brainiac conspiracy

Saturday Night Music Blogging

Because sometimes we all gotta shake it like a Polaroid picture.

---Baron V

Today's Worst Person

Boris Johnson:

Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests, it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16 per cent of our species have an IQ below 85, while about 2 per cent have an IQ above 130.

The harder you shake the pack, the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top. And for one reason or another---boardroom greed or, as I am assured, the natural and God-given talent of boardroom inhabitants---the income gap between the top cornflakes and the bottom cornflakes is getting wider than ever.

I stress I don’t believe that economic equality is possible. Indeed, some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity.

I suppose we can give him credit for being an honest man, but it never ceases to amaze me how so many people----around the world, apparently!---continue to elect political leaders who display such open contempt for so many of their own constituents. We must have some unconscious desire to be punished to keep entrusting our governments to such awful people.

---Baron V

Maybe We Should Let The Insurance Companies Run Everything

Because what could possibly go wrong here:

The administration is setting up a temporary process to send companies the federal subsidies used to help millions of Americans buy coverage because the online system won’t be ready as planned, said Aaron Albright, a spokesman for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Insurers will estimate what they are owed rather than have the government calculate the bill.

---Baron V

Yet Another Light Blogging Day

For still more obvious reasons. Go enjoy the holiday weekend!

---Baron V

Still Not Getting It

Maybe the smartest guy in the room, like, isn't:

I continue to believe and [I'm] absolutely convinced that, at the end of the day, people are going to look back at the work we've done to make sure that in this country, you don't go bankrupt when you get sick, that families have that security. That is going be a legacy I am extraordinarily proud of.

You want to prevent medical bankruptcies, you prevent medical bankruptcies. The Goldberg Act doesn't really do much to address this; it only shifts the costs around. Yes, many Americans---maybe even a majority---will benefit eventually from its provisions. But many Americans will not, and will be required to pay more---sometimes, a lot more---simply to access a medical-industrial system that routinely gouges its patients, and which pads its payrolls with thousands of unproductive middlemen. There has always been a smarter, less wasteful option!

---Baron V

Today's Worst Persons

America's job creators, and the persons who patronize them:

Gun-buying after Thanksgiving is becoming something of a holiday tradition. In each of the past two years, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has reported a record number of calls for background checks for gun purchases on the Friday after Thanksgiving. A flood of 154,873 calls on Black Friday in 2012, nearly three times the daily average that year, caused outages at some of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System's call centers.

The FBI does not track actual firearms purchases, and customers can buy multiple guns at one time, suggesting the total number of weapons sold on Black Friday could be even higher than the number of background-check calls. The bureau has reported 17,238,102 background checks this year through Oct. 31.

You really have to wonder about our nation's mental health.

Also too, mental health:

Starting as early as Thursday night, shootings and stabbings have been reported at retailers in several states. Among the most violent episodes happened yesterday at a Kohl's in Romeovile, Ill., when an alleged shoplifter dragged a police officer from his car before being shot in the arm by other law enforcement officers present at the scene, The Chicago Tribune reports.

A shooting was also reported Thursday night in Las Vegas. Two assailants reportedly attempted to steal a TV from a man who had recently purchased it. After arguing, the man was shot in the leg before the attacker sped off in his car, leaving the TV behind, CBS News 8 reports. In an email sent to The Huffington Post, Kohl's said it was "cooperating with the authorities leading the investigation" into the incident.

A police officer in Rialto, Calif., was also injured Thursday night when a fight broke out at a local Walmart.

In Virginia, a man was allegedly slashed with a knife during an altercation with another shopper over a parking space at a Walmart.

A stabbing was reported early Friday morning in Carlsbad, Calif. The victim in that case was stabbed in the stomach at the entrance of a mall, according to NBC San Diego.

Sure, I know that out of millions of people, these are statistically insignificant events, but they point to a more worrisome social trend. Granted, the overwhelming majority of Americans are peaceful and tolerant people, but the minority who aren't are growing increasingly unhinged, and are more heavily armed, with each passing year. Perhaps this won't amount to anything in the long term, but I really worry sometimes that something will happen that will set them off, and we're going to end up with some armed insurrection on our hands. Angry people and guns are not conducive to a civil society.

---Baron V

Another Light Blogging Day

Again, for obvious reasons. And no, I didn't go out to the mall. Am busy instead cooking homemade turkey stock, from which we'll make turkey chili later. Be kind too your leftovers today.

---Baron V

Leave it to the Experts

It's especially true in the fast-paced fields of IT and Web development, where new technologies are constantly evolving, and paradigm shifts happen in nanoseconds. That's why it's essential that our creaky and hidebound government delegates its online initiatives to the wizards in the private sector. You know, the ones with the proven track records:

Oregon, which ranks around the middle of the 50 states in population, was among the largest recipients of federal grant money to build its system and publicize the program, receiving more than $305 million overall [...]

But the all-important website was tripped up when it persisted in generating inaccurate estimates of tax subsidies available to some customers.

Kitzhaber and other state officials have been clear about their unhappiness with Oracle, the firm contracted to create the site; Cover Oregon has withheld 5% of the company's pay, a spokesman said.

After members of the Cover Oregon board voiced frustration with Oracle during a 4 1/2-hour meeting last week, the state program's executive director assured them that he had asked Oracle to bring in the "A team" and send home "the C team."

---Baron V

Thanksgiving Night Music Blogging

Because we're all thankful for tryptophan, or should be.

---Baron V

Light Blogging Day

For all the obvious reasons. But I'm still thankful!

---Baron V

Thin Gruel

Wish I could be this optimistic:

[O]ne response I've heard on this front goes something like this: Sure, most of the uninsured will get covered and people with preexisting [conditions] will be protected and you won't be able to be dropped if you get sick but it's just going to be an endless PR nightmare and the Dems will be paying for it in 2014 and 2016 and maybe 2018 and it may 'work' but never be popular.

This doesn't strike me as probable or logical. Over time, if the key market failures in the health care system are removed, I think most people will decide it was a good idea.

But this is a major stumbling block because many of the "market failures" in our health care system---the army of middlemen, brokers, sales reps, administrators and insurance adjusters who siphon billions of dollars out of the system in return for nothing that affects positive health outcomes---are enshrined in the new law. You want to cut health-care costs, you cut health-care costs. The Goldberg Act, by and large, doesn't do that. It forces everyone to patronize a parasitic industry that we really don't need, and transfers billions of taxpayer dollars to that same industry to provide coverage for the working poor. Even if all the cost-sharing mechanisms work, and health-care costs flat-line under the new law---which is a pretty rosy scenario---we're still paying far more for the same (or worse) care than people in any other developed nation. I mean, it's not even close.

There is, of course, a much fairer and simpler alternative that will provide more affordable health care to everyone. It may not be politically feasible now, but it was four years, and it probably will be again one day, and that's what liberals need to be lobbying aggressively for, not resigning ourselves to the idea that the Goldberg Act is the best of all possible worlds, because it isn't. You want to make health care more affordable, get rid of the middlemen and rent-seekers.

---Baron V

Be Afraid

Be very afraid:

“This does not have the characteristics, as far as I’m concerned, of a stock market bubble,” Greenspan said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” airing this weekend. “It could come out that way but I don’t see it at this stage.”

---Baron V

College Isn't For Everyone

And there's no doubt that many high-school students would be better off enrolling in some kind of vocational/industrial-training program such as those offered by German companies. But this would require an attitudinal sea change on the part of our domestic job creators because there would be no unpaid internships or bullshit $7/hour wages. You want to motivate people to devote their careers to you, you have to pay them decent wages the first minute they set foot on the shop floor. That's why I'm not too optimistic that such a program would succeed in this country---not because there's a shortage of skilled labor or vacant positions to fill, but because the business model of too many American companies is grounded in impoverishing the labor force. That's how they pay the shareholders.

---Baron V

Thanksgiving Eve Music Blogging

Because everybody gotta be thankful for something, and loyal readers, I am thankful for you.

---Baron V

Winners and Losers

Why must there always be (sigh) . . . ?

During a meeting last week, officials at Covered California, the state’s much-touted health insurance marketplace, made a pretty stark admission: Half of the approximately 1 million consumers whose health plans are being canceled will pay more under the Affordable Care Act.

They may be a small percentage of the total insurance pool, but next November they will all remember the lovely holiday parting gift that Team Democrat gave to them! It should also be noted that our "successful" Covered California is not exactly a fast-moving train; I set up an account there and applied for enrollment 10 days ago, and up to now, have heard nothing back. Then again, that could be because they are still waiting to hear back from the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, the Homeland Security department, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Experian. I suppose this was all to be expected because, as a rule, Rube Goldberg devices take ten times longer to perform a simple task than, say, actually performing the simple task.

---Baron V

Chickens Home to Roost

It's been depressing in recent months to see quite a few folks on the left---I won't name names, but you probably know many of them---rushing to defend the administration's unlimited intelligence-gathering as relatively benign and harmless. "Medadata isn't data" is the usual retort, though we've also heard "They're not listening to/reading content" and "The Guardian spies on you, too" being used as rationalizations. What's maddening about it is how shortsighted these loyal liberals are. It's like this: The gravy-trainers---er, security contractors---who peddle their spyware services to the government can also peddle them to other job creators in the private sector, whose motives might not be as benevolent as the Obama administration's. One thing our own history teaches us is that when institutions of power have unlimited access to our communications, those institutions inevitably use that power to spy on and harass leftists. Or does the word COINTELPRO not ring a bell anymore?

---Baron V

Killing off Liberalism

In the larger scheme of things, the latest Goldberg Act delay probably won't change things much since most small businesses purchase their health-care plans from private brokerages, so the government exchanges probably won't affect them. But the fact that they've had nearly four years to get this right and they still can't get it right suggests that maybe, just maybe, that all of these clumsy snafus are emblematic of a piece of legislation that is, well, a clumsy snafu. Not for everyone, of course---some people will benefit greatly if they can ever get enrolled. Big picture, though, whether it's deserved or not, the Goldberg Act will be associated forever with Team Democrat in particular and activist liberal government in general. If it fails, it will be seen as a failure of liberalism, and that's something that the administration really needed to have thought through when they were planning the rollout.

Then again, maybe they've always wanted to kill off liberalism from the get-go, in which case they're doing a heckuva job, and your humble blogger has been playing for the wrong team.

---Baron V

No Money for Education Grants or Food-Safety Inspections

Because the price of freedom is eternal wanking:

The National Security Agency has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches, according to a top-secret NSA document. The document, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, identifies six targets, all Muslims, as “exemplars” of how “personal vulnerabilities” can be learned through electronic surveillance, and then exploited to undermine a target's credibility, reputation and authority.

Of course, these sentinels of liberty would never waste our money by actually visiting those porn sites, though it's hard to figure out how they'd know they were actually porn sites unless they actually, like, visited them. But peeping Toms do like to to peep, so, eternal wanking.

---Baron V

Nothing Has Changed

As mentioned earlier, people are still in need of jobs, and money, and debt relief. Because

U.S. borrowers are increasingly missing payments on home equity lines of credit they took out during the housing bubble, a trend that could deal another blow to the country's biggest banks.

The loans are a problem now because an increasing number are hitting their 10-year anniversary, at which point borrowers usually must start paying down the principal on the loans as well as the interest they had been paying all along.

More than $221 billion of these loans at the largest banks will hit this mark over the next four years, about 40 percent of the home equity lines of credit now outstanding.

I am guessing this means that there will be no "tapering," and that the money spigot will remain open since banks must never suffer the consequences of their bad business decisions. There will, however, be plenty of tapering for the rest of us. Matter of fact, it's already happening!

---Baron V

Still Not Good Enough

Yeah, the jobs numbers are better than they were in the depths of the Great Recession, but by and large, they are still terrible. It's tragic because there is no reason why we should be in this position when we had the power and the mandate to do something about it four years ago. You think the American people elected a liberal black guy named Hussein, along with huge Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, to only make incremental changes to the system? Unfortunately, that's what the liberal black guy named Hussein and his best and brightest advisers thought, and for their incrementalism they were rewarded by those same voters two years later with a Congress full of radicals. None of this needed to have happened, but Team Obama needed to come to grips with the fact that Americans want some systemic changes in their government. They're not interested in tinkering with an unfair tax code, or in health-care legislation that transfers billions of taxpayer dollars to insurance companies that deserve to be put out of business, or in "financial reform" that upholds a banking system that robbed millions of Americans of their life savings, or in cuts to social-insurance programs that are already too meager by half. In other words, they weren't interested in corporate-friendly neoliberal economic policy that incubated our problems in the first place, and they're still not interested now.

People in this country right now are scared, angry and terribly insecure. They still need jobs, and money, and mortgage relief, and except for the temporary respite afforded by the Recovery Act, they haven't gotten the help they need. What they've gotten instead is an administration that was more concerned with foaming the runways for rich people than in pursuing the goal of full employment for everyone else. Sure, America's first black President would have faced some serious obstacles in any event, but one still suspects that history's verdict of this administration will not be overly charitable, considering how much they promised and how little they delivered.

---Baron V