Monday, November 25. 2013
It is true. Student loans simply enable higher ed to raise costs. Economist Says Higher Ed Bubble Starting To Burst
Does higher ed produce a better product than it did 50 years ago? I very much doubt it.
Is it abuse of the system, or is it the Obama economy? As Disability Spending Surges, So Does Gov't Dependence
There was a time when anybody would be ashamed to take charity, and would knock themselves out to avoid it or to get out from it. The way some people talk nowadays, you're a chump if you don't take what you can. There is never gratitude towards the taxpaying neighbor. No Thank You notes for the charity.
People should never give up on engagement with life. Can you find dignity?
Sunday, November 24. 2013
Manias, Panics and ObamaCare Crashes - A reader's guide to the coming Affordable Care Act traumas.
A synopsis of what patients, hospitals and doctors have to look forward to, thanks to our moral and intellectual superiors who take pride and pleasure in forcing "our own good" down our throats.
Saturday, November 23. 2013
Let's give thanks to government this year for all of its benevolence:
Barack suggests we give thanks for obamacare at Thanksgiving
Bloomberg suggests we address gun control around the table.
Thanks for the handy social tips, geniuses. These are recommendations for intra-family mass murder.
Friday, November 22. 2013
Tesla electric cars look pretty cool. The owners of a Tesla (assuming it's an owner whose car didn't catch fire) love their cars and evangelize them.
I'm not sure I'm a Tesla guy. Nothing against the technology, but they are expensive to buy and maintain. They take too long to 'refuel'.
Regardless, these are cars that more or less sell themselves. So why in the world do they need to engage in false advertising and hyperbole? My father, a surgeon, never advertised even after the law was changed and he was allowed to. Why, I asked? His response was that good product and good service sells itself. His business was always strong. Sometimes, however, it pays to advertise if your product is very good. But it doesn't pay to create your own standards when you do it.
 It's official: Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich is Racist, Says Portland School Official
What about Fluffernutter?
Being a gentleman
No High School Diploma? No Problem: Here Are The Best Paying Jobs For You
The federal government's war on school choice
The War on Achievement
Sharpton Won't Apologize for Barneys Shakedown
Is the NY Times editorial board for the filibuster, or against it?
CEO: ‘When we go to the White House, we talk to people we wouldn’t hire.”
"Our check’s gonna come in the mail every month, and it’s gonna be on
time, and we get subsidized housing. We even get presents delivered for
our kids on Christmas. Why should I work?"
Living the reality of Santa Claus
PM Cameron: We need to get rid of all this green crap
ObamaCare Forced Mom Into Medicaid
Top Cancer Hospital Not Included on Obamacare Plans Sold in NY
Healthcare.gov can't tell consumers whether they can keep their doctors
Only a limited number of doctors and hospitals will be covered by insurance bought through the exchange. It doesn't mean you can't use them, but it's on your nickel. The Obamacare "system" seeks the cheapest "vendors."
Mead discusses The NY Times' turning against Obamacare:
Middle America isn’t frothing over Obamacare because we are a nation of racist policy wonks who did the math and hate the blacks. The public is angry first (as Edsall mostly seems to understand) because of the supremely infuriating blend of incompetent arrogance our Second Lincoln has brought to the greatest domestic challenge of his presidency. They are angry because an expensive and cumbersome new piece of social engineering looks badly engineered. But in the second place, they are angry because the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and its journalistic spear carriers in the MSM systematically misrepresented the nature of the new system.
Does Edsall or anybody else really think that Obamacare would have passed Congress if public opinion had understood back in 2010 that all those assurances about keeping your plan and your doctors were as bogus as the old line that the check is in the mail?
The UN and Israel: A History of Discrimination
Thursday, November 21. 2013
The US is not the Soviet Union. I am reaching my boiling point with this BS: The 5 Economic "Big Lies" The Government Is Telling You.
No doubt these lies are "for my own good," just like the Obamacare lies. I am sick of an overly-powerful federal government, and sick of the fawning respect it gets from the media. It disgusts me, this culture of branding and pop-culture, high-school, leg-tingling nonsense which has invaded government.
From a good post on Washington DC and it's over-importance and self-importance, Fifty Years after Dallas - In a TV cult like Kennedy’s, there is more than a whiff of Roman decadence.
The real difficulty is that the presidency has come to occupy too large a place in our individual psyches, even as the federal nation-state over which the president presides has come to occupy too large a place in our individual lives. The imperial presidency that had its beginnings in the administrations of the first Roosevelt and Wilson has grown up with the imperial state, a noxious weed that is only too likely to culminate in a kind of Caesarian first magistracy, an office very different from the one the Founders envisioned when they drafted the second article of the Constitution.
As the federal government grows ever more potent, local and regional culture diminish apace; we are left only with national power and the national sanctities. Kennedy, who made the slenderest of marks on the policy of the nation, left the greatest impression on its imaginative life. He had, indeed, an eye for the enchanting symbol. He approved the peculiar logo that is to this day blazoned on the presidential aircraft; he conceived the Medal of Freedom; he laid down the protocols for the pageantry of the modern state visit. What is more, he chose for his mate a brunette of excellent taste who turned the dowdy White House into the most stylish of 20th-century courts, and selected for his (most notable) concubine a platinum blonde who continues to haunt that dream-vision of an America in which Huck Finn, Abe Lincoln, and Betsy Ross (or some such mythical company) are forever laughing and swapping yarns on a raft on the Mississippi.
It is, alas, a spurious dream.
JFK was not much as a president, but he was a pre-Beatles pop-idol for the gals, and he enchanted the media. The only good thing about him was his basic conservatism. Rich and handsome, with good, expensive speech-writers. So what?
Wednesday, November 20. 2013
...it would be the 13th largest economy in the world.
Quite remarkable, really. It could be like Singapore or Hong Kong, or something, but much bigger, I guess. It is odd that such a thriving metropolis would elect a Commie mayor. Something in the water, maybe. Sure, it's expensive, but that's supply and demand. There is high demand to be here. Sometimes it feels like the whole world wants to move here, despite the living challenges and the fierce, if invigorating, competition.
I will ask one more time: "Why don't all the ardent Lefties who love living in this terrible, capitalistic, and thriving NYC move to Portland, Oregon? Better yet, Mexico City, Havana or Managua."
Tuesday, November 19. 2013
Sultan: The God of global warming
If You’ve Lost Country Music and College Football Fans…
Failed Left-Wing Policies Sinking Obama's Presidency
If the true history of
the West and Islam is being turned upside its head, what other
historical “orthodoxies” being peddled around as truth are also false?
The Cult of Outrage
Employment data was falsified prior to election
Capital gains: Spending on contracts and lobbying propels a wave of new wealth in D .C.
Obamacare vs. the Dutiful - Hard-working Americans might wonder, “Why bother?”
Marxist Sandinista Movement Could Maintain Permanent Control of Nicaragua - New constitutional amendments could put dictator in place
A tribute to Prince Charles, champion of anti-science, on his 65th birthday
Ireland Will Bulldoze 40 Vacant Housing Developments — Only 1,260 to Go
Monday, November 18. 2013
Sunday, November 17. 2013
Head Start is just one more useless, expensive federal boondoggle. It has a constituency, however, and nobody really wants to be "against the children." It was a failed and possibly destructive experiment which devolved into federal babysitting with unionized babysitters.
The wisdom of Reagan: "...a government program is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth!"
Image is h/t Moonbattery -
Saturday, November 16. 2013
Of course it is.
Government is, for some reason, exempt from fraud claims. Works nicely for our moral and intellectual superiors in Washington to be insulated from their consequences. A good gig for glib low-lifes.
 Norway Moves Against Circumcision
Genital mutilation. The Christian view of God does not demand that slicing and dicing but the Jewish view of God does, and the Muslim god requires it of both men and women. What's that all about? Sacrifice?
New Yorkers Paying Through The Nose for Electricity
Can't blame Con Ed. It's the taxes. Only the poor and the rich can afford NYC - and the struggling ambitious youth and new immigrants who will put up with anything to be part of the Big Time. The youth and the immigrants should not care about comfort.
Pope Francis corruption fury: Tie them to a rock and throw them in the sea
Big Ethanol’s bad week just got worse: EPA announces reduction to 2014 biofuels requirements
It's about time
Armed Robbery Spikes in California Gun Control Paradise
Duh. Everybody law-abiding becomes a helpless victim. It's open season on the law-abiding.
Lawmakers Urge Administration to Stop EPA Takeover of Ponds, Ditches, Streams
My ditches? We have plenty of them at the farm. Molon labe.
Dalrymple: I Have Seen the Future, and it Is Idiocy
Nothing new about government idiocy. Everybody knows that governments are idiots.
Niall Ferguson: Paul Krugman Has Gotten Nearly Everything Wrong,
And Yet This Has Only Provoked Further Arrogance, Self-Flattery, and
Sneering At Those Who Got It Right
Ugh!… Obama Bashes America Again – Says ‘The System’ Doesn’t Give People ‘A Fair Shot’
Like who? And what "system"? There is no "system." That's the beauty part.
Syrian Rebels: Hey, Sorry For Beheading The Wrong Person, Our Bad!
Driscoll: Befuddled Central Planner in Chief Discovers Complexity Of Real Life
The city of Bel Aire, Kansas must not have liked its plan…
Friday, November 15. 2013
At the WaPo.
Ya gotta laugh.
Thursday, November 14. 2013
 Try it again, Icarus - it will work this time. Obama today basically says "Never mind. Keep your old plan for one year until after the election next fall, then we go back to now."
That cannot be done. As this guy says, New Jersey Assn. of Health Underwriters, on the ‘Fix’: ‘This Is a New Insanity’.
Insurers have spent two years revising their plans to meet Obamacare legal requirements, erasing their old plans and creating new ones with new pricing and new, expanded coverages (in many cases) and new deductibles. Not to mention 20,000 pages of government regulations to try to understand. Thus we had, today, yet another phony false promise which, as I understand it, is not even consistent with the law even if it could be done.
You break it, you own it.
Our government moral and intellectual superiors have done it once again. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, but hubris exists as does Nemesis, even today. Good Lord, save us from others with good intentions towards us.
We at Maggie's HQ are lucky. Our very cheap $10,000 deductible family policy didn't change at all, so "we can keep it." "Allowed" to keep it? Well, thanks, geniuses. I bought that, my choice. Our IQ is over 100 (if you add Mrs. BD's IQ in there), so we aren't stupid. Am I allowed to keep my car too? Or is it "substandard"? It gets me to Dunkin' Donuts every morning at 4:45 so it's good enough for me.
Yesterday we had a post by Bulldog about colleges as teen fun 'n sex resorts. By coincidence, this morning I chatted with a dad whose daughter is applying to college. She only willing to consider a college with a major football or basketball team, modern dorms with pool, sauna, and work-out room, and which offers a major in pre-school education. Plus she wants to go out of state to "be independent."
Would "the college experience" cost any more or less without the "education"?
She has high grades but mediocre SAT scores. Clearly the slick college marketing has captured her attention. She wants to try out for cheerleader.
I've been reading Edmund Wilson's A Prelude: Landscapes, Characters & Conversations from the Earlier Years of My Life. Wilson had the real, old-time "college experience," investing himself in a rigorous and vigorous life of the mind at prep school and at Princeton (advanced math, Greek, Latin, French, and his own literary and intellectual pursuits and interests on the side) while inhabiting spartan quarters and making many lifelong relationships.
He writes with such relaxed clarity and innocence that even his musings about aunts and uncles are a delight.
Just like I said yesterday, Here Comes The Real Government Takeover Of Health Care.
Just watch Congress.
Update: Obama Announces Obamacare ‘Fix’ That Doesn’t Fix Anything, Blames Insurance Companies
That is so lame. Congress will ignore him now because their livelihoods are at stake.
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A book: 
Heritage