Health Care Reform

I think the new government healthcare plan should include public access to the same hallucinogens Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer are taking.

Harry says that we will praise the new healthcare plan with "an earful of wonderment and happiness."

Schumer said,."I believe that the negativity that leader McConnell and others have continually displayed on the floor has peaked, and now, when people learn what's actually in the bill and all the good it does, it's going to become more and more popular."

So I guess that means "We passed it.   You're going to like it. "

I hear that Reid went on to say some other things, much less widely covered:

• We're not going to have actual death panels;  more precisely, we'll have death committees which have much fewer participants than a whole inefficient "panel" would imply.  Also there will be some sort of funding for the necessary, mandated gas chambers and ovens.
  
• The healthcare plan won't cost anything at all.  In fact, it will generate money.  Really!  And all that extra money will be used, in part, to produce a series of comic books based on Nancy Pelosi's "Government Man" hero;  some children will also receive toys that encourage politically-correct, non-competitive playtime activities.
  
• Adults will also receive similar toys, and will be required to attend play-time with their children.  Work will no longer be necessary;  the government will handle it all.  And everyone will get delicious cake and cookies to eat every evening.
  
• The Leprechauns will bring us, one by one, to the end of the rainbow, where we will each receive a pile of treasure from their magic chest.  We shall then take this money to the nearest IRS collections office, where it may (must) be donated (surrendered) to the government, which knows what really should be done with it.  After all, we printed it in the first place, so it's ours anyway.
  
• It will rain jellybeans and marshmallows in the spring, to the wonderment of all young and old.
• Frosty the snowman will marry the the tooth fairy, and their children will be blessed by the Pope for reducing global warming, saving the entire planet from destruction.
• The tomato-men will finally land on Jupiter's moon, Titan, where will will harvest dark matter for the giraffe people.
• I, Harry Reid, will grow to twenty feet tall.  My might will be unchallenged.  My teeth will be so very white.   I will become the ruler of the entire universe, spreading joy and wonderment for all.  I'll be unstoppable!  Invincible!  Muahhhh-hah-hah-haaa!!
  

I could be mistaken on a few pf his points, but the general idea I think is still there.

20 Years Ago

My God, what do we have left anymore?  Who'll stand?  Anyone???

No surprise here

Take the test, it's interesting.

California Saves Us from TV

California appears poised to be first to ban power-guzzling big-screen TVs

The payoff could be big for TV owners, said Ken Rider, a commission staff engineer. Average first-year savings from reduced electricity use would be an estimated $30 per set and $912 million statewide, he said.

So you see, not having a choice to buy an energy-inefficient TV is actually a Good Thing.

You might suggest that the energy-efficiency of a TV is a feature with a particular market value;   Maybe some people would pay a little more for TV up front in order to get a savings in the long-term by reduced power consumption.  But if you think this way, you would be a moron by California's standards.  That's because everyone knows that markets don't function by assigning a monetary value to product features.  The government is supposed to dictate the standards so that no choices are required of consumers, who are all naturally stupid.

By the way, at $30 per set, $912M savings implies 30.4 million new TVs.  Assume there are 30.4 million new TV screens replacing energy-hogging older screens in the first year.   And to get to that figure, you must exclude people who are replacing displays already considered "energy efficient".    The population being somewhere around 37 million people, that's one new TV purchased for 8 out of every 10 Californians (including both adults and children).  Seems a bit of a stretch.  How often do you buy a large screen TV?

Stop Board Violence, Now!

Derrion Albert was killed by violent tribal thugs near his school on 9/24/09. It needn't have happened.

If sensible measures were in place to assure that wooden construction materials (i.e., "boards") did not fall into the hands of misanthropic gang members, maybe he'd still be alive. Boards are dangerous when misused. Just look at what happens when they fall into the hands of kids afflicted by psychotic malevolent tendencies.

We can't allow this to go on, can we? If only sensible wood-control measures were in place, our streets would be safer. Our children's schools would be safer. After all, who really needs wood, anyway? The average person does not need to have wood, and therefore why shouldn't it be a crime to possess wood in the streets? Only trained and licensed construction personnel have any real need to handle potentially dangerous wood products.

And let's not forget the horrific weapons of murder used to work with wood -- drills, saws, and various hand tools. In the wrong hands all of these things can be misused to terrible effect and loss of life. Senseless, wanton carnage.

The euphemistically titled "construction products industry" keeps pumping out these instruments of death and mayhem with frightening efficiency. They're filling our streets with unlicensed, unregulated weapons that average people shouldn't have in the first place. For what? "Craftsmen"? "Do-it-yourselfers?" I'll say. Take a look at the photo at the top of this article again. Those are some real DIYers, there.

Where is Dianne Feinstein, champion of public safety through regulation, to this end? Just because her long sought restrictions on gun ownership have failed to stem the violence, why should she give up now? By banning or regulating more of these hazardous items, maybe one day we really can turn all our feral psychotics into decent, happy people.
People don't need wood - it causes violence. So make boards illegal, please senator. Then perhaps we will have tranquility and peace in our schools. Do it for Derrion.

Acorn in Meltdown

Way to go, Andrew Breitbart! Along with the brilliantly clever James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, we're witnessing the spasmic fireworks show of the iniquitous ACORN organization, falling apart and disintegrating before all our eyes. Even "mainstream news" can't gloss this one over neatly enough this time. There is no plausible path by which to ignore en masse on journalistic grounds. The the status quo ante that is rpidly becoming the new status quo is a place without an ACORN organization left operating... in any capacity ... and utterly humiliated and discredited, defunded, anad dropped off all the regular invitation lists in coming weeks.

Beware dying institutions of political advocacy. When they go down, it gets ugly, and it's best to stand clear during the final eplosive meltdown that blows its wicked core to smithereens.

Health Care Reform ... Or Jail?

After reading this little article, we can distill the message thusly:

• If you can't afford health insurance you can 'choose' the government plan.
  
• If you opt to go without insurance THEN you will be fined.
  
• If you cannot (or will not) pay the fine, THEN you could face jail time.

English translation:

• Rich people can do what they want.
  
• Poor people must do what the government demands or else face imprisonment

Wow, what - whoa! Hold on here. Ummm... I'm still a bit concered about those "death panels". Can we talk about that again?

Back to the Future

Ronald Reagan, speaking close to 50 years ago on the government-run healthcare issue. It sounds prophetic. It's simply uncanny...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRdLpem-AAs

Silly, Unnecessary Freedom of Speech

More than a dozen of 34 radio stations ordered shut by the Venezuelan government went off the air on Saturday, part of President Hugo Chavez's drive to extend his socialist revolution to the media.

"We haven't closed any radio stations, we've applied the law," Chavez said on state television. "We've recovered a bunch of stations that were outside the law, that now belong to the people and not the bourgeoisie."

"They're closing the space for dissidents in Venezuela," William Echeverria, head of the National Council of Journalists, told RCTV, a private cable TV station, which did not have its broadcasting license renewed in 2007.

Full article here

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."

-George Orwell, "1984"

"Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain."

-George Orwell, "1984"

...is everybody feeling ... happy? Mr. Glover? Mr. Penn? Hello? Anybody there?

Succinct

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.

Radar, USA Style

The Sea-Based X-band (SBX) radar platform, referred to obliquely by the news media today. Very few pictures. I wonder why. This monster of a floating radar platform is just stunning. Used to provide high-resolution object tracking for the THAAD anti-missile system. There are a lot of great pics of it here, in quite high resolution, including various stages of contruction: http://eyeball-series.org/sbx1-birdseye.htm

S.Korea sends more troops to N.Korea border

S.Korea sends more troops to N.Korea border

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Illegal Immigration in San Diego

Here in San Diego we see a lot of illegal immigration (euphemistically referred to as "undocumented workers" locally). I will be the first to say that the Mexican people whom I have met are extremely hard-working, courteous, and kind people. The effects of illegal immigration (and I stress the word illegal) are well known. California is currently struggling within itself as to what do do with a lot of the economic ramifications tied very closely to the issue.

So it occurred to me, most people who live elsewhere never see the kind of signage we have here. The above image is taken from the I-5 freeway heading south toward Tijuana, just prior to crossing the US/Mexico border. The first time I saw it I was stunned. A warning sign to drivers about families fleeing unexpectededly across the highway? Yep. No joke.

Inventory Time

"We have so much room for improvement;"

"Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory ... of how we are taking responsibility."

Is everyone ready to provide dear Nancy with their detailed inventories now? Do not delay, lest you risk incurring the wrath of the Barney Frank. I don't even want to go into what that might entail.

A Random Thought

It just occurred to me. There's something that's really gotta piss off the left-wing, communal, kum-bay-yah, tree-hugging crowd. Something they probably didn't realize.

They're always so busy, toting around their iPods filled with music written by socialistic-thinking musicians. You know, the ones who tell us over and again how capitalism is the bane of utopian bliss.

Surfing the 'net till their eyes bleed, writing on their blogs how evil president Bush is, how America is so wrong. How we've never done anything right, and never will so long as we're beholden to the ideals of a free market. Such an unruly, unregulated behemoth -- it crushes every delicate thing under the mighty wheels by which it advances.

They're texting their cohorts incessently about every annoying minutia of the day. Stuff that couldn't matter less, filling the communications network infrastructure with profit-making data packets that ultimately make the quarterly statements of the familiar industry giants.

It's alright with me if they do these things. Hey, it's great to be able to do all that. What a wonderful technological playground we have in our lives. I don't know how we all got along without it. And for sure, it has opened up the "information age" in ways we barely could imagine only a scant 15 years ago. A blip by any account, when considered in the context of what we would say is modern history.

So what's this silly little thought?

While those folks are busy bashing the military as a factory of evil, they're doing it via the global internet, which was a direct product of our military's research efforts ... we know that better as DARPA, the defense advanced research projects agency. That's a little ironic.

Of course, the military didn't make the net what it is in totality; not at all. It was innovative things laid upon this infrastructure that made it really amazing. Things like the world wide web. And e-commerce.

How did we find all those Starbucks shops without it? Or anything at all, without Google maps?
Or what about the definition of "defenestration" at a moment's notice? Or where to get a good recipe for Swedish meatballs?

Yes, the human need for things of every manner drives the creation of those things, and gives rise to ways to profit from them. It's called free market capitalism, and it made the internet a richly filled universe unto its own. Irony number two.

And it's comes via the network that was spawned from the devil's hand itself - the military research budget.

How can you possibly write any more text messages knowing it's likely going to pass through a communications satellite? Those satellites are directly a result of technology produced in our space program - a race with the Soviets in the 60's to ensure our military and strategic superiority.

Yes indeed, the Code Pink and Daily Kos crowd would have to find this a little hard to explain. Without those cool toys of the 21st century, life would just, well, suck. But you wouldn't catch 'em ditching all that to stand by those leftish ideals. Seriously, now - are you kidding?

All thanks to your wicked US military and the firey hellspawn that is capitalism.

What to do... oh what to do...