Hi there, Morons and Moronettes. tmi3rd here, and in a break from weather, tonight's thoughts are about ObamaCare and working around the extremely onerous regulations now in place.

Much as I'd love to say we can realistically repeal ObamaCare, I'm not convinced our political leadership has the fortitude to do so. Under the circumstances, you're still going to need to be able to get hold of a doctor and get treated for what ails you in the immediate future.

The Wall Street Journal article that lays it out in its clearest form is hidden behind the paywall, so let's blockquote the key point:

"To keep costs low, the insurers are pressing for hospitals to grant discounts from the rates hospitals usually get in commercial plans. In return, participating hospitals would be part of smaller networks of providers. Hospitals will be paid less by the insurer, but will likely get more patients because those people will have fewer choices. The bet is that many consumers will be willing to accept these narrower networks because it will help keep premiums down."

Soooo... a pretty close approximation of HMOs and PPOs that went over so poorly in the 80s and 90s, and a very close approximation of how things work if you're insured by certain groups already in existence. You're covered if you see a doctor or receive a service within the network, but you're on your own if you go see someone outside of the network. Want to see more docs? It's going to cost you a lot more.

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Posted by: Open Blogger at 01:24 PM | Comments (245)
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Monday's DOOM post will be 2.3% shorter due to the budget cuts mandated by the sequester.

Arthur C. Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), wants your heart to bleed for the poor. This is a deeply misguided editorial, for one simple reason: "social engineering" public policy has proven to be terribly destructive to American society. Government policies tend to promote exactly the wrong behaviors in people. It's not "here's now you can help yourself", it's always "here's how the government or bureaucracy can help you". Government "help" produces dependence and apathy, not responsibility. Instruction without judgement is worthless. Religious instruction works to transmit ethics and values because there is an element of judgement and shame involved; public policy fails precisely because it tries hard to avoid any stigma or shame. The government treats being poor as a disaster that happens to a person, like a tornado or hurricane, and is thus amenable to a governmental "fix". Religious teaching, on the other hand, understands that poverty is equal parts luck, fate, and behavior: it cannot be "fixed". It is part of the human condition. What Brooks is advocating is therapy not for the poor, but for the people who want to feel better about themselves by "helping" the poor. Liberals have been doing this for decades, and now Brooks wants the GOP to start doing it as well.

His Majesty the King has proclaimed a "recovery" every quarter for his entire Presidency so far. So how is the "recovery" going so far? Well, last quarter we grew at a blazing 0.1% percent. Forward!

His Majesty the King Barack Hussein Obama disdains the mundane reality around him, and wishes his humble subjects could catch a glimpse of the rarified universe that he himself inhabits.

The next step in His Majesty's plan to "raise revenue": abolishing the tax exemption for contributing to 401(k) savings plans. Note the way the government thinks of this: it's not more of your money that you're keeping for yourself; it's money you're taking away from the government. That's really how they see it -- money you don't pay in tax is revenue they lose. Your money belongs to them; they simply allow you to keep a certain percentage of it. This is how the American government sees the individual taxpaying citizen.

Being master of your own destiny: out. Being a servant to a self-selected group of elites: in. It's hard to feel too badly for these newly-minted serfs, however -- they voted for their overlords, so they're only getting what they asked for.

Speaking of the Democrat fiefdom of California, Governor Moonbeam's "balanced budget" is every bit the bad joke I assumed it was. I'm amazed at how long states like California and Illinois can keep the plates spinning by deceptive accounting, budgetary tricks, and a mostly-inert legistlature. (And like his Democrat colleage Barack Obama, Jerry Brown benefits from a liberal-dominated press that has long since devolved into a Democrat propaganda organ.)

The true national debt isn't $16 trillion, as ghastly as that number is. The real federal debt is closer to $32 trillion. And that number doesn't include the huge load of state, county, and municipal debt, which could double that number.

Lots of parents are shorting their own retirement funds in order to send Junior to college, and in many cases that college degree is a waste of money.

Woonsocket, RI is the latest city to face bankruptcy due to public-employee pension and healthcare costs.

Is employment a "human right"? Answer: no. Employment is a side-effect of industry, not the purpose of it. You have the right to labor all you please, either on your own behalf or on someone else's. But you don't have the natural right to be paid for that labor. Your labor is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it.

In Europe, public demonstrations against "austerity" have sprung up in both Italy and Portugal. Seems like every time the Euro-crats declare the crisis over, a new wildfire blazes to life.

The sexual revolution continues to wreak havoc on the lives of Boomers and their children. The Baby Boom generation has gotten divorced at a prodigious rate, and one of the side-effects of that inability to make marriage work is that Boomers now have to sustain two households going into retirement. And that's on top of having insufficient retirement funds saved to begin with.
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Posted by: Monty at 04:11 AM | Comments (179)
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Neo-neocon: The Long Reach of Family and Time

The past isn't even all that past when it comes to family memories. Often we're just a generation or two away from major historical events:

Please let that sink in for a moment: my own grandfather's sister was born in 1838. Not only that, but she lived to be over 100 years old dance at my parents' wedding. She appears in photos of the occasion, a small figure wearing a black headscarf, almost impossibly old and wrinkled but smiling.

I never met her; she died some years before I was born. But what tales she might have told! One of the difficulties of reaching back in time by talking to the elderly is that the young rarely have the inclination to do it before it's too late. Old people-who cares what they have to say?

Luckily for me my mother's side is a long-lived line and so I was able to know my great-grandmother fairly well until she died at 94. She was sharp and feisty right up until the end - think of a savvier version of Granny from the Beverly Hillbillies. She was born around 1902 and I remember her mentioning once in passing that her grandmother had personal memories of Union troops arriving at their farm during the Civil War. Unfortunately I didn't get the chance to follow-up so this memory is now gone forever. :-(

And here is a photograph of a Revolutionary War soldier, Conrad Heyer, taken in 1852 when he was over 100 years old. Quite possibly this makes him the earliest-born human to ever be photographed.

He was approximately 103 when photographed, having been born in 1749. He was reportedly the first white child born in Waldoboro, Maine, then a German immigrant community. He served in the Continental Army under George Washington during the Revolutionary War, crossing the Delaware with him and fighting in other major battles. He eventually bought a farm and retired to Waldoboro, where he happily regaled visitors with tales of his Revolutionary War exploits until his dying day.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:09 PM | Comments (567)
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But they're very non-judgmental about it.

Posted by: Ace at 05:12 PM | Comments (202)
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Jonah Goldberg is one of my faves over at NRO, and he posted an article on Friday concerning the organizers of CPAC declining to invite Chris Christie to this year's event. If you haven't read it yet, you should. It's pretty well written.

If I might have a second, I'd like to explain why I disagree with his ultimate point in the article: the fact that Chris Christie will more than likely be reelected in a Blue State, making him a contender for the 2016 nomination and a must-have for the CPAC organizers.

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Posted by: Russ from Winterset at 03:34 PM | Comments (190)
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By way of background, I have a private pilot license (I can fly small, single engine planes like a Cessna 172, though I haven't in years). I flew out of an airport like the one described in this story and can tell you for a fact, it's fear mongering based in either ignorance or agenda driven.

Mayor David Crase and airport director Rachelle Powell spent last week writing letters to Huelskamp and other elected officials urging them to save Garden City’s tower, one of 238 at relatively small airports across the country set to close beginning April 1. Crase said the closure would “undo years of investments” at the local, state and federal level. Powell warned of a decline in flights and associated revenue from fuel or fees or dinners at the popular restaurant Napoli’s at the Flight Deck. Though it was too soon to know, she worried that American Eagle might curtail the only regional jet service in and out of southwestern Kansas — a constellation of gridded towns that dissolve into farm fields and ranches and some of the largest meatpacking plants in the world.

Mostly, Powell was worried about what she described as “a severe negative impact” on airport safety. While the early and late American Eagle flights take off and land at a time when the tower is closed, Powell said, air traffic controllers guide the two afternoon flights, along with occasional military jet training runs, medical evacuation flights, casino charters and private jets that have delivered people such as Dick Cheney, Harrison Ford and Huelskamp himself to the high plains.

If the tower is eliminated completely, those responsibilities revert to pilots, who must communicate among themselves to coordinate landings, takeoffs and emergency responses.

Wait, 2 of the 4 four scheduled commercial flights already take off an land without anyone in the tower? So it's done safely twice a day but doing it two more times will be....what?

At an airport like this (as opposed to ones in NYC, LA, ATL or even midsized ones like San Jose, Orlando, or Nashville), there's very little traffic to sequence and pilots have plenty of tools to work safely in and around the airport.

People who aren't pilots tend to have an overinflated sense of what air traffic controllers do. At an airport like the on in the story, the answer is not that much. They don't have radar, they don't have the ability to provide what are called "separation services" (which is what it sounds like...the ability to tell planes where to go to keep them from hitting each other).

Notice no actual pilots were interviewed in this story. My guess is most of them would just shrug if asked what closing this tower will mean to them. Sure, it's nice to have an extra set of eyes (and that's all a tower controller here really is*, though you can't assume they are ever actually watching) but beyond that, it's a non-event.

There's nothing inherently unsafe about an airport with this level of traffic not having a control tower (again, right now 1/2 the flights operate under these conditions already).

Keep stories like this in mind as you see more and more about how devastating the sequester will be. Reporters often have no clue what they are writing about, they are just pushing a storyline. They hope the accumulation of a million little cuts (and inflating their impacts) will force the GOP to cave.

Added: The reporter who wrote this story seems to be the same one who wrote the Rick Perry "Niggerhead" story.

*For the pilots in the audience, yes, Class D towers do provide some services but I don't want to get into the weeds about things like IFR vs. VFR, clearances, etc. Bottom line is, there's no problem for an ATP to manage an approach into a low traffic, non-towered field.

Posted by: DrewM at 10:14 AM | Comments (218)
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Apparently my first draft wasn't "acceptable" but the news must go on even though there wasn't much of note that happened this past week. Down below we go more...

Posted by: Gang of Gaming Morons! at 11:12 AM | Comments (72)
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Everything Must Go

Ammo has been damned near impossible to find, but we've discussed that here before.

Yesterday I was looking for some 30-round AR magazine springs (figuring that'd be the hardest part to make from scratch if you went metal shop or 3D-printer for the rest). Sold. Out. ... at least at Brownell's and a couple of other places. Wolff looked like they had some, but at $5.00 a print for 10, that's enough to make me start pricing rolls of spring steel.

Let me know if you're seeing better supplies of guns & ammo in your area in the comments.

Related: ItÂ’s George Soros Fault We Have So Little Ammo! Not.

Gun Of The Week

(answer below)

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Posted by: andy at 11:45 AM | Comments (270)
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Sequester: Day 3

Panic! Horror! 170 million jerbs lost!

Posted by: andy at 03:33 AM | Comments (370)
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Scene from "The Master," courtesy of director Philip Michael Thomas
and producer Keyser Sose

Erg's an idiot. This is a trivial thing but I wanted to share it, just so you can make fun of this insipid troll when he returns.

Erg loves to come into movie review threads and inform me that my aesthetic judgment is "knucklehead." He returned again to tell me so in the review of the The Master.

His primary complaint is that our aesthetic judgment is hopelessly compromised by our knucklehead need for validation of our knucklehead beliefs. But he never comprehends the irony of making this claim while also offering his own hyperpoliticized view of art. Here's erg explaining to me what The Master is about.

Did I say The Master? I meant all films. All films -- every one of them -- is about this, according to erg:

287 The director's films are pretty easy to understand unless you are terrified by the paralyzing fear that the movie might say something bad about George W. Bush. This is called the "George Lucas effect." The only cure for this malady is public suicide. But I digress.

The director of this film, like all of the other films, ridicules the knucklehead fantasies of the monad-hero-self-made-man. The director despises the right wing knucklehead. In the most directly brilliant exposé to this understanding of the director's works, he has a drunken plutocrat murdering a charlatan evangelist with a bowling pin. If only this happened every day in the Capitol Rotunda, you would learn something important.

Now at some point I began to suspect erg hadn't even seen The Master in the first place, because he kept "explaining what it meant" in such general terms. So I asked him an easy trivial question about the movie (in which city did a certain event take place), which he wouldn't answer, but he did continue insisting he'd seen the movie, and was here to explain it all for us:

299 It is a condemnation of groupthink posing as the liberation of the self (eternal life through reincarnation is the dominant trope). The particular film is a backhand slap to not only the contrived new age religions, but also a kick at any of this kind of totalizing worldview masquerading as self enlightenment (knuckleheaded politics). He did not invent this critique – Weber did when he noticed about 100 years ago the contradiction of the mass delusion of especially Protestant religion operating in the marketplace of ideas of capitalist civilization. Only, the delusion was the organizing principle of mass exploitation.

Like I said, he hates you. This movie was never intended for you. Do yourself a favor and never watch another movie that this director makes.

At this point, BumperStickerist came into the thread and began A Con. The Con was simple: BumperStickerist began pretending in comment 311 that something so absurd that only erg could believe it had been in the movie:

311 Let's go back to a basic question:

Did you, personally, see the entire movie - from opening credits through the part where the girl gets thrown into the volcano and on to the closing credits?

So: Did. You. See. This. Movie?

btw - With your own eyes and not through some 'by proxy/meta' standard.

-- BumperStickerist

Now if you've watched the trailer you will instantly realize this is not the sort of movie where a girl gets thrown into a volcano. It's ridiculous. It's so ridiculous I wasn't even going to bother trying to convince erg of this.

But then I wondered-- maybe he was this stupid after all.

Could we really make him not only believe there was a volcano in the movie but further get him to pretend to have seen the volcano in the movie? After all, since he's pretending to having seen the film, he'd naturally have to pretend to have seen everything (we claim) is in the film, right?

So I joined in the Con of trying to get erg to "explain" the girl-gets-thrown-into-the-volcano part of the film, which of course doesn't exist. For Science.

You can pick it the thread up at 311 to see how this went. If you don't have the patience for it, or can't take the suspense, I'll link this comment (erg posting as "andrew breitbart," as usual and this one, where erg finally explains to all of us knuckleheads that the volcano which wasn't in the movie symbolized in the movie, and what the director intended by the volcano sequence which doesn't exist.

I know it was a big waste of time. I know we ought to feel ashamed of ourselves for picking on a mentally-unstable, psychologically-unwell imbecile.

But I'm calling it a Big Win for Team Moron anyway.

Trollz Lulz: The Goofening: ...continues.

Posted by: Ace at 02:20 PM | Comments (474)
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