Fish Fear Me

Thursday Stuff

I woke up to about 3" of snow yesterday morning at my place, but some parts of the state got more than twice that. With the leaves still falling and a forecast of cold and more snow next week it's shaping up to be the messiest start to winter in a long time. Like a lot of people around here, I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to get the leaves up before the snow sticks around for good. That's not exactly a tragedy, but it does make for a messy spring and maybe some lawn damage. It would be nice to avoid that.

Got whipped last week in fantasy football. Half my team had a bye week and the other half mostly had poor match ups. The final was 55-24. The good news is that my division rival also lost, so we remain tied at 7-2, 3 games ahead of the rest of the division with 4 games to go. I face the other division leader this week, so I have a tough opponent there, but I also have a few key players back. As always, we'll see what happens.

Washington plays the Vikes here tonight, bringing the Redskins name controversy with them. There will be protests outside the stadium before the game and I'm halfway tempted to go down there and check out the circus, but I probably won't. As I've said here before, I think the owner should change the name and reap the merchandise windfall that would naturally bring to the franchise. What I absolutely oppose though, is any effort by any government entity to censor the name. If there is a battle to be fought over the name, it has to happen in the court of public opinion and nowhere else.

Obn a side note, Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto raised an interesting point related to this the other day. When this is over, what are we going to do about the "O" state? 

Oklahoma is based on Choctaw Indian words which translate as red people (okla meaning "people" and humma meaning "red"). 

Hmmm. Can we really tolerate a state name like that, or maybe does it just show that owner Daniel Snyder simply needs to come up with the right Algonquin language name for his team?

100 years ago today the Great Storm of 1913 descended on the Great Lakes. Formed on the eastern slopes of the Rockies the day before, it barrelled into the Upper Midwest and pummelled the Great Lakes for three days. By the time it was over, dozens of ships had been sunk or driven aground and more than 250 sailors were dead. Here's a video of some of the ships that were lost:

 

I haven't dug into it beyond a first read of the editorial, but I'm not getting why writing it was a firing offense, even for a magazine called Guns and Ammo. As much as I scorn the irrational fears and grossly ineffective policies of most gun control groups, is it that hard for the readers of Guns and Ammo to recognize that yes, some gun reasonable gun regulations are essential?

Depends On The Drugs

MAPLE PLAIN

SEPT. 23

Advice given. A 60-year-old woman from the 1500 block of Howard Avenue called police stating that her birthday was coming up and she was concerned someone might give her food with drugs in it. An officer advised her to decline the food.

Party pooper. Those brownies were probably delicious.

"We Have Always Been At War With Eastasia"-Barack Obama Edition

As far as I know, even Richard Nixon didn't sink so low as to blatantly lie about his big lie:

"Now if you had or one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really like that plan what we said was you could keep it if it hasn't changed since the laws passed."

What an astonishing level of contempt, not just for the truth, but civil society itself.

You know, our society and our political system has been built to withstand an awful lot of disagreements and anger and shouting, but it's not going to make it much longer if a president and his party can get away with blatantly rewriting history. Because allowing that would mean the end of accountability and that would fatally undermine the credibility of the system itself. If that goes, what are we left with to resolve our differences? 

 

(This mild blog post about a subject that's actually rather infuriating has been brought to you by the mantra, "breathe in, breathe out.")

Tell Me Lies Tell Me Sweet Little Lies

To me, the greatest joy of hunting is walking down some trail, or Forest Service road that isn't really a road by anyone else's standard, and feeling the modern world fade away with each footstep. Not that I hate modernity itself, I'm no Luddite by any means, but the way the modern world works these days, especially here in America, makes me despair sometimes. The first three weeks of October were particularly soul-sucking in exposing the debased and incompetent nature of our so-called elites. Three solid days of walking in the woods at the end of October could not have come at a better time. So with a little refreshed perspective from that, a few thoughts on Obamacare.

Of all of the lies around Obamacare, the website failure is the smallest and most fixable. We were once again sold the fable that the federal bureaucracy has the competence to get something right the first time. It doesn't. It never has and it never will. Even the most admired bureaucracy in the federal government, the US military, initially fucks things up all the time. The Obamacare website will eventually be fixed to an acceptable standard by the same method the federal bureaucracies always use─the combined brute force of lots of money and manpower. 

The first really big lie that has been exposed is Obama's(and the entire Democratic Party's) claim that if you like your plan or your doctor you will be able to keep them. Not only did they know that wasn't going to be true for millions of individual plans, they spent the last three years tightening the regulatory screws that would make it a certainty for millions more. Additional coverage mandated by Obamacare have made those plans illegal and the replacement plans are naturally more expensive.

In addition, many insurers are controlling the cost to consumers by cutting down the number of in-network providers in their lower cost plans. Millions of Americans are discovering they can only keep their doctor if they switch insurers, which may not be practical if they are in a group plan, or if they upgrade their coverage. And if you think it's fun now, wait until the employer mandate fully kicks in and we see what other consequences make themselves known.

Nothing exposes Obama's unprincipled and arrogant nature more than his attempt to blame insurers for all of this. That's a lie, pure and simple. And nothing is more infuriating than his craven apologists who have commandeered for themselves the right to determine what is or is not the right minimal health care coverage for everybody else.

The biggest lie of all is not yet obvious to many Americans, though it should be. That's the idea that the government, through a maze of mandates, subsidies, cost-shifting, and dozens of panels of experts, can effectively manage the US health care system at all. We've been doing that stuff to one extent or another for decades now at the state and federal level and it's why the health care system is as screwed up as it is today. Now we're going to do all that stuff on steroids and the result will be...awesome?

No, it's going to be a disaster of perverse incentives and completely predictable unintended consequences leading to "fix," after "fix," after "fix" until it becomes obvious even to Democrats that this was the dumbest government intervention in the history of the United States. And I haven't even touched on the crushing economic effects that are just starting to be felt.

Obamacare was conceived as a lie, gestated through secret backroom deals, and birthed by Pelosi and Reid as a 2000-page monstrosity that nobody had read, let alone even partly understood. That it's going to be an unprecedented disaster should surprise no one.