Flawed Logic: Insurance Edition

Indoctrinate them young

On September 8, 2009, history will be made. Will you be a part of it?

At 12:00 p.m., Eastern Time (ET), President Barack Obama will deliver a national address to the students of America. (Please note that this is a change from the originally scheduled time.) During this special address, the president will speak directly to the nation’s children and youth about persisting and succeeding in school. The president will challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning.

From the suggested student activities:

Why does President Obama want to speak with us today? How will he inspire us? How will he challenge us? What might he say? Do you remember any other historic moments when the president spoke to the nation?

and

What do you think the president wants us to do? Does the speech make you want to do anything? Are we able to do what President Obama is asking of us? What would you like to tell the president?

My email to the school:

Principal xxxxxx,

On Tuesday, September 8th, President Obama will be making an address directed at all public school students. Does [our school] intend to include this address in the students' schedule?

I think the kind of hero worship encouraged in the suggested student activities is inappropriate for impressionable young minds.

Sincerely,
princewally

Yes, I am starting out nice. Flies, vinegar and all that.

Update:

I got a response from the principal.

Mr. princewally,

This is not a mandated activity that the district is encouraging. The District's position is that this is not part of our curriculum and we therefore should not be giving time for it. However, some teachers can use portions for social studies connection.

The classroom teacher should be able to give you more information regarding their connection, if there is one.

Thank you,

xxxxxxx, Principal

Now, I'm just waiting on a response from my son's teacher, which should come after school hours.

The logical extension....

...of nanny-state policies.

The Children’s Secretary set out £400million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV super-vision in their own homes.

They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.

Private security guards will also be sent round to carry out home checks, while parents will be given help to combat drug and alcohol addiction.

Can anyone else hear the flushing sound?

Half

Some skewed survey shows 50% of the population supports socialized health care. Are they the 50% with no net tax burden? The 50% with no skin in the game?

Apparently, the younger generation supports socialism, while the older folks have seen the results in the real world.

How can the younger group be educated?

Communized Healthcare, II

If Keith Ellison won't put his family on the horribly executed government healthcare plan, why should I?

When one man reads a prepared question asking Ellison whether he’d put forego his “Cadillac plan” as a Congressman and put his family on ObamaCare, Ellison plays emcee rather than answer it — and another constituent loudly demands his response.

$100 Million

A Gazillion Jobs...

...Saved or created?

And I said, "Well, to me a job sustained is if I didn't have to lay-off or fire someone because you ordered something and that's not the case." And he had a guide that the government provided that explains their logic on each line item, and they said, "No, sustained would mean that someone actually worked on the product and made it and so that counts as a job sustained." And so I said, "So the person that answers the phone would be one, the person that boxed it up would be two," and I said I can't do that."

Healthcare, the new tax

Is that how he got the providers on board? "If I force people to buy your service, will you back my plan?"

Socialized Spin on Healtcare

I'm not even sure what press conference or interview could possibly be spun this hard to make this statement. The players who are actually involved in the system are scared out of their minds at the idea of socialized medicine. It hasn't worked anywhere in the world and it obliterates innovation.

That's because members of Congress are gearing up to reform the U.S. health care system, and unlike in 1993 when then-first lady Hillary Clinton tried her hand at changing the medical system, this time the important players -- doctors, insurance companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers -- seem to be on board.

Government run healthcare, at its best.

Inspection Finds Poor Training Rife At VA Clinics

Fewer than half of Veterans Affairs centers given a surprise inspection last month had proper training and guidelines in place for common endoscopic procedures such as colonoscopies

Let's socialize everything.

The rest of the world is trying to get away from, while we're trying to get into it. Why can't we learn from their mistakes?

Obama: America Is In Very Deep Recession

And it keeps getting deeper the more you swing the socialist shovel, Mr. President.*

Redefinition of terms

Quit calling it stimulus! It's just government spending. A turd by any other name smells the same.

President* promised Monday to deliver more than 600,000 jobs through his $787 billion stimulus plan this summer, with federal agencies pumping billions.

The Future of Socialized Medicine

A MOTHER is taking her fight to the European Court of Human Rights after she was forbidden from seeing her three-year-old daughter because she is not “clever enough” to look after her.

Yes, you read that right. Self-important bureaucrats have seized her daughter because she isn't smart enough to keep her.

But..."declaration by a psychiatrist that Rachel, 24, has no learning difficulties and “good literacy and numeracy and [that] her general intellectual abilities appear to be within the normal range”."

So she is smart enough. Monkeys have babies, I don't understand why the UK thinks someone of normal intelligence can't manage it.

Now, now, princewally, this isn't fair. Of course the government will allow subjects to have some form of recourse.

Well, yeah.

Her attempts to fight Nottingham city council’s adoption of her daughter have been hampered because her case was taken over by the official solicitor, the government-funded lawyer who acts for those unable to represent themselves. He was brought in to represent Rachel’s interests because she was judged to be intellectually incapable of instructing her own solicitor. He declined to contest the council’s adoption application, despite her wish to do so.

You gotta remember, government hacks will always back the government play. Always. Don't think it won't happen here.

Found here.

CNN's bias on display

If you are covering news, and start debating and insulting the subject of the news, you are not a "reporter". That is called manufacturing the news and letting your bias hang our for everyone to see.


Is there anyone who can honestly claim that CNN is not biased? Peaceful, non-vulgar protests-protected by the first amendment-are somehow "not family viewing", but jokes about "tea-bagging" are? Idiots.

A Lesson on Socialism

An economics professor said he had never failed a single student before but had, once, failed an entire class. The class had insisted that socialism worked - and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer for all, for society. The professor then said ok, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism.

He said that all grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A. After the first test the grades were averaged and everyone was given a B. The students who studied hard were upset, and the students who studied little were happy. But, as the second test rolled around, the students who hadn't studied much for the first test had studied even less, and the ones who studied hard weren't motivated to study hard again, and they decided they wanted a free ride too; so they studied little. The second Test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around the average was an F.

The scores never increased as bickering, blame, name calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for anyone else. All failed .... and the professor told them that the socialism they wanted would ultimately fail, as they had, because the reward of success normally goes to those that work harder, but when government takes the reward away; few will try so no one will succeed.



I heard it on the intartubes.

Simon Jester

Once again following Kevin's links, I find this:

We are Simon Jester.

We are not anarchists.

We are not Far-Right or Far-Left. We are the seventy percent in the middle.

We are not Capital “L” libertarians, although we do have sympathies with their platform.

We are neither bitter clingers nor conspiracy nuts.

What we are is a group of folks that think we see liberty and freedom eroding in our beloved United States. We see the policies and agendas of the hirelings in Washington D.C. heading toward an abbreviation if not outright abrogation of the Bill of Rights.

We think that the Federal government is grasping to consolidate power using the current crisis, since as Rahm Emmanuel said, it’s a terrible thing to waste. We think the Federal government, not just this administration, is more interested in self-serving personal, political, and party power than it is in actually doing its best to do the least.

This President didn’t make it this way. It has been heading along this path since Woodrow Wilson held political prisoners and FDR held four terms as president; since Johnson’s Great Society and Nixon took us off the gold standard; since Bush Sr. lied about no new taxes, Clinton desecrated the Oval Office, Bush Jr. rammed through the Patriot Act, and Obama wanted every high school kid to ‘volunteer.’

For almost a hundred years, our country has been heading towards becoming a Socialist, centrally planned, Nanny State where the Federal Government tells it citizens how to conduct business, what they could grow in their own gardens or on their own farms, and now even how much a private citizen is allowed to earn before punitive and illegal taxation takes it away.

Now is the time to make it stop.

Proud to be Simon Jester

Welfare

If you are suckling the government teat, if I concede that the existence of a government teat is necessary to a successful society, can we at least limit the teat to providing basics? Gruel and a laminated cardboard box, maybe? Booze, pot and meth go firmly into the "not a necessity of living" category.

Lawmakers in at least eight states want recipients of food stamps, unemployment benefits or welfare to submit to random drug testing.

The effort comes as more Americans turn to these safety nets to ride out the recession. Poverty and civil liberties advocates fear the strategy could backfire, discouraging some people from seeking financial aid and making already desperate situations worse.

If welfare is acceptable, it shouldn't provide any cash. A check to the landlord(move back in with your family!) and a food stamp card should be the limit. You don't need cable, cigarettes, beer or weed. Your government-assistance-enabled landlord can cover the electric and heating bills. My share of the government teat is not hanging out there to provide you with freelance pharmaceuticals or any form of entertainment at all.

If you want the extras, get a job. Failing a drug test will keep you away from that, too.

On a side note, wtf is a poverty advocate? Does poverty really need someone pushing for its benefit?

On a practical note: If a reliable drug test costs $1500, and a leech welfare recipient receives $1200 in total benefits, it takes less than 2 months for failing a leech welfare recipient to pay for itself. Faster, if you count the approximately 90% overhead of government programs. The only consideration should be how many people will get washed out of the program compared to how many will pass the test, which makes those tests a waste of money. If 10 people apply for welfare, using the numbers above, that's $15,000 in tests. Over 1 year, without the tests, that's $144,000 in welfare. One person out of ten being washed out of the program will almost pay for the tests of everybody on welfare.

Individual Theft

A tax targeted at a select group of individuals? How un-American is that? That's the worst of communism.

Christopher Dodd, read your Constitution, then go to hell.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Sen. Christopher Dodd on Monday suggested a tax provision to recoup the bonuses for executives of ailing insurance giant AIG.
Sen. Chris Dodd said the government could apply a tax to the AIG bonuses.

Dodd, D-Connecticut, said the notion is in the "earliest of thinking" and has not been settled on as a way to resolve the issue, which has set off outrage in Washington and across the country.

The tax would apply only to those at AIG who have received bonuses. The provision would help the government get back the money in the form of tax revenue.

Update: Wrong, Sen. Jerkface. Governments have NO rights.

"We have a right to tax," the Connecticut Democrat told CNN. "You could write a tax provision that's narrowly crafted only to the people receiving bonuses."

Headlines of Lies

Duluth-Twin Cities high-speed rail in running for stimulus funding

Government projects are NOT stimulating for the economy. Government is ALWAYS a net drain. The government does not produce anything. It merely reassigns wealth, with an inevitably percentage of overhead.

The light rail in Minneapolis came in at triple budget and is running at a loss for every passenger. You can't make that up in volume.