The Other McCain

by Smitty

Amid the sending up of the idiot Lefty ‘Day of Rage’ noise, Dana Loesch drops this little YouTube grenade:

by Smitty

Manland doesn’t have any design flaws, to my eye, (emphasis mine):

An Ikea store in Sydney, Australia, has either set retail shopping forward by three decades or set gender equality back by three decades—you decide: they’re testing out Manland, which is, as one local newscaster describes it, “basically a creche for husbands and boyfriends with short retail attention spans, a place to hang out while their wives and girlfriends run the aisles of Ikea.” Think ultimate man-cave stuff such as video games, foosball tables, free hot dogs, and pinball machines. (Apparently reading books is not encouraged in Manland!) As with Ikea’s childcare creche, women dropping off their husbands and boyfriends are given a buzzer. “After 30 minutes, the buzzer goes off, it reminds you that you have to come pick up your man or else, you know, we may have to all the authorities,” explains one Ikea sales associate. Clearly there are a number of loopholes in this whole program, not the least being the fact that it overlooks gay couples.

It’s not a loophole; it’s a design choice. Ikea is about making money, silly rabbit, not advancing a social agenda. The only business case for advancing a social agenda is that it somehow make money. It’s a furniture store, not a gay bar, Sarah: know the difference.

Update: linked at Three Beers Later.

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.

*Will I burn for that link? Probably.