Monthly Archives: March 2010

Via Reason:

Here’s Harold Koh, previously the Dean of Yale law school, now the State department’s top lawyer, explaining why killing suspected terrorists (as well as innocent bystanders) with drones is A-OK. In short, Koh’s rationale is that nothing in the rules of war specifically prohibits using super-smart technology when fighting an enemy that relies on donkeys for transport, so long as those super-smart weapons are employed only as necessary and proportional. That’s a curious position, Harry, considering you had this to say (worth reading if for no other reason than Koh uses three strawman arguments in one paragraph) regarding Bush’s comparatively humane policy of not killing suspected terrorists outright, but rather detaining them until they are tried before a military commission:

The Supreme Court’s historic decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld has presented both Congress and the President with an opportunity to make a fresh start in crafting a fair and durable solution to the problems of humane treatment and fair trial of suspected terrorist detainees.

Get it? The way to craft a “fair and durable solution to the problems of humane treatment and fair trial of suspected terrorist detainees” is to skip the sticky issues of capture, detainment, and subsequent legal proceedings. Just send in the drones. Then again I find his rules of war argument unavailing, too, considering that we’re no longer involved in a war on terror, but rather engaged in a global contingency operation.

No, wait, that’s a brilliant argument. What are the rules expressly governing global contingency operations? None that I know of. Do the Geneva conventions apply? Can you find a lawyer within your own administration to say no because the issue is novel, and therefore executive authority must Constitutionally fill the void? Subject to, of course, Congressional limitations speaking directly (via mandate) or indirectly (failing to provide funding) on the matter.  Hey, it worked for Bush and John Yoo, and I have yet to be persuaded that Yoo was wrong as a matter of law. I’m pretty sure, however, that Koh and company weren’t big fans of that. For instance, prior to becoming Attorney General, Eric Holder’s law firm litigated, pro bono, a good number of cases challenging Bush’s terror policies.

So how does the Obama administration square it’s drone assassination policies with its previous opposition to Bush’s detainment policies?  This author essentially asked the same question, in January 2009, after Obama promised to close Gitmo, but didn’t say anything about ending drone asassinations.

Next, How the Left Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the FBI:

And so when a progressive like Rachel Maddow cheers that the Michigan militia members can be indicted and imprisoned without having done anything violent, when she reports that the FBI has infiltrated this group for months and stepped in to arrest them just in the nick of time, we should not be too surprised when she fails to make the obvious connection, and fails to be the least bit skeptical of the federal government’s police agents infiltrating a group for months only to discover that that group’s members are saying things about government that amount to “seditious conspiracy.” What kind of Orwellian world is it when the government can arrest people accused only of planning to commit violence against government agents and unleash a “civil war” that we all know is only a fantasy? What kind of world is it when the very media figure who denounced Bush’s “preemptive war” and Obama’s adoption of Bush’s “pre-crime” approach to imprisoning “enemy combatants” in “prolonged detention” before they commit violence is happy to see a group indicted on federal charges of talking about committing violence—talk that we can safely guess was likely incited by the very FBI that had been infiltrating this group for months? What kind of absurdist dystopia has the left crying foul when a private citizen infiltrates ACORN, but has no similar apprehensions about the FBI infiltrating “extremist” groups and arresting them for “seditious conspiracy”? How can anyone who saw through the Bush lies of war and crackdowns in the name of “national security” and stopping madmen from getting “weapons of mass destruction” really believe that fewer than a dozen Americans with some rifles and some pipebombs were themselves planning to use “weapons of mass destruction” in any way that posed a threat to the U.S. government? And what about the charge of having weapons in connection to a crime—that crime being the intention of one day committing a crime, without even a specific target in mind?

More on the beloved FBI here, specifically information about it’s “secret room,” via GoodShit.

It is where the government has hidden the most secret
information: plans to relocate Congress if Washington were attacked,
dossiers on double agents, case files about high-profile mob figures and
their politician friends, and a disturbing number of reports about the
possible smuggling of atomic bombs into the United States.

It is also where the bureau stowed documents considered more embarrassing
than classified, including its history of illegal spying on domestic
political organizations and surveillance of nascent gay rights groups.

It is the FBI¹s ³special file room,¹¹ where for decades sensitive material
has been stored separately from the bureau¹s central filing system to
restrict access severely and, in more sinister instances, some experts
assert, prevent the Congress and the public from getting their hands on it.

Basically everything at IntelNews is interesting, and I didn’t know about it. For instance, this bit on The Limits of Israeli Espionage.

Discriminations snark: Will Obamacare’s tanning salon tax provide palefaces with a disparate impact claim?

More Discriminations snark: is the logical end of Obamacare a civil right to electricity? Why not?

The deity one atheist conservative would designate as his God-particle, if he believed either in the human need for a God-particle, the potential for a deity to exist, or that such beliefs were germane to conservatism.  For the record, it appears Instapunk would choose Christ, brah, and bear-mace liberals accordingly.

Economic Trouble Looming Abroad, by Mish Shedlock.

Finally, a film on Gerrymandering, ”the practice by which politicians manipulate voting districts for personal and political benefit.” It happens more than many think, too.  See here for the twenty most gerrymandered congressional districts in the US of A.

Instapunk has an interesting post up contrasting liberals’ fascination with government as the cure for all ills with conservatives’ reliance on the individual, and asserting that liberals’ and conservatives’ opposing views correlate with where they stand, respectively, on a spectrum with faith in Christ on one end and the absence thereof on the other.

Liberals are believers in Christian morality who can no longer bring themselves to believe in personal salvation. This is the explanation of their extraordinarily vindictive and hateful bile. They are all jilted lovers. (Why they excuse every manifestation of personal depravity in themselves and celebrate their politicial morality instead. “Teddy Kennedy was a GOOD man…” Really?) They believe in Christ’s message but they hate Christ because he isn’t there, didn’t exist, didn’t rise from the dead, didn’t savethem. It’s that simple. Every dreaded liberal apocalypse from nuclear Armageddon to global warming is just one more variation on original sin. But for them, the new Adam never came and so they wait, like Noah at the high-tech helm of his impossible ark, for the annihiliating rains to come.

Interestingly, this is also the explanation of the rise of a kind of rigid fundamentalism that eschews the philosophy of Christianity in favor of Jesus as a kind of dashboard totem. I’m saved. You’re not. End of story. The liberals think they’re reacting to a simple-minded version of the faith they’ve graduated from in their infinite wisdom, but the truth is they’re responsible for the bogeyman they see in every rural corner of a country they’ve learned to loathe. As they grew rigid and progressively more self-destructive, fundamentalism became the scar tissue of the common folk, a way of protecting themselves against the soul death created by doubt.

Everything else that’s happened in the last hundred or so years flows from this elementary observation. Liberals are the people who became their own version of Christ to save the sinners from themselves. Socialism, fascism, communism are all attempts by human pretenders to the throne of Christ to fill what they perceive as a vaccuum. Their mistakes are all attributable to the fact that men and committees and political parties are no substitute for Christ. Show me a liberal, a leftist, a progressive, etc, and I’ll show you someone who doesn’t really believe, in his heart of hearts, in the salvation offered by Jesus Christ. Their hatred for the believers who oppose them is an irrational fury they cannot contain.

Conservatives are the people who choose to believe in the Christ, as either a human-divine superposition or a parable good enough to be the organizing principle of their lives. Again, it’s that simple. They’re the non-jilted lovers. Yes, they’re also sinners, as we all are, but they accept that. They also accept that things like poverty, disease, misfortune, endless other awful things are inherent in life itself and not the fault of insufficient government control. That’s why the most rigidly braindead of them tithe to their churches.

Instapunk could have quoted Jesus himself here, per Mark 14:7: “For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good.”

Men who do not believe in God nevertheless feel the need of God and seek to become God or one of his factotums. They’re the danger. Their greatest fear is the lack of belief in their own Godhood. That’s why they turn ugly, controlling, violent, and murderous. But they’re all still Christians. That’s why they keep trying to expand their power. Their awful, debilitating secret is that there’s no Christ and so they have to fill in for him.

How should conservatives deal with the left’s disrespect and lack of empathy? By spanking their ass. Like a disappointed Dad. Until it gets so hot and red they call out to God to make it stop. That’s how you learn there are consequences for personal choices that can only be called, uh, poor.

My theory has long been that the divide between Left and Right stems from liberal’s fundamental belief that: (a) government is inherently noble; (b) wealth is inherently bad; and (c) the unwealthy are inherently oppressed.  Instapunk’s theory does a good job of fleshing out part of my theory. Liberals believe government is inherently noble in the same way that Christians believe God is inherently noble.  In effect, liberals substitute ever more government as their God Particle to fill the inexplicable God-void innate to humans worldwide. In that sense, Tim Tebow and Ted Kennedy are basically the same person, except that Ted Kennedy violated his big government principles by deregulating the airline and trucking industries (to all of our benefit), while Tim Tebow is still perfect by Christian standards, to the detriment of the whordes of men and women who want to sleep with him.

Last week I began a list of healthcare rubes – those who support the bill for fiscal, moral, and philosophical, reasons that cold, hard facts show the bill utterly fails to provide.  Yesterday I added a couple of clueless Congressman to that list.  Today, I add those of you who support the bill because, notwithstanding it’s other failings, you believe it will prevent insurance companies from asserting preexisting conditions as the reason for denying essential coverage to children.

See here, and here for a long, thorough breakdown of what Congress and the administration promised (before and after the bill passed), why those promises are false, and who confirms that they are false. With regard to who has confirmed that Obamacare’s promise to force insurance companies to provide full coverage to children regardless of preexisting conditions, JOM writes “[f]olks reassured by an appeal to authority will note that the AP has quotes from two Democrats supporting their interpretation.”  LOL.

More persuasively, the articles points out that, due to actually reading the fucking bill and suffering through objective analysis of its provisions, Obamacare-fanatic Ezra Klein backed away from his previous full-fledged commitment to the Administration’s talking points, and the Old Gray Mare herself acknowledged that health insurance companies “do not have to provide one of the benefits that the president calls a centerpiece of the law: coverage for certain children with pre-existing conditions.”

At this point, you’re basically not a healthcare rube if you support the bill because you understand it is an intentional, manipulative leap left towards a centrally planned economy and the establishment of government’s authority to manage every area of our lives. To your dismay, however, you’re not a tough, Machiavellian sonofabitch either.  You’re a moron because if the 20th century taught us anything it is that concentrating power in the State and centrally planning economies is an EPIC FAIL.

Here’s a dooozy from Steve Horowitz at Coordination noting that, not even two weeks after Obamacare’s passage, Congress is stunned that, contrary to the bill’s stated purpose of lowering health care costs, the bill is doing just the opposite.

And so it begins.  As many folks predicted, the passage of so-called “health care reform” has sent the signal to major US corporations that their insurance costs will be rising.  The result is that several have already announced plans to take large charges on their budgets to offset the costs.  In the case of AT&T, for example, it’s $1 billion due to changes in the tax treatment of their in-house subsidies for the health care costs of their retirees.

Equally predictable has been the reaction of Congress:  demand that the CEOs come to Washington and justify those charges.  If you didn’t think we were on the road to the world of Atlas Shrugged, this should make matters clearer.

What’s most amusing though is the way that Representatives Waxman and Stupak phrased matters in their letter to the CEOs:

“The new law is designed to expand coverage and bring down costs, so your assertions are a matter of concern.”

I’m adding Reps. Waxman and Stupak to my list of Obamacare Rubes.

In other words:  “this law isn’t working out how we intended, dammit, and it must be your fault! We said this would bring down costs, so that should be sufficient!”  It really is the equivalent of a five year-old’s temper tantrum at not getting his way in a complicated world.

It never occurs to Waxman, Stupak, et. al. that there might be a set of economic laws out there that not even the mighty power of Congress and King Obama can bend to their wishes.  If their law “said” coverage would expand and costs would come down, then only the evil designs of greedy people could be frustrating that result.

It couldn’t be that the legislation was doomed from the start and that this is the result that a number of critics predicted, could it?

That Congress would ignore or discount unintended consequences is indeed a “Dog Bites Man” story.  But for those who claim that opponents of ObamaCare were fear-mongering or racists or just opponents of change, I will only suggest that this will be the first of many of our predictions about its effects that are likely to come to pass.  And I will be doing my personal best to document as many as I can, so watch this spot.

Congress and the President are similarly stunned that the CBO’s projected budget deficits for the next decade are considerably larger than Congress and President hoped for, and that Social Security has run out of money much sooner than they anticipated, as in this year (the first in which Social Security payouts exceed receipts).

Cato put together the following video breaking down the what, why, and how of implementing a flat tax.  The author, Daniel MItchell, also notes the following:

There are two big hurdles that must be overcome to achieve tax reform. The first obstacle is that the class-warfare crowd wants the tax code to penalize success with high tax rates. That issue is addressed in the video in a couple of ways. I explain that fairness should be defined as treating all people equally . . .

Emphasis added.  I couldn’t agree more:

In an unfair world equal treatment is the least unfair policy, and may be the only equality, and dignity, society can provide.  Equal treatment should be the policy of individuals and private institutions.  Equal treatment must be the policy of local, state, and federal governments, as well as public institutions.  Equal treatment rises above every brutish form of collectivism and treats people as individuals, without regard to color, class, or creed, that we may all enjoy the dignity of rising, falling, failing, and achieving, on our own fortune and merit.

Last week I commented quite a bit about Obamacare (for instance, see here and here), and shared my opinion that the bill’s healthcare mandate is bullshit unconstitutional.  In the comments of this post, loyal Dueling Barstools reader (and lawyer for hire) Cavan offered an interesting legal theory to legally support the mandate.  Assuming a commerce clause argument to support the mandate would fail, Cavan wondered if an eminent domain argument might work.

The merits are political. But legally I don’t see how the commerce clause can support this–maybe emminent domain, a-la, Kelo–we take property (money) from one private citizen and give it to another… but then they have to give just compensation, which legally means market value in $$. This law is a tax pure and simple; it takes property without giving just compensation. It took a constitutional amendment to get income tax going, and it should take the same here.

Seeking to provide Cavan (and the legions of DuelingBarstools readers who, strangely, rarely comment) a more cogent response than I can offer, I emailed Robert Thomas, an acclaimed appellate lawyer in Honolulu and author of Inversecondemnation – the gold standard for commentary on regulatory takings, eminent domain, inverse condemnation, property rights, and land use law. Robert  was kind enough to consider my email, and provided the following response:

Eminent domain is not supposed to be punitive. (But neither are taxes, but we all know the tax power can be abused that way.) The more punitive an exercise of eminent domain looks, the less it would appear to a court that it is being exercised for a public purpose.

And as a practical matter, seizure under the eminent domain power really would not make much sense as a punitive tool, since the constitution requires just compensation to be paid. So if a citizen didn’t purchase health insurance and the government took her property by eminent domain, she would have to be paid for the property, resulting in zero gain for the government.

What it sounds like the commenter is really asking is whether the government can simply seize assets (not by eminent domain, but as a forfeiture) if someone doesn’t comply, along the lines of what happens to the assets of alleged drug dealers. Asset seizure for violating criminal law is not “eminent domain,” and is a whole different application of law.

So, eminent domain theory will not support the healthcare mandate.  For more information see Inversecondemnation’s recent roundup of eminent domain / takings multimedia, including this Reason video, which discusses a particularly controversial example of eminent domain abuse in New York.

Via the Paladin I discover that America’s first legal male prostitute (hereafter, the “prostidude”) has quit.

America’s first legal male prostitute has left a rural Nevada brothel after a two-month stint that generated plenty of attention but fewer than 10 paying customers. Brothel owner Jim Davis said Friday the Shady Lady Ranch had parted ways with the “prostitude” who worked under the name Markus. A replacement has been hired, but Davis hinted it was possible that Markus, a 25-year-old Alabama native, could be back.

This article puts it somewhat differently: “Prostidude told to pack his nutsack and leave.”  My source for this article had some choice observations:

#1)  “prostidude” — that’s epic

#2)  gotta love that picture….click on it to get a bigger better view of him.  Was he caught by surprise with a chubby coming out of the gym in his sweatpants, or is this a calculated move to arouse women who will rush to become customers?

[Pictures here.]

#3)  i cant believe he had 10 customers.  over what period of time?  The article and pictures i really want is about those women.

[Ed. note: According to the article it was over two months.]

#4)  i cant believe he is a college dropout…..he clearly has so much potential as the picture effectively communicates (see #2 above)

#5)  very surprised at the lack of nipple rings.

LOL @ #5.

Next, Prostidude compares self to Rosa Parks, Van Gogh, Ghandi, and apparently initiates intimacy with clients thusly:

“So,” Markus says after leaning over and kissing my knee, “we’re going to get undressed and then take a shower. Then we can both inspect each other to make sure there are no discrepancies.”  Minutes later, as we’re standing naked in the shower, he’s examining me like a second-rate gynecologist and nodding. “Yeah,” he murmurs, cooing that I’m “practically” an 8 or a 9. “Everything looks great down there.”

Finally, for your information he’s smart and sensitive:

He says he’s never had an STD and doesn’t worry about getting women pregnant (“because you can feel it when a condom breaks”). * * * “I’m not a hooker,” he says repeatedly. “I’m a surrogate lover.

The Ignominious End of the Last Living Nazi War Criminal.

Nothing Outside the State.

Sage Advice on Iran.

Egos Collide.

And the Public Caste Continues to Rise.

Reason Taking David Brooks to School, as Usual.

Here’s to Hoping the Academic Bubble Bursts.

Gandhi’s Guide to Obamacare.

Ancient Inventions, a Video.

John Eastman for California Attorney General.

And finally, a bedtime story: The Libertarian Alarm Clock.

I’m quite pleased that Google is taking a stand against censorship of speech, expression, and in general publicly rebutting China’s totalitarianism, especially since I don’t consider it Google’s penultimate responsibility, as a private for-profit company, to be the torchbearer of individual liberty abroad. Considering, however, that Google’s Sergey Brin knows first hand the suppression of liberty endemic to totalitarian, communist states – and has made billions from the free exchange of information in the relatively free world – it would have been personally shameful for Brin if Google accepted China’s censorship demands. Since Google stands to lose significant market share in what will eventually be the largest consumer market in the world, Google’s decision is laudable. After all, someone will accept China’s censorship demands and reap fiscal profits for doing so. Regardless, of whether Google’s decision is a long term strategy that counts on strong brand loyalty from Chinese citizens if and when Chinese citizensobtain from freedom of expression, or a principled stand on individual liberty, I commend Google.

With that said, Google’s apparently principled stand in China is at odds with the subtle censorship of politically incorrect speech that Google has engaged in here at home.  For instance, Steve Sailer noted not too long ago that Google appeared to have jiggled its search prediction algorithms to prevent the unsavory Pat Buchanan from appearing as quickly as Buchanan’s infamy would seem to require (and does so on Yahoo), and erased a popular human biodiversity blog (an unpopular, politically incorrect topic amongst both the progressive left and religious right), purportedly for violating Google’s terms of use regarding discriminatory speech.  Sailer wrote:

So, somebody at Google is doing this intentionally. To repeat, this one example isn’t at all important — what’s striking is the mindless animus of somebody at Google that would lead to going to all the trouble of doing such a trivial thing.  And because Google is so close to being a monopoly, it’s crucial that the public monitor abuses by Google stemming from Google’s not exactly subtle political biases, such as this silly little thing or the more serious annihilation of Mangan’s blog in November (which was rectified after many complaints).

I find it curiously inconsistent that Google takes a stand against China’s censorship while engaging it political speech-schadenfreud at home.  While playing the playing the role of the Tank-Man in Tianamen square abroad, Google plays that of Alberta’s despicable “Human Rights Commission” at home. Explain yourself, Google.

By the way, DuelingBarstools started out on a blogspot account, but I purchased DuelingBarstools’ URL specifically so I wouldn’t be subject to Google’s terms of use after Steve Sailer reported Google’s petty, politically correct censorship.

[UPDATE 3/27/2010 @ 11:55 am] – The Conglomerate considered two reasons for Google’s decision: (1) Corporate Social Responsibility; and (2) Corporate Identity.

Yeehaw.  Today’s edition is brought you by Kat Miner photography, who is quite the fan of cab name speculation.

Camey Cab.  I’m wholly unfamiliar with the term or name “Camey,” other than that it is of celtic origin. So far as i can tell on the Internet Camey is an elementary school in Texas, a model in the Virgin Islands, an article of clothing, a record label, and the name of the aptly named entertainer Cab Calloway’s first grandson. Now, that’s all fine and well, but just in case you thought Camey Cab had nothing to do with east Africa, this creepy picture came up too when I searched for Camey, as did a map of Balli Camey, which appears to be a town in Mudug region of Somalia. I’m pretty sure the cab driver isn’t Irish, as all the Irish in San Diego work in bars.  Since a large proportion of the cab drivers are from East Africa, I’m hazarding a guess that Camey Cab’s driver hails from Balli Camey, Somalia. No word on whether Cartman, Ike, Butters, et al. visited Balli Camey during the Fatbeard episode.

Deluxe-1 is a decent sales pitch. If nothing else it differentiates this cab from the cabs with interesting names. Looking for a comfy ride? Deluxe-1 cab 600 is the cab for you. Have no fear, step right up, all comers welcome. With a name like Deluxe-1, surely this cab has a plush, clean interior, a miniature dust devil vacuum cleaner in the trunk, and miniature bottles of water for his customers. It’d be quite the letdown to get in Deluxe-1 Cab and find it’s no different than any other cab. Don’t let me down, Deluxe-1 Cab.

Flow Cab. Who doesn’t want to ride in the Flow Cab? How awesome a name is Flow Cab? If you’ve got to get somewhere, you might as well flow, amirite? You know you’re luck is improving when you hail a cab and it’s Flow Cab. You have to smile the whole time while riding in Flow Cab, even while stuck in traffic. Flow Cab is so cool it doesn’t need a flowmaster to let everyone know it’s arrived, like F-words do. Fortunately, Kat’s high resolution camera was able to capture the Flow Cab in motion, which is the only way to get a photo of it because Flow Cab is too cool to be photographed at a standstill. Oh, you didn’t know? When Flow Cab is parked, or stopped at a red light, Flow disappears – that’s why you’ve never seen Flow Cab before. No, it’s not a hologram. Flow Cab is that cool.

Donbas is the name of a town and industrial region in eastern Ukraine. Donbas’ history and modern identity is complex, as it is located within the Donets basin, which spans three provinces in the Ukraine as well as extending into Russia. Via Wiki:

Donbas may sometimes be referred to a larger supranational region also consisting a part of neighbouring Rostov Oblast in Russia. This is explained by the fact that Donets’ coal basin geographically extends to that area (also specializing in coal mining), which sometimes called a “Russian Donbass”. But lesser economical and, most of all, sociopolitical significance of that Russian area (compared with the Ukrainian part) leads to gradual abandonment of such generic usage of the Donbas term.

In 1676, the first town of the Donbass emerged: Solanoye (now Slavyansk) which was built for the high-profit business of extracting newly-discovered rock-salt reserves. In 1721, vast and rich coal fields were found, which started the “industrial boom” which led to the flourish of the region in 18th–first half of 20th century.

Ukrainian scholar and current Deputy Prime Minister Hrygoriy Nemyria said:

The fact that you came from the Donbas was more important than that you were Russian or Ukrainian; so of course the break-up of the Soviet Union also meant a raising of this regional identity and loyalty… In any case, most people here honestly couldn’t say what they are ethnically, because most families, like mine, are mixed.^[1]

Presumably, Donbas Cab’s driver identifies as much with the “supranational” region of Donbas as (or more) strongly than he identifies with either the Ukraine or Russia. While I don’t know much about Ukranian history, aside from some of the nastier things that occurred there during WWII, such as the 1.5 million Jews the Nazis brutally murdered there, so it’s nice that via Donbas Cab I’ve learned a little bit more. It’s sobering to learn, however, that Stalin’s murderous hand was particularly brutal in Donbas, as Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s-1990s by Hiroaki Kuromiya relates:

A little-known former Cossack land, the Donbas remained a haven for fugitives, providing freedom to whoever needed it. As a result, Stalin’s Terror was extraordinarily harsh in the Donbas. Drawing on much new information from formerly closed archives in Ukraine and Russia, the book paints a detailed yet panoramic picture of the tumultuous history of the Donbas and analyzes critical events in modern Ukrainian and Russian history from a regional perspective.

^{I wonder, too, if Donbas Cab’s name originates at least in part from Jacques Sandulesco’s novel Donbas: A True Story of an Escape Across Russia, a true story of the author’s escape from Soviet hell. Read excerpts from chapters 1, 2, and 3, here, and  the diary of Sandulesco’s return to Donbas in 1999. Here’s a customer review from Amazon:}

a Topkapi-esque adventure, about a man’s return to his homeland behind the Iron Curtain after being kidnapped by Russian soldiers as a youth and shipped off to a Soviet slave labor camp, escaping after a mine cave-in crushed his legs, escaping to freedom, working his way West from black marketeer in the Middle East and Europe, to prize fighter in the midwest to nightclub owner in New York. It deals with his friend’s plans to embarass the Russian Government by the very high profile heist of priceless religious icons right from under their noses.

The lead character, Jack, was one of those impossible men, like Indiana Jones, Dirk Pitt, Jack Ryan or James Bond. Who knew that he was for real?

Donbas is his story, the true tale of a 16 year old boy’s decent into the hell of the mines in the Donbas region of the USSR. His torture, his survival, his escape and his life since then is the stuff great movies are made of. So why is Hollywood sitting on their hands on this one?

Read the adventure, then rent movies like “Moscow On The Hudson”, “The Owl And The Pussycat” and “Trading Places”. Watch for a big, burly man with a thick Russian accent and say hello to Jacques.

Domas Cab is a deep name, and I want to meet the driver. I’ll be on the lookout for him.

I saw this video a couple years ago when Ezra Levant released it just after the start of his sham prosecution in front of the Alberta Human Rights Commission.  Watching it was a political gut-check for me.  I realized I neither possessed the knowledge to believe in natural rights and individual liberty the way Levant did, nor had half of Levant’s conviction.  Since then I’ve endeavored to obtain both.

Hopefully the following two articles are NOT a glimpse into our future.  Stopping the ever increasing encroachment of the nanny state, however, will require a sustained showing of significantly more political spine than the USA has shown lately since, if support for Obamacare is any indication, at least 40% of the country is on board for the USA’s metamorphous into a dependency state.

First article: In the UK, “excessively noisy sex” in one’s own home at mid-morning is a crime punishable by deprivation of liberty – jail. Really.  I don’t even know what to say.  It’s one thing for your apartment complex or whatever to get annoyed with you and not renew your lease.  But for the government to criminalize and jail you for having loud sex?  No wonder the UK’s birthrate is dropping.

Second article: UK regulating the size of chips / french fries / freedom fries.  In the USA a soup nazi is a classic Seinfeld episode.  In the UK, chip nazis are a grim reality.  Since their government runs healthcare, of course, it’s actually pretty sensible to micromanage every aspect of their citizens’ lives as it relates to health – if you accept the premise of a paternalistic state.

This quote, from an article by an English ex-pat in America that my facebook dueling partner Neil sent to me, speaks volumes about England:

“I was born into an England whose citizens believed that one of them was worth any ten foreigners, that the Wogs began at Calais, and that the principal function of foreigners in the grand scheme of things was to make Englishmen laugh. I now gaze across the pond glumly at a “nation” in which the national flag is shunned as “racist.”

Via Reason, I find this Tim Carney article detailing the wool Obama and Congress pulled (and remain dedicated to actively pulling) over the collective eyes of the rubes – those of you who support Obamacare under baseless assumptions that it represents a triumph of the people over corporate lobbying, a blow to special interests, and transparent government. If you think it creates a better health care system, or is economically viable, you’re a rube too. And if you understand all of that, but will suffer those ills in order to provide national health care access as a matter of policy, you’re a rube as well because there are much better, more efficient ways to provide national access to health care without diminishing individual liberty and advancing the cause of the dependency state. Oh, and if you justify support for Obamacare under the assumption it is merely a national extension of the healthcare mandate in Hawai’i or Massachusetts-Care, for your information those models really blow, you’re dead wrong, and a rube to boot. Now, here’s Carney’s article:

“Tonight,” President Obama intoned near midnight Sunday, after the House had passed two health care bills, “we pushed back on the undue influence of special interests. … We proved that this government — a government of the people and by the people — still works for the people.”

But even before the president spoke, the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America — whose $26.1 million lobbying effort in 2009 was the most expensive by any industry lobby in history — hailed the health package as “important and historic.”

The second-biggest industry lobby in America, the American Medical Association, also cheered, as did the American Hospital Association, the No. 5 industry lobby. Throw in the goliath senior lobby AARP and Beltway powerhouse General Electric, and you realize Obama’s underdog tale is all bark and no bite.

The health care bill Obama signed into law Tuesday is a triumph for the special interests. It will benefit the biggest businesses, and by injecting more government into the economy, it will permanently stimulate K Street.

Yet all along Obama has claimed the opposite. The Democrats’ party-line Senate vote for the bill represented “standing up to the special interests,” Obama said in December — just before the health care lobbyists and pharmaceutical political action committees hosted fundraisers for Martha Coakley to try to preserve the Democrats’ 60-vote supermajority.

Throughout March, as momentum built for passing the bill, and as Democrats adopted the mantra, “You’re either with the American people, or you’re with the insurance companies,” health insurance stocks climbed in tandem with the bill’s odds of passing. The health sector outperformed every other sector in the S&P 500 over the last month.

And once the bill passed, health care stocks rallied. Insurance giant Aetna — whose product you are now required by law to own — hit its 52-week high the morning after. Drug maker Pfizer rose 4 percent Monday and Tuesday, increasing its market capitalization by $3.8 billion — almost a two-hundredfold return on the company’s $21.9 million lobbying effort.

In Washington, talk of who’s getting rich or taking a hit often distracts pointlessly from substantive issues. But it’s important here for two reasons.

First, there’s the unsettling but unavoidable conclusion that our president is willing to deceive us if he thinks he can get away with it. He knew the drug makers were on his side — after all, he cut a private deal with top drug lobbyist Billy Tauzin. He also knew that the media would consider any big government proposal a blow to big business.

Second, showing who benefits most makes clear that this “reform” wasn’t designed to “work for the people,” as Obama claims. It works for the deep-pocketed companies who wrote it. Come January, you will no longer be able to buy over-the-counter medicines with your health savings account money — if you want the tax deduction, you’ll need to get more costly prescription drugs. That hurts customers and taxpayers while driving up health care spending — but it profits Big Pharma.

The bill is loaded with sugar plums for the drug industry:

Taxpayers will subsidize drug makers even more. o Employers will be forced to give prescription-drug insurance to workers. o Generic versions of biologic drugs will be kept off the market for 12 years. o States will be forced to subsidize drugs through Medicaid. o Americans will still be prohibited from importing cheaper drugs from China. o Medicare will continue overpaying for drugs.

If the bill’s actual provisions paint a different picture from Obama’s rhetoric, so does the money trail.

Standing behind Obama at the bill signing Tuesday were Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., the leading Senate and House recipients, respectively, of health-sector political action committee money in this election cycle. The 2008 champs of health PAC fundraising, Max Baucus and Charlie Rangel, were also on stage.

And the man with the pen in his hand had received more money from drug companies and health insurance companies than any politician in the history of the country.

We won’t know for years whether Obama was right about the effects of this law. But we already know that Obama’s story of how we got here — the people triumphing over the special interests — is a tall tale.

Cato’s Ilya Shapiro breaks down Obama’s most “progressive” judicial appointee to date: (by the way, chalk “progressive” right up with “health care reform” as obfuscatory misnomers):

Today the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing for the nomination of 39-year-old Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Liu’s confirmation would compromise the judiciary’s check on legislative overreach and push the courts not only to ratify such constitutional abominations as the individual health insurance mandate but to establish socialized health care as a legal mandate itself.

Yesterday Cato legal associate Evan Turgeon and I published an op-ed on the Liu nomination in theDaily Caller.  Here are some highlights:

While Liu purports to develop an original approach [to constitutional interpretation], his nuanced methodology fails to generate a novel result. He may “suggest a more cautious and discriminating judicial role than one that is guided by a comprehensive moral theory,” but it is impossible to imagine a case in which Liu would reach a different outcome than a judge employing the (disfavored) “Living Constitution” analysis. And this is not surprising, given that the stated purpose of Liu’s scholarship is to establish legal justifications for “rights” foreign to the Enlightenment tradition on which our republic rests — those that make demands on others (unlike, say, the right to free speech, which makes no demands on anyone).

…Even more dangerously, Liu’s approach flouts the Constitution’s very purpose: protecting individual rights by limiting government power. As the branch responsible for interpreting the Constitution, the judiciary must defend citizens’ inalienable rights, such as the rights to life, liberty, and property, from infringement by government actors. Liu’s approach turns that role on its head. He views the judiciary not as a safeguard against state tyranny, but as a rubber stamp for any legislation that reflects popular opinion. And it’s a one-way ratchet: Liu would likely rule that the next Congress could not repeal Obamacare because it is precisely the kind of “landmark legislation” — to borrow progressive Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman’s phrase — that cannot be undone.

As a member of the ACLU and chairman of the American Constitution Society, it is no secret what kind of rights Liu would find justified by “collective values.” Liu lists “education, shelter, subsistence, health care and the like, or to the money these things cost” as examples of affirmative rights he would seek to establish in law — to constitutionalize beyond a future legislature’s reach.

Read the whole thing.  Also read Ed Whelan’s series of posts on Liu at NRO’s Bench Memos blog.  (I don’t agree with Ed on everything, but he’s doing a workmanlike job on this important nomination, as he did on Harold Koh.)

And if all the above isn’t enough, here’s Liu in the 2006 Yale Law Journal:

On my account of the Constitution’s citizenship guarantee, federal responsibility logically extends to areas beyond education. Importantly, however, the duty of government cannot be reduced to simply providing the basic necessities of life….. Beyond a minimal safety net, the legislative agenda of equal citizenship should extend to systems of support and opportunity that, like education, provide a foundation for political and economic autonomy and participation. The main pillars of the agenda would include basic employment supports such as expanded health insurance, child care, transportation subsidies, job training, and a robust earned income tax credit.

As Evan and I wrote:

We don’t expect a president of either party to appoint judges who adhere 100 percent to the Cato line — though that would be nice — so we do not object to every judicial nominee whose philosophy differs from ours.

Goodwin Liu’s nomination, however, is different. By far the most extreme of Obama’s picks to date, Liu would push the Ninth Circuit to redistribute wealth by radically expanding — and constitutionalizing — welfare “rights.”

The Senate needs to understand who it’s dealing with here.

It’s not unprecedented for a lawyer to sit on a federal appellate court for a year or two, then jump to the Supreme Court.  John Roberts sat on the DC court of appeals for just a couple of years before W appointed him to the Supreme Court, and then to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

First, Woman sentenced to six months for not using condom:

Michelle Hottentot, 26, of Sherman Heights, has been sentenced to six months in jail for violating the state’s Health Care Freedom and Insurance Act. Ms. Hottentot was convicted of having unprotected sex with an unidentified man with whom she was not in a committed monogamous relationship.

Prosecutors had argued that Ms. Hottentot’s promiscuous behavior was in violation of the state’s health care laws, which require that all citizens not “knowingly engage in any behavior that might be considered ‘risky’ to any reasonable person or entity.” Cities around the state have been prosecuting people for any number of activities, including riding skateboards and inhaling helium to make their voices squeaky.

“These are dangerous activities that threaten the individuals’ health,” said prosecutor Randy O’Toole after the verdict. “The costs for the consequences of these actions are spread out to all of us, so the state has a vital interest in seeing that people don’t engage in them. She could have gotten an STD!”

Remember Mark Steyn’s article a few days ago regarding California’s intention to, budget woes notwithstanding, drive the porn business out of California regulate the use of condoms and impose hygiene restrictions on the porn industry? That was real. And it’s not far from the “future” headline linked to above.

Second, Health Care 2020: A dispatch from the future on the effects of health care reform, excerpts below:

March 23, 2020—At the beginning of the last decade, there was great excitement about the future of medicine. Advances in biotechnology, nanotechnology, diagnostics, information technology, stem cell treatments, vaccines, and organ transplants were poised to radically improve the health prospects of Americans. Looking back from 2020, we can see that most of these major biomedical advances failed to materialize. What happened? Three words: health care reform.

Thanks to the health care reform legislation, a higher percentage of Americans are now covered by health insurance than ever before—up from 83 percent in 2010 to nearly 95 percent of the legal population now. About half of the newly insured are covered by Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program. Most of the remainder purchased subsidized coverage through the new state insurance exchanges. There have been some improvements in the overall health of Americans. Cardiovascular disease continued its decline because cholesterol lowering statins, which are no longer under patent protection, are more widely prescribed under new federally set treatment guidelines. Over the past 10 years, cancer mortality rates have also continued to decline, at least in part because people now covered by government programs or subsidized insurance now receive earlier cancer screening. Nevertheless, in 2020, cardiovascular disease and cancer remain the leading causes of death among Americans.  * * *

Since 2010, insurance companies had been turned essentially into public utilities with the feds setting strict minimum benefits requirements. The health reform bill also limited the administrative costs of insurers, which has ended up basically guaranteeing their profits. With competition all but outlawed, the increasingly consolidated insurance industry has had very little incentive to pay for new treatment regimens outside those specified by government standard-setting agencies. Federal government health agencies have been reluctant to authorize newer treatments because they often lead to higher insurance premiums that then must be subsidized by higher taxes.

Then there is the doctor dearth. The signs of the impending shortage were already clear back in 2010. For example, as reimbursement rates from government health care schemes tightened, more and more doctors were refusing to accept Medicaid and Medicare patients. After health care reform passed, the physician shortage was exacerbated when many doctors faced with declining incomes simply chose to retire early. Already bad in many areas back in 2010, waiting times for a doctor’s appointment 10 years later have nearly quadrupled, reaching the Canadian and British average of about 110 days.

Just swell.  Keep in mind the second future article is from Reason, the same blog, albeit different authors, who advises keeping a sense of pragmatic perspective while analyzing the effects of Obamacare.

Leonard E. Read, Accent on the Right (1968).  Download it in pdf form here.  Read chapter two online here.  A quote and an excerpt from chapter two are below, but read it the whole thing:

“While there are many who will agree that they, personally, should not kill, steal, enslave, it is only the individual with a first-rate moral nature who will have no hand in encouraging any agency — even government — in doing these things for him or others.”

* * *

Where Will Each Stand?

Let us now return to the question this chapter poses: What shall be construed as wrong and, thus, prohibited? For, I repeat, it is the difference of opinion as to what should be denied others that highlights the essential difference between the collectivists — socialists, statists, interventionists, mercantilists — and those of the libertarian faith. Take stock of what you would prohibit others from doing and you will accurately find your own position in the ideological lineup. Or, this method can be used to determine anyone else’s position.

Consider the following statement:

Government has a positive responsibility in any just society to see to it that each and every one of its citizens acquires all the skills and the opportunities necessary to practice and appreciate the arts to the limit of his natural ability. Enjoyment of the arts and participation in them are among man’s natural rights and essential to his full development as a civilized person. One of the reasons governments are instituted among men is to make this right a reality.

It is significant that the author uses the term “its citizens,” the antecedent of “its” being government. Such a conception is basic to the collectivist philosophy: We — you and I — belong to the state. We are “its” wards! Of course, if one accepts this statist premise, the above position is sensible enough: it has to do with a detail in the state’s paternalistic concern for its charges.

What I care about is the advancement of liberty, prosperity, and equal treatment.  That’s the lens I view through, it’s my paradigm.  With that said, Obamacare is certain to make health insurance companies increasingly prosperous. Proof is the fact that insurance companies have lined up to support the bill, which bought their support with a myriad of subsidies, anti-competitive measures, and a mandate that citizens must purchase near-cadillac versions of their products. By further entrenching the existing health insurance oligopoly Obamacare further limits those companies exposure to market pressures that in every other free sector of the economy (including the aspects of health care that insurance doesn’t cover) force organizations to be efficient and invite innovation, which combined with competition for consumers’ dollars, drives down consumer costs. Now, the federal government is playing the role of the marketplace, tasked with “checking” health insurance companies. A lamb to lobbyist slaughter, mark my words.

By contrast, the bill is certain to diminish the prosperity of productive citizens, who will pay an additional tax on their health insurance plans, see their health insurance costs rise, and experience an ever worsening quality of health care as an already overextended health care infrastructure adds millions of new patients.  All of this has been done in the name of universal health care, which by the way is nearly as much a misnomer as ‘health care reform.’  ’National access’ is a better term – I’ll call it “universal” when rape victims in Darfur have access to health care.  If national access to healthcare is the benchmark for western civilization – rather than ever increasing measures of individual liberty, prosperity, and equal treatment – then there are far better ways to go about providing national access to health care.  For instance, simply implementing a national version of Gov. Mitch Daniels’ (R-IN) Healthy Indiana plan, which is provides statewide access to health care relatively efficiently.

To be sure, Obamacare’s purpose isn’t to provide national access to health care – national coverage doesn’t begin for four years (taxes begin now, however).  Rather, under the guise of ‘reform’ Obamacare carries the torch of government expansion, entitlement, deficit spending, curtailment of civil, social, and economic liberty, and repeated felation of special interest groups, voting blocs, and corporate conglomerates – the modus operandi of both parties, unfortunately.

What to do? We should elect a President, preferably Gary Johnson, and a Congress, that will take a blowtorch to the labyrinth of unnecessary health care regulation that obstructs new entrants to the health insurance market, precludes innovative health care delivery systems, denies permits to construct new health care facilities, and rewards with tax incentives the buffet-like insurance plans employers purchase, while punishing individuals by taxing the less expensive plans they typically purchase when they control their health care dollars.

Here’s more real health care reform, from Cato, from 2002:

Health care is cheap: Eat less fat and more veggies, take a daily walk, quit smoking, and drink a little wine with some nuts. Fail to take care of yourself, and the long-term results can be costly — like the results of never changing the oil in your car and never replacing the tires. New diagnostic and surgical technologies involve expensive equipment and skills. Even so, insurance for gigantic medical expenses is also cheap. My policy pays nothing unless annual medical bills top $2,000. Most people call that “catastrophic” insurance. I call it real insurance.

By contrast, I have a friend who’s counting on being able to receive a lung transplant within twenty years.

Insurance for accidental damage to cars and homes is real insurance — something to protect against emergencies, not routine expenses. We do not expect an insurance company to pay for tires and gasoline, or to pay for home painting and termite inspections. When families make their own choices and pay for them, they choose insurance only for catastrophic expenses — the car becoming a total wreck, the house burnt to the ground or the breadwinner dropping dead. If we never collect a dime from such genuine insurance, we consider ourselves lucky.

With health insurance, by contrast, we all want somebody else to pay. Each of us expects to pay less for health insurance than the insurance companies pay to hospitals, doctors and pharmacies. Sadly, that does not add up.

More than a fourth of the U.S. population already has federally subsidized health care through Medicare, Medicaid and military health benefits. If that percentage ever reached 100 percent, as some politicians promise, we might finally begin to wonder how it is possible for everybody to subsidize everybody else.

If you subsidize something, people want more of it. That increase in demand translates into a market in which prices can more easily be raised.

If health insurance operated like car insurance we could implement a program similar to a food stamp program to provide national access to health care.  Of course, the food stamp system is feasible because the cost of food is relatively cheap.  Food is relatively cheap because, corn subsidies and trade protections aside, the production and especially the sale (delivery) of food is a highly competitive market. By contrast, medical care costs rise every year, except in every aspect of the health care industry that insurance doesn’t cover, such as elective surgeries, where prices drop every year as consumer demand spurs innovation and suppliers compete to provide the highest value quotient. For example, the cost of getting stitches (a simple procedure humans have been performing for centuries) rises every year, while the cost of having laser beams magically and painlessly make your eyes perfect drops every year.  The difference between stitches going up and laser eye surgery going down is their respective purchase and delivery system. For me, reform means moving closer towards the model that drives down costs, using health savings accounts, rather than insurance, to pay for every health purchase except catastrophic care, and making sure the marketplace for catastrophic health insurance is competitive.

Now, what of freedom?  Here’s twenty ways Obamacare limits civil and economic freedom:

1. You are young and don’t want health insurance? You are starting up a small business and need to minimize expenses, and one way to do that is to forego health insurance? Tough. You have to pay $750 annually for the “privilege.” (Section 1501)

Don’t you get insurance anyway, since it’s ‘universal’?  If so, in effect you’re insurance rate is $750.  Why would anyone pay into the insurance pool?  This bill is a trojan horse to make health care so expensive, so lousy, so inaccessible (you’ve got coverage, but you never see your doctor) that a single payer system looks delicious by comparison. And if you think that a single payer system will prevent the same companies, lobbies, and interest groups that profit from Obamacare from making out like bandits I’ve got a bridge to nowhere to sell you.

2. You are young and healthy and want to pay for insurance that reflects that status? Tough. You’ll have to pay for premiums that cover not only you, but also the guy who smokes three packs a day, drink a gallon of whiskey and eats chicken fat off the floor. That’s because insurance companies will no longer be able to underwrite on the basis of a person’s health status. (Section 2701).

See here for articles discussing why paying for other people’s health is economically, logically, and morally objectionable.

3. You would like to pay less in premiums by buying insurance with lifetime or annual limits on coverage? Tough. Health insurers will no longer be able to offer such policies, even if that is what customers prefer. (Section 2711).

In other words, you must have health care coverage you don’t need, won’t use, and may not even understand you have.

4. Think you’d like a policy that is cheaper because it doesn’t cover preventive care or requires cost-sharing for such care? Tough. Health insurers will no longer be able to offer policies that do not cover preventive services or offer them with cost-sharing, even if that’s what the customer wants. (Section 2712).

I bet the homeopathy / chiropractor lobby likes that.

5. You are an employer and you would like to offer coverage that doesn’t allow your employers’ slacker children to stay on the policy until age 26? Tough. (Section 2714).

If you get lucky you’re slacker kids will move to Canada in response to the country electing Gary Johnson in 2012. After all, threatening to move to Canada in response to not liking the country’s direction is number 75 on the list of SWPL.

6. You must buy a policy that covers ambulatory patient services, emergency services, hospitalization, maternity and newborn care, mental health and substance use disorder services, including behavioral health treatment; prescription drugs; rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices; laboratory services; preventive and wellness services; chronic disease management; and pediatric services, including oral and vision care.
You’re a single guy without children? Tough, your policy must cover pediatric services. You’re a woman who can’t have children? Tough, your policy must cover maternity services. You’re a teetotaler? Tough, your policy must cover substance abuse treatment. (Add your own violation of personal freedom here.) (Section 1302).

Wow, that first bit there covers basically every aspect of health care except elective surgeries.  By the way, I wouldn’t be surprised that the substance abuse requirement is challenged on freedom of religion grounds.

7. Do you want a plan with lots of cost-sharing and low premiums? Well, the best you can do is a “Bronze plan,” which has benefits that provide benefits that are actuarially equivalent to 60% of the full actuarial value of the benefits provided under the plan. Anything lower than that, tough. (Section 1302 (d)(1)(A))

Bronze plans are akin to a pre-owned Cadillac.

8. You are an employer in the small-group insurance market and you’d like to offer policies with deductibles higher than $2,000 for individuals and $4,000 for families? Tough. (Section 1302 (c) (2) (A).

Just tell the federal government you’re too important to your community to fail.  That should result in a bailout or subsidy – too important to a ‘community’ will be the next “too big to fail.”  Mark my words.

9. If you are a large employer (defined as at least 101 employees) and you do not want to provide health insurance to your employee, then you will pay a $750 fine per employee (It could be $2,000 to $3,000 under the reconciliation changes). Think you know how to better spend that money? Tough. (Section 1513).

10. You are an employer who offers health flexible spending arrangements and your employees want to deduct more than $2,500 from their salaries for it? Sorry, can’t do that. (Section 9005 (i)).

I wonder if the above provision was slipped in just to screw with Whole Foods, whose innovative and effective health care plan is championed by libertarians and decried by liberals.

11. If you are a physician and you don’t want the government looking over your shoulder? Tough. The Secretary of Health and Human Services is authorized to use your claims data to issue you reports that measure the resources you use, provide information on the quality of care you provide, and compare the resources you use to those used by other physicians. Of course, this will all be just for informational purposes. It’s not like the government will ever use it to intervene in your practice and patients’ care. Of course not. (Section 3003 (i))

I don’t know enough about the judicial constructions concerning the medical doctor-patient privilege to know Courts will reject this provision, but it will certainly be litigated at great cost to all.

12. If you are a physician and you want to own your own hospital, you must be an owner and have a “Medicare provider agreement” by Feb. 1, 2010. (Dec. 31, 2010 in the reconciliation changes.) If you didn’t have those by then, you are out of luck. (Section 6001 (i) (1) (A)).

13. If you are a physician owner and you want to expand your hospital? Well, you can’t (Section 6001 (i) (1) (B). Unless, it is located in a country where, over the last five years, population growth has been 150% of what it has been in the state (Section 6601 (i) (3) ( E)). And then you cannot increase your capacity by more than 200% (Section 6001 (i) (3) (C)).

Numbers 13 and 14 shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone – US hasn’t authorized the building of a new petroleum refinery or nuclear power plant in a long, long time.  As a result, energy prices have risen dramatically.  So will health care prices, with such restrictions on infrastructure development.

14. You are a health insurer and you want to raise premiums to meet costs? Well, if that increase is deemed “unreasonable” by the Secretary of Health and Human Services it will be subject to review and can be denied. (Section 1003)

Your best response is to fire all of your center-left and left employees, who will be certain to assist ACORN next election cycle and elect a president and Congress who will get you a bailout or subsidy of some sort.

15. The government will extract a fee of $2.3 billion annually from the pharmaceutical industry. If you are a pharmaceutical company what you will pay depends on the ratio of the number of brand-name drugs you sell to the total number of brand-name drugs sold in the U.S. So, if you sell 10% of the brand-name drugs in the U.S., what you pay will be 10% multiplied by $2.3 billion, or $230,000,000. (Under reconciliation, it starts at $2.55 billion, jumps to $3 billion in 2012, then to $3.5 billion in 2017 and $4.2 billion in 2018, before settling at $2.8 billion in 2019 (Section 1404)). Think you, as a pharmaceutical executive, know how to better use that money, say for research and development? Tough. (Section 9008 (b)).

16. The government will extract a fee of $2 billion annually from medical device makers. If you are a medical device maker what you will pay depends on your share of medical device sales in the U.S. So, if you sell 10% of the medical devices in the U.S., what you pay will be 10% multiplied by $2 billion, or $200,000,000. Think you, as a medical device maker, know how to better use that money, say for R&D? Tough. (Section 9009 (b)).
The reconciliation package turns that into a 2.9% excise tax for medical device makers. Think you, as a medical device maker, know how to better use that money, say for research and development? Tough. (Section 1405).

Hope 15 and 16 doesn’t result in my pal Marc, an R&D engineer at Alcon, losing his job.

17. The government will extract a fee of $6.7 billion annually from insurance companies. If you are an insurer, what you will pay depends on your share of net premiums plus 200% of your administrative costs. So, if your net premiums and administrative costs are equal to 10% of the total, you will pay 10% of $6.7 billion, or $670,000,000. In the reconciliation bill, the fee will start at $8 billion in 2014, $11.3 billion in 2015, $1.9 billion in 2017, and $14.3 billion in 2018 (Section 1406).Think you, as an insurance executive, know how to better spend that money? Tough.(Section 9010 (b) (1) (A and B).)

The people who come up with these taxes, fees, and levies, are pretty damn imaginative.  Too bad they don’t use their brains in the private sector and create wealth, rather than devolving into professional leeches.

18. If an insurance company board or its stockholders think the CEO is worth more than $500,000 in deferred compensation? Tough.(Section 9014).

Meanwhile, the president of Ohio State University makes $1.2 million, annually.

19. You will have to pay an additional 0.5% payroll tax on any dollar you make over $250,000 if you file a joint return and $200,000 if you file an individual return. What? You think you know how to spend the money you earned better than the government? Tough. (Section 9015).
That amount will rise to a 3.8% tax if reconciliation passes. It will also apply to investment income, estates, and trusts. You think you know how to spend the money you earned better than the government? Like you need to ask. (Section 1402).

20. If you go for cosmetic surgery, you will pay an additional 5% tax on the cost of the procedure. Think you know how to spend that money you earned better than the government? Tough. (Section 9017).

Unfortunately the members of Congress are exempt from Obamacare, which is despicable.  And what of equal treatment? Discriminations discusses some disturbing special treatment provisions in Obamacare, just to ensure that Obamacare advances none of what I care most about – liberty, prosperity, and equal treatment.

In sum, Obamacare is a Victory for Obama’s Agenda of Spreading Dependency, and an epic fail for individual liberty, prosperity, and equal treatment.

Health care will not be seriously revisited for at least a generation, so the system’s costliest defect — untaxed employer-provided insurance, which entangles a high-inflation commodity, health care, with the wage system — remains. Obama could not challenge this without adopting measures — e.g., tax credits for individuals, enabling them to shop for their own insurance — that empower individuals and therefore conflict with his party’s agenda of spreading dependency.

[UPDATED 3/31/2010 @ 12:00pm]

As far as I can tell only 10 state attorney generals (from Alabama, Florida, Nebraska, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Washington) are joining Virginia’s challenge to Obamacare.  Randy Barnett, a Volokh Conspirator, lists the bases for challenging Obamacare here, which include (a) the individual mandate, (b) state-specific kickbacks, and (c) Tenth Amendment. His prognosis is fairly grim:

Ultimately, there are three ways to think about whether a law is constitutional: Does it conflict with what the Constitution says? Does it conflict with what the Supreme Court has said? Will five justices accept a particular argument? Although the first three of the potential constitutional challenges to health-care reform have a sound basis in the text of the Constitution, and no Supreme Court precedents clearly bar their success, the smart money says there won’t be five votes to thwart the popular will to enact comprehensive health insurance reform.

That’s interesting, and extremely important.  But it obfuscates a more important issue.  Only 11 out of 50 states are joining the suit.  A medical prognosis is appropriate here: America’s political spine has osteoporosis.  The best thing you can say about 11/50 is that it’s a fraction George Washington would have used.  [Ed. note: I once read, although I can't find any support on the Internet tonight, that Washington used uncommon fractions, like 7/11, 23/31, etc.]   Also, like I said before, referring to Obamacare as reform is a leading candidate for misnomer of the still infant decade, “since the bill entrenches the existing health care industries’ oligopolistic relationship with the federal government.”

While there may be much perspective to be had regarding the implications of the bill, and what is the best course of action to take to repeal it, I’m struggling to find any positive perspective about the fact that only 11 states are joining the fight.  It’s an appropriate time for inspiration from greater men than ourselves:

“The utopian schemes of leveling, and a community of goods, are as visionary and impracticable as those which vest all property in the Crown. They are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government, unconstitutional.” — Samuel Adams, via.

“If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.” — Samuel Adams, via Pila.

“The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.” – Variously attributed, mostly to Alexis de Tocqueville.

Here’s my new favorite, also by Tocqueville:

“I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it.”

Finally, Mark Levin reminded us today that Tocqueville warned us, in the early third of the 19th century:

Tocqueville foresaw a slow death of freedom.  He feared that the power of the central government would gradually expand, meddling in every area of our lives, and he was afraid that we would welcome it, and even convince ourselves that we controlled it.

Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately.  It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will.  Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated…

The tyranny he foresaw for us does not have much in common with the vicious dictatorships of the last century, or with contemporary North Korea, Iran, or Saudi Arabia.  “The nature of despotic power in democratic ages is not to be fierce or cruel, but minute and meddling.”  The vision and even the language anticipated Orwell’s 1984, or Huxley’s Brave New World. Tocqueville described the new tyranny as “an immense and tutelary power,” and its task is to regulate every aspect of our lives.

It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.

Tocqueville thought we would not be bludgeoned into submission; we would be seduced.  He foresaw the collapse of American democracy as the end result of two parallel developments that would ultimately render us meekly subservient to an enlarged bureaucratic power: the corruption of our character, and the emergence of a vast welfare state.  His nightmare vision is brilliantly and terrifyingly prescient:

That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild.  It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.  For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

UPDATE: I found some typos and lousy syntax, and fixed it accordingly.

Today’s bottom feeder is New York Councilmember Letitia James [D-Fort Greene], via Overlawyered, who wants big $$ for bumping into someone’s trailer hitch.

“[James] wants money for “serious, severe and permanent” injuries from David Day, who is described as an itinerant laborer. “Please don’t go forward with it,” Day is reported to have written to James. “You are famous and powerful while I’m a nobody without means who’s done you no harm.”

The original article has some rich details.

The court documents also allege that the injuries caused James to be unable to attend to her usual occupation — though the alleged pain and suffering occurred on the eve of the councilwoman’s re-election campaign, one that she waged with her typical vigor against two primary rivals.

By the way, this (@ 0:34) is the most “vigorous” political campaigning I’ve seen yet.

She bounced to an easy victory. Additionally, several of James’s Council colleagues told this newspaper that they did not recall James limping or using crutches during the summer.

But court papers paint a very different scenario of the events of July 11 on Fulton Street between S. Portland Avenue and S. Oxford Street.

The lawsuit claims that James “came into contact with the exposed, unprotected hitch,” contact that led to “great physical and mental pain” — though the actual body part that was damaged is not cited.

Also exposed and unprotected, vehicle bumpers, side-view mirrors, bike-racks.

James claims that Day’s hitch is illegal and that her injuries resulted “solely [from] the careless and negligent manner in which [he] owned and maintained his motor vehicle.”

But Day says that the hitch is legal. He said he was loading recyclables into his car from the curbside when James parked closely behind him. She bumped into the hitch when walking between the cars to the sidewalk, he said.

He was recycling? Must have forgotten to separate the plastics.

She had a scratch on her shin, Day recalled, and he didn’t think much of it until receiving notification that he was being sued. Since then, he’s waged a one-man crusade to ward off the councilwoman’s suit.

“Please don’t go forward with it,” he wrote to James in February. “You are famous and powerful while I’m a nobody without means who’s done you no harm. Pursuing this course to court can bring only ruin all around.”

He also pointed out that he makes roughly one-tenth of James’s salary, meaning that the lawmaker would likely not get much in a settlement.

As such, James shouldn’t bank on a cash bonanza similar to the one that Borough President Markowitz received in 2003, two years after the notorious slip and fall in an ice-slicked Albany parking lot that resulted in an ankle broken in three places. Markowitz was on crutches for weeks.

On Wednesday, James responded to news coverage of her lawsuit, maintaining that she is fighting the case against the Everyman laborer on behalf of … everyman.

“It’s a public safety issue,” said James. “My car was parked and his car was parked. His hitch was exposed. … This lawsuit could be ended today if he removed it.”

The councilwoman claims that she discussed this with Day, but he refused to remove the hitch. Day claims that he got the hitch from a U-Haul dealership, and that it is legal.

Legal or not, James retorted that the hitch was “rusty” and caused a seven-inch scar on her leg.

“The doctor said it was a deep laceration and he wanted to give me stitches, but I said no,” said the courageous councilwoman.

I sure hope the author of this piece used the word courageous sarcastically.

The larger irony of James’s suit, of course, is that the councilwoman, not Day, may be the person who broke traffic regulations.

Walking between two parked cars could be jaywalking.

By the way, Queen Letitia makes $122K per year.

The fight for racial preferences is alive and well in America.  Via PLF, here’s the newest member of Magna Cum Blogroll – Discriminations:

Is there anyone left in America (other than a recently arrived traveler or two from outer space) who believes that the Obama administration favors post-racial policies? If so, and if they’re able to read (which is doubtful), they should take a look at the brief the administration recently filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit supporting the University of Texas’s desire to return to “race-conscious” admissions. As noted by Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity (which along with the Pacific Legal Foundation has filed a brief opposing this return to racial discrimination)

[t]he brief is a full-throated endorsement of such discrimination, and it goes out of its way to say that the administration will support it at the K-12 level, too, as well as throughout university admissions: “In view of the importance of diversity in educational institutions, the United States, through the Departments of Education and Justice, supports the efforts of school systems and post-secondary educational institutions that wish to develop admissions policies that endeavor to achieve the educational benefits of diversity in accordance with [the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision upholding the use of preferences by the University of Michigan law school].”

There is, for anyone who has followed Obama’s career before the campaign and after the election, nothing surprising here. Nor is there anything surprising about the fact that the usual suspects of the higher education establishment are supporting UT, arguing in their brief that universities have a First Amendment right to discriminate in admissions if such a policies “best meet their needs.” The value of “inclusiveness” is so great, in their view, that they support the right of universities to exclude some applicants who would have been admitted but for their race.Those same groups (for the most part), however, do not believe that religious student organizations have a First Amendment right to admit members (or not) based on whether applicants share the religious beliefs around which the groups are organized. The education organizations believe that the First Amendment rights of the education institutions trump whatever rights their students may have to organize groups that reflect their views.

The journalist A.J. Liebling famously said that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” To the grandees of American higher education, apparently, the First Amendment belongs only to the institutions that ladle it out as they see fit.

Why not treat every citizen of the United States of America equally, without exception, and without regard to color, class, or creed, that we may all enjoy the dignity of rising, falling, failing, and achieving on our own fortune and merit? In short, equal treatment:

Life is many things.  For instance, it is famously ironic – no one escapes alive.  But life is not fair.  Humanity is inherently unequal.  To wit, the same God who made Brad Pitt made Danny Devito.

Fairness is a subjective illusion.  No two individuals or environments are equal.  Attempts to create fairness only shift unfairness’ burden.  Even where necessary or justifiable – and there is never a consensus as to when shifting the burden of unfairness is justifiable – doing so is nevertheless unfair.

In an unfair world equal treatment is the least unfair policy, and may be the only equality, and dignity, society can provide.  Equal treatment should be the policy of individuals and private institutions.  Equal treatment must be the policy of local, state, and federal governments, as well as public institutions.  Equal treatment rises above every brutish form of collectivism and treats people as individuals. We can neither give nor ask for more.

I suppose equal treatment doesn’t leve enough room for political graft, as Instapundit would say.

“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”  That’s a good lede for this disturbing bit of change news, via Reason’s Matt Welch, who informs that mainstream media wonks are pushing “for an unprecedented federal government intrusion into the free press. And its alarming proposals are gaining a sympathetic audience on Capitol Hill.”

In March 2009, McChesney and John Nichols, the Washington correspondent for The Nation, penned a widely circulated story for the progressive weekly calling for a journalism “stimulus” costing $60 billion over the next three years. Provisions included a $200 tax credit for newspaper subscriptions, the elimination of postage rates for magazines receiving less than 20 percent of their revenue from advertising, and taxpayer support for “a well-funded student newspaper and a low-power FM radio station” at “every middle school, high school and college.”

In 2005 the same duo had published a book whose subtitle complained that the American media “destroy democracy.” Now they pitched their plan to save the media as a way to “sustain” the country’s “democratic infrastructure.” Apparently a lot can change in just four years. “Only government,” McChesney and Nichols concluded in the Nation piece, “can implement policies and subsidies to provide an institutional framework for quality journalism.”

McChesney and Nichols have expanded their argument to book length in The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again. As the title implies, the authors see the current crisis—during which several major media companies have declared bankruptcy and shuttered century-old newspapers—as a cleared site on which central planners can construct the kind of journalism McChesney and Nichols pined for when savaging the corporate media. “Journalism,” they claim, “is a public good that is no longer commercially viable. If we want journalism, it will require public subsidies and enlightened policies.”

Emphasis added.  Also added: my opinions that racial preferences entrench the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism, and government colluding with mainstream media is statist garbage.

David Bernstein at Volokh poses a rhetorical question:

But seriously, I’m really wondering, if you were among my liberal interlocutors who adopted the line that Medicare Part D was a malevolent “giveaway” to the drug companies, how are you feeling about Obamacare?

What the health care bill means to the Humble Libertarian:

In response to the passage of H.R. 4872, the “Health Care and Education Affordability Reconciliation Act of 2010,” (full text here) the Internet is abuzz with questions like “What does the health care bill mean to me?” which is a trending topic on Google, along with “new health care bill pros and cons,” “healthcare bill summary,” and “obama health care plan explained.”

Oh now you’re interested? You couldn’t have bothered to search for these questions before the bill passed, and determine your opinion in time to make a difference in its passage? Hmm? Okay. Whatever. At least you’re paying attention now.

Let’s break it down:

Asshat playing Calvinball.

The Dialectical Playa, King of Rants:

How did Obamacare pass? Quite simply it came down to this: the American people voted for the government they deserved. In the aftermath of extinguishing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for the slavery of entitlements and big government, we can now comfortably focus on the important things, like who wins American Idol or why Jesse James cheated on Sandra Bullock. What? You’re somewhat disconcerted by Obama’s and the Democrats’ vision for America? Get used to it because to the Left, Obamacare is, as Obama himself so aptly described it last night, “what change looks like”. And you’ve still got some change-you-can-believe-in coming with “Cap-and-Trade” and “Immigration Reform”. So while all those disturbing thoughts and images may compel you to wring your hands, you would be much better off by becoming, like the Stupak Bloc, sellouts and embracing the new reality that “We’re all Socialists now.” But rest assured, however you reconcile the fact that the advent of the United Socialist States of America is as equally your fault as it is Barack Obama’s and the Democrats’ . . .

I thought “reform” was the misnomer in “health care reform,” since the bill entrenches the existing health care industries’ oligopolistic relationship with the federal government.  Apparently, I was half wrong:

The “reconciliation bill” is not a “health bill” but an anti-health bill.  It relies heavily on price controls, taxes and fines to punish doctors, hospitals and formerly innovative companies the produce prescription drugs and medical devices.  If we treated farmers, food companies and grocery stores the way Congress threatens to treat the health industries would anybody expect food to become better or cheaper?

Ludwig Von Mises weighs in on Obamacare, sort of:

In the words of Dr. Oreschenkov in conversation with Lyudmila Afanasyevna, a longtime patient and herself a physician in the cancer ward: “In general, the family doctor is the most comforting figure in our lives. But he has been cut down and foreshortened. . . . Sometimes it’s easier to find a wife than to find a doctor nowadays who is prepared to give you as much time as you need and understands you completely, all of you.”

Lyudmila Afanasyevna: “All right, but how many of these family doctors would be needed? They just can’t be fitted into our system of universal, free, public health services.”
Dr. Oreschenkov: “Universal and public—yes, they could. Free, no.”

Lyudmila Afanasyevna: “But the fact that it is free is our greatest achievement.”

Dr. Oreschenkov: “Is it such a great achievement? What do you mean by ‘free’? The doctors don’t work without pay. It’s just that the patient doesn’t pay them, they’re paid out of the public budget. The public budget comes from these same patients. Treatment isn’t free, it’s just depersonalized. If the cost of it were left with the patient, he’d turn the ten rubles over and over in his hands. But when he really needed help he’d come to the doctor five times over…

“Is it better the way it is now? You’d pay anything for careful and sympathetic attention from the doctor, but everywhere there’s a schedule, a quota the doctors have to meet; next! . . . And what do patients come for? For a certificate to be absent from work, for sick leave, for certification for invalids’ pensions: and the doctor’s job is to catch the frauds. Doctor and patient as enemies—is that medicine?”

“Depersonalized,” “doctor and patient as enemies”—those are the key phrases in the growing body of complaints about health maintenance organizations and other forms of managed care. In many managed care situations, the patient no longer regards the physician who serves him as “his” or “her” physician responsible primarily to the patient; and the physician no longer regards himself as primarily responsible to the patient. His first responsibility is to the managed care entity that hires him. He is not engaged in the kind of private medical practice that Dr. Oreschenkov valued so highly.

VDH:

Do Democrats realize that we really have crossed the Rubicon? In the future when the Republicans gain majorities (and they will), the liberal modus operandi will be the model—bare 51% majorities, reconciliation, the nuclear option, talk of deem and pass, not a single Democrat vote—all ends justifying the means in order to radically restructure vast swaths of American economic and social life. Is someone unhinged at the DNC? They just blew up any shred of bipartisan consensus when their President polls below 50%, the Democratically-controlled Congress below 20%, and health care reform less than 50%. Usually unpopular leaders and their unpopular ideas seek the shelter of minority rights and prerogatives. What will they do when they are in the minority—since they’ve entered the arena, boasted “let the games begin” and shouted “by any means necessary”?

Aloha ‘oe, small insurance companies – the big insurance company oligopoly has got you now:

“The support for the bill coming from the major insurers should be one piece of evidence that they expect it to be good for them, particularly due to the provision that requires Americans to buy health insurance. In addition, as is the case with almost all regulation, larger firms are better able to absorb the fixed cost of compliance than are smaller firms. Given that this bill authorizes the hiring of over 16,000 new IRS agents to enforce its tax code provisions, such compliance costs are sure to be high, which will have a higher relative burden for the smaller firms.” * * *

“The irony, of course, is that the very same progressives who have supported this bill will be summarily outraged by the decline of small health and dental insurers and the oligopolistic behavior of the remaining large ones. Not that they will accept it, but they have no one to blame but themselves for supporting this bill as its changes will be the cause of those problems.”

The disconnect between economics and politics:

Economics is the study of the whole system of exchange relationships. Politics is the study of the whole system of coercive or potentially coercive relationships.  In almost any particular social institution, there are elements of both types of behavior, and it is appropriate that both the economist and the political scientist study such institutions.  What I should stress is the potentiality of exchange in those socio-political institutions that we normally consider to embody primarily coercive or quasi-coercive elements.  To the extent that man has available to him alternatives of action, he meets his associates as, in some sense, an ‘equal,’ in other words, in a trading relationship.  Only in those situations where pure rent is the sole element in return is the economic relationship wholly replaced by the political.” Buchanan CW, Vol. 1, p. 40.

Government’s track record in health care when it controls all the chips: The VA’s inability failure to provide:

While the VA’s budget, payroll, and number of facilities expanded rapidly to become “by far the most extensive [medical program] in the country,” its standard of care stagnated, and complaints of inefficiency and negligence mounted. A 1949 commission “uncovered a staggering amount of waste,” a result of the highly political nature of the VA’s health care system.

The VA was raised to a Cabinet department in 1989, although Hamowy argues that there was “not one substantive argument put forward” that justified doing so. The Cabinet position offered no lasting changes to address the extensive waste and inferior care. Conditions further deteriorated as the U.S. began to intervene in Iraq and Afghanistan, “substantially increasing the number of veterans needing medical care” from an already dilapidated system. Hamowy finds that “the lifetime costs of providing disability benefits and medical care to the veterans of these two wars . . . will amount to between $350 and $700 billion.”

The VA has clearly overstepped its original role as a health care provider for veterans with service-related disabilities, a raison d’être that the author believes “was extremely weak to begin with.” As new evidence of the VA’s inefficiency reaches the news daily, such as having to reconsider the Gulf War syndrome cases, Failure to Provide presents a compelling examination of the rationale behind the administration that “paved the way for instituting a national system of socialized medicine.”

Obamacare promises decreased medical costs; market betting otherwise:

One of the promises of Obamacare has been that it would reduce health care costs.  The day after the House passed the Senate’s version of health care reform, this headline says “Health Care Companies Pull Stock Market Higher.” Clearly, money is being bet on health care costs increasing, putting more money, not less, into the health care sector.

That should not be surprising.  In a free market setting, individuals decide how much they want to spend on various services, including health care.  With increasing government control, spending on health care will increasingly be a political decision, not the aggregation of individual decisions.  Health care companies already have their lobbyists, who pull for more generous reimbursements.  Consumers (the elderly on Medicare, the poor (and increasingly middle class) on Medicaid, etc.)  will exert political pressures for more benefits.  Political allocation of resources will surely increase costs.

Taxpayers won’t like the idea of higher taxes, already a part of Obamacare, so expect the bulk of the increased cost to push the budget deficit higher.  Essentially, Congress has looked around the world and decided they’d like to shape our public sector to be more like Greece. At least, by not being on the leading edge here, we can see what’s coming.

Finally, five days to Obama is three, tops.

Want to know what my idea of political porn is?  Imagine standing to the side of the stage at the RNC in August, 2012.  Then, Bruce Buffer, UFC announcer extraordinaire, introduces Governor Gary Johnson, the GOP’s candidate for President, to the stage as for his acceptance speech.  Dream with me.

Until then, I’ll settle for digging up an old Reason interview with Gary Johnson from 2001.

New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson is many things—a successful businessman, a two-term governor, an Iron Man triathlete, an aspiring conqueror of Mt. Everest. He’s hardly a liberal, though, unless one uses the term in its original sense of someone who believes that a minimal state is best suited for a free people. Even then, the term doesn’t fully do justice to this energetic man. When pressed on his vision of the state’s role, the 47-year-old Johnson speaks of “ensuring a level playing field and [making certain] that liberties and freedoms are equally available to all.” He argues that the government only “needs to ensure that no one is harmful to anyone else.”

To be sure, Johnson’s limited-government iconoclasm is more that of an accountant—or a motivational speaker—than that of a philosopher-king. When I first ask him to explain his overarching governing philosophy, he pulls from his wallet a card containing his seven—count ’em—principles of good government, which seem to be culled equally from Ben Franklin and Tony Robbins. Number 1: Become reality driven. Number 2: Always be honest and tell the truth. Number 7: Be willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done.

Read it all.

First, luck: A bus driver in England won the lottery, a few months after he finalized his divorce papers.  Then again, they say you can’t tell good luck from bad until you’re dead, and I believe that.

Here’s a shocker: diversity training doesn’t work.  Why not try equal treatment training?

Mark Steyn’s thoughts on California’s plan to regulate the porn industry:

On Thursday, the California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board voted to set up a committee to examine whether condoms should be required on all pornographic film shoots within the Golden State.

California has run out of money, but it hasn’t yet run out of things to regulate.

For a government regulatory hearing, the testimony was livelier than usual. The porn star Madelyne Hernandez recalled an especially grueling scene in which she had been obliged to have sex with 75 men. The bureaucrats nodded thoughtfully, no doubt contemplating another languorous 18-month committee assignment looking into capping the number of group-sex participants at 60 per scene. In future, if a porn actress finds 75 men waiting for her on the set, they’ll be bureaucrats from Sacramento’s Condom Enforcement Squad.

The committee will also make recommendations on whether the “adult” movie industry should be subject to the same regulatory regime and hygiene procedures as hospitals and doctors’ surgeries. You mean with everyone in surgical masks? Kinky. If you’ve ever been in the filthy, C. difficile– and MRSA-infected wards of Britain’s National Health Service, it may make more sense after the passage of Obamacare to require hospitals to bring themselves up to the same hygiene standards as the average Bangkok porn shoot.

One can make arguments for permitting porn and for banning porn, but there isn’t a lot to be said for the bureaucratization of porn. Hard to believe there will be dull, bespoke California bureaucrats looking forward to early retirement on gold-plated pensions who’ll be getting home, sinking into the La-Z-Boy and complaining to the missus about a tough day at the office working on the permits for Debbie Does the Fresno OSHA Office.

Does procedure matter?  Do dead-guilty criminals go free every day because police and courts, being human, are unable to perfectly adhere to procedure – due process- a Constitutional right of the accused?  Yes.  Here’s a good article on why process matters.  Since Obama doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, do me a favor and send it along to him.

One day historians of the health care debate will puzzle over a curious distinction. Why was so much ink spilled over the difference between “process” and “substance”? The terms seem suited to a discourse on phenomenology, not politics. Nevertheless, future historians will note that early 21st century liberals decried the process of legislating because they felt it blinded their subjects to the beneficial substance of social reform. Look beyond the turbulence, tumult, and messy compromises of democracy, their argument went, and the goodness of the liberal cause is self-evident.

But of course it is not self-evident. And to separate process from substance is to create, as somebody likes to say, a false choice. When you bake a cake, everything depends on the selection of ingredients and the manner of preparation. So, too, with the law. Health care reform’s inputs—the partisanship, the special deals, the procedural tricks, the budgetary gimmicks—will directly affect its outputs, i.e., its consequences. They are part and parcel of a $1 trillion-plus health bill that will raise taxes, cut Medicare, become ridiculously expensive sooner rather than later, and poison politics for a long time to come. Liberals miss the point. The process is the substance.

And the process has been immensely revealing. Consider what has happened since Congress took up health care reform in earnest last summer. The Democrats quickly shut out the GOP. The legislation rapidly became unpopular. The people voiced their opposition in rambunctious town hall meetings and at a massive march on Washington in early September. They were mocked and vilified for their efforts. The congressional majority pressed on despite public resistance. The House passed its original bill by five votes last November. Only one Republican supported it.

Brute force rules the House. But not the Senate. The rules there demand general agreement, reflected in the support of 60 senators, before a measure is passed. And because there is no general agreement on the Democratic proposal, it has been unable to pass the upper chamber by regular order.

What to do? First, sweeten the deal. Last December, the Senate leadership traded favors with Democrats from (most famously) Louisiana, Florida, and Nebraska. The logrolling gave us a handful of catchy names to describe the various corrupt bargains: The Louisiana Purchase. The Gator Aid. The Cornhusker Kickback. Defend them? The Democrats don’t even try.

And yet the deals were enough to win 60 votes. The Senate passed its initial version of health care reform on Christmas Eve. And then the unbelievable happened. Massachusetts replaced the late Edward Kennedy with an obscure GOP state senator who drives a pickup truck and campaigned explicitly on a pledge to stop the health care bill. The import of Scott Brown’s election was obvious. A Republican hadn’t been elected to the Senate from Massachusetts since 1972. Brown had nationalized the election by campaigning against the Democratic agenda. The president flew to Massachusetts at the last minute to try to rescue the campaign. The voters rebuked him.

Once the shock wore off, the Democrats decided that if they could not pass their reform following normal procedure, they would simply change the procedure. Hence the decision to pursue “reconciliation,” a parliamentary measure under which budgets can pass the Senate by a simple majority. Except even that wasn’t enough. For reconciliation to happen, the House would have to pass the original Senate bill—a bill which even the speaker of the House admitted no one wanted to vote for.

Solution: Change the procedure again, this time “deeming” the Senate bill passed without actually voting for it. Dismiss the public outcry over all these changes as flippant objections to mere “process.” And in order to ensure a positive score from the Congressional Budget Office, game the system so that the taxes come first, the spending comes later, Medicare “savings” are double-counted, and a student-loan reform applies to health care’s price tag.

One cannot judge the full consequences of health care reform. What can be judged is the manner by which Democrats have governed over the last year. They have been partisan and ideological, derisive and dismissive. They try to legislate massive changes to American society and the American economy by the tiniest of margins and the most arcane of methods. The process has taken on a substance all its own.

And it’s repellent.

Health care reform, a misnomer if there ever was one, seems to bring out the passion in people.  For instance, this commenter on the Reason article linked to and copied at the bottom of this post.

Of course it’s not a fundamental reform. How would entrenching the existing interests onto the government payroll constitute a fundamental reform. It’s the ultimate bulwark against reform, an unbreachable wall against reform ever threatening the powers that be again.

Here’s Zombie’s take on why many Americans principally oppose ‘universal’ health care.  Some excerpts below (bolded emphasis is Zombies’):

Now, I really don’t care if you overeat, smoke like a chimney, hump like a bunny or forget to lock the safety mechanism on your pistol as you jam it in your waistband. Fine by me. And as a laissez-faire social-libertarian live-and-let-live kind of person, I would never under normal circumstances condemn anyone for any of the behaviors listed above. That is: Until the bill for your stupidity shows up in my mailbox. Then suddenly, I’m forced to care about what you do, because I’m being forced to pay for the consequences

What I don’t like about the very concept of universal health care is that it compels me to become my brother’s keeper and insert myself into the moral decisions of his life. I’d rather grant each person maximum freedom. I’d prefer to let people make whatever choices they want, however stupid or dangerous I may deem those choices to be. Just so long as you take responsibility for your actions, and you reap the consequences and pay for them yourself — hey, be as foolish or hedonistic or selfish or thoughtless as you like. Not my business.

But if the bill for your foolishness shows up in the form of higher taxes on me, then I unwillingly start to care what you do. And, trust me on this, you don’t want me turning my heartless judgmental eye on your foolish lifestyle. Because I’d have no qualms criticizing half the stuff you do.

Do you want that? No. Do I want that? No. And that’s the point. Instituting a single-payer universal health-care system, or even a watered-down version as the government is now proposing, compels me to become a meddlesome busybody in your personal choices. And it will compel you to become a meddlesome busybody in everyone else’s personal choices. It forever douses the beautiful flame of individualism — freedom to act without interference, just so long as you are ready to accept the consequences, whatever they may be.

Unfortunately, individualism has been under assault for a long time.

Since it’s nearly impossible to sort out who is personally responsible for which ailments, the only logical solution is to let each person pay for their own care, because that way there’s nothing left to argue about. But if we share costs, we share blame, and that’s the origin of resentment and anger that the average American feels about socialized medicine.

Now, the Dialectical Playa’s latest rant.  The last time he ranted it was about David Brooks,  the neo-conservative member of Obama’s “Praetorian Guard” – he was referring, of course, to the Old Gray Mare (New York Times).

The Republic has fallen. Americans voted for Hopeandchange ™ without ever comprehending what Obama was hoping to change them into. Thus we stand before a litany of present failures and future disasters beginning with Cap-and-Trade, Obamacare, a feckless foreign policy abroad, a deliberately Kafkaesque economy at home, political corruption, incompetence, moral and ethical indifference, the circumvention of reason, the defenestration of ethics, a contempt of probity, and a servile willingness by some politicians to become reprobates in the service of an administration dedicated to cleaving “We the People” from the Constitution and the Constitution from the people.

A man who has never held a job working for others or owned a company with people working for him is now insensibly the most powerful man on earth in a job that requires him to work for over 300,000,000 citizens while managing and directing a government of almost 12,000,000 employees. How did it come to this?

When’s the last time you heard an Obama rant that doesn’t mention the 2010 budget deficit or national debt?  By the way, did you know that the national debt increases $4.05 BILLION per day?

Here’s another gem of a rant, this time by Sean Malone, at Logicology.

I can’t tell if it’s funny, or just down right depressing.  It’s definitely true, but I really can’t make up my mind as to whether or not it’s worth laughing at, worth crying about or worth breaking out the tar and the feathers.

Also from this comments thread was a link to Rep. Paul Ryan talking about his plan for Medicaid.

There are three things about this video that strike me on first viewing, especially not really knowing too much about Paul Ryan to begin with…

1. He’s created what seems to be a good idea addressing a very serious problem in an intelligent way, and he’s extremely well prepared in defending said idea.
2. House Rules Committee Chairman, Louis Slaughter is either willfully ignorant, unimaginably stupid, downright evil, or some combination of the three.  Note that she was also the one who suggested that instead of actually voting on the health care bill, the house just “deems” it to be good to go…  Cause, you know, something that’s already hated by a majority of the American people shouldn’t even really be subject to a full vote anyway…  Ugh.  And…
3. Take careful stock of the other people in the room besides Paul Ryan.  That, my unaware American friends, is what socialists sound like.

I know the word socialism gets thrown around a lot as a perjorative.  But the fact of the matter is that it is actually a defined political philosophy, although there is some debate on the specifics.  The point of it, however, is that resources are centrally controlled and distributed based not on voluntary, private exchange (as no one gets to own any private property in such a system), but on centralized, government mandates.

Here we have Paul Ryan suggesting that instead of operating in a situation where people get taxed heavily and then the government decides what benefits they shall receive, we should provide people with the freedom to choose what they want for themselves – not only cutting out the middleman and depoliticizing health care decisions for the elderly, but also reconnecting price signals between producers & consumers in the medical sector.  In essence, Paul Ryan is proposing a version of Medicaid that looks more like the Food Stamp program, which (shock!) actually works fairly well precisely because it keeps price signals intact and lets individuals make their own choices based on their own tastes & needs.

What none of the other idiots in the room seem to grasp is that if individuals were actually in charge of paying for their own care directly (even with government assistance in the form of vouchers) then there would actually be competition among producers – in this case insurance companies, drug manufacturers and doctors/hospitals – for consumers’ business. JUST doing that – even if we made absolutely no other changes at all – would result in a world where health care prices actually go down!

Yet all anyone behind Rep. Ryan can say is that his plan won’t keep up with “health care inflation” – which is something that’s 100% caused by government involvement (as it is in every other area they dominate, such as education and housing) and under his plan, the way he described it, would probably be much less of an issue… There’s that Parmenides’ Fallacy again slapping me in the face with its stupidity.  I wish it were slapping our congressmen & women in the face instead, but alas, their stupidity seems always to go unpunished.

Sadly though, every other person in the room with Ryan obviously cannot even imagine a world in which the power-brokers don’t get a say in other people’s health care decisions.  And that, my dear friends, is why they have earned the label “socialist”.

It’s positively disgusting to me… I hope it is to you.

I cannot stress enough that the essence of socialism – in all it’s various forms from the U.S.S.R., to Nazi Germany, to fascist Italy, France & Spain, to right here in the good old U.S. of A. – is central control.  A few hard core Marxists hold out on the idea that for someone to “be” a socialist, they have to advocate the total abolition of private property, but why do that when the fascist strain clearly proved that you can control the resources of the world and still pretend to leave ownership in the hands of individuals?

There is no need to nationalize everything when you can write laws which force individuals to do exactly what you want them to do anyway.

And that’s what it’s all about… Freedom vs. Control.  There is, as Ludwig von Mises said, no third way.

Paul Ryan here is coming down on the side of liberty, and for that he gets my thanks… However… All the other socialist asshats in the room can kindly die in a fire.  Surely that would be preferable to a world where each of these fools gets to wrap their grubby little fingers around the neck of the American economy and continue to throttle it to death with their idiocy.

You don’t get to hear asshat very often. Malone’s got some great commentary here too on the Parmenides’ Fallacy in Health Care.

Finally, Nick Gillespie.  By the way, epic ranting in the comments after the Gillespie article.

If you’re left puzzling over how to carry the $940 billion in spending and subtract the $138 billion in deficit reduction as health care reform is being debated, check out Tobin Harshaw’s excellent round-up of dueling scratchpads over at the New York Times’ Opinionator blog. The conclusion, after running through a pretty thorough summary of arguments claiming the bill does cut the deficit over its first decade and that it does not (Reason’s own Peter Suderman has a star turn in that section!): “Only time will tell.”

Those last four words are the saddest in an opinion editor’s vocabulary — always true and never helpful in the slightest. The additional problem here, of course, is that members of Congress have only the rest of the weekend to guess what time will reveal.

More here.

It seems to me that if that’s the best you can come up with after running through the numbers, that’s enough on its face to say no to this bill, given all the other stuff it does, from mandating insurance coverage, to expanding all sorts of control over how coverage is delivered. Given the history of other interventions into the medical industry, it’s implausible that this won’t end up costing massive amounts more than whatever figures are being bandied about.

But apart from that, this doesn’t even represent a fundamental reform, one that would radically open up the health care industry to the sorts of personalized service and market competition that have actually driven costs down and services up in every other aspect of the economy that is not subject to huge amounts of cheap government money and subsidies (read: house prices and education, which along with health care tell you everything you need to know about what happens when the government gets overly involved in a given sector).

It’s also worth noting that a hunk a hunk a burning change is not included in this bill but is surely coming down the road. That’s the so-called “doc fix,” which routinely staves off cuts in Medicare reimbursements to physicians in the name of propping up one of the great boondoggles of the past 45 years. As Reason alum Ed Carson writes in Investors Business Daily:

The Sustainable Growth Rate imposes automatic cuts in Medicare payment rates to doctors.

For several years, fearing a revolt by doctors — and seniors — Congress has suspended those cuts. The original draft of the House health care bill included a permanent “doc fix.” But that ballooned deficits, so Democrats dropped it, even though everyone knows Congress isn’t going to slash doctors’ rates. The CBO has estimated a “doc fix” would cost $247 billion over 10 years.

Supposed cuts in Medicare spending help to squeak this bill under the fake door titled “cuts deficit by a teeny amount over its first 10 years,” as does the inclusion of a student loan provision (yes) in the reconciliation version that cuts subsidies to private lenders for student loans. Don’t hold your breath on any of this actually happening. The feds, you see, are looking to cut out the middleman when it comes to brokering student loans; they promise $19.4 billion in savings from this, which as Carson writes, “for virtually all of the $19.8 billion in deficit reduction from the [House's] health care reconciliation bill.”

Regarding the “doc fix,” look for it to come into play soon enough if/when the health care reform passes. Here’s Speaker Pelosi talking on the record on Friday, on why the fix wasn’t in the bill that’s getting voted on today. Especially since a permanent fix was part of earlier versions of the House bill:

Well, we have been including it in legislation for a long time, because it’s not about a doctor fix, it’s about our seniors or anyone who relies upon Medicare to have access to physicians, that they be in their region and in their program.

So this is again, you call it the doctor fix, but it is really about access to health care for Americans. It’s not in this bill, but we will have it soon. And we have made a commitment to do this. This is very important.

That’s from the liberal site TPM, which notes “Leadership aides would never say that a doc fix definitely won’t happen.” Which is, of course, another way of saying they will. And when they do, say goodbye to even the fiction of deficit cuts via a $940 billion (and counting) health care reform bill. But as any number of really bad gamblers could tell you (but probably wouldn’t): You gotta spend money to lose money.

Here’s some gems from the comments:

tkwelge:

Even if they believe that they are doing good, they shouldn’t try to cram this bill down the throat of the hundreds of millions of people who are against it. Socialism can only work when large percentages of the population agree on the specifics, which is why a government encompassing 300 million people has a much harder time passing such “reforms” than smaller, more homogenous countries. How can you possibly please all interests, without picking favorites, and please all 300 million individuals concerned in a way that people can even come to a majority consensus? You can’t!

Why couldn’t we have experimented with a basket of reform options on the state level first? Could we have given deregulation a shot? What the hell!

What, you mean federalism? It’ll never catch on.  LET THE RECORD REFLECT THAT I AM BEING SARCASTIC.

Yeehaw.  Now, before we get to cab name speculation I have a couple of announcements.

First, dear readers, we are not the only ones interested in cab names. I recently discovered a professional photographer named Kat Miner who has a penchant for photographing unique cab names. (For instance, check out Strawberry Cab here.)  Kat kindly agreed to let Dueling Barstools use the high resolution cab photos on her Flickr page.  Check out Kat’s beautiful, non-cab photography at SeeThiNgsDiFferenTLy, which you can also find on DuelingBarstools’ Magna Cum Blogroll.  Second, I got a new phone – the Droid.  The Droid’s camera phone is substantially better than my previous cell phone, which required masking tape to hold the battery in place.  Finally, a special thanks to loyal Dueling Barstools reader SarahB, who delivered the following commentary on the Taxi’s R Us Cab.  [ed' note: I think "Sarah's Speculation" could be a regular feature . . .]

That misplaced single quotation mark caused me to initially pronounce it as Taxisaurus.  IMO, that would be an awesome name.  You would hear it before you saw it, its engine bellowing and roaring, warning you of its impending arrival.  Get off the streets, it’s TAXISAURUS!  Grrrr.

Perhaps the name is a philosophical proposition?  Taxis are us.  We are taxis.  What are taxis?   Vehicles that transport a being from one (beginning) point to another (end) point.  What are we, our physical selves?  Vehicles that transport a being…  Whoa.  That cab operator is deep.  I wonder if when the cab door opens, the soft dulcet tones of a sitar and the sweet smell of burning Nag Champa wafts out into the night air, intertwining, wrapping their soothing tendrils of somnolence around you.  Having rendered you in a soporific state, you would be pulled into its warm, womb-like chamber.

The cab tagline could be, “Aura you one of us?”  (Cheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeese.)

Editors note: Relish this bit one more time: “[s]oft dulcet tones of a sitar and the sweet smell of burning Nag Champa wafts out into the night air, intertwining, wrapping their soothing tendrils of somnolence around you.”

Next up is Red Sea Cab, our second Egyptian cab (Nile Cab was first).  Thanks to loyal Dueling Barstools reader Ale for the picture! The first thing that comes to mind is Charlton Heston playing Moses in The Ten Commandments parting the Red Sea Cab.  The second thing that comes to mind is stunning underwater imagery. The more I think about it, though, I’m surprised at the name Red Sea Cab. After all, the Red Sea might understandably be a sore spot for Egyptians, since the name makes everyone in Judeo-Christendom cheer think of the Israelites escaping pyramid-construction slavery and drowning Pharaoh (and his army) to boot.  Plus, with all of the other great cab names Egypt provides (e.g. MUMMY Cab), I’m surprised this cab driver picked Red Sea, unless of course he’s scuba certified.  I’ll be sure to ask him. Perhaps I’ve wrongly assumed this cab driver is Egyptian, since Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Yemen, and Djibouti all border the Red Sea. I’m going to make an educated guess and say the driver is Sudanese.  A Sudanese cab driver would have to pick the name Red Sea by default.  What else is he going to name his cab – Darfur cab? [Answer: NO.]

I’ve been trying to photograph Jazzy Cab for a while.  Fortunately Ale came through with this great picture.  Mahalo, Ale.  Jazzy Cab is a warm, friendly, fun name.  Surely Jazzy Cab has an iPod playing the 100 Greatest Jazz Albums on a loop.  I for one would be very disappointed if Jazzy Cab’s interior is not decorated in a plush British theme, with overstuffed leather wingback chairs, rich wood, fine portraits and a baby grand piano.

This is a doozy: Maipu Cab.  Maipu is the name of a city in Chile, as well as the name of a city in the heart of Argentina’s wine country, Mendoza.  I think it’s safe to say this cab driver is South American.  The Chilean Maipu is quite famous, as it was the site of the last great battle in the struggle for Chilean independence.  Here’s a bit from the Encyclopedia Brittanica:

On April 5, 1818, during the South American wars of independence, a victory won by Argentine and Chilean rebels, commanded by José de San Martín, leader of the resistance to Spain in southern South America, over Spanish royalists, near Santiago, Chile. The six-hour battle left 2,000 royalists dead and 3,000 captured; the patriots lost about 1,000 men. It ended the struggle for Chilean independence.

Here’s a bit about the Argentinean Maipu:

Part of the Mendoza River high region (also known as the Central Valley), Maipú comprises a high concentration of bodegas that are known for producing some of Argentina’s finest Malbecs from the region’s oldest vines. A thirty-minute drive southeast of Mendoza’s city center, Maipú is also a good place to sample other red varietals (including Cabernet Sauvignon, Tempranillo, and Syrah) in addition to Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Chenin, Torrontes and Viognier.

If you step into the Maipu cab be sure to ask the driver whether he’s from Chile or Argentina.  But it’s not out of the realm of possibility that he’ll have ties to both.  For instance, I’m from Waimea on the big island.  My wife (M-Wife) is from Waimea, Kaua’i.  Yeah, it’s cute – we’re both from the same, but different, town. Maybe Maipu Cab’s driver has a similar (read as: romantic) story.

M-Wife took this picture of Fay Cab.  The obvious reason for the name (owner’s name is Fay) is boring.  Foxtrot Alpha Yankee?  That’s almost a sentence.  Fay is one letter away from “Gay” as well as “Fag.”  Thankfully, South Park has stripped both of those words of their ability to slur homosexuals, for instance see here – Vroom Vrooom Vroom Vroom.  Fag Cab would be the cab of choice for individuals with obnoxiously loud motorcycles. (If you don’t get that, click the link in the previous sentence).  Personally I’d love to see “Gay Cab.”  Gay Cab would confident in its sexuality, whatever that is, and is a good reference to better days when people self described as gay because they were happy.  Or it’d be because the cab driver is a Marvin Gaye fan, but had to drop the “e” to avoid a copyright / trademark infringement.

Pila began with this seemingly benign quote:

I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world because they’d never expect it. — Jack Handey

Mike replied:

They call that place Canada.

Niall liked that:

@Michael: brilliant. just brilliant.

All links below via Goodshit, the brilliant NSFW website I brave every  day (and twice on Sundays)  in search of interesting information.

While life continues here in Disneyland the United States of America, Iranians look death in the face while protesting for limited measures of democracy and liberty that’d make me go Galt.

And in other news, rural Chinese possess almost nothing while surviving in grim circumstances.Oh, and China’s treatment of its citizens make Gitmo look like fun.

Back to Disneyland now.  This just in – Jimi Hendrix was awesome.

I feel sad for people who have to judge Jimi Hendrix on the basis of recordings and film alone; because in the flesh he was so extraordinary. He had a kind of alchemist’s ability; when he was on the stage, he changed. He physically changed. He became incredibly graceful and beautiful. It wasn’t just people taking LSD, though that was going on, there’s no question. But he had a power that almost sobered you up if you were on an acid trip. He was bigger than LSD. What he played was fucking loud but also incredibly lyrical and expert.

We’re fortunate to be able to research the important stuff, such as establishing the common sparrow as the world’s most promiscuous bird.  Really.

This bit is fascinating, and upsetting – drone warriors suffer more war related stress and trauma than soldiers in the combat theatre.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: One drone pilot told SPIEGEL ONLINE that they suffer from just as much stress and trauma.

Singer: Yes, all this doesn’t mean we’re not seeing all sorts of new stressers. In the beginning we feared that drones may make the operators not really care about what they’re doing. But the opposite has turned out to be true. They may almost care too much. We’re seeing higher levels of combat stress among remote units than among some units in Afghanistan. We found significantly increased fatigue, emotional exhaustion and burnout. Drone operators are more likely to suffer impaired domestic relationships, too.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What explains this stress?

Singer: There are different theories as to why. Traditional bomber pilots don’t see their targets. A remote operator sees the target up close, he sees what happens to it during the explosion and the aftermath. You’re further away physically but you see more. Also, the drone war takes place 24/7, 365 days a year. The war doesn’t stop on Christmas. It’s like being a fireman when there’s a fire every single day, day after day after day. That’s emotionally and physically taxing. On top of that, many units are understaffed.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Don’t drone operators have it easier, commuting home every day?

Singer: No, there’s a disconnect. You’re at war, and two minutes later you’re changing your brain and you think about football practice with your kids. Drone units don’t show as much cohesion as traditional units. The whole unit used to share the emotional experience. Now there’s no “band of brothers” anymore.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: But isn’t the fact that drone operators are physically safe from war the whole point? Doesn’t that ease combat stress?

Singer: Not at all. I once talked to an Air Force sergeant who flew drones. She told me how they watched US soldiers on the ground being killed. They could only circle above and watch. There was nothing more they could do.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Which consequences does the drone war have for the nations that lead them?

Singer: War used to be a very serious decision. Now we don’t even declare war anymore. We don’t pay war taxes, we don’t buy war bonds. Now we can carry it out without having to deal with some of the consequences of sending our sons and daughters into harm’s way. It also changes the way politicians think about war. You already have society’s barriers against war dropping, and now you have a technology that takes the barriers to the ground.

You’d think the country that brought us the Kama Sutra would have more interesting information to publish than this boring drivel about finding sexual position best suited for you.

Technically speaking, sex is a weird peculiar thing: we have two people sitting in positions that seem to defy the gravitational laws, puffing and moving rapidly while they are exchanging fluids. Sex can, in fact, become fatiguing and unpleasant as it equally is satisfying and beneficial.

Really, India, sex is weird and peculiar?  I think it’s awesome.  I wish you, however, that you will describe the positions that “defy the gravitational laws.”  Yes, that is a challenge to you, Times of India . . .

Finally, Meet the Finn that would “send Rambo to the cleaners.”

Interesting read here:

It’s pretty clear that obesity is an enormous problem in the U.S., but apparently the old favorites NutriSystem (NTSI) and Weight Watchers (WTW) may not be the best way to play this unfortunate trend. While drug makerssearch for new obesity treatments to find a quicker fix, Altucher found an interesting corollary play related to sleep apnea in the form of ResMed(RMD). According to SleepEducation.com, there is a strong relationship between weight and obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), with OSA being most common in obese, middle-aged men. ResMed makes diagnostic and treatment equipment for sleep-disordered breathing. At 27x trailing/16x forward EPS, there is a lot of growth priced in to RMD shares. His other obesity related idea is small cap Synovis Life Technologies (SYNO) which makes biomaterial surgical staples and related products that are used in, among other procedures, gastric bypass surgery. I wonder how New York Governor Patterson’s proposed soda tax fits into this thesis!

The article also discusses some of the more well known demographic gold mines, such as baby boomers, and lesser known – pawn shops.

Some good reads here on whether too much, or a lack of, regulation was the proximate cause of the recent financial crisis.  First, a “short” paper (hey, 27 pages of economic analysis seems short after penning an 89 page scholarly legal article) titled The Global Financial Crisis and the Efficient Market Hypothesis: What Have We Learned?

The sharp economic downturn and turmoil in the financial markets, commonly referred to as the “global financial crisis,” has spawned an impressive outpouring of blame. The efficient market hypothesis – the idea that competitive financial markets ruthlessly exploit all available information when setting security prices – has been singled out for particular attention. Like all good theories, market efficiency has major limitations, even though it continues to be the source of important and enduring insights. Despite the theory’s undoubted limitations, the claim that it is responsible for the current worldwide crisis seems wildly exaggerated. This essay discusses many of those claims. These include claims that belief in the notion of market efficiency was responsible for an asset bubble, for investment practitioners miscalculating risks, and for regulators worldwide falling asleep at the switch. Other claims are that the collapse of Lehman Bros. and other large financial institutions implies market inefficiency, and that an efficient market would have predicted the crash. These claims are without merit. Despite the evidence of widespread anomalies and the advent of behavioral finance, we continue to follow practices that assume efficient pricing.

Here’s commentary on the article, via Instapundit.  Excerpt below, but read the whole thing.

Otherwise, the characterization of the role of the EMH in the crisis falls short of the mark. If regulators had been true believers in efficiency, they would have been considerably more skeptical about some of the consistently high returns being reported by various financial institutions. If the capital market is fiercely competitive, there is a good chance that high returns are attributable to high leverage, high risk, inside information, or dishonest accounting. True believers in efficiency would have looked more closely at the leverage and risk-taking positions of Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns, AIG, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and banks and investment banks generally. They might have questioned the source of the trading profits of hedge funds like Galleon, and discovered some using inside information.And they would have been exceptionally skeptical of the surreally high and stable returns reported over an extended period by Bernie Madoff.

Nifty argument. The problem wasn’t that regulators believed too much in EMH. The problem was that they didn’t believe it enough!

Whenever the mainstream media or government make a concerted effort to make a mountain out of what no one is sure isn’t still a molehill I’m skeptical.  When it appears the mainstream media and government collude to both push the same viewpoint I’m even more skeptical. And when government has a vested financial and political interest in viewpoint they’re pushing my tendency is to go contrarian.

With regard to the Toyota situation, government has a significant vested interest (60% stake) in General Motors, a one of Toyota’s primary competitors.  As such, government possesses a significant financial interest in diminishing Toyota’s brand value and market share, since doing so gives GM a competitive advantage. Moreover, the current Congress and administration possess a strong political interest in boosting GM’s stock and diminishing Toyota’s stock - GM’s workers are heavily unionized and located mostly in blue states while Toyota’s US workers are not unionized, and located largely in red states.

This isn’t to say there is no plausible basis (see here, too) for the Toyota recall, or Congress calling hearings on the matter.  Indeed, last week I drove past the location of a deadly, throttle-gone-wild Toyota crash near Sante, San Diego.  But it is to say that government’s monetary and political interests in seeing Toyota diminished raises an extraordinary conflict of interest. By contrast, I’m unaware of any such conflict of interest during the Firestone tires recall a few years ago. Government’s conflict of interest in the Toyota recall deserves strict scrutiny, such as this (hat tip to Reason for the link):

You know those unseen and undetectable gremlins that hide in Toyota’s electronic throttle controls? Turns out they have it in for elderly drivers. The Los Angeles Times has compiled a list of 56 fatal incidents over 19 years purportedly involving unintended Toyota acceleration and…the age of the driver can be publicly ascertained in a little more than half the instances. That median age turns out to be 60 — that is to say, half the drivers were that old or older. By contrast, only 16 percent of general auto fatalities in 2008 occurred with a driver 60 or older behind the wheel. Whatever is causing Avalons, Highlanders, and Tundras to misbehave is largely bypassing drivers in their twenties and thirties and instead homing in on drivers old enough to remember the Eisenhower era.

With copycat-claims against Toyota on the rise, and no doubt hordes of trial lawyers preparing class action suits, there is ample basis for skepticism.

Great read here, via Goodshit. Yes, I read that NSFW site for you every day so you can reap the fruits of Goodshit’s labor. For example, this link to a unique history of the middle east seen through modern Egypt’s eyes.

October 6, 1981, was meant to be a day of celebration in Egypt. It marked the anniversary of Egypt’s grandest moment of victory in three Arab-Israeli conflicts, when the country’s underdog army thrust across the Suez Canal in the opening days of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and sent Israeli troops reeling in retreat. On a cool, cloudless morning, the Cairo stadium was packed with Egyptian families that had come to see the military strut its hardware. On the reviewing stand, President Anwar el-Sadat, the war’s architect, watched with satisfaction as men and machines paraded before him. I was nearby, a newly arrived foreign correspondent.

Suddenly, one of the army trucks halted directly in front of the reviewing stand just as six Mirage jets roared overhead in an acrobatic performance, painting the sky with long trails of red, yellow, purple, and green smoke. Sadat stood up, apparently preparing to exchange salutes with yet another contingent of Egyptian troops. He made himself a perfect target for four Islamist assassins who jumped from the truck, stormed the podium, and riddled his body with bullets.

As the killers continued for what seemed an eternity to spray the stand with their deadly fire, I considered for an instant whether to hit the ground and risk being trampled to death by panicked spectators or remain afoot and risk taking a stray bullet. Instinct told me to stay on my feet, and my sense of journalistic duty impelled me to go find out whether Sadat was alive or dead.

I wove my way through the fleeing crowd and managed to reach the podium. It was pandemonium. Wild- eyed Egyptian security men were running every which way, trying to apprehend the assassins and attend to the scores of foreign and local dignitaries present, seven of whom lay dead or dying. The utter chaos allowed me to get close enough to witness another unforgettable scene: Vice President Hosni Mubarak emerging from beneath a pile of chairs security men had thrown helter- skelter over him for protection. He was brushing dirt off his peaked military cap, which had been pierced by a bullet.

Mubarak, lucky to be alive, pulled himself together admirably that day to take over leadership of the shaken Nile River nation. But Egypt and the rest of the Arab world would never be the same. For centuries, Egypt had prided itself on being the center of that world. Seat of a 5,000- year- old civilization that at times had thought of itself as umm idduniya, “mother of the world, ” it was the most populous and economically and militarily powerful Arab state, a center of culture and learning that supplied physicians, imams, and technical experts to other Arab nations. Under Sadat and his predecessor, the pan- Arab hero Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–70), Egypt had reasserted its primacy as the Arabs broke free of colonial rule after World War II and entered an era of soaring hopes. Sadat had even begun some pioneering reforms— allowing opposition political parties, implementing market- oriented economic changes— that might have rippled through the Arab world had he lived. Though many reviled him for signing a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, Egypt remained the most dynamic force in Arab affairs.

Mubarak’s accession would bring an abrupt end to Egypt’s preeminence. Cautious and unimaginative, the former air force commander has never in his 29-year reign come close to filling the shoes of his predecessors. Afflicted by health problems, he will turn 82 in May and is not expected to reign much longer. Cairo is awash with speculation about who will replace him. Its discontented intelligentsia is debating intensely whether Egypt any longer has the wherewithal, or vision, to shape Arab policies toward an immovable Israel, a belligerent Iran, fractious Palestinians, or an imposing America, much less grapple with the Islamist challenge to secular governments.

During the Mubarak years, other voices and centers have arisen, particularly on the western shores of the Persian Gulf. There, monarchies once thought quaint relics of Arab history— including Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates—have taken on new life. The accumulation of massive oil wealth in the hands of kings and emirs amid soaring demand and prices over the past few decades has given birth to a far more diverse and multipolar Arab world. It has made possible innovations in domestic and foreign policy and supplied vast sums for the building of glittering, hypermodern “global cities” that lure Western and Asian money, business, and tourists away from Cairo.

Read the whole thing.

I’ m writing a monthly column for MMAR Reader, the online Mixed Martial Arts magazine for MMARecruiter.com.  (You can read the debut issue here.)  While MMA doesn’t occupy a lot of bandwith here at DuelingBarstools, I hope you enjoy last months’ column.

Talking Points: Making A Case for Mixed Martial Arts

Thankfully the days of war hero-Senators castigating mixed martial arts as human cockfighting are over.  This article by Donald F. Walter provides a thorough explanation as to why.  MMA is tracking upward on an explosive growth curve, yet mainstream acceptability eludes the sport of MMA and individual mixed martial artists.  For instance, while former college and NFL stars turned public officials, such as Peter Boulware and Heath Shuler, proudly list their football careers on their respective government biographies, Matt Lindland’s opponent for the Oregon State House stereotyped Lindland as a pit-fighting brute because of his participation in MMA.  Perhaps in hopes of avoiding similar – and unfounded – smear tactics Oregon State House hopeful Chael Sonnen, who is known to freely share his mind, has kept his elite status as a top UFC middleweight contender out of the political conversation.  Clearly a significant portion of the populace negatively perceives MMA and its brightest stars.  (The Big Island of Hawai’i, whose mayor recently proclaimed October 27 as “BJ Penn Day,” is a notable exception to this rule.)

I have no quibble with individuals who lack interest in MMA or more generally contact sports.  They aren’t for everyone.  I take issue, however, with individuals who denounce MMA as barbaric while heartily cheering for other similarly violent sports.  Indeed, America’s most popular sport, American Football, which may one day replace Baseball as the national pastime, is at least as violent as MMA.

Football is a brutal and increasingly violent game in which career threatening bodily injuries are routine, several positions encourage morbid obesity, and life threatening spinal, and cognitive injuries are an acceptable risk to players and fans alike.  A read through this message board discussing a proposed NFL rule change (eliminating the three point stance) designed to increase quarterback player safety reveals increased safety measures are often unpopular for fear such measures will reduce the level of carnage tarnish the purity of the game.

Malcom Gladwell asserts that football fans are at fault for popularizing such a violent game.  In response, a blogger accuses Gladwell of “judgment and inquiry for [anti-football] propaganda” and denying that players are capable of understanding and rationalizing football’s inherent risks.  An alternative explanation of football’s enduring popularity (see pages 71-74) may be that during the late nineteenth century football’s inherent violence, as well as the discipline necessary to play such a rule driven and organized game, played an important role in developing boys into men of strength and character.

I know of no human culture that didn’t develop similar contests, or reward physical acts of bravery, strength, and courage, in order to develop its youth.  To do so is human, arguably necessary, and today optional.  In any case, and either in spite or because of football’s violent nature, 138 million Americans, including 58 million women, self describe as NFL fans.  If the violence, injury, and risk-reward inherent in football, hockey, boxing, and martial arts, is itself barbaric then those sports’ fans are barbarians.

Few would admit to barbarianism, however, and as a result a popular view is to draw a distinction between MMA violence and sport, including football and boxing.  Several commentators, see here and here, have factually debunked the idea that the Unified Rules governing sanctioned mixed martial arts lacks sufficient restrictions and penalties for excessive acts of force as compared to other contact sports. Or that MMA’s small gloves increase brain trauma as compared to boxing gloves. And that mixed martial artists face either a higher rate of injury or are prone to more catastrophic injuries than other mainstream contact sports, especially football.

What repulses the average non-MMA-but-football-loving-fan is the lack of a helmet, facemask, or bulbous glove, which is ignorantly perceived as protection rather than tools to enhance violence.  MMA forces viewers to observe in one theater the beautiful, but at times brutal, reality of contact sport performed by skilled martial artists who combine any number of disciplines into a single, unique human weapon.  There is glory, blood, victory, and defeat.  MMA is acutely human because you see it.  It is honest, and I believe it is good.  It reflects humanity’s past, present, and future.  And if MMA is not good, it is not good because it is human, not because you see it.

Football fans see only glimpses of their game’s humanity, for it is muted by facemasks, helmets, and piles of bodies, the fact that twenty-two players occupy the field, and relatively distant cameras.  I find it a peculiar worldview that cherishes a game whose most poignant moment is a stretcher carting a limp player off the field, typically with helmet on, while refusing to tolerate the humanity mixed martial arts reveals.  To each his own.  I enjoy football as well as MMA, but the latter more because there is no filter, and no off-season to the sport’s development, intrigue, and sporting action.

When I retire to my library (har har, I live in a shoebox) for a nightcap tonight I’ll be reading these articles:

The Paranoid Center: How the panic over right-wing violence is being used to marginalize peaceful dissent. (Reason)

‘Chiefs, Thieves, and Priests’: Science writer Matt Ridley on the causes of poverty and prosperity. (Reason)

My Inflation Nightmare. (The Atlantic)

Supersonic Jump, from 23 miles in the air. (Old Gray Mare)

And because I can’t get enough Gary Johnson, You cut spending . . . (Reason)

Via Reason, who notes that “RomneyCare is probably not a very good model for federal health care reform:”

[Massachusetts] Treasurer Timothy P. Cahill – a former Democrat running as an independent for governor – said the local [health care] plan enacted in 2006 has succeeded only because of huge subsidies and favorable regulatory changes from the federal government.

“Who, exactly, is going to bail out the federal government if this [Mass-Care] plan goes national?” he asked.

And there you have it – nominee (and early front runner) for the rhetorical question of the year.  If you don’t think this question is rhetorical, I don’t know what to tell you, other than I’ll likely find your answer implausible. But I’m willing to hear you out.

Cahill made his remarks after Gov. Deval L. Patrick, a Democrat, accused him and Republican gubernatorial candidate Charles D. Baker of being silent amid the state and national health care debates.

Cahill cited quotations in which he has called for the state to abandon its plan, and for the federal government not to match it.

He also gave reporters a copy of a recent state ledger sheet, showing the state’s Medicaid program ballooning from $7.5 billion to a projected $9.2 billion since the plan was adopted. Meanwhile, of the 407,000 newly insured, only 32 percent paid for private insurance wholly by themselves.

The full article is here.

First, a new website called “Alternative Right,” which Steve Sailer describes as “flashy,” and DuelingBarstools Pugilist in Chief Pila derides as elitist.  They’re both right.  The website is well done, and its self description is arguably snooty: “an online magazine of radical traditionalism. As such, it marks an attempt to forge a new intellectual right-wing that is independent and outside the “conservative” establishment.”   I suppose the implication is that the current conservative establishment is partisan and unintelligent.  I cannot disagree with that statement.

I’m gonna give Alt-Right a bit more time, if for no other reason than the intelligent right needs forum for urban, educated elitist snobs as well as more practical individuals such as Pila, Instapunk, theDialecticalPlayer, and Goodshit.  Another reason to give Alt-Right a chance is that they have a blog dedicated to Human Biodiversity (an uncomfortable reality to which our policy makers are intentionally oblivious – to our detriment) and some interesting commentary, such as this post on Robert A. Taft.

Next, On Reading Hayek: LL&L and the new statement of liberal principles of justice and political economy.

Everything by Michael Yon and Michael Totten.

At the Beacon Blog, Mitt Romney willingly makes himself cannon fodder:

Good ole Mitt “has urged the Tea Party leaders not to be quite so independent minded”, cautioning them not to mount direct electoral challenges outside the GOP establishment. I guess Romney will be running for President on the Anti-Change platform, against Obama’s “Really, I mean it this time Change” platform. Decisions, decisions.

Emphasis added, as well as hearty laughter.

Instapunk analyzes Jesus Television.

Von Mises remembers James Madison, the father of the Constitution, on his birthday.  Read the whole thing, it includes some rich, and timely, Madison quotes.

James Madison, coauthor of the Federalist Papers, defender of the Constitution before the Virginia ratifying convention, and sponsor of the Bill of Rights in the House of Representatives, was the preeminent interpreter of the Constitution for 50 years. He left no doubt that its role was to clearly enumerate the limited powers given to the federal government and to defend Americans from “the first experiment on our liberties” by its hand.

Half Sigma has a way with words. Here’s his one sentence lede for an article that made the blog-rounds last week, basically reporting that the president of the Detroit School Board is nearly illiterate.

The president of the Detroit school board is shockingly stupid.

Oh, and since I like cabs, here’s Half Sigma on Cab Drivers who cheat.

Joe Rogan’s guest blog on GQ, a magazine I unsubscribed from during the 2008 election season.  Joe is tackling the issue of how we will all die . . .

It’s everywhere you look online; from the collapse of the dollar, to terrorism, to the reports of thousands of earth quakes occurring in Yellowstone National Park threatening to ignite the 600 kilometer wide super- volcano that erupts every 600,000 to 800,000 years and kills almost everything on the continent.

Last time that happened? 600,000 years ago.

Everywhere you look it’s asteroids, and paranoids, and BAD AIDS. Just as a social engineering tool the internet porn is an incredibly important factor in keeping people docile. People argue that porn creates violence, but I usually think it’s because unlike me, they’ve probably never run into someone desperately searching for something to jerk off too. You don’t want to see that, trust me.

The biggest and most popular meme of doom online without a doubt is the end of the world date of December 21st, 2012. There are thousands of websites dedicated to it, as well as hundreds of books, and even one really retarded blockbuster movie. It wasn’t even really a movie as much as it was a bunch of people randomly talking inserted into a showcase of modern computer technology creating insane fake disaster scenes

And finally, Reason TV that is always good for you:

And Part II: