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User Journal

Journal Journal: Admiring the Administration's efforts to play drums and guitar simultaneously 8

. . ."Getting the Facts Straight on Health Care Reform," was written by Gruber for The New England Journal of Medicine in December 2009.
Breitbart has since learned that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) used this same article to defend itself in the case filed by the Commonwealth of Virginia. In the lawsuit, the Commonwealth argued that Congress has exceeded its Article 1 powers in enacting Obamacare. Page six of HHSâ(TM)s October 4, 2010, Reply Memorandum in Support of Defendant's Motion for Summary Judgment states:

The "guaranteed issue" and "community rating" reforms are regulations of insurance policies placed into Interstate commerce, and those reforms depend directly on the minimum coverage provision to work. See, e,g., Jonathan Gruber, Getting the Facts Straight on Health Care Reform, 361 NEW ENGL.J. OF MED. 2497, 2498 (2009).

HHSâ(TM)s use of the Gruber article raises a key question: Why would the Obama administration and Obamacare supporters claim that the presidentâ(TM)s health care law contained a "typo" stating only state exchanges are eligible for subsidies if the Obama administration itself used an article by Obamacare architect Gruber stating the exact opposite?

My question is: Given the thorough, systemic, nonstop falsehood involved in all stages of ObamaCare, from wee intellectual tumor through full bureaucratic metastasis, how does anyone expect any good to come of this? How does it begin to be possible to trust these clowns to do anything whatsoever, including delivering any aspect of health care? When they are done, and give it all a "My bad", and then peddle their real goal, Single Payer, by what miracle shall they have become trustworthy?

User Journal

Journal Journal: So this problem isn't new, or owned by either party 58

The arguments by which the Obama administration is countering lawsuits that seek to limit Obamacare subsidies to participants in "exchanges" established by states--a limit that is specified in the Obamacare law itself--have raised the outcome's stakes. Administration officials argue that the plain, unmistakable, uncontested language of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is less important than what they want the law to mean, and that hewing to its words would deprive millions of people of the subsidies that the administration had granted them regardless of those words. Therefore the courts should enforce what the administration wants rather than what the law says.
The Democratic Party, the bulk of its appointees in the judiciary, and the mainstream media echo these arguments.
America has moved away from the rule of law in recent decades, as more and more of the decisions by which we must live are made by administrative agencies in consultation with their favorite constituencies and judges rather than by the people's elected representatives. More and more, statutes passed by Congress are lengthy grants of power to administrative agencies, the content of which is determined by complex interactions between bureaucrats, special interests, and judges aligned with either. Hence House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's famous statement--that the ACA's meaning would be determined only after its passage--was true of it and most other modern legislation as well. This is the rule of men, not of law.

Obama is arguably more audacious about it, but look at the TSA.
Sarah Palin is arguing for impeachment, though that's really all about making damn_registrars foam at the mouth and driving subscriptions. We can impeach our way through the whole federal government, but if we are discussing systemic changes, then we're pissing in the wind, say I.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Just how much lying is acceptable in support of "Higher Truth"? 49

On Thursday, footage surfaced of Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist and chief architect of Obamacare, discussing the issue at the heart of the latest ACA court cases: whether subsidies are only available for state-run insurance exchanges or can also be paid as part of a federal exchange.
During a January 2012 lecture Gruber said, "I think what's important to remember politically about this, is if you're a state and you don't set up an exchange, that means your citizens don't get their tax credits."
Gruber spoke with Jonathan Cohn, a senior editor at The New Republic, about the video on Friday and said the remarks were a "mistake" made while "speaking off-the-cuff."

Since ObamaCare is just a river of lies anyway, this sort of blatant falsehood must be deemed entirely in character.
Just don't forget to salivate when these deceivers are done with the whole ObamaCare falsehood and offer to "fix" the whole situation with Single Prayer.
No matter the magnitude and frequency of the falsehoods spewing from these liars, you have to give them the benefit of the doubt. Because "it's the right thing to do". Also, you've been stupid enough to vote them power thus far, America: why change now?

User Journal

Journal Journal: Practical socialism 29

So, past all of the theorizing, what ends up happening in pretty much any political system you can name is that power gets concentrated, corrupts leaders, and ruin follows.
The act of trying to separate the theory of a system from the ensuing existential wreckage is among the more amusing acts one can watch other human beings undertake. No Christian wants to admit that Adolf himself made Christian utterances, for a bit of auto-Godwinism.
Thus when evaluating the goodness of a system of thought, I submit that not only should the abstract ideas be considered, but also the historical results of the ideas, and the subjective effects.
For my observation, Socialism offers some emotionally pleasing notions, but, like every single bureaucratic solution I've ever seen, winds up loving the problems it purports to "solve", and leads to stagnation.
Restated: you'll always have a statistical distribution of income. What matters not is that there are rich and poor (that's inevitable), but that there is a current flowing inside the distribution, so that people can reap as much/little as their genius and effort supports.
The big fib of Socialism is that, with just a few more pages of legislation, we can make that current flow "fairly".
Socialism, for some, seems a substitute for a proper faith in something that will endure beyond the final heartbeat.

User Journal

Journal Journal: niwdoG 24

Playing the Godwin card when the topic is really the meaning, ownership, and usage of the symbol "Socialist" (by, for example, the U.S.S.R) is really kinda l4m3.
Yet, strangely, in character.
Shark

Journal Journal: Burn, Baby, Burn! 1

"Sustainability" is, as far as I can see, a project designed to keep this culture - this lifestyle - afloat. The modern human economy is an engine of mass destruction. Of course, I am conflicted about this. I live at the heart of this machine; like you, I am a beneficiary of it. If it falls apart, I will probably suffer, and I don't want to. ...

I don't think any "climate movement" is going to reverse the tide of history, for one reason: We are all climate change. It is not the evil "1%" destroying the planet. We are all of us part of that destruction. This is the great, conflicted, complex situation we find ourselves in. I am climate change. You are climate change. Our culture is climate change. And climate change itself is just the tip of a much bigger iceberg, if you'll pardon the terrible but appropriate pun. If we were to wake up tomorrow to the news that climate change were a hoax or a huge mistake, we would still be living in a world in which extinction rates were between 100 and 1000 times natural levels and in which we have managed to destroy 25 percent of the world's wildlife in the last four decades alone."

http://grist.org/climate-energy/i-withdraw-a-talk-with-climate-defeatist-paul-kingsnorth/

Medicine

Journal Journal: Gimme Gimme Penicillin! 3

China 'seals off' town after man dies of bubonic plague
"A Chinese town has been sealed off and 151 people placed in quarantine since last week after a man died of bubonic plague, state media said Tuesday.

The 30,000 people living in Yumen in the northwestern province of Gansu are not being allowed to leave, and police at roadblocks on its perimeter are telling motorists to find alternative routes, state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) said.

Other reports said that earlier this month the 38-year-old victim had found a dead marmot, a small furry animal which lives on grasslands and is related to the squirrel.

He chopped it up to feed his dog but developed a fever the same day. He was taken to hospital after his condition worsened and died last Wednesday."

https://au.news.yahoo.com/a/24523564/china-seals-off-town-after-man-dies-of-bubonic-plague/

The Matrix

Journal Journal: Property is Moral Opposite of Liberty 10

Think about that, while you make absolute positions...

"...Liberty, as defined in its truest negative sense, is freedom from external restraint. This, along with the principle of self-ownership, commands that nobody shall have the right to act on the body of another without their consent. But "property rights" as Gobry slyly calls them gives people precisely that right. For a right to property is not a right over a piece of the world, but rather a right to act on the bodies of others: to attack and externally restrain those bodies without consent.

In a world that respects liberty, people are free to do whatever they'd like, provided they do not act on the body of another (e.g. externally restrain it). This requires that people may walk about the world as they please, grabbing and utilizing any of its various pieces and resources as they go. No person may stop them from doing so because such stopping would impose an external restraint on their body, a destruction of their negative liberty.

Yet, this kind of liberty-destroying external restraint is precisely what property ownership is. In fact, it is the only thing that property is: a social relation of violent exclusion wherein the "owner" has claimed a right to attack other human beings if they try to act on a particular piece of the world. Claiming a "property right" does not change the piece of world that it is meant to attach to, nor the person claiming it. It merely advertises a terrifying threat: everyone else's pre-existing liberty to use this piece of the world is hereby extinguished at my violent hands whether they consent to have their liberty so destroyed or not."

http://mattbruenig.com/2014/07/23/does-nature-command-the-destruction-of-all-human-liberty/

The Internet

Journal Journal: Was the Internet Created for Covert Domestic Surveillance?

"From its creation by DoD contracts and grants to research institutions, there have been aspersions cast by those easily dismissed as "fringe" commentators, on the nefarious, or at least covert, motivation to create the Internet. Conspiracy theory may have been met by reality in recent months with now commonplace reporting, first by Wikileaks and later, in the more extensive Edward Snowden revelations. It is still almost canon, that NSA mass-surveillance and warrantless information analysis occurred through coopting the burgeoning Internet, and diverting traffic in a way that is counter to the ideals of its creators and promoters. But what if the social, commercial Internet were always intended as a sort of giant honeypot? The idea would still seem farfetched, if it weren't recently disclosed by William Binney that the NSA is recording 80% of all US phone conversations â" not simply metadata. Closer examination of the record shows that ARPAnet was being used to clandestinely gather information on the legitimate activities of US citizens â" and transmit the information to the US Army Intelligence Command NSA â" as far back as 1968! According to articles published in 1975 by MIT in "The Tech":

  "via the ARPANET, a computer network connecting more than 50 government agencies and universities throughout the country. The network is funded by the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)... The information, according to intelligence sources, was transferred and stored at the headquarters of the National Security Agency (NSA), at Fort Meade, Maryland. The Army files were transmitted on the ARPANET in about January 1972, sources say, more than two years after the material â" and the data banks maintained at the [Army's] Fort Holabird facility â" were ordered destroyed."

MIT officials were worried 40 years ago, about this abuse of interconnected TCP communications and the complicity of their own research scientists. These concerns arose at the height of the Watergate fallout and downfall of President Nixon for illegal wiretapping and information theft allegations. The danger of Government "record keeping" was outlined by Senator Sam Ervin, in an address to MIT that was also profiled in the same publication. Clearly, this did not begin in the last decade, and clearly pre-dates the 2001 "Global War on Terror" pretext. It is important to remember, the NSA was an almost unknown agency at this time, and was chartered to strictly forbid intel on US citizens and those dwelling within US borders."

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