| Not that I'm thrilled about Obama, |
[Jan. 19th, 2009|03:17 pm] |
but let's take in the outgoing president's list of achievements one last time (from http://www.campaignforliberty.com/):
• Two undeclared, unwinnable imperial wars, with hundreds of thousands of dead, including thousands of Americans, and many tens of thousands of Americans wounded, with the violence and occupations continuing to this day;
• Detention without trial or habeas corpus;
• A torture scandal and the institutionalization, from the top down, of "enhanced interrogation techniques" that offend basic standards of human decency;
• New precedents on "extraordinary renditioning," whereby U.S. intelligence and military agencies hand off detainees to foreign countries where they are interrogated in ways that even the U.S. at Guantanamo will not use;
• Warrantless wiretapping of the citizenry conducted by the military wing of the government;
• Spying on peaceful political activists and putting many names on no-fly lists;
• The modification of Posse Comitatus and insurrection law to empower the president to order the military and national guard to impose order on the domestic population;
• More signing statements than any president before;
• Credit expansion that helped bring on the greatest financial crisis in many years;
• The largest expansion of welfare spending since the Great Society, specifically in the area of prescription drugs;
• The biggest bailout ever, so far, with frightening moves toward economic fascism in the financial sector;
• A doubling of the deficit and debt;
• The nationalization of airline security and the introduction of the color-coded terror system;
• The Department of Homeland Security;
• Sarbanes-Oxley and other posturing corporate regulation that hurts small firms while doing nothing to improve the economy;
• Signing McCain-Feingold into law, despite knowing it violating the First Amendment;
• The further nationalization of education;
• The 21st century version of the "unitary executive," which concentrates ever more power into the presidency;
• Massive protectionism, secrecy, duplicity, socialism, corporatism, and growing reliance on police-state tactics;
• Terrible diplomatic blunders with North Korea, the Midle East and elsewhere;
• The failure to catch Osama bin Laden. |
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| Mother 3 |
[Jan. 16th, 2009|12:05 am] |
Have any of you people played mother 3 yet?
I know that some of you like video games. I assume that all of you like a good story.
If you have it in you to enjoy stories and video games, every moment that you aren't playing mother 3 is, in a way, a loss. This game is Important, a modern masterpiece. The way it controls your emotions by the end is so deft that it knows the very moment at which you're crying.
I still get the feeling that daph may be the only one on my friends list to have beaten mother 3. Hopefully I'll be wrong. |
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| Seriously |
[Dec. 8th, 2008|12:37 pm] |
Seriously
Seriously
Masterpiece Grimlock
Two months before my birthday. I do not think I'll wait for birthday. |
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| Vote, my friends. |
[Nov. 4th, 2008|09:32 am] |
Ron Paul, 1983
Ron Paul 2008
I've spoken to people who, because the candidate they favor is ahead in the polls in their state, will not vote.
VOTE, PEOPLE
There are amendments you can have a say in. There are other officials you can choose. Don't piss away the one civic power that is handed to you. |
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| I asked the internet about socialized medicine, and this is what it told me. |
[Oct. 4th, 2008|05:38 pm] |
I said:
Here's a little anecdote about socialized medicine that I heard from the daughter of a florida doctor.
This doctor has saved the lives of several people who have been abandoned by their socialized healthcare systems. See, when the government gives you money whether or not you actually help your patients, you have no incentive to help people with extremely serious or difficult conditions. These people came to this country because their socialized doctors left them to die.
Torumasuta said:
That doesn't really mesh with my own experiences with socialized medicine. As a poor person in Massachusetts, my family has de facto socialized medicine, and while the red tape is absolutely (absolutely!) atrocious, it has always come through for the big things. When they discovered my mother had an unruptured brain aneurysm, the only thing that could save her was a fairly new technique that could only be performed by the guy who actually invented it. I don't even want to know how much that operation actually cost, but once we were able to get through the red tape to prove that the operation was necessary, we got it. The doctor didn't get his usual rich person fee, but he did it anyway because it was either my mother had it or she died, and it happened.
It's actually the small things that Massachusetts' socialized medicine system has trouble with. Getting a dentist appointment is nearly impossible, for instance, and to even make this possible doctors had to actually create a new dental practice to cut down costs enough for MassHealth to pay for it. It's often standing room only, and the wait for non-emergency appointments can be up to six hours, and there aren't individual dental offices but rather dental cubicles in an assembly line-style system of dentists, but it gets done, because a) MassHealth pays what they can for it and b) there are just enough people who care to make this happen for the poor, despite the terrible working conditions and pay.
That's not to say socializing the financial market would be awesome, or anything. As a socialist I don't even believe that. I'm just saying that, as a guy whose life and that of his family's has depended on socialized medicine, I have to say that, yeah, socialized medicine has its problems, but it has always come through for us eventually. It's the one system in Massachusetts that I am really proud of. Maybe my results are atypical, but hey, I thought it was worth bringing out a different perspective.
Broco said:
This is pretty much my experience of the Canadian health-care system as well. A few years ago I was supposed to get minor sinus surgery, but it was delayed for months because people with serious conditions kept cutting ahead of me. Resources are rationed based on what doctors feel is more crucial rather than which patient has more money. I assume secondpillow was talking about Cuba, which is an outlier given that it isn't a rich country.
But yeah Obama's plan is anyway not really socialized medicine but some kind of hybrid public-private system that won't nationalize the existing private health insurers, so looking at actual 100% government-payed socialized medicine won't give you an idea of what it's really like. It looks to me like it will maintain most of the good and bad properties of the current US system, with the exception that the number of completely uninsured people will be greatly reduced. |
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| Ron Paul on the Rape of our Rights |
[Oct. 3rd, 2008|05:42 pm] |
United States House of Representatives
Statement on HR 1424
October 3, 2008
Madame Speaker, only in Washington could a bill demonstrably worse than its predecessor be brought back for another vote and actually expect to gain votes. That this bailout was initially defeated was a welcome surprise, but the power-brokers in Washington and on Wall Street could not allow that defeat to be permanent. It was most unfortunate that this monstrosity of a bill, loaded up with even more pork, was able to pass.
The Federal Reserve has already injected hundreds of billions of dollars into US and world credit markets. The adjusted monetary base is up sharply, bank reserves have exploded, and the national debt is up almost half a trillion dollars over the past two weeks. Yet, we are still told that after all this intervention, all this inflation, that we still need an additional $700 billion bailout, otherwise the credit markets will seize and the economy will collapse. This is the same excuse that preceded previous bailouts, and undoubtedly we will hear it again in the future after this bailout fails.
One of the most dangerous effects of this bailout is the incredibly elevated risk of moral hazard in the future. The worst performing financial services firms, even those who have been taken over by the government or have filed for bankruptcy, will find all of their poor decision-making rewarded. What incentive do Wall Street firms or any other large concerns have to make sound financial decisions, now that they see the federal government bailing out private companies to the tune of trillions of dollars? As Congress did with the legislation authorizing the Fannie and Freddie bailout, it proposes a solution that exacerbates and encourages the problematic behavior that led to this crisis in the first place.
With deposit insurance increasing to $250,000 and banks able to set their reserves to zero, we will undoubtedly see future increases in unsound lending. No one in our society seems to understand that wealth is not created by government fiat, is not created by banks, and is not created through the manipulation of interest rates and provision of easy credit. A debt-based society cannot prosper and is doomed to fail, as debts must either be defaulted on or repaid, neither resolution of which presents this country with a pleasant view of the future. True wealth can only come about through savings, the deferral of present consumption in order to provide for a higher level of future consumption. Instead, our government through its own behavior and through its policies encourages us to live beyond our means, reducing existing capital and mortgaging our future to pay for present consumption.
The money for this bailout does not just materialize out of thin air. The entire burden will be borne by the taxpayers, not now, because that is politically unacceptable, but in the future. This bailout will be paid for through the issuance of debt which we can only hope will be purchased by foreign creditors. The interest payments on that debt, which already take up a sizeable portion of federal expenditures, will rise, and our children and grandchildren will be burdened with increased taxes in order to pay that increased debt.
As usual, Congress has show itself to be reactive rather than proactive. For years, many people have been warning about the housing bubble and the inevitable bust. Congress ignored the impending storm, and responded to this crisis with a poorly thought-out piece of legislation that will only further harm the economy. We ought to be ashamed. |
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