Say Anything Blog

This one hour program from This American Life examines why and how the Health Insurers have made health care more expensive, less accessible and less about prevention and more about resolving issues that could have been prevented.  Our current system has less to do with health care and mostly has to do with disease care.

I don’t recommend you listen to this unless you want to have your belief in the best health care system in the world hot air balloon punctured.

The truth is out there.

You can thank Mr El Nino out in the Pacific. 

I know this is Liberal Public Radio, but it’s worth hearing.  Ira Glass’s program has succeeded in explaining the unexplainable often.

He puts into perspective pretty well why the health care crisis will take us into oblivion if we don’t get it right.

I know most won’t listen to this.  If you just listen to the first five minutes it will help you.  The interview with David Frumm is worth while. 

The whole thing is worth listening to.

Obama’s tumble down the poll stairs has left him more and more improbable to see a second term.  The party of Tea is coalescing.  He sees handwriting on the wall.

So maybe he is just going nuts.  Putting as many crazy policies in place just before he follows Jimmy Carter into that Dark Night.

FDIC will be in the red until 2012 at least unless things get worse….Like the end of the world.

There are sooo many junk science concepts that are promoted by the left and the right.  Some would be really easy for me to believe.  Others, that I WANT to believe just are junk science.

So, I put a magnifying glass up the the whole idea and try very hard to identify the concepts and widely held beliefs that people have as true or bad science.  For instance, I WANTED to believe that women that had abortions were prone to get cancer.  It was convenient and would have served my side well.  But as a person schooled in spotting bad science, despite the idea that it would be good propaganda, it just didn’t hold up.

There are many others. I won’t list them here.

BUT from the really stupid science department with no good science to back it up are:

• Anthropogenic Global Warming…. Junk Science, we can do nothing about affecting the weather.  We are fleas on a global dog.
• Solar energy being more than site specific as a source of power.
• Wind power other than occasional site specific opportunistic use, otherwise junk science, particularly the wind farm concept.
• Hybrid vehicles are just bad science in every way.  They have no long term ecological or economic benefit.
• Electric plug in vehicles are a good way of harnessing Nuclear Energy for local slow transportation.  Like a bicycle.  I would have one if I could afford it if it would be just for here.
• Opposing Nuclear energy for waste disposal issues borders on Junk Science, but nuclear energy as the total answer is Junk Economics.
• The fact is, much of the carbon control ideas like cap and trade are just Junk Science and only has to do with control.

So, as a service to those not scientifically prone, here are some ways you can be fooled less:

From Junkscience.com

The scientific method’s experimental approach is more about questions than answers. Junk scientists rush to the answers without addressing or caring about the questions.

A few good rules to recognize junk science are:

•   * Doubt everything: Be skeptical of scary health news. In science, credibility is earned, not self-evident. You think, therefore you doubt.
•   * The Yoke’s on them: The burden of proof is always on the party trying to prove a point. “Better safe than sorry” can be an excuse to push junk science.
•   * Speculation isn’t science: Watch out for junk scientists who try to pass off speculation as reasons to hit the panic button. Giveaway terms include “may”, “might’, “could”, “if”, “possibly”, “perhaps”, “potentially”, and the like. When uttered by someone with a clear vested interest in promoting a health scare, these words can indicate junk science.
•   * Anecdotes aren’t data : Anecdotal data are essentially a single or a few observations. Anecdotes are designed to appeal to your emotions and fears. It’s a ruse to get you to put your brain in neutral and overlook the facts.

From today’s WSJ.

The argument the reporter makes is that Tea Party Activists are hurting the Republican Party.  OK, then, let’s dissolve the Republican Party and the liberals in it and create a Conservative party.  Call it that.  No more Republicans.  Run by Conservatives. 

Then, let’s run Conservatives against the Liberal nutcases and see who wins.

You know the answer to that.  The divide in the Conservative and Republican efforts must stop.  SO, let’s just abolish Republicans.  Let the Population vote then either Democrat as represented by Obama, Pelosi, Rangle, Reid and Franks against a much more conservative alternative. 

I don’t have any question how that would turn out.  Of course many RINOs would join the Democrat party.  Snowe, McCain.  Some would be independdant.  But most would affilillate with the conservatives. 

Let’s see some Tea Party like turn outs recently for any liberal or “Republican” causes.

NONE that I can see.  Even the highly touted Gay march on Washington last weekend was a few thousand.  Not that you would have known it from the reporting.

But who believes them any more. 

Not me.

Slowly but surely Europe is Signaling their enemies that they are ready to surrender.  The President of France has now stated that they will send NO MORE TROOPS to Afghanistan. 

If I’m an Iranian Mullah thinking about a takeover of Europe, I just got a green light.

NATO is useless.  It’s a concept, not a reality.

Death is now inevitable.  It has been coming a long time.  Rotting from the inside out.

Just like the USA will if we continue on our current path

In noodling around I ran across an economist that thinks like I do.  He would be lambasted by fiscal conservatives because he has Social Conservative sensibilities as a competent Economist.  He hates the tax and spend liberal ideals that crush the poor, but he hates hypocrisy more.  And he disdains the idea of political parties.  I’m with him.  He says it better than I can.

On the left right media noises like Olberman vs Limbaugh, Moore vs Hannity (which Hannity lost terribly) he says:

“politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.” This marshaling of hatreds is not the whole of politics, to be sure, but it is an essential element. Thus, Democrats encourage people to hate big corporations, and Republicans encourage people to hate welfare recipients.

Of course, it’s all a fraud, designed to distract people from the overriding reality of political life, which is that the state and its principal supporters are constantly screwing the rest of us, regardless of which party happens to control the presidency and the Congress. Amid all the partisan sound and fury, hardly anybody notices that political reality boils down to two “parties”:

(1) those who, in one way or another, use state power to bully and live at the expense of others; and
(2) those unfortunate others.

Even when politics seems to involve life-and-death issues, the partisan divisions often only obscure the overriding political realities.

So, Democrats say that anti-abortion Republicans, who claim to have such tremendous concern for saving the lives of the unborn, have no interest whatever in saving the lives of those already born, such as the poor children living in the ghetto.

And Republicans say that Democrats, who claim to have such tremendous concern for the poor, systematically contribute to the perpetuation of poverty by the countless taxes and regulations they load onto business owners who would otherwise be in better position to hire and train the poor and thereby to hasten their escape from poverty.

If the unborn children happen to be living in the wombs of women on whom U.S. bombs and rockets rain down in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, however, all Republican concerns for the unborn evaporate completely, as do the Democrats’ concerns for the poor children living in the selfsame bombarded villages. Both parties’ positions would seem to rest on very flexible and selective morality, if indeed either party may be said to have any moral basis at all, notwithstanding their chronic public displays of “moral” wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Read it here:

Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long.

Neither Bardwell nor the couple immediately returned phone calls from The Associated Press. But Bardwell told the Daily Star of Hammond that he was not a racist.

“I do ceremonies for black couples right here in my house,” Bardwell said. “My main concern is for the children.”

Bardwell said he has discussed the topic with blacks and whites, along with witnessing some interracial marriages. He came to the conclusion that most of black society does not readily accept offspring of such relationships, and neither does white society, he said.

“I don’t do interracial marriages because I don’t want to put children in a situation they didn’t bring on themselves,” Bardwell said. “In my heart, I feel the children will later suffer.”

I guess I agree with him.  I mean what could happen to the child of a broken interracial marriage who produces a halfbreed baby.  What could ever become of him? 

I mean he could never grow up to be President or anything could he?

This is an interesting story.  Tom Thumb and all that.  I don’t know why I post this except it’s interesting.  I’m really really big.  And he’s really really small.  There is justice after all in the universe.

We will get some out of stater. Someone who never went to NDSU.  Someone who never lived in North Dakota. 

I guess that’s just the way it is.  I guess if you went to NDSU you are too stupid to be it’s president.  What does that say about NDSU anyway?

I guess that’s the way it is.  I was going to throw my hat in the ring. 

But I graduated from NDSU.  OH Well.

What I fear is that we will get AL GORE for a president or some liberal nutcase like him.

Worse, would be Dr. Shirley Dyke and her significant other moving into the two million dollar mansion. 

Let’s face it, the Higher Education board is going to be subject to pressure to equal opportunity something or another.

How about we just hire an old white guy who knows something about running a big operation, Agriculture and North Dakota.

I’m available.

Now that Obama’s new Economy is in full tilt mode we keep seeing signs from a French Company that apparently is opening up shop everywhere.  Many of these buildings are quite different. Big box stores, office buildings, one time restaurants, banks that used to be there.  Perhaps you’ve seen their sign…...FORLEASE…..

Here’s an example.