing around Trump from the left! Here is a nice list ... many of them were ruled suicides. If you woke up and found out you had made friends with the Clinton's, what would YOU do?



Anyway, the press didn't complain so much about how much W's frequent trips to the ranch COST, they just HATED going down there ... and of course they hated W, so it was BAD!



Then BO, whom the conservative press kept lots of records of cost, days off, golf outings, etc on.



Ho hum.



It is sad that anyone cares about this "issue".





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If Only Democrats Cared

Blues for Brooke Baldwin | Power Line:

I'm more a text guy than a video guy, but it is worth following the link and watching this one, significantly because of the sadness of the liberal CNN reporter in double frame as her planned Trump takedown totally blows up in her face.

As the Syrian refugee says, if someone really cared about them, they would have done something about Assad rather than use them as political pawns.

Indeed -- if there were a few more blacks that would realize that if someone cared, they would care about the 5K or so young black men shooting each other in large Democrat controlled BOistan cities a lot more than the handful or two killed in shootings by police -- shootings which nearly always turn out to be justified.

I'm being unfair though -- the Democrats in charge DO care, it is just that what they care about is POWER. Many of the rank and file Democrat supporters are pretty much the same as sports fans. They cheer for "their team" and listen only to media outlets that tell them that Democrats are good, caring, kind, wonderful etc, and Republicans are evil, nasty, uncaring, killers, "Hitler", etc.

Rarely, even on CNN, or at the New York Times, some story that could give a Democrat pause will slip through. It will usually be so buried that most of them will never even see it -- and the few that do can validly dismiss it as an "outlier that needs no explanation" ... back to our regularly scheduled positive coveraged of THE HOME TEAM! ... "The Party", TP-D.

If only ....

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NPR, Binders of Cluelessness

'The Boston Globe' Obtains Mitt Romney's 'Binders Full Of Women' : NPR:

I got to hear this lament from NPR this PM about "how did we get to Trump from this?" as they pined away for the "good old days" when they tarred and feathered Mitt Romney with this story because "it seemed insensitive".

So they found the thick binders full of data on women that Mitt dutifully and honestly used  to place women into positions in state government when he was governor. He was a decent and honest guy, aghast at the way politics was played against him, and aghast that it was leading to Trump in 2016. Even after what happened to him, he still had the illusion that the political game was somehow "fair", or "honorable".

One only needs to listen to the NPR story to understand that it isn't -- at least not if you have any ways of thinking that don't align completely with "The Party" (TP_D) in NPRs case.

The response of the Trump voters, including a whole lot of white women was "F**K your binders and the women populating them -- we understand your game now. We don't listen to you!"

If not for the "Binders", "the '80s called and want their foreign policy back", the lies about Benghazi being due to a "movie", the dog on the car roof, and a few other odds and ends, most likely Romney would have beaten BO and be in the 2nd term of his presidency now. Trump would have never been necessary -- America would not have fallen solidly into BOistan as it did in BO's 2nd term. We might have made some pretty decent progress the past 4 years!

Ah, "the good old days" of 2012 when crying wolf over "Binders of Women" was still listened to by many more sheep out in the hinterlands than "grabbing p***ey" was listened or cared about by 2016. No rules means NO RULES!

If you cry wolf enough times, eventually NOBODY is going to believe ANYTHING you cry! No rules means NO RULES ... and then everyone just screams whatever is on their mind LOUDER. Until they turn to violence ... which usually doesn't take that long.

Not that I really expect anyone at NPR to be able to understand that. They just don't understand how smearing Romney with a lie back in 2012 contributed to them being not listened to now, and they REALLY don't understand it, because they report with glee how in fact Romney actually was the kind of rube republican who thought if he "did the right thing", he would be treated "fairly". NPR knew what was happening and poor stupid Mitt didn't ... but what that hell happened?

Hopefully Trump explained it to him when he gave him the head fake on Secretary of State. "Hey Mitt, you are completely clueless, but it is nice to have dinner with you. How did you enjoy being a speed bump out there on my path to the White House last fall? Damn, you are one slow cookie -- when they slapped you up aside the head with those Binders of Women didn't you even wake up a TINY bit?

Hey, no harm no foul Mitt. Want a position in my administration? GET A CLUE MITTENS!".

Many of us saw this coming for a LONG time ... it's here.

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OJ, Susan Rice: "If I Did It"

Susan Rice unmasked | Power Line:

PL is covering the tale of the BO administration "unmasking" and spreading classified information around in order to illegitimize the Trump election. This after declaring with two weeks to go in the election that the "election is completely legitimate, and any Trump claims otherwise are treasonous and un-American".

It seems that Susan Rice needs to write a book with the same title as OJ did ... "If I did it".

To the left, "legitimate" means they win, "illegitimate" means they don't.

If one only listens to left wing media, the Rice story is either not told at all or listed as "fake news". Who knows? We live in a surreal world where "truth" is pretty much a tribal thing. The left has plenty of "stories / narratives" to make their folks believe that "Russian hacking" and possible "Trump collusion" is very legitimate and important -- you just have to suspend what they told you from the "Russian Reset" through "the 1980's want their foreign policy back", through BO assuring them he would have "more flexibility after the election", through their "help" with the "red line", two weeks before the election where "nothing they have done affects the election" ... to now ... they are significant enemies, they definitely impacted the election, and probably Trump conspired with them.

Not hard to believe at all if you are in the "D" tribe.

We do certainly KNOW that "someone" got a lot of data on phone calls involving at least Trump associates, if not Trump himself. So his incoming administration was CERTAINLY spied on. Is gathering information on your political opponents the proper use of US espionage resources?

Again, I guess that depends on your "tribe". It is rather hard to imagine the D's and MSM being quite as sanguine if the rolls were reversed ... if W had spied on Hillary and others in the incoming BO adminstration back in late '08 and early '09 and released information on their supposedly private conversations.

I'm not a D, so it seems pretty surreal to me.



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Apple Phishing, DON'T CLICK!

The Phishers keep getting better and better . I tend to not be a very trusting person, however I am a person. It certainly LOOKS like it is from Apple, I'm on a Mac Air, I have an iTunes Account, why not click the link? 

I'm guessing that I have enough stuff set so that clicking the link would not instantly result in a disaster for me, but I'm not clicking it. If I had a lot of curiosity, or wanted to execute my personal imagined version of the movie "Taken", I'd click it in a Virtual Machine with all sorts of debug options set to see what it did ... then (in my fantasy), figure out where it came from and hunt the hacker down personally, telling him I don't like the order he swaps registers in his code. 

I don't mind his hacking, it just bothers me that such a coding amateur attempted to gain access to MY machine! ... so he needs to die painfully, but that is just a detail ... the machines are already in charge anyway, we are just living out the last gasps of biological life before they exterminate us. He thinks he was an anarchist, but he has no idea ... 

Anyway, REMEMBER!!! 

WHEN IN DOUBT DON'T CLICK!

Obama Spied, Media Lied

Obama Spied, Media Lied | Klavan On The Culture:

I mostly like the title -- the insides are what anyone that has a balanced media diet already knows -- the BO administration decided after Trump was elected to go into the NSA recording of ALL US digital communications and pull out what they could to create a smear campaign to de-legitimize the election of Trump. They then purposely spread this information as widely as possible in violation of a host of security and privacy law.

Lawlessness, Lies and the stench of BO ... they go together like stink, flies and shit.

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Coal, Climate, Arguing the 100ths

The Climate Yawns - WSJ:

Last week, "The Party", the Greens, and the MSM (but I repeat myself), went ape over Trump rolling back BO's "climate legacy". THIS is his "climate legacy":

Gina McCarthy, Mr. Obama’s EPA administrator, admitted as much when confronted, during a 2015 House hearing, with the fact that, by the agency’s own climate models, the effect would be only 1/100th of a degree Celsius. Instead, she said success should be measured in terms of “positioning the U.S. for leadership in an international discussion.”

Mind you, those models are only considered accurate to a few TENTHS of a degree. It's like getting on a scale each AM that only registers in 100s of pounds and asserting "my weight is the same". Or, to carry the analogy farther, "I've lost weight". You could also of course say that you had gained weight! The scale isn't measuring any change less than 100lbs, so it is entirely up to you!

This is for course whey we have been having "warmest months and years, EVER" quite regularly ... "warmer" (than some new "baseline") by 100ths of a degree!

 "Pile up all the government policies enacted or seriously on the table, and their net effect is zilch. A new McKinsey study, that would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad, points out that Germany’s switch to renewables has been a success by almost every metric except CO 2 output—which is up instead of down.

Rising energy prices to support this energy transition have had one measurable effect—more than 330,000 German households have had their electricity shut off in the past year from nonpayment of bills almost three times as high as those paid by U.S. households."

There was a time when Democrats would be concerned about policies that raised prices of basic commodities like power so hundreds of thousands of people were resorting to candles, but that time is past.

As the article points out, the Democrats have been screaming in unison that the Trump changes "don't save any jobs!" ... market forces, fracked natural gas, global production and other factors are squeezing the coal miners anyway. So one might ask them why it was important to "declare war on coal" and promise to "shut all the mines down" if it was going to happen anyway?

I'm certain that the Hillary's vote calculators assured her that the symbolism of "the war on coal" was FAR more important to her inevitable win than a few 10's of thousands of hick coal miners, and maybe a few more million red deplorable red state "coal sympathizers" that were just too stupid to understand that coal could not be saved, even if Hillary didn't murder it to rake in a few more green campaign dollars and big city votes!

Why, those coal people and those that sympathize with them are just as stupid as the fools that thought we would ever see sub-$2 gas by fracking. Those red staters are just plain idiots, and they just NEVER seem to be able to get it!

And now, the vermin seem to have lost faith in our brilliant elites! How could this happen?

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BOistan Civil War Update

The Civil War is Here | Frontpage Mag:

IMHO, we LOST the Civil War under BO and are now in BOistan ... but perhaps we are going to get a rebel action going, although so far it doesn't look good. Generally a good article that covers what I've covered in a number of posts in one place.

I especially liked the ending ... although, AGAIN, the US was NOT a "Democratic System", it was a CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC. BOistan might be semi-democratic, but since the power elite in BOistan are pure ideologues, "voting" is just one more mechanism for them to use to concentrate power --

"The left is a treasonous movement. The Democrats became a treasonous organization when they fell under the sway of a movement that rejects our system of government, its laws and its elections. Now their treason is coming to a head. They are engaged in a struggle for power against the government. That’s not protest. It’s not activism. The old treason of the sixties has come of age. A civil war has begun. 

This is a primal conflict between a totalitarian system and a democratic system. Its outcome will determine whether we will be a free nation or a nation of slaves."

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The Stale Russian Joke

Democrats & Russian-Hacking Allegations -- Putin Is Smiling | National Review:





I'm sick of writing about it. It was always a farce and it is getting to be a very old farce. Good article that covers the whole narrative quite well with some scope. It's the way "The Party" does  business -- power at ALL costs, maybe especially at the cost of the interests of BOistanis.,

“Russia hacked the election” is politicized theater of the most irresponsible kind — the worst since Democrats last sought to delegitimize a Republican administration by agitating against a war they had voted to support, even as American men and women were laying their lives on the line. And in this theatrical exercise, just as in the last one, the Left is undermining national security for political advantage.

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Pence, Sexism, Wrong Forest

Mike Pence Is Why We Have To Stop Excusing Religious Sexism | The Huffington Post:

This particular flap is proof that much of BOistan has moved beyond "not seeing the forest for the trees", and is in fact in "the wrong forest". They may even be doing a colonoscopy on Forrest Gump rather than whatever they thought they were doing with a tree in their own forest.

They built the current sexual harrassment forest, the rest of us have to live in it even though they don't recognize the work of their own hands.

For those that are not aware, Mike Pence has a rule of not going out for dinner / drinks and heavily avoiding private conversations with women that are not his wife -- and that is TERRIBLE, and can ONLY be explained by:

1. Complete lack of self control / fear. 
2. Misogyny, sexism, etc "bad attitude" toward women

 I just have to tip my hat to the "non-judgemental liberal society with maximum personal freedom" -- yeah, right!

In BOistan today, the legal standard for sexual harrassment is "she said she felt harrassed". Having been WAY too close to this issue with multiple people over the past 20 years, I speak from experience -- you can DEFINITELY lose your job, be slapped with a restraining order, charged with a crime, etc over the CHARGE of ANY sort of "ogling, speaking, innuendo, etc", let alone "touching".

The CHARGE against Clarence Thomas for example was allegedly (so much for presumption of innocence, innocent until PROVEN giuilty:

1. Mentioning the X-rated movie "Long Dong Silver" (they subponaed his video rental records)
2. Saying that a hair on a Coke can "looked like a pube"

That was IT ... for that ALLEGATION, he nearly lost the opportunity to be on the SCOTUS! No witnesses, no documentation, just "Anita Hill said" (after she had followed him to two separate jobs). Teddy Kennedy, the secretarial swimming coach sat in judgement, Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.

Men all over the country with a degree of regularity that nobody cares to talk about, let alone recognize, are being charged with all manner of "things", and your best defense is to simply NEVER be in a situation where such a SUSPICION could even be REMOTELY corroborated -- not that following this rule is any sort of a guarantee. In one of the cases I know intimately, a man was falsely accused of resting his hand on a woman's knee at a meeting he did not attend (mistaken identity), and he had to prove he was not at the meeting to save his job!

Being a REPUBLICAN, let alone in the TRUMP administration? All this goes 100X ... ANY sort of tale is going to get FRONT PAGE NEWS and treated as totally true with nothing in the way of corroboration.

Pence is a wise man on this issue  -- let's hope the other men in the Trump administration are just as wise or even wiser -- I would basically want to be videotaped 100% of the time were I Pence, Tillerson, Sessions, etc.

Read the article -- the modern feminist is not just rabid, she is insane.

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The Single Payer Attack

The road to single-payer health care: Charles Krauthammer | OregonLive.com:

"Single Payer" is one of the greatest oxymorons in the history of mankind -- right up there with "Military Intelligence" or "Government Benefits". The government provides precisely NOTHING -- they pay for it either with money they take from living people, or debt they accrue against future people.

Thus, the same people that pay for everything else -- those that work, create, invest, succeed; pay for the addition of a PUBLIC system. If you currently live in public housing, use nothing but public transportation and eat via SNAP and foodshelves, you will probably LOVE a public system.

If not, you will no doubt use the public system as much as you use the other public systems -- you will pay for it, but you will not use it. Rather, like many of us with schools, you will get your medical care from a private system with private insurers -- at least when it matters.

The objective of "Single Payer" is to make healthcare unaffordable to more people, thus increasing the number of people dependent on the government and willing to vote for candidates who promise to transfer ever larger amounts of money to the government so it can buy the votes of the folks clamoring for better care. "VA for over half the nation" -- once they are trapped on "The Party's" plantation, they have no choice but to demand ever larger payments for the declining working part of the population and the dwindling future generations -- the offical TP position is that that those brown illegal babies will solve all our problems (eventually).

Public medicine is popular because there are more healthy people than sick people, and because sick people often don't vote -- or not for long at least.

The rather odd thing that the election of Trump and now the failure to repeal BOcare has engendered is the "throw up the hands, declare healthcare a "right" and go ahead with the fiction of "single payer" among a lot of people that really ought to know better.

Acceptance of its major premise -- that no one be denied health care -- is more widespread than ever. Even House Speaker Paul Ryan avers that "our goal is to give every American access to quality, affordable health care," making universality an essential premise of his own reform. And look at how sensitive and defensive Republicans have been about the possibility of people losing coverage in any Obamacare repeal.

The fact of the real world is that there are ZERO "rights" to a good that takes effort to create. Air can be free becuase we don't have to work to create it. Water can be almost free -- although even water is increasingly expensive. Even though the tap is "close to free" people increasingly opt for the marketed version in plastic bottles.

Food, shelter, clothing, bourbon, Packers tickets, cars, healthcare ... NOPE.

Let's take shelter as an example. If there is a "right" to shelter, then let's define it. How about a college dorm room? Double occupancy 224 SQ feet, shared bathroom / showers , cafeteria, pizza night once a week, burger night once a week ... many of us have been there.

The military barrracks would be another -- you just lose the stalls around the shitters, and it is one big room with a bunch of bunks to sleep in. I never served, however I did get to spend some time in them on scouting trips.

The USSR essentially had this -- as did/does the US in major cities. Giant concrete mausaleums with broken windows and a urine / fecal stench in the stairwells that was rumored to be supremely memorable. It may not quite be the third world, but you can smell it from there -- get a little too far off the trail in Mexico and the pungent mix of sewage, diesel, cooking smoke, urine and rotting miscellany gives a hint of "universal humanity".

In public health wards in Europe, the optimum ward size is 6-10 beds, but many are now 18 and over. "Private and semi-private"? That would be in the PRIVATE system!

When we were kids, our parents would admonish us to have some backbone. "If everyone else jumps over a cliff, are you going to as well?" This is often the leading argument for "Universal Health Care" ... everyone else in the western world has it, we should too ...".

Freedom isn't free either -- it takes intelligence, backbone, attention to reality ... and yes, maybe even "arrogance" -- what "right" do we have to be free after all?

NONE! It takes constant vigillance and often violence to maintain it -- and BOistan clearly lacks even the appreciation for the concept!

'via Blog this'

Every Biased Picture Markets A Story

Kellyanne Conway & Conservatives Receive Different Treatment in Photos | National Review:

The pictures in the linked article are what is important, so just go and look.

We are wired to be visual creatures, there is a reason that a picture worth a "thousand words" ... many, I'd argue are worth FAR more than that.

The MSM used to be "essentially marketing" for the left, now it IS marketing for the left! To the same extent that "You Deserve a Break Today" or "Nationwide Is On Your Side" is "fake", so is the NY Times. They are MARKETING a viewpoint to you, and that is ALL they are attempting to do -- they aren't about to have their "ads" ("news stories") give some other viewpoint like; "Well, our food isn't all that healthy and Subway might be a good choice as well", or "Insurance is a tough decision, be sure to look at all the facts and shop around".

To a significant extent, I "market" as well ... so does everyone! We ALL have our "teams, tribes, parties, heroes, sacred cows, friends, enemies, etc". Prior to say "1950", it was standard to have a whole lot of Americans with one or more shared transcendent views that were "accepted on faith". Christianity was the big one, American Exceptionalism ... as in Constitutionally limited government by rule of law was the other. A good post trying to understand bias in the old US vs BOistan media is here.

Now, to the extent that anything is "sacred", it is "might is right" and may the best marketing win.

That is why I say we live in BOistan. BO made it completely clear that "rule by power" was acceptible and it was cheered by the left/MSM, and with the election of Trump, the left has shown us in fullness that the acceptance of the results of elections --- even both houses of congress, 75% of the state governments and the White House, is no longer one of their beliefs (see might is right).

Rather, it is cause for resistance at all costs, fighting with the courts not for accepting the will of the people and even ALLOWING (forget "bipartisanship", a word that has now died) the party with all the votes to move forward with any sort of comity. (remember when it was so "Un-American" when Republicans didn't "reach across the aisle" early in the BO administration?)

This is not so much about "politics" as it is cultural survival. This is the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, which at it's simplest said "Absolute earthly institutional power corrupts". If "The Party" (TP-D) can't be controlled, and some majority of people returned to a belief in Christ, organized under some political organization, then what developed after the Reformation and reached it's pinnacle in the US is truly dead.

But that is my bias ... I believe that Christ is the answer, and that man cannot be free except in Christ. We either serve God through Christ, or we serve Satan. In Christ is eternal freedom, in Satan is eternal slavery and death. Or as Reagan put it, "If we ever forget that we are One Nation Under God, then we will be a nation gone under."

Perhaps you have another answer. If so, I hope that you will give some deep thought as to what that political structure might be -- please note that pure democracy opens the door to Sharia law and many other tyrannies of the masses. Western civilization post Reformation was quite a run. It was certainly not perfect, but up to the abandonment of Christianity, it was doing pretty well.

Without vision, the people perish. BOistan is a foreign land to many of us -- where do we go from here?