This should be an interesting series:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSUHB6ljDmg?rel=0&showinfo=0&vq=hd720]
Month: October 2016
Who Could Have Seen This Coming?
Near ‘Collapse,’ Minnesota to Raise Obamacare Rates by Half
Minnesota will let the health insurers in its Obamacare market raise rates by at least 50 percent next year, after the individual market there came to the brink of collapse, the state’s commerce commissioner said Friday.
The increases range from 50 percent to 67 percent, Commissioner Mike Rothman’s office said in a statement. Rothman, who regulates the state’s insurers, is an appointee under Governor Mark Dayton, a Democrat. The rate hike follows increases for this year of 14 percent to 49 percent.
Oh, yeah. We did.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdnY8r7_fLw?rel=0]
But What Happens When There Are No Old Men?
From Instapundit:
Gangs of young men strutting and killing people is the default state for humanity. Civilization is what puts that under control. Until it doesn’t.
I was reminded, as I often am, by something I posted here many years ago –
I was reading an article the other day, in the local newspaper, about an elderly Korean gentleman who has moved into town and opened a martial arts studio. He chastened the reporter who had come to interview him not to suggest that the martial arts were ‘all about fighting.’ “No!” he said. “The purpose is social harmony.”
That is exactly right. The secret of social harmony is simple: Old men must be dangerous.
Very nearly all the violence that plagues, rather than protects, society is the work of young males between the ages of fourteen and thirty. A substantial amount of the violence that protects rather than plagues society is performed by other members of the same group. The reasons for this predisposition are generally rooted in biology, which is to say that they are not going anywhere, in spite of the current fashion that suggests doping half the young with Ritalin.
The question is how to move these young men from the first group (violent and predatory) into the second (violent, but protective). This is to ask: what is the difference between a street gang and the Marine Corps, or a thug and a policeman? In every case, we see that the good youths are guided and disciplined by old men. This is half the answer to the problem.
But what happens when there aren’t enough (or any) dangerous old men to guide the young ones?
Chicago. New Orleans. Detroit. St. Louis….
Nice to Know Thomas Sowell and I Agree
His recent Investor’s Business Daily column entitled Our Political Predicament — A Big Risk Vs. A Certain Disaster spells it out in detail. Excerpt:
There is no point denying or sugar-coating the plain fact that the voters this election year face a choice between two of the worst candidates in living memory. A professor at Morgan State University summarized the situation by saying that the upcoming debates may enable voters to decide which is the “less insufferable” candidate to be President of the United States.
My own take on this election is that the voter is in a situation much like that of an American fighter pilot in World War II, whose plane has been hit by enemy fire out over the Pacific Ocean and is beginning to burst into flames.
If he bails out, there is no guarantee that his parachute will open. But even if he lands safely in the ocean, he may be eaten by sharks. If he comes down on land, he may be captured by the Japanese and tortured and/or killed.
In other words, there are huge and potentially fatal risks. But, if he remains in the plane, he is doomed for certain. To me, Donald Trump represents multiple and potentially fatal risks. But Hillary Clinton is a certainty of disaster. Her vaunted “experience” is an experience of having repeatedly made decisions that turned out to be not merely wrong but catastrophic.
I think I said pretty much exactly that below.
RTWT.