He calls it a "Tipping Point". I call it a "Death Spiral".

More people on means-tested government benefits than full time workers in America.

This is the natural result when parasites can vote themselves largess from the producer's wallets.  As it was in Rome, so it is in America, with Obama as our Emperor Nero.

“The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it… which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’

‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome.”  -Robert A. Heinlein

This is what you get when you care more about skin color than capability

Moochelle Obama's Princeton pal top exec at company that received no-bid contract for Obamacare website.

Gosh, a no-bid contract for multiple millions of dollars that ends in complete and total disaster?  Where are all the ProgNazis screaming "HALLIBURTON!  CHIMYMCHITLERBUSH!"

Hurting

Due to a combination of something I ate and work I've done, my abs feel like there's an alien about to chew it's way out of my guts.  So pardon me if the posting is light.

If you'd like to waste a couple of hours, go watch this.  (NSFW)

You want to fix health care?

Two VERY SIMPLE things that could be done to cut costs of both health insurance and the additional costs of malpractice insurance for hospitals, clinics and medical personnel (which WILL get passed onto the consumers, e.g., you and me and everyone else).

First, a simple change to malpractice lawsuits: Loser pays. Court costs, attorneys fees for both sides, filings, costs associated with juries, all of it. That will cut down nuisance suits to damned near nothing, because when personal injury lawyers can file a suit over damned near any sort of "pain and suffering" and settling is cheaper than having to pay thousands or millions to fight even the most bullshit of cases. (Remember that case of "I didn't know coffee would be hot!"? Eventually settled while on appeal.)

If the lady who didn't know that hot coffee would be hot had been told up front that she would have had to pay the legal fees for the other side if she lost (because juries can sometimes suffer attacks of common sense), do you think she would have started attorney shopping, hoping for a big payday from a corporation with deep pockets? After all, she had originally only asked for $20,000, to cover both "past and anticipated future medical expenses", and what's 20 grand to a corporation that makes almost a billion in profits every year?

Yeah, I don't think so, either.

Second, allow for insurance companies to spread out. Right now, health insurance companies are operating under a federally-applid restriction to not cross State lines. That means you can get car insurance from a company in a different State, but your health insurance MUST be offered from an insurance company in the same State as you. MUST.

That limits the available pool out of which your company must make up its payouts, and in many small States, there is no real competition. Allowing your health insurance company to widen its pool and spread out the risk allows them to lower the costs for everyone, and the instant competition will drive down prices to truly competitive levels, since every insurance company will be looking to get as many customers as they can by offering better deals, while still turning a profit for its shareholders. Which is, after all, why the shareholders invested in the company in the first place.

The math behind actuarial tables hasn't changed since the time of Hammurabi, so it will also come down to better service, lower rates and happier consumers.

And all by opening up the State borders.

Easy. Simple. "Loser Pays" means lower costs to the providers of medical services, and opening the State borders means lower costs to the consumer of medical services. We save money coming and going.

I know it's wrong

But I can't stop laughing...




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Forgetting the Past

“Anyone who clings to the historically untrue -- and -- thoroughly immoral doctrine that violence never solves anything I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler would referee. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor; and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms.”

Robert. A. Heinlein

There are multiple reasons why a majority of Americans today would just look at you and go "Huh?" when you mention the anniversary of the attack in Beirut.  The collective symptoms of those reasons are manifest in the blithering Marxist jack-ass currently infecting the Oval Office.

We've lost the lessons of the past, and now we're going to relearn them in painful ways that could have been avoided.

Two. Just two,

Army's chief of staff Gen. Ray Odierno told a Washington conference Monday that the U.S. Army had not conducted any training in the last six months of the fiscal year ending Sept. 30. And, he said, there currently are only two Army brigades rated combat-ready. That's a total of between 7,000 to 10,000 troops and less than one-third what the combat veteran regards as necessary for proper national security.
"Right now," Odierno said, "we have in the Army two brigades that are trained. That's it. Two."

That's roughly one-third of the troops we would need to merely defend our own borders. But we have money to waste on 404Care and closing down national monuments?

Burn it down. Scatter the stones, salt the ground then take off and nuke it from orbit.

This bears repeating

Ace pointed it out to me first yesterday, but it still bears repeating.

The Phone Help Line for the 404Care our Democratic Overlords are attempting to ram down our throats was announced by TFG his own self. (Because, of course, the website was a colossal failure.)

1-800-F1U-CKYO.

No, I'm not kidding. (800) 318-2596

Of course, the phone lines crashed soon after his announcement (overwhelming call volume can do that), in yet another stunning display of both Smart Power (tm) and government pre-planning.

And these are the people who claim they know our health needs better than we do?

Listening to Mark Levin

As I was driving around doing errands tonight, and he had a couple of clips of Mitch McConnell on some Sunday talk show, and 'ol Mitch is promising that there will be no more government shut-downs, and golly, we have a sayin' back in old Kentucky about blah blah blah blah.

This is why this country is fucked.  Because the Progressive Anti-American Left doesn't even need to send out their own spokes-holes on Sunday - the GOP does it for them.  And these are the people in charge of the GOP - they're the ones who get to dole out the dollars for election and re-election bids; they're the ones who get to set the course for the party as a whole, and they are wholly, completely and totally given to be quivering, spineless little bitches for Obama and the rest of the Anti-American ProgNazis.

Take a country and culture of pefectionists

And then introduce Catholicism.

And then have them learn Latin Hymns.



I truly did enjoy my time over in Korea.  To this day, the Ragin' Mrs. and I go to a Korean BBQ restaurant every chance we get.

Bela Fleck

Doing Bach





Yes, a banjo.  LISTEN!


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