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Government

Journal Journal: Just another few hundred billiion dollars there... 64

I mentioned before that the Health Insurance Industry wastes tens of billions of dollars annually of our money, directly. I would think that would bother people enough to want to attack that industry just out of that magnitude of waste. Yet I overlooked completely another giant waste from them, to the tune of an even larger pile of money.

Annually, the federal government spends Over 300 Billion dollars on insurance subsidies. They also lose out on a comparable amount of money that would otherwise be counted as income tax, due to the provision that makes health insurance pre-tax contributions untaxed.

But of course all this gets us one of the worst health care systems on the planet, for the largest cost anywhere. Clearly this is a great deal.
User Journal

Journal Journal: No. 4 Will Warm Fusty's Heart 22

https://www.activistpost.com/2016/01/9-ways-to-stop-cooperating-with-the-ruling-elites-control-system.html

4. Don't vote for any of the major political parties

By voting for one of these parties you're only giving your power away to help the ruling criminals' further advance their NWO agenda. Stop believing the Republican-Democrat paradigm; or, if you're in the UK, the Lib-Lab-Con sock puppet campaign shows backed and financed by T.H.E.Y (The Hierarchy Enslaving You).

It doesn't matter who gets voted in. They're all funded and backed by the ruling elite. So whoever wins, the politicians who get in office will only be there to serve their lords and masters the ruling elite instead of the wishes of we-the-people.

Yes, there are a growing number of people who know this, but many still don't fully understand. Any advantages of selecting one party over the other because of, say, a policy in your favor or to your advantage will only be a short-term payoff. In the end, if you vote for one of the major parties because of this then you'll only have to suffer the far greater long-term cost for having chosen the party with their connections to the ruling elite's agenda.

Well, that's good as far as it goes. But how are we precluding THEY from controlling, say, a JFKjr?

The improved answer is to seize control at the local level. Fair enough.

But at that point, one discovers that the system runs backward; the money is borrowed and comes down the food chain, rather than having local taxes fund matters and move up the food chain to fund the government.

Money, we know, is mostly fungible with power. I'd fall short of directly equating them, but that amounts to a quibble.

The rest of The Famous Article is interesting and worth discussion as well.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Award for special dediction to obtuse trolling goes to ... 14

Smitty, of course

The specific effort here has to deal with his 2 week long fact-free diversion driven by his utterly unhinged hatred for the NIH. Start back here where I pointed out that our broken health care system needs to be completely scuttled to arrive at something that could ever improve outcomes. Then out of nowhere he declares the NIH to be an "epic disaster" , in spite of the fact that they do not have any meaningful role in the patient-provider aspect of health care. Strangely enough he mentions it right after backtracking away from his anti-factual bit about Sweden (perhaps in some alternate reality) abandoning Nordic Socialism.

Shortly after in a different thread we saw his NIH hatred come up again . He came up with a few random musings on the matter, including

The NIH is a bureaucracy first; its mission a distant second.

The NIH is symptomatic and related to the general turn from prosperity to Socialism, with the attendant economic/demographic/moral/happiness collapse.

I don't hate the NIH staff: I don't even know them. What I despise is the worship of bureaucracy on offer.

Yes, I actively hate the homo bureaucratus infestation that reduces people to livestock.

Going to Single Payer and importing the NIH would be a cure so much worse than the disease

Not a single one of which he gave any factual support for. Along the way he kept insisting that I was somehow calling them "perfect", in spite of multiple comments where I very plainly said the opposite of that. He did get in his last posts on the matters, so clearly he won on that dimension.

User Journal

Journal Journal: "it is serving very well under the circumstances" 30

I need to frame this one from fustakrakitch, emphasis mine:

The constitution is the procedural manual for the government, "We the People" are the authority, government exists to serve as the voice of "We the People". And it is serving very well under the circumstances. It is a perfect reflection of our own apathy. And you remain in denial of that juicy little fact.

I would argue that Congress and the Executive branches have been swamped by the organizational effects of the last century into a vast, un-elected bureaucratic mass. You can attach pejorative labels if needful; I'm only after the simple, plain, non-partisan, observable point. The SCOTUS teeters on the brink.

Fustakrakitch mostly seems to troll on here. I get that. And maybe with enough yeomanwork and squinting, I can even track "very well under the circumstances". But just chalking it up to "apathy" is zooming out into the stratosphere.

Stay beautiful, Fusty.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Unexpectedly, A Funding Deadline Just Totally Snuck Up On The Republicans 20

How can the Daily Kos say this?

Republican incompetence sets the stage for a Sunday government shutdown

Set aside the details of which chamber of Congress is working on which bill for a minute--we'll get to them next. The single basic fact everyone needs to understand is that the federal government will shut down this weekend when the deadline to fund it is missed, and House Republicans are the reason for that.

Those Republicans were really going to get around to doing their fundamental job Real Soon Now. They just totally got distracted by watching Barbie all Summer. Couldn't concentrate. Honest.

Less cheekily, if they left me in charge, I'd put down a simple rule: if Congress doesn't do it's basic job on time, then none of the dickheads and dickheadettes responsible can run for their current seat when next next up.

If these losers can't do the basics, our system should force us to find some officials who will.

Draconian? Sure, but if you want Grace, then talk to the Almighty.

And now, back to the carefully orchestrated farce that is our politics.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Big, If True, But Thin On Facts 7

Everyone knows the DNC and activist groups will trigger their ballot fraud operations in 2024, the problem for them is they can only lift so much through the fraud itself.

Yes, it is possible for the metropolitan counties of Philadelphia (PA), Wayne (MI), Clark (NV), Fulton (GA), Racine (WI) and Maricopa/Pinal (AZ) to each generate between 300,000 and 500,000 fraudulent ballots. However, when contrast against the anticipated scale of the state loss, that might not be enough.

The democrats need a candidate who can lose at a much smaller statewide margin so that ballot fraud (absentee collection) in the corrupt counties can reach their goals. Biden is not that candidate.

That sets up the dynamic where Biden support within the group who will be responsible for covering his deficits has become tenuous. Remember, Eric Holder and the Chicago network organized the original ballot operation and tested it in California in 2018. The two weeks after election day 2018 showed 21 GOP win seats on the day of election, flip through the use of the post-election ballot counting. That midterm test in CA was then rolled out nationally in 2020.

The counties that must be relied upon to sway the election are nervous about the scale of lift they will be required to provide. Within that tenuous situation, the ever ego-driven Obama network cannot accept that level of risk. Hence, Obama strategically retreats.

At the same time, the DC intelligence apparatus that needs to pretend the election is legit and support the fraud, is applying pressure on Biden to exit.

The message from Main Justice, the DOJ-CRD and the DHS embeds is that too much fraud would be problematic to achieve.

Team Biden is fully aware of this dynamic, they need to close the gap--not defeat Trump--but close the election gap to a distance that can be successfully closed by the ballot harvesting and manipulation operations. That's the focus and impetus behind all of the Biden campaign operations; close the gap.

That breathless prose is quite the allegation: "The message from Main Justice, the DOJ-CRD and the DHS embeds is that too much fraud would be problematic to achieve." One is genuniely curious what traffic (if any) to which "Sundance" is privy that could be paraphrased to say that.

The thrust of the post, if you read it all, is that the DNC is worried that Trump may overwhelm the various rigging measures that were intended to keep Zombie Joe in office. (Not that I wish ill on the fellow, but I doubt that he lives another 14 months.)

I'm not actually sure any of this matters. Even if the Eminence Orange wins the primary (solid possibility), there are any number of other legal/medical shoes to drop. Stipulate that the Citrus Caesar wins the election and is inagurated again: what is the likelihood that the GOPatsies would lift finger #1 to bolster election integrity and curb mail-in ballots (an idea too stuck in foopid for even the French)? Low, I'd say. The Deep State doesn't give a French frigate's fo'c's'le for election integrity, and the peasantry having a say.

United States

Journal Journal: This must not be possible, as per Smitty's source 62

Apparently, the readers and writers for outside magazine don't read enough of the writings from Smitty's friends to realize that they erroneously chose a hopeless warzone hell-hole wasteland as one of the "top 15 happiest places to live in the US.

Certainly, Outside Magazine - and the people who wrote for it - must have accidentally visited some other place that they didn't see the "real" Minneapolis where people need to run for their lives and the murder rate exceeds 5,000,000%.
Republicans

Journal Journal: GOP rolling out the time machine conspiracy again... 18

People are claiming that Trump's bit where he says that a Joe Biden re-election would cause WWII is some sort of gaffe. Excluding the standard GOP rant that exempts the infinitely infallible Saint Donald from ever making gaffes, there is a better explanation for what he was saying.

Really, this lines up with the standard GOP conspiracy of the Democratic Time Machine. After all if President Lawnchair had access to a time machine that could have prevented Benghazi, then certainly Biden would know about it as well, wouldn't he?

Too bad for Trump he didn't use that time machine to prevent the January 6th uprising. He'd be in a whole lot less trouble if he had.
Medicine

Journal Journal: So this is what capitalist choice looks like? 66

I ran into a situation recently when trying to get a prescription filled for one of my sons recently (he's under 18). We have two main drug store chains here where we live, we'll call them "A" and "B". There are other options but these are the main players.

For no particular reason I've always had my own prescriptions filled at "A". A while ago my wife and I were talking about trying "B" in the future but we never progressed beyond talking about it.

Then we ran into supply issues getting our son's prescription filled at "A". Our son's doctor suggested we try "B" so we did; I asked a pharmacist at "B" if they had his prescription available and they said yes, so it seemed like a good thing to do.

Except I then went there after the prescription had been called in - mind you we had to adjust the dosing to match what was available but that wasn't terribly difficult - only to find that our insurance wasn't accepted there. All other things being equal the prescription would be $15 at "A" or around $50 at "B" (in other words full retail price at "B").

So then I was directed to a different pharmacy, that exists in some other local retailers. I went there and was told they couldn't fill that prescription for new patients currently; hence two different pharmacies that I could use could not fill the prescription while one I could not use could.

I'm sure this make sense to someone. All I see is another way that we are lining the pockets of the wealthy shitheads that run the most morally bankrupt industry the world has ever known.
User Journal

Journal Journal: I Blame the "Victim" 96

The Boebert scandal is something to behold. She has apparently laid some claim to Christianity and made a public apology for acting a trifle worldly.

The pressures of politics have apparently broken her marriage. Prioritizing family over power is among the chief reasons why so many qualified people run away, run VERY away, from public service.

May the Lord pour some grace upon the lady.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Stick a Fork in the Republic 48

This meeting with the FBI in the Fall of 2020 eventually led to the majority of the impeachment articles, alleging that [Texas AG Ken] Paxton misused his office to benefit a specific individual who had, several years earlier, donated to one of Paxton's campaigns.
During the cross-examination by Mitch Little, an attorney for Paxton, Vassar made the shocking revelation that he and the other employees had gone to the FBI without a shred of evidence.
"Mr. Vassar, please, I want to get this straight -- you went to the FBI on September 30 with your compatriots, and reported the elected attorney general of this state for a crime without any evidence?" Little asked. "Yes?"
"Thatâ(TM)s right," Vassar admitted. "We took no evidence."
He attempted to clarify, saying, "We had no evidence that we could point to, but we had reasonable conclusions we could draw."

In code terms, if the government is the operating system, and the law is a programming language, then the legal system is the exception handling machinery.

"Lawfare", then, is an inversion where normal operations are moved to the exception handler.

With all of the resource leakage, the Republic kinda seems to be grinding to a halt.

One rumor that I heard on this Paxton flap is that it's R-on-R:

Paxton's crime was easily defeating George P. Bush, which triggered all of the corrupt GOPe appointees, bureaucrats and politicians.

Which just goes to show that neither end of the Deep State steamer is worth preserving, no matter how stridently fustakrakitch refuses to wield the Article V axe to change matters.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Three Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy Political Attacks On Trump 133

The 14th Amendment is a dead letter. 06Jan was an Op.

Instead:

1. Point out that DJT is a spendthrift. A substantial fiscal reform platform would do well against him.

2. While 06Jan was a farce, him letting the prisoners of 06Jan was terrible. He tacitly agrees with the bogus charges by not making an issue of the disgusting treatment of citizens.

3. He can't both take victory laps over Operation Warp Speed, and be critical of the Covid response. He could whine that he was the victim of a masterful squeeze play, but he needs to admit that he got rooked.

Our politics is a complete farce. Unless and until we have a no-kidding Article V Convention along lines similar to those articulated by Levin...I have no idea where this goes, but it looks like a dog's breakfast to me.

EXIT QUESTION: Why are the opponents not arguing the obvious?

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