Category: Uncategorized

by Smitty

Maybe he’s explained a way around Pournelle somewhere. I should like to see such an explanation in the context of this:

Ultimately we must either ration health care (death panels and all) or restructure it top to bottom so that it is able to deliver the same or, preferably, much higher levels of care much less expensively. Proponents of a single payer health care system (basically, the kind many European countries and Canada have where the government collects premiums for everyone, sets prices, and pays bills) argue that it is cheaper than our current hybrid (and grossly inefficient and excessively) pricey system.

I agree with the single payer crowd there, but a single payer system only really makes sense under two conditions. The first, as the Spanish are discovering in a very unpleasant way, is that single payer only works if the single payer has plenty of money. If you count on the government to cover your health care, and the cost of health care bankrupts your government so that the health care system goes down as well, it’s hard to call that a success.

The second problem is related to it: single payer would be more feasible if the technology of health care has frozen. That is, if we already knew the best way to treat all diseases, manage hospitals, divide up responsibilities between different types of health care professionals and so on, a single payer approach might make sense.

The Iron Law of Bureaucracy, just to rephrase it for fun, says that homo bureaucratus lacks predators. That is, for all these metrosexual creeps may do nothing useful to add to the population of the country, they sure now how to make an org chart ‘splode.

One huge question here, pertaining to health care and everything else, is: ‘How in the world are we offering feedback to stabilize the size of the bureaucracy and trim it?’ Our first task on the path to sanity is to disabuse ourselves of the notion that the federal government should manage individual health. Yes, some in our society continue to want to make that mistake, but that doesn’t make it any less bloody-minded.

by Smitty

Daily Pundit saw it, and zeroed in on the same section I did, but let me slice it differently, emphasis mine:

It is, at bottom, an argument against the 20th century — specifically against the notion that the Constitution envisions and empowers a muscular federal government able to ensure that its citizens have clean air, healthy food and safe workplaces.

To grasp the radical nature of the constitutional conservative approach, consider the record of every Republican president since the New Deal.

In the first bold place, Marcus, you’re doing nothing more than echoing FDR. In essentially latching onto a Second Bill of Rights, which has never properly been ratified, you tacitly admit you’ve blown by Article V. Way to go.

See, the Constitution precedes the Nude Eel*. If you wanted to show that Constitutional conservatives are radical, you should show their records against the original document, not FyoDoR’s Folly.

Can I recommend some reading to you? Amar’s books on the Constitution and Bill of Rights are actually some decent scholarship. You should read them, Ruth. They might help you look less silly in print.

And these Constitutional Progressives. Workin’ hard, trying to paper over the fact that FDR pulled a masterful Article V end-around. Screw them, their crappy ideas, and the lame web server to which the ideas were published. In its way, it is amusing to see Progressives tacitly admit that they’ve really screwed up, lost the public debate, and now have to work to re-frame the debate. Seventy years late, $14+ trillion short, ya jackwagons.

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*Will I burn for that link? Probably.

by Smitty (h/t Jihad Watch)

In the Jerusalem Post:

CAIRO – Egypt’s Prime Minister Essam Sharaf said a peace deal with Israel was not “sacred” and could be changed for the benefit of peace or the region.

His comments, made in an interview with a Turkish television channel and broadcast on state television, were the strongest yet by the new government which took over after president Hosni Mubarak was overthrown in February.

“The Camp David agreement is not a sacred thing and is always open to discussion with what would benefit the region and the case of fair peace … and we could make a change if needed,” he said in the interview.

One wonders exactly what defects Sharaf is referring to in this 30+ year-old agreement. Maybe some exist, or conditions have shifted in those decades that merit some follow-on talks.

However, anyone who has been paying attention to the shenanigans involving pretty much every single one of Israels neighbors in the last couple of years has got to look at this and wonder, what, if any, good can come from Sharaf.

Interesting times.

by Smitty (via PJ)

Dear old Cynthia,

“Our president is committing war crimes,” McKinney, an unapologetic supporter of departed Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, told the crowd. “What does that make him? A war criminal.”

At another point in her speech, she has this to say about Obama: “If you’re the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, then make peace.”

See, Cynthia:

• Moammar Gadhafi is a Bad Man. You mark yourself a Bad Woman, or a Foolish Woman, to support such.
• Engaging in an act of war is not, itself, criminal. If you have specific evidence, Cynthia, you need to get that into a court. Merely ‘crying wolf’ about criminal acts would increase the deflection on your beclownment meter, if you weren’t already torquing the thing into a crescent.
• The Nobel Peace Prize ceased to be meaningful around the time Yassir Arafat received his. Do you still think it meaningful, or that BHO is somehow deserving thereof?

Poor, confused ‘Tripoli’ (Trippy) Cynthia. Is she the black ‘Hanoi’ Jane Fonda?

by Smitty

Drudge’s headline puts the question front and center:But is this phenomenon just Jewish? Is there any constiuency that still thinks the dampness on their back is rain?

Without drawing any line connecting the dots between this century and the last, one wonders to what degree the leadership of other communities, as a sin of omission, let ‘things’ go too far?

Enough of that. Let us be positive. The citizens of the U.S. are in at least the early stages of coming to grips with the wreckage of Progressivism. The ones arguing against liberty are fairly well-known crapflooders. We just have to be willing to return government to its proper, Constitutional role of managing events occuring above State level (i.e. federal), and emancipate the people from the Progressive noose about the neck, hand in the wallet, crap in the culture. Yes, there is some cruft that’s built up during the decades of federal over-reach, but: is it self-justifying? Can we look at that debt and say it was worth it? Does a tradition of economic folly since FDR somehow lock us into perpetuating the folly?

These are the sorts of things I hope go through the minds of the leaders of every constituency that supported BHO in ’08. Don’t let me do more than encourage you both to think and to vote.

Shifting the topic slightly, Zycher is worth quoting:

Class warfare is not pretty, and I see little evidence that it works politically, but there is a more fundamental issue that arises in the wake of the president’s ongoing demonization of millionaires, billionaires, oil companies, owners of private jets, ad infinitum. To wit: The constitution — the basis for the preservation of American liberty — is antidemocratic, that is, it is structured to defend unpopular minorities against the whims and passions of political majorities. No public official, far less the president of the United States, can campaign against unpopular groups that have broken no law, without undermining the fundamental principle that the rule of law shall prevail over political lynch mobs, and that the rights of the least popular or powerful are an essential component of the rights of all. This general point seems rather obvious, and I am surely not the first to make it. But I have not seen it elsewhere, perhaps because I have failed to look in the right places.

The other aspect of class warfare is that it runs contrary to the idea of private property. I’ve no interest in your wallet. I may be a little less materialistic about my wallet than some, but this is not an open invitation to pilferage. The Tenth Commandment about not coveting should answer the mail for those of any serious Judaism or Christianity, as far as I can tell.

by Smitty

Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert, in a nearly IowaHawkean bout of tee-hee-hee,

President Obama repeatedly asked members of Congress to pass the American Jobs Act last week. But when no Democrat filed Obama’s bill after he presented it to Congress, a conservative congressman swiped the name for his own legislation.

See, if you were to have somebody submit the legislation first, things like this may not happen. Alternative titles for the President’s legislation:

1. The Steamer, Formerly Known As The American Jobs Act
2. S^*t My Union Owner Says
3. @AttackWatch Bait

In related Texan news,
Whoops! Looks like I was scooped by The Lonely Conservative.

Oh, and the AttackWatch dead pool? It’s a late Friday afternoon data dump on the way to the bar.

Update: linked at Daily Pundit.

Update II: Surber-lanche!

by Smitty

Megan McArdle makes a point that I think I can clarify a bit:

The jobs that are being automated are the stable, well-paying jobs where you could settle in and know exactly what you’d be doing for years. As Arnold says, if you can define it, you can probably outline it specifically enough to outsource, either to a lower-wage worker somewhere else, or to a computer.

Restated, jobs that involve information management, especially in well-bounded cases, are readily re-stated in software.

So, knowing how to

• write code,
• administer information systems,
• do jobs that have a significant ‘real-world’ component (fixing cars),
• involve creativity,
• are not easily structured in code (customer service)

are likely to remain longer.

Interestingly, these decades into the information age, one tough nut to crack is picking over somebody else’s idea of an information system, when it comes to maintaining or re-engineering information systems. The Daily WTF is replete with examples.

Years ago, I was working on porting a client/server system to a web-enabled database. ASP against Oracle 8i, to date myself and hint at the fun it entailed. The application was hugely reporting-intensive. The old Project Manager had been retained as a consultant.

You tried to avoid being clever, but I was kind of backed into a corner. So I coded a rather smart .asp file that looked at the user’s request, and then did a lot of surgery to it before presenting something to the database for the query. A messy database schema sort of looked like the logical whole you would have thought it was.

Punchline: the old PM looks at the work, and tells me I have replaced 200+ explicit queries in the original client/server code. I heaved a sigh of relief, because this explained some of the odd column orderings of the reports, which detail I had no interest in capturing.

Back on topic, though, the Information Age has blown away vast swaths of the private sector, and is even now crushing the public sector. Private citizens just do not require the government, especially the federal government, managing their birth, housing, health, education, employment, and retirement. Private citizens do not need legions of civil servants reading email, shuffling from meeting to meeting, and emitting PowerPoint all day. This must stop.

Request to somebody with better data access: can we refer to civil service hires as ‘positions’, and private sector as ‘jobs’? I should like to see what the employment numbers look like without the invisible hand of Uncle Sam stirring the pot.

by Smitty

Via McCotter on Twitter, my other favorite blue state Republican, after the recently beclowned Pawlenty, is introducing legislation to stabilize Social Security:

The McCotter plan salvages both the Old Age and the Disability trust funds from that projected insolvency without reducing benefits, raising taxes, or increasing the age of retirement eligibility. Continue reading Can McCotter Survive Where Bush Found Himself Whacked? →