Archives for 2017
Fall Flicker
Great Horned Owl on Comanche Creek
El Paso Windmills from Kiowa
Western Kingbird fledges
2 of the 4 that came out of the nest next to our house
The health industry
“It’s all about the money, boys!” Big Dan Teague
Health insurance, hospitals, big pharma, retail pharma, healthcare professionals, healthcare equipment and device manufacturing, are in it for the money. And rightly so. Money is the exchange medium that enables people to trade peacefully for what they want. Without money, people kill each other. See Venezuela.
Federal, state and local governments—political organizations—write laws to manage health care and health insurance. The laws they’ve written control prices, the services available, where those services will be provided, how much the patient pays, and most importantly, how much the government funds.
Political organizations follow the money. The biggest, most ossified and intransigent spender is government. Whoever turns that money spigot on gets rich.
That’s why congress isn’t repealing Obamacare. The reason has little to do with patient or voter revolts in 2018 that could favor Democrats, though Democrats certainly portray it as such—a case of making hay while the sun shines.
The reason comes from all of the vested money interests in the great mess of a health market enabled and protected by government. When it comes time to prune it back—i.e. now—no one will step forward to shut off their tap on the government money reservoir.
Politicians want to keep receiving money for their votes on profitable laws, begging the question of who profits.
Government health insurance/practitioner/substance/health transaction controllers and regulators all want to keep their statutory jobs.
Health finance at all levels of funds flow, a massive industry, want to keep their jobs.
And so it goes with the millions of consequential transactions all lubricated by virtually unlimited government money.
The patient entitlement is the tip of the iceberg. The far more pernicious entitlements in the fabric of the health industry—the ones that removal would lead to unemployment of the comfortably well paid—form the scaffold propping the whole thing up.
The mantra offered as a solution—“Single Payor”—would be like throwing gasoline onto a raging fire with the expectation it will perform like water.
The real solution is to reintroduce the highly protected and funded rare birds in all facets of the health industry to competition and market forces.
Because it’s all about the money, boys.
Mourning Cloak
We’re still a Republic
When did social media become the vehicle for the American polity to enforce compliance on the part of elected officials over their magisterial discretion? Oh, that’s right. Never. America never became a direct democracy, informally or officially. We’re still a Republic.
We elect officials and thereby grant them a license to make governing decisions, for which they have magisterial immunity, for a period of time. At the end of that time we may re-elect them or put someone else into their office whom we like better.
Still, the Left practice informal direct democracy as if they, the Left, are a co-equal, if not superior, branch of government with ministerial powers.
On the negative side, they riot, burn, loot, kill, slander, subvert, abuse, misrepresent, suppress, disenfranchise, deconstruct, and foster division, unboundedly, about anything, any person, and any policy they don’t like.
On the positive side they promulgate unobtainable utopian visions to underpin all of the necessary negatives they must, regrettably, practice—the “break a few eggs” part of their duality for the greater good.
Locally, the Elbert County Left roam the county’s meeting halls and offices on the lookout for any opportunity to inject, influence, aggravate, and impose their direction. When not physically engaging government, they publish.
Their publications—social media, local press—usually construct a battle ground with social justice warriors defending all that is good and right in the world on the one hand, and the evil old guard polluters and environment destroyers on the other. They can find a morality play for a Leftist good guy and a conservative bad guy in any set of facts. And when short of facts, innuendo works just as well.
The Leftist elite in Elbert County, a mere handful of zealots, sow more division and disinformation than they’re worth. There is no greater good about these self-serving ideologues who look down upon the uneducated proles whom they must, regrettably, control.
Delaware 4th of July Parade, 2017 (55th I think)
Kiowa sky tonight
Victor Davis Hanson: The State of the Nation
Trump’s Way Out of the Progressive Labyrinth
amgreatness.com/2017/06/19/trumps-way-progressive-labyrinth/
6/18/2017
In every single week of the Trump presidency, the investigators and attorneys of FBI Director James Comey or, subsequently, of special counsel Robert Mueller, have leaked information that President Donald Trump was under investigation for either colluding with the Russians or obstructing justice—allegations so far without any substantiating evidence.
In the case of Comey, we now know that his office or sympathetic third-parties leaked to the press false stories that Trump was under FBI investigation at precisely the time that the careerist Comey was privately reassuring the president himself that he was in fact not being investigated.
The appointment of Mueller was a concession to opposition demands that Trump appoint a Lawrence Walsh-type Special Prosecutor. The Comey-Mueller investigations and leaks occur simultaneously with House Intelligence member Adam Schiff’s passive-aggressive and often pompous announcements of evidence of Russian collusion—including raising the specter of a Grand Jury investigation—that are never followed by any evidence.
Since January 2017, the Congress ceased being a legislative body. It is now a Star-chamber court determined to decapitate the presidency.
Never in the history of the republic have there been so many legislative and political simultaneous efforts to 1) sabotage the Electoral College, 2) sue to overturn the presidential vote in key swing states, 3) boycott the Inauguration, 4) systematically block presidential appointments, 5) surveille, unmask, and leak classified or privileged information about the elected president, 6) nullify federal law at the state and local level, 7) sue to remove the president by invoking the Emoluments Clause, 8) declare Trump unfit under the 25th Amendments, 9) demand recusals from his top aides, 10) cherry-pick sympathetic judges to block presidential executive orders, 11) have a prior administration’s residual appointees subvert their successor, and 12) promise impending impeachment.
And that is only the political effort to remove the president. [Read more…]
Webb Raceway
insulting progressives–what else is there?
on the horns of a dilemma
Much as random Islamic violence now marks time, random Leftist violence is catching up.
The system–law enforcement and social scientists–will write algorithms to signal when a citizen is about to go active and cause harm. People will be monitored, boxes will be checked, but it won’t work because each new attacker will learn from their predecessors and change their approach.
Algorithms can only model what is already known, yet, the system will keep adjusting the software and applying it to everyone because we must be politically correct and targeting groups who’ve historically spawned violence might be prejudicial.
So, as with Islamic violence, Leftists will now curtail all of our freedoms by causing the security apparatus in our society to ratchet up, forcing every American through a tighter sieve of scrutiny and acceptable behavior. And the political violence will still increase.
The choice appears to be to grant the Leftists totalitarian power by giving them votes so they can implement communism directly, or watch our freedoms diminish by the gradual constriction of safety measures.
Such are the accommodations that toleration of cults–religious and political–require.
Western Kingbird
Comey: dirty cop
The Great Global Warming Swindle Full Movie
This program touches on all of the fatal flaws of the AGW movement. It is an antidote to mass hysteria.
advocacy politics
Advocacy – post electoral bureaucratic politics
Presenting facts in the light most favorable to your position, and most harmful to the position of your adversary, is expected of trial lawyers in the zealous pursuit of their clients’ case, or prosecution thereof. The jury decides which facts presented by the advocates to accept as persuasive, and the judge moderates the procedure to keep the process fair. Since the trial forum is balanced and moderated, advocates can go to any lengths in their representations of reality that they think they can get away with.
Political advocacy, also largely conducted by lawyers, has no jury for vetting facts and no judge to moderate a fair process. Political advocates are presumed to be tempered by the ethics of statesmanship.
It only takes a few minutes observation of the C-Span coverage of Congress to refute that myth and see how the throttle on advocacy of adherence to the ethics of statesmanship gets abused and ignored.
Locally in Elbert County, hard Left writers routinely build cases using all the devices a lawyer might employ in trial advocacy. And after one of them presents such an analysis, an applauding cadre of supporters dependably, relentlessly, repeat and elevate the case ad nauseam to drown out any questions of fact.
The longer they can keep the attention of the media, the thicker their patina of legitimacy becomes, and the more insistent the accolades get. The media rarely fail to cooperate.
Periodically the voters get a chance to reset the players after an extended clock numbered in years has expired, but the vote really only checks the most egregious offenders. Meanwhile, in the middle of the clock where untold thousands of bureaucratic actions play out, the ebbs and flows of advocacy politics do the most damage.
how the door swings
On our recent trip we transited numerous border crossings, each with their own armed border patrol officers, customs inspectors, baggage x-ray machines, fingerprint readers, electronic passport scanners, video and still cameras for recording face images, and rope lines for sorting and queuing people. Cameras are never allowed in border crossing areas. We processed through immigration authorities in China, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, China again, Hong Kong again, and finally the U.S.
The U.S. is the only country in the above list that does not register your leaving the country. There is no exit immigration process from the U.S. You are free to leave any time, provided you can find another country who will let you in. The rest of the countries we visited all had both exit and entrance immigration processes. Their governments have the capacity to prevent you from leaving.
Our government controls the export of products from the U.S., but people are free to go. Let that sink in.
The exportation of people, as in the U.S. population, is not a problem for the U.S. Again, let that sink in.
We transited Taipei outbound and inbound, but since we remained in the international terminal and did not legally enter Taiwan, there was no need to go through their immigration process.
The immigration drill is fairly standard with arrival cards, departure cards and customs declaration cards for those immigrants carrying dutiable goods.
Near the end of our trip, we transited both ways through the Hong Kong and China Lo Wu border crossing one day. This crossing has foot bridges going over a moat with steep 30’ concrete walls on both sides of the water, no shallow parts, and the final wall on the Hong Kong side topped with large dense coils of concertina wire facing the Chinese side. It is a formidable boundary.
There are two immigration authorities, face to face, with an international zone between the two. Everyone goes through both an exit and an entry process in Lo Wu, whether you’re coming or going. The foreign queues had much less volume than the Chinese national queues.
As visitors to China we had to previously obtain a visa, a process through the Chinese embassy in the U.S. that involved paying a fee and obtaining a letter of intent from a Chinese entity that was planning to see us. They don’t let people into their country without a reason.
Similarly, the Chinese don’t let their own citizens out without a reason. Chinese citizens must obtain an exit visa to visit Hong Kong. This is a Chinese requirement, not a Hong Kong requirement, that probably has something to do with the fact that 90% of the population of Hong Kong is made up of Chinese people who decided to not return to China. Exit visas for Chinese wanting to visit Hong Kong may be refused by the government, and it was because this happened to our friend that we met in Lo Wu that day.
Well, I guess the main point of this little writing has come and gone, but it bears reinforcing. The next time you hear an ungrateful person talking trash about some aspect of America, please remind them that the door is wide open for them to leave.
Hong Kong nightly light show
