Stones Cry Out

Haven’t done a new one of these in a while. We’ve got 2 new polls up (in addition to the perennial social network one).

You can answer how the Affordable Care Act has affected your insurance policy and your insurance costs. And feel free to rant or rave in the comment section of this post. How is this new law affecting you?

During this evening, I’m going to be doing a long-overdue upgrade of the WordPress software that runs this blog. While that’s happening, there’s no telling what you might see here. But on the other side of this, you’ll see a slightly different-looking SCO, as well as a more secure one (which is the primary reason I’m doing this).

Update: The update is complete. The look of the site may change a bit as I do some tweaking, and you may see more on the sidebar as I play around a bit. Now that we’re current, there are new features and plugins that become available, so I may be trying some out for a spin.

Day off yesterday, but work slammed in during the evening … and no workout no posting.

1. By whose standard is “it crappy”. Not yours, theirs.
2. Liberal bias and media.
3. You won’t lose your doctor, oh, wait .. she did.
4. Ms Ensler’s little play rebounds.
5. Unregulated. Alas, there is no middle road. I’d suggest for all drugs and herbs, regulation and certification be voluntary. The cost of regulation would be countered by the sales perk of noting that you are regulated. I’d continue with a rejoinder that the typical FDA drug regulation level (the highest level of regulation) indemnify you from tort.
6. My thought was “sounds like  a straw” .. which is probably not proper.
7. Tightly and loosely coupled and stability.
8. Guess I won’t be retiring to Alaska.
9. Global warming increasing violent weather … which if true means we aren’t experiencing global warming.
10. I do like her music.
11. A cricket race.
12. So, do you want to terrify your wife or girlfriend.
13. A book noted.
14. The IRS thang resurfaces.
15. Another book noted (which I bought and started reading). (HT)
16. And I’m ashamed to say I’ve never seen this movie.
17. Now there’s a plan … that hasn’t exactly considered elections.

The House Republicans have produced a devastating video. Keep doing this, guys.

Good, err, day.

1. For the Depends wearing vampire in your life.
2. And speaking of Romania …
3. Halloween.
4. Sad commentary.
5. Ms Sebellius apparently thinks that one of the most heavily regulated industries is unregulated. What I wonder does she think a heavily regulated industry might look like? Or how she might describe an actually unregulated market.
6. A big atom.
7. “Every good modeler” which I guess excludes the climate crowd and a lot of economists (at least who offer that the reason their model wasn’t followed was because in real life people acted irrationally).
8. Apparently not all Democrats are willing to deny Obama’s “if you like it you can keep it” wasn’t a lie.
9. Completely amazing. If you watch one thing on YouTube this week, make it this.
10. Heh.
11. I’ve described Obamacare as “moving around deck chairs on the Titanic” … here’s a similar analogy.
12. Optimism.
13. Cool.
14. Celebrating the grease pen, for myself I prefer ink … except when on airplanes. Ink pens do bad things when cabin pressure changes.
15. Bang tech.
16. Getting closer to the next car I might buy. I’m looking for 3 digit mpg before I pull the trigger.
17. College staff that needs to spend more time with simple arithmetic and expanding thirds as decimals.

Yeah, I know I’ve been harping on ObamaCare for quite a while now, but there’s just so much wrong with it. And I’m not speaking of the website. All I’ll say about that is that the oversight that was given to putting that together is the same oversight you’re likely to see on the program itself. How does that make you feel?

No, the big deal is the fact that what you were sold is not what you’re getting. You were given some promises about this that were repeated over and over.

Well of course no one was saying you’d lose your coverage. Obama couldn’t have sold this particular bill of goods if he’d been honest about it. What we’re getting are millions of Americans whose insurance companies had to—had to—cancel their policies because they didn’t meet ObamaCare’s standards. Yes, you can keep your plan, as long as the government says you can. And then you can’t. Ben Shapiro tweeted, “PolitiFact rated Obama’s ‘If you like your plan, you can keep it’ as ‘half true.’ Which half? ‘If you like it’?”

Oh, and you can keep your doctor, as long as he doesn’t leave the practice, or get laid off from the hospital. There are links in the show notes to stories about how the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is, for many Americans, not being very protective in this regard.

And the “affordable” part? Not so much, either. First there was the promise.

And now comes the reality. Supporters of ObamaCare, most notably, are getting acute cases of “sticker shock” as they find out how much their premiums will go up. A writer at the left-wing Daily Kos website was floored that his rates were doubling.

I never felt too good about how this was passed and what it entailed, but I figured if it saved Americans money, I could go along with it.

I don’t know what to think now. This appears, in my experience, to not be a reform for the people.

What am I missing?

Well for starters, you’re missing the reality of basic economics. And, as Dave Ramsey says, you’re missing basic math skills. What happening is that non-subsidized premiums are skyrocketing, but even if you get the subsidies, the deductibles are huge, reaching 10-12 thousand dollars. Sure the insurance may be affordable, but the health care is not.

But it’s not even so much the broken promises, so much as it is the fact that they knew, from the start of this awful bill, that they couldn’t keep it. Regulations within the bill itself give an estimate that 40 to 67 percent of customers who bought their own insurance will not be able to keep their policy. That’s an estimate right in the bill.

But Obama kept parroting that promise, and the media kept dutifully reporting it. From the “Now They Tell Us” Department, NBC News now reports this rather important bit of information, now that the bill has passed the Congress and the Supreme Court, and has started signing people up. And this startling revelation was worth a whopping 21 seconds on the NBC Nightly News.

Yeah, you can report on how the administration lied to us, but what about the journalistic malpractice in not doing this digging years ago? I’m looking at all of you, including CBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC and Fox.

Why is it that conservatives saws this coming but liberals didn’t? And why were conservatives who pointed this out called “racists” (and still are)? The truth would have benefited conservatives, liberals and independents. But blind partisanship won the day, and we’ve all been dragged into the same pit.

Indeed, dealing with the pre-existing conditions issue and lowering the cost of insurance are admirable goals. But the ObamaCare way of dealing with this is, overall, not the way to do it. The Republicans have had their proposal up on the web for all to see for years; a plan to fix the specific problems without upending the entire industry and forcing government’s choice on the individual.

The American Psychiatric Association has bowed to pressure again.

A shocking announcement made by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in its latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders caused an uproar among pro-family organizations and many others, as the APA states it now classifies pedophilia as a sexual orientation or preference instead of a disorder.

The APA is either becoming less about psychiatry and more about political correctness, or it’s too easily pushed around by interest groups. It’s classification of homosexuality as a “sexual orientation” gave a huge boost to mainstreaming of that behavior. Now what?

Update: New information. The American Family Association was right, that “sexual orientation” was used referring to pedphila. However, the American Psychiatric Association now says that was a mistake.

In response to media calls, including queries from Charisma News, the APA admitted there was an error in the DSM and announced plans to correct its manual to make it clear that it does not classify pedophilia as a sexual orientation.

Oops.

1. So. Lie?
2. Awesome for some, somewhat ridiculous for others.
3. There’s gold in them thar hills, which is the crux of the problem.
4. Privacy.
5. Skill and tech.
6. Progress, not.
7. It may be a design flaw, but it’s also a design requirement because the designers can’t allow the average person to see how much of a better break others … and how to game his own response to get the same break.
8. ‘Cause it’s important we screen Ms Merkel’s calls for her connections to terrorist cells.
9. No lions, not problem … apparently.
10. I sincerely hope that ‘s a typo. The quote “page 230 … of a speech” should never be seen. Nobody should talk for 230 pages straight. Ever.
11. In the real world, when experiment fails to be in accordance with theory, the theory is suspect. In the dismal science, it’s not so.
12. Yet another climate prediction (more and bigger large storms) falls by the wayside.
13. Someone fails to realize “rewards spending” is not the principal function of the bank.

Moving on (ward)

1. Gosh, the distinction of are you a “body with a soul” or a “soul with a body” seems to me a lot like is “that a particle or a wave”. Why isn’t both the default answer?
2. Obfuscating the young.
3. From an IT perspective, healthcare.gov.
4. Sounds like interface problems galore.
5. A core liberal fallacy along the lines of “if we all just talked about stuff and emphathized more” there’d never be war and conflict rears its head. Sorry, you can be as reasonable and empathetic as you want … Hitler (or Stalin or the modern equivalent) won’t.
6. Not understanding the whole public servant thing apparently.
7. Geesh, I’m in my 50s. I thought that would be my likely retirement age, my kids .. who knows. Probably 80 or 90, eh?
8. Cinema.
9. Heh.
10. An essay, the like of which we should probably see more. We fear death because we avoid it or is it the other way around?

Yo.

1. Cancer.
2. A chant at a sporting event.
3. Property rights and theology.
4. They don’t just try to turn elections by biasing their audits. They also lie and cheat.
5. Seems like the last sentence of the first paragraph says, “and you should ignore this paper.”
6. A problem for the left.
7. A year of living dangerously? Or a lifetime?
8. Small screen and large screen.
9. Another small screen suggestion here.
10. I’m not buying the freedom of speech thing. Lots of employment options limit speech. If you want a job with the restrictions then live by the restrictions.
11. Drones.
12. Heh.
13. Foreign policy reboot.
14. Naked! (SFW)

Nuff said, err, linked.

G/day

1. The (unintentional?) parody Obama created (or approved) returns to haunt.
2. ATF in the news.
3. My suggestion was indulgences.
4. Pedagogy.
5. An account of an Evangelical who crossed the Tiber.
6. Hollywood Austin, apparently channels Bronte instead of being faith to Jane.
7. Two women named Martha.
8. Is it an order of magnitude or just half of that?
9. More than what? Not a good description. Some of the more colorful terms from Heartbreak Ridge come to mind.
10. So, was Mr Obama ignorant or lying?
11. How about Mr Krugman?
12. Democrat (not) keeping it classy. That’s gotta be embarrassing.
13. Employment, actually when I read this my first thought was, those people with those figures, my wife has raised our kids for almost two decades. I’d say she’s been gainfully employed the entire time. Would they?
14. My curiosity is piqued.

• Those who think or write that the Washington DC football team’s name “Redskins” needs to be changed are the modern equivalent of those in the 13th century buying indulgences. Sporting team names are pretty far down on the actual list of problems in the daily life of indigenous Americans, drug abuse, alcoholism, poverty, suicide and so on. Those are issues much higher. Seems to me if you actual cared one whit about the native American you’d be acting on real issues not pretend ones. (for extra credit, cite last time you heard the term redskin used as a derogatory racial epithet. If you, like me, never have … gosh perhaps it isn’t actually a derogatory racial epithet).
• Continuing that theme, of modern indulgences. The Redskin thing is a racial/racism indulgence or guilt expiation.  It is interesting to note that those same people who are pretending at concern for Native Americans with the Redskin thing are the same ones punting for SSM … what sin is that indulgence paying for?
• On the other side of the coin (those against SSM), just remember “Jesus came to save sinners, of whom I am first.” Gays can’t destroy marriage as thoroughly as heterosexuals are doing right now.
• One hard fast rule of Internet punditry to remember, there is always, yes always, someone smarter than you, better informed than you, and better in whatever way you can imagine who disagrees rationally and logically with that strongly held opinion of yours. So the next time you call someone an idiot or stupid because they hold an opinion (especially political or religious) different than you, remember that.
• American politicians should play more Go than Chess. A paradigm intrinsic to Chess is forking, putting the opposition into a corner where he only has two bad choices. Go’s fundamental paradigm by contrast teaches you how to quickly recognize a losing position and moving elsewhere.

Good, well, whatever.

1. Peter principle in practice.
2. Baby Bunting Boo-boo. My view is that the Son will judge and he will judge rightly, which is enough for me. How he will judge? Dunno.
3. My faith teaches the Christian life is summed up in the goal of acquisition of the Holy Spirit … how that figures into this little phrase … I don’t know. Which is your first clue that it is heading in the wrong direction.
4. Geeky game for girls (and boys).
5. Making equines to elephants has nothing to do with these two notions of equality and opportunity.
6. Race.
7. Failure.
8. A demographic question.
9. Putting global warming in historical context.
10. A film.
11. Fast.
12. Markets in everything.
13. Geometry and the bulb.
14. Heh.

Here’s something I’ve not done in a while. Let’s once again play “Name That Quote”. This is the game where I read someone’s words verbatim, and you try to figure out who said it. If you’re playing along at home, give yourself 10 points for being correct, 5 points if you’re close (and I’ll let you determine what close is), and 1 point if you get the political party right. (Hey, it’s a 50-50 chance.) And for this quote, party is a factor. Here’s the quote:

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies.

There’s lots more, but you get the gist of it. Come to the website and see the show notes for a link to the full text of this rant against a debt limit increase.

I will give you a hint; this is not from the current debt limit fight. The speaker is someone who has been on both sides of the debate. That’s right, he was against the debt limit increase before he was for it. No, it’s not John Kerry, but if you thought that, you were close.

This quote, from March 16th, 2006, during a Republican presidential administration, is from the, then, junior Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama. Of course, now that he’s in the Oval Office, it’s just as reckless, and just as much a failure of leadership, to agree with what he said. You’re likely to get whiplash discovering what a difference an administration makes.

Good morning.

1. A non-cowboy (or a man who’s word is not trusted) in charge and consequences.
2. Faith and unbelief.
3. WWII memorial shutdowns and a photo-essay. Apparently manning barricades was less expensive than janitorial services. I’m not convinced.
4. Milk now costs more than gasoline, a facet to consider when reading this quote on price indices and inflation.
5. “Great news”.
6. Debt and the rolling pin.
7. Apparently “millenials” all either live in cities with awesome mass transit or are unemployed …  or perhaps only those polled.
8. A smarter, uhm, land-mine of sorts.
9. I’d like to hear those advocates of affirmative action in schooling explain the need for capping Asian student populations. ‘Cause you know, Asians run everything in this country, look at how they dominate everything in the beltway and wall street.
10. Rape. Meet not-Rape.