Bob Hayes Online

No, no, no, no, a thousand times, NO.

If my fellow citizens want to burden themselves with some horrific tax-and-spend nightmare of socialized medicine, they may. I’ll oppose it, but there’s a right to make stupid choices.

But I will not be coerced into buying an insurance product, whether public or private, to satisfy some bureaucrat’s desire that my spending choices reflect the ones s/he thinks I should make.

Hell, no.

If this atrocity becomes law, I will stand on the steps of the US Capitol and demand to be arrested for my crime of refusing to pay. We are not children subject to the whims of a babysitter, however benevolent. We are free Americans. I will choose the course of my own life, and I do not yield that power to any man or any state.

They can have my taxes but they cannot have my conscience or my choices. Those are mine, now and forever.

End of discussion.

This is just sad beyond words. The school’s genius plan for reconciling this poor child and the bullies who taunted him? Making them sit together at lunch – so they could develop a rapport.

At what point did it become a requirement that you be a complete dumbshit in order to run a school? I’m praying for this little one’s mother and family as they grieve the loss of their son.

Another great passes from the scene – Dave Arneson, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, has died.

Update: this is a nice testimonial from OOTS.

The actor Andy Hallett, who is best known for playing Lorne (the bar owner) in Joss Whedon’s “Angel”, has died at the age of 33 from heart failure.

I always liked Lorne. What a shame that the man who personified the character has passed so young. Hallett’s first acting job was playing Lorne, and he never acted again after “Angel” wound down – his life is something of a mystery.

H/T to Amp.

Many people seem to be under the impression that if the United States could attain energy independence, we could stop worrying about the war on terror/militant Islam because without our petrodollars, the mullahs would be out of cash. Would that it were so. Leaving aside the moral implications of abandoning a third of the world to rot under an oppressive theocracy, it’s not likely that the Islamic world is going to become economically incapable of bringing the war to us any time soon.

If we get rid of our dependence on foreign oil (a good idea on its own merits, so don’t think I’m arguing against that), we free up room in the consumption pipeline for Africa and Asia to increase their use of cars and other oil-burning technologies. Saudi Arabia is likely to stay rich no matter what we do; we might just make the multitrillion dollar investment to move America to renewable sources, but we certainly aren’t going to make the megatrillion dollar investment to turn China, Africa, India, and Indonesia (to point to the first four billion people who would like cars now, please) into Ecotopia.

So they will have leverage, despite the fact that we hypothetically-don’t need their oil anymore, because they will still have money and power. And quite likely nukes, since for some strange reason, President Obama’s hypercharisma has failed to convince Iran that they don’t need nukes because the community organizer has their best interest at heart, and we all know he doesn’t have the clankers to go after Iran in any effective way. Nuclear-armed states don’t need us to need their export products for us to be embroiled in conflict with them; the USSR had nothing that we needed.

And even if tomorrow morning Al Gore wakes up with a ready-to-go patent application for the Galt Engine and we all start generating a personal terawatt using nothing more than the morning dew, mild sexual desire, and bits of yarn, all THAT will accomplish is to launch the biggest boom in plastic production since Pamela Anderson went shopping for new boobs. Oil price crashes, plastic starts costing eight cents a ton to make, and we all start building plastic houses – and oil ramps right back up to $30/barrel. Plastic houses would be cool and all (I personally want them to make giant Lego bricks about 3′ long that people can snap together to build their own structures because that would be awesome) but would leave the ayatollahs with plenty of cash on hand.

In the long run, readily-extractable hydrocarbons will always have significant economic value, even if nobody would dream of setting them on fire.

This one’s for Joanne. Although in an effort to appease my only reader, I did put it in the “Things That Suck” category.

Advocates of a federal solution to the economic crisis based on spending a great deal of money point out that we spent our way out of trouble during WWII. They are right. We did. It worked.

The problem is, we were able to do it because our federal government was so small. It did less, and much of what it did was done well. In comparison to its European competitors, however, it was rather small and unimportant – dingy, even. Our government was poor but honest.

Expanding a competent organization and increasing its power can, indeed, have a positive economic effect, especially when the competent government is faced with a powerful and effective outside enemy – there’s no luxury of wasting resources when the Nazis are at the door.

We currently have powerful enemies – terrorist regimes and groups worldwide – but they aren’t nearly so effective as the Nazis. We’re not in danger of being taken over by Osama Bin Laden, so our government has the luxury of taking things a little less seriously and being a little bit more wasteful.

And while elements of our government are quite competent at what they do, there isn’t a huge unused reserve of “competence” out there in the economy like there was in 1939. Our economic machine is running, broadly, at capacity now in productive terms, and long may it continue to do so – but some huge federal expansion now would be mostly cancerous and parasitic – three tumors for every healthy cell built up.

We no longer have a poor but honest government that can be assumed to use additional power or resources for the benefit of all. It would be nice if we did, but we don’t.

Our current situation, in fact, can fairly be described as the dark warning that should have been delivered to Washington in the 1930s: “Sure, you can grow out of your current problems. This is what you’ll look like when that’s done.”

First off, Happy New Year.

Second off, WTF? This ad is on the top of the Drudge Report as of this writing. God knows where else it’s been placed.

In no particular order:

1) You’re not welcome. Give me my tax money back, you corporate whores.

2) You didn’t have any money, so you begged for the taxpayers to bail you out, and they did (against the popular will), and the first thing you do is spend a bunch of money on an ad THANKING THEM? You know, my folks gave us some money to help us buy our house (thanks!) – I’m pretty sure that if we’d taken a couple grand of that money to put up a billboard in our town saying “Thank You!”, that they would have been pissed off. Because they gave us the money for a house, not for PR stunts. Chrysler’s money, ditto.

3) With public relations and economics skills like these, no wonder your company is in the toilet. It deserves to be in the toilet. Fail now, and get out of the way.

(Sorry, Joanne. But you know I still love ya.)

Many conservatives are innately suspicious of any body wielding worldwide authority. (US military hyperpower is theoretically equally suspect, but since other countries COULD balance us, they just choose not to spend the money, it isn’t such a big deal.)

The problem with worldwide authority is that it loses the constraint of people being able to opt out. If the US becomes a Mormon theocracy, you can move to Mexico. If California goes communist, my in-laws can come to Colorado. If Modesto goes Nazi, they can go to Stockton. When power is local, people can opt out of that power, and that very fact tends to curb abuse of authority – the Temple Police will continue to be powerless outside of Salt Lake City, California can’t afford to go Communist because all the taxpayers will move, and Modesto is too busy creating photogenic sex crimes so they can get on the news to bother with the goosestepping and the bookburning mmmGLAVin.

Whereas if the UN has real power, and chooses to abuse it – where you gonna go? Mars is too cold. That’s one major reason why we hate the UN. The fact that it is a haven for thugs and kleptocrats and has committed more evil than good in its history is relevant, but not the key issue.

Liberals often think of the UN as representing the peoples of the world. Unfortunately, it doesn’t – it represents the GOVERNMENTS of the world. And most governments, most of the time, suck. It’s frankly amazing that the UN hasn’t sucked more.

A couple weeks ago, 3rd of 3 developed a high fever. Stoic dad wanted to let her gut it out on the couch, and save a few hundred dollars. Soppy mom insisted that she go to the ER (it was 9 PM). Guess who won that one.

The ER said she was coming down with a virus, beat them what it was because she didn’t have any other symptoms. They gave her Tylenol to get the fever down and recommended advanced medical treatments like keeping her comfortable and giving her plenty to drink. I brought her home a couple of hours later, having successfully shielded her from comprehending why the streetwalker in the next room was slurring her speech and talking about it hurting to pee.

A few days ago, we get the bill from the ER doctor. (I don’t know why, but this hospital separates the bills out, one for the ER itself, one for the doctor you end up seeing.) It was $204 – more than I want to pay, but in line with historical experience. I waited for the ER bill, which in the past has been around $100.

Today we get the ER bill. $1540. But, because the hospital loves us and wants to work with our financial situation, if we pay them by the 19th of March they’ll take 40% off, leaving it around 900 something. Cue my head exploding, wife quietly freaking, chaos reigning supreme.

So I get on the phone with the nice, calm lady at Centura who, I suspect, gets about fifty of these “wtf?” calls a day. She says the $1500 is for the ER service, is not a mistake, and that she can’t give me an itemized bill over the phone because of privacy regulations. But she can send me one – it will take a mere two business weeks to arrive. In the meantime, they want their money.

(Which, yeah. That’s going to happen. I wouldn’t pay $1500 for a whole child, let alone one ER visit. I won’t pay $1.50 to someone who hasn’t yet billed me.)

So a few questions for the hive mind.

1) Has something happened in the year since she last went to the ER, that the customary walk-through-the-door charge has increased fifteen-fold?

2) What’s my legal recourse here? In my surly 20-something days, I would have laughed and tell them to f*** off, and good luck collecting. (And the next time I visit the ER, it will be as Raoul Rodriguez, and try to prove different.) But these days I’m trying to buy a house, and trying to make all the red lines on the credit report read yellow or green instead.

3) Anybody got $1500 lying around they don’t need? (Oh, well, $950 if you can get it to me by 3/19.)

4) How is it possible for a commercial enterprise to legally demand money from people without presenting an itemized bill? (Technically, it’s not a demand. It’s an OFFER. That seems like thin cheese; if I were a judge in petty court I’d throw it out post-haste.)

5) WTF? I mean, what the F-ing F?