Seen in traffic tonight (sorry about the image quality – cellphone cam):
AR-Kitty! And AR-Kitty Jr!
Category: Uncategorized
Bill Whittle – The Hammer of Reality
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGeWMPFlGlY?rel=0]
So, there’s just one question here: are these people really so incredibly dense, out of touch, incompetent and downright delusional to think that all this was going to work, or was it destined to fail from the beginning in order to destroy the private insurance market and leave us nothing but the single payer utopia that gives progressives a thrill up their legs?
Good question.
Thomas Sowell Calls Them “The Anointed”
I ran across an interesting essay today. Published at Bloomberg.com, it’s entitled Blame Rich, Overeducated Elites as Our Society Frays. Excerpt:
Complex human societies, including our own, are fragile. They are held together by an invisible web of mutual trust and social cooperation. This web can fray easily, resulting in a wave of political instability, internal conflict and, sometimes, outright social collapse.
Or, as the GeekWithA.45 put it some time back, “Entire societies can and have gone stark raving batshit fucking insane.”
How does growing economic inequality lead to political instability? Partly this correlation reflects a direct, causal connection. High inequality is corrosive of social cooperation and willingness to compromise, and waning cooperation means more discord and political infighting. Perhaps more important, economic inequality is also a symptom of deeper social changes, which have gone largely unnoticed.
Increasing inequality leads not only to the growth of top fortunes; it also results in greater numbers of wealth-holders. The “1 percent” becomes “2 percent.” Or even more. There are many more millionaires, multimillionaires and billionaires today compared with 30 years ago, as a proportion of the population.
—
Rich Americans tend to be more politically active than the rest of the population. They support candidates who share their views and values; they sometimes run for office themselves. Yet the supply of political offices has stayed flat (there are still 100 senators and 435 representatives — the same numbers as in 1970). In technical terms, such a situation is known as “elite overproduction.”
Please read the whole essay, it’s not long.
The gist of it is what Thomas Sowell observed back when he wrote Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulations as a Basis for Social Policy. (OK, one more quote from the piece):
A large class of disgruntled elite-wannabes, often well-educated and highly capable, has been denied access to elite positions.
The “elite” and “elite-wannabes” are what Sowell refers to as “the Anointed.” They’re better than the rest of us because they went to the right schools and know the right people. As that quote from Sultan Knish in the header of this blog says, they
…see themselves as the individuals who have been ‘liberated’ to think for themselves. They make choices. You however are just a member of the unthinking masses. You are not really a person, but only respond to the agendas of your corporate overlords. If you eat too much, it’s because corporations make you eat. If you kill, it’s because corporations encourage you to buy guns. You are not an individual. You are a social problem.
Eric Hoffer observed about such people, they end up as government bureaucrats, bunny inspectors – overeducated mid-level functionaries angry at their lot in life and willing to take it out on the “great unwashed” public. And “Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America.” Listen to what he told Eric Sevareid:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOUXSPpN_eE?t=45&w=560&h=315]
The author of the piece doesn’t forecast systemic social collapse, but he does predict – well, one last excerpt:
We should expect many years of political turmoil, peaking in the 2020s. And because complex societies are much more fragile than we assume, there is a chance of a catastrophic failure of some kind, with a default on U.S. government bonds being among the less frightening possibilities.
Isn’t that cheerful news.
And now you understand why gun and ammo sales have been astronomical for the last five years. “Less frightening,” indeed.
THIS is The Other Side™
And why we call them “blood dancers.”
Damn, those people are sick.
Well, They Finally Found Rising Gun Violence Statistics SOMEWHERE…
…other than Chicago, that is.
In PG-13 movies.
When the first “Die Hard” and “Terminator” movies landed in theaters in the 1980s, both were rated R. But their sequels arrived with PG-13 marks — even though the level of violence had actually escalated.
Critics have blasted Hollywood’s movie ratings for years, claiming that the Motion Picture Assn. of America takes a prudish view of sex and foul language but a very liberal one when it comes to mayhem and bloodshed.
A new report provides strong evidence for that critique, concluding that gunplay has tripled within PG-13 films since 1985, the first full year the rating was used. Last year, PG-13 films were actually more violent than films rated R.
—
Researchers found that 94% of the highest-grossing films since 1985 had one or more sequences containing violence. Of those 396 films, gunplay has tripled within the PG-13 rating, while it remained flat or declined in films rated G, PG and R.
And, of course, this cinematic violence is responsible for school shootings:
In addition to quantifying the accelerating levels of violence in blockbuster movies aimed at children and teens, the report also addressed the effect this kind of cinematic bloodshed can have on young moviegoers, which several other investigations have shown can increase hostile behavior.
“The presence of guns in films also provides youth with scripts on how to use guns,” the report said. “In addition, children no longer need to go to movie theaters to see films; films are readily available on the Internet or cable. Thus, children much younger than 13 years can easily view films that contain ample gun violence.”
As The Onion put it,
How else are children going to learn to shoot while jumping sideways?
Gun Pr0n – I Found My New Coffee Table!
Check THIS out!
The Truth About Mental Illness and Guns
From Reason.com
Worth your eight minutes.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5ukrWC0lns?rel=0]
GeekWithA.45 on Health Care “Reform”
He left this as a comment to yesterday’s QotD, but it’s too important just to leave there:
I’ve said it before. The pre-Obamacare healthcare market was already distorted by perverse, unnatural market forces, and that this sort of problem whose root cause was complexity was not going to be solved by adding additional complexity to it.
The only thing additional complexity would do would be to shake things up, find a new set of winners and losers, and generally cost everyone.
Coming off my yearly engagement with the think tanks, I’ve heard, for the first time, a series of data points coming from hospital CEOs that add up to one thing: the admission that exercising a hospital’s primary function is no longer a source of value and revenue, it is viewed as entirely cost, risk, and liability. Consequently, they are no longer building any capacity, and are in fact looking for ways to reduce their capacity and eliminate hospital beds.
The aging boomers are gonna love that when it comes home to roost.
Again, I think it bears repeating: the healthcare industry now views exercising its particular expertise and primary function as primarily a source of cost, risk, and liability.
That, as they say, isn’t sustainable.
In desperation, they’re looking to preventative care across their collective “healthcare community” (defined by what?) to save them, but at the end of the day, preventative medicine comes down to 3 things: “Don’t smoke, don’t be obese, and get a checkup once a year, do what doc says if they find something”. That will get them something, but not a whole lot. Humans being what they are, horsehair shirts never work.
The dark portent dripped across the whole thing is, of course, the premise that any lifestyle choice that potentially affects health becomes a matter of public policy, because it’s now a matter of public expense.
Welcome to the endarkenment, a peculiar state of nature.
I’m going to close this post with a quote from the Starship Nostromo’s AI “Mother”:
“The option to override detonation procedure has now expired.”
American healthcare is all over but the screaming.
Quote of the Day – Government Competence Edition
Reader J. in the first comment to yesterday’s QotD:
I am 100% convinced at this point, that if you asked the US Federal Government to come into your kitchen and make you a peanut butter sandwich; it would cost $100 Million, they would burn down your house, and you would be handed two roofing shingles with a dog turd in between.
I’m not sure they’d get the “shit-on-a-shingle” part right.
Holy Crap, the Chicago Tribune?!?
Did someone drop acid in my iced tea? Just let me leave this here:
Stop digging. Start over.
The Americans manhandled by this exercise in government arrogance now find themselves divided into warring tribes: Those with chronic ailments who have found new plans on Obamacare exchanges and are pleased. Those who don’t want or can’t afford the replacement policies Obamacare offers them. Those whose new policies block them from using the health providers who have treated them for many years. The estimated 23 million to 41 million people whose employer-sponsored plans are the next to be imperiled. And on and on.
Most of these tribespeople only wish their big problem was a slipshod Obamacare website. On Thursday, their plight grew more frightful. With even Democratic members of Congress storming the White House over the cancellations, Obama declared — by what legal authority is unclear — that he would overrule the law he signed in 2010 and allow insurers to extend those canceled policies for a year.
—
We understand why the president and leaders of his party want to rescue whatever they can of Obamacare. On their watch, official Washington has blown the launch of a new entitlement program … under the schedule they alone set in early 2010.
What we don’t understand is their reluctance to give that failure more than lip service. Many of the Americans who heard their president say Thursday that “we fumbled the rollout of this health care law” would have been pleased to hear him add: So we’re admitting it. This law is a bust. We’re starting over.
(Bold emphasis mine.) RTWT.
Wow.
Who knew the editors of the Trib were racists?