Blacklist Emotions

While I don't know what Anil Dash thinks about my calling his twitter blacklist a blacklist, I'm having a bit of fun today with an overactive defender named Nathan Edwards who has come to the conclusion that I'm condescending to Anil (I don't think I am and certainly didn't intend to). And when I clarified that and gave more detail as to what I was talking about, he switched to the idea that I'm making fun of Anil for running a blacklist (I'm not).

In reality, I made an implicit prediction, that Anil's tribe, like most (but not all) lefty tribes are ok with blacklists in practice so long as they are conducted by ideological allies and not labeled as blacklists. You see, a great deal of the left has swallowed the idea that only the evil guys on the right do blacklists and correct thinking people never do blacklists. It's not true. Before Hollywood got scared into not hiring communists in the McCarthy era, communists were busy beavers working to keep anti-communist art off the silver screen. You don't hear much about that earlier effort. It would ruin the narrative.

The experiment continues.

Obamacare Scrooged

People signing up for Obamacare are being robbed by the government. This time it's not metaphorically, like when your perfectly satisfactory insurance plan is made illegal and all the compliant plans are more expensive and have worse terms but literally. People are having their accounts debited improperly during the Christmas season. And because it is being done by the government, there is little recourse to sue due to sovereign immunity and, of course, those most injured haven't the money to hire representation anyway. I think Pope Francis calls it 'despoliation of the poor'.

Double debits, wrong day debits, wrong amount debits, these are all standard hazards with any sort of Electronic Funds Transfer (ETF) system. There's nothing particularly new about these issues. It's all part of the back end errors that those dastardly Republicans have been hyperventilating about and Democrats have been pooh poohing for weeks now.

You never know when Tuttle will turn into Buttle in one of these systems. But what's in a name?

Merry Christmas Cross posted: Chicagoboyz

Voter fraud via Obamacare?

While the tone is a bit over the top, this PJMedia article on Motor Voter provisions in Obamacare raise some troubling questions. Under no circumstances should we ever bypass established fraud checks. It's especially troubling if the federal government instructs the state to bypass fraud checks.

If this is actually happening, this is a great big warning sign. Normally, you would just raise your eyebrow and move on, giving the administration the benefit of the doubt. President Obama already blew through that with his electoral campaign practice of bypassing donation fraud checks on foreign addresses. He already had his second chance and blew it. This is at least round three on the issue of election fraud.

So how do you address the issue and figure out if it is real? The web sites will eventually get fixed and create a flood of records. The clock is ticking. The first step is probably to call your state's Secretary of State office and sort out if the article has its facts straight.

Chipotle makes genocide look so pretty and attractive

My younger daughter found Chipotle's Scarecrow IOS propaganda game. It's a short freebie and you get a buy one, get one coupon if you complete all the levels and give out your personal information. Alongside the somewhat amusing gameplay comes a load of locavore/free range farming propaganda.

For reasons unexplained in the video and game, the countryside has been emptied by Crow Foods, Inc and food is exclusively grown in cartoonish, factory conditions with lots of pointless discomfort. But the only local farmer left decides to grow his own food, cook, and serve it in his own restaurant all to the music soundtrack of Fiona Apple covering Pure Imagination, in a subtly twisted and dark fashion.

Of course the real nightmare would be the reality of us all following Chipotle's ideas. We'd do ok in the US because we're rich enough to outbid the 3rd world for food, but once again famine would be more than a political problem in significant chunks of the globe.

We can feed the world if we work hard at it and use the best techniques we have for delivering food from field to plate. We can do it without factory farming but only after a fairly massive human die off. Smiley faced genocide as a restaurant ad campaign. What will they think of next?

Is Obamacare bad for minorities?

Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, the ACA, (whatever your favorite label) has racial implications according to NY Times "Contributing Op-Ed Writer" Thomas B. Edsall.

In addition, the Affordable Care Act can be construed as a transfer of benefits from Medicare, which serves an overwhelmingly white population of the elderly – 77 percent of recipients are white — to Obamacare, which will serve a population that is 54.7 percent minority. Over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the Affordable Care Act cuts $455 billion from the Medicare budget in order to help pay for Obamacare.
Those who think that a critical mass of white voters has moved past its resistance to programs shifting tax dollars and other resources from the middle class to poorer minorities merely need to look at the election of 2010, which demonstrated how readily this resistance can be used politically. The passage of the A.C.A. that year forced such issues to the fore, and Republicans swept the House and state houses across the country. The program’s current difficulties have the clear potential to replay events of 2010 in 2014 and possibly 2016.

I don't have any doubt that Mr. Edsall is basically correct about the racial makeup of the two programs' beneficiaries. But there's a curious assumption made that Obamacare actually makes things better. This is an assumption that is unburdened by any pedestrian things like evidence or proof.

What if the policy critics are right and that it makes things worse? Under those circumstances, wouldn't Obamacare's beneficiary racial makeup make it a favorite of the KKK/Nazi set (however big that demographic remains these days)?

So who's catering to Illinois Nazi these days?

HT: Instapundit
HT: Best of the Web

What's that party? Obamacare Insurance Mod Rejection Edition

On Drudge right now is an early rejection of President Obama's plan to permit insurance companies to retain their noncompliant plans for a year. The State of Washington's Insurance Commissioner took two hours to release a statement rejecting the idea. Nowhere in the piece is a mention of the man's party so for most readers it would be a surprise that he's an Obamacare supporting Democrat. His Wikipedia page notes he had previously served 16 years in the Washington legislature and one term in Congress as a Democrat.

This man took to the pages of the Seattle Times on November 12th to defend insurance cancellations. President Obama made this man look like a fool, just as he's done for a great deal of the rest of the Democratic party. But don't count on the press to highlight the party source of much of the return fire.

David Brin's halfway house

David Brin pens a sort of halfway house out of current liberal economic insanity by recommending that today's liberals reclaim Adam Smith as one of their own. It's not a bad point and I certainly applaud it. It would have been a better point if he hadn't studded the post with false accusations that the right doesn't study Smith and that it's entirely ignorant of his other major work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He's recycling old accusations about what the right is and what it's about that simply aren't true. But perhaps he has to in order to inoculate himself from ejection from the tribe.

I think if he's going to be serious about this, he's in for a big surprise. In doing a bit of googling on the subject of false accusations of the right disproportionately favoring crony capitalism, I came up with the following by me over at Obsidian Wings. Over two years later, I can't improve on it so might as well quote it.

It always astonishes me the superficial level of analysis on the left about how the big bad capitalists tilt the system to nefariously aid their interests. Of course they do, but how? Dig deep into the details and you will find, time after time, the use of big government to pass rules and regulations that hinder their upstart competitors (direct and indirect) and leave themselves largely free to continue making disproportionate profits.

The solution seems obvious, to enumerate all the regulations, sift through them, get rid of the ones who give the rich an unfair advantage, and maintain the structure as a regular counter to the inevitable attempts the well off will sponsor to put in a new crop in future.

But looking at the mechanics of getting rid of the unfair privileges of the upper classes and you find yourself looking at a process that is a lot more like a tea party Republican's platform than a progressive Democrat's. So put your shoulder to the grindstone and enumerate all the governments, enumerate all their laws, rules, and regulations. Identify in each what is upholding unfair privilege for the rich and you'll find a large cadre of tea party people right there supporting the repeal.

I don't believe for a minute that the left will actually do this because their anti-corporatism is a sham, a shakedown, an appeal for a check written to shut the leadership up. I would be pleasantly surprised to be wrong and more than happy to collaborate on freeing up our economy from welfare for the rich which is another thing that is choking this country.

 So I'm hoping and praying that +David Brin is sincere and his initiative prospers. It would make for a better country, even with all the false accusations regarding the right.

There are few things as stupid as NY Times stupid

Charles Blow is something of a guilty pleasure of mine and yesterday's column on the ACA did not disappoint in its vapidity, stupidity, and completely missing the point. Like it or not, the ACA, or Obamacare, is the law and so part of the job of the Congress is to oversee how the executive is spending the money that Congress appropriates. Congressmen do this both for programs that they approve of and disapprove of. It's part of the job. But in Charles Blow's mind this normal activity is a sign of illegitimate obstruction. It's utterly precious for Blow to say "If Republicans are correct, that the law is the abomination that they say it is, it will be borne out in due time with jobs killed and premiums raised" as premiums are being raised already and people are being thrown en masse out of full time status and into part time work. These bad things have been happening all this year and started happening even before then. If that's the standard, the law has already failed, but Charles Blow doesn't show evidence of any contact with this news. The idea that the health law is rising in popularity is another exercise in spin as the health law's polling chart on Real Clear Politics demonstrates. The most recent high water mark was in the second week of August, 2012 when support was only 4.7% below opposition with a support level of 42.6%. The most recent support level is 39.9% (October 21, 2013), which is behind opposition to the law by 10.6%. The general trend is a gentle slope downwards in support. Blow's major problem is that he hasn't come to grips with the fact that the world doesn't fit the worldview that wrote Obamacare and rammed it through Congress on a party line vote. Ludwig von Mises 1920 observation that government is incapable of calculating prices has not been refuted. The hollowing out of the US medical system since the 1960s when government started calculating prices for doctors continues apace and Obamacare only minimally helps that situation by at least partially switching from AMA owned CPT billing codes for which the AMA charges royalties and to WHO owned ICD-10 PCS billing codes for which the WHO only asserts copyright so that the system is not misused. It's not enough and people will continue to get hurt by the opaqueness of healthcare billing. In a nation that is rapidly heading for a cliff, progress is measured by how much you can slow down the headlong rush towards disaster. The refusal of the GOP to just give in and join in the lemming rush towards the precipice is one of its finer moments. Blow accidentally arrives at a bit of truth. The fact that the Obama administration managed this web site project like it was the early 1970s is likely not to loom large in history's judgment of this episode. What will loom larger is the Democratic party's adoption of unsustainable solutions to an economic sector that was already badly damaged by government intervention and price distortion.