a violent response?

While violence is never funny, I have to say that I am bemused by the media’s overhyped coverage of the ‘violent’ response to the passage in the House of H.R. 3490, the Patient  Protection and Affordable Care Act.

As a quick example, the Huffington Post apparently believes it is okay to portray Sunday's protesters as racist.  As we well know, the best way to diminish a group is to tar it with the actions of an individual.  However, while Representative Cleaver said someone spit on him (as far as I know, nobody actually filmed this and Rep. Cleaver himself was unable to identify the offender to the police) and both Representative Lewis and Senator Frank were offended by slurs shouted at them not a single act of physical violence occurred and there were no arrests.

Now, if it had been the left protesting capitalism…

Pittsburgh, September 24th, 2009 .. “A police report said at least 19 shops and banks, including many fast food restaurants, bagel shops and diners near the university, had their glass windows or doors smashed in.

Sixty-six people were arrested following the clashes on Thursday -- 24 during the disturbances in the afternoon and 42 overnight, police said.”

In fact, that was the results of the first day of protest and involved approximately 1000 protesters.  Contrast that with the “Tea Party” protesters outside the Capitol Building.  What was that saying?  Sticks and stones…

As I understand it, there was even less violence on Sunday than there was after the 2004 ALCS Red Sox win.  Go figure.

Altruism, the most noble of intentions

Have you ever watched someone who is reading a really good book? I mean really observed them. Perhaps you were in a library when you heard someone exclaim and looked up (obviously your book wasn’t as good as it could have been) to see a reader, oblivious to anyone else in the room, with an intense expression on their face. Maybe you sat down in an airport gate area and noticed a reader who didn’t look up when the flight was called for the second or third time. Whatever the case may have been, I know the next thing you did was try to see the title of their book. With any luck, you found a good book to read.

I know I’ve been that reader, lost in the story, literally woven into the fabric the author has crafted. Really good books are like that, sucking you in until it is almost irritating to return to the real world around you. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series comes to mind, as do Anne McCaffery’s The Dragonriders of Pern series and Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan stories. I can remember befriending the local bookstore proprietor so that I could be on the list of people for whom he reserved one of his limited copies of upcoming releases. The good old days of the corner bookstore. But I digress…

Over the past several years I have found myself reading less entertaining books such as Mark Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny, Niall Ferguson’s The Ascent of Money and Peter Schiff’s Crash Proof. However, I remain the reader who runs down to Barnes and Noble and picks up a book that has been turned into a movie so I can read it as the author intended before seeing a script writer’s perversion of the story. That is sort of how I discovered Terry Goodkind’s The Sword of Truth series.

In looking for something to watch on TV, I stumbled upon ABC’s Legend of the Seeker. I missed season one, but went back and caught up online after the first couple installments of season two. Then I saw an interview with the author, Terry Goodkind, and made it a point to pick up the first book in the series (Wizard’s First Rule). I was hooked. The next trip to the bookstore involved picking up book two and ordering books three through six. I just finished book six, Faith of the Fallen, and it is so relevant to today’s politics that I found myself reading paragraph sized excerpts of it to my wife and having to explain the back-story in the the process. She smiled indulgently through the whole exercise, bless her heart.

I understand that Goodkind describes himself as an objectivist and I will not pretend to know diddly about objectivism (perhaps that shall be my next path of inquiry). What struck me about the storyline in Faith of the Fallen was the socially destructive force of altruism. Goodkind seems to have taken the proverb ‘Hell is full of good intentions or desires’ and, quite literally, played it out in his story.

Now I find myself looking at the Obama administration's use of altruism to destroy the very fabric of the United States of America and constructing parallels to Goodkind's storyline in Faith of the Fallen. What scares me is that The Order was successful for hundreds of years and I see no reason why today's 'altruists' should fail in their efforts.

the Healthcare Summit

I find it both amusing and disconcerting to hear the President "moderating" the "discussion" since he has a vested interest in the outcome - passage of the 'compromise' bill.

The Democrats are obviously starting from the position that their bill is a starting position when, in fact, the only reason they are sitting at that particular table is because the 'compromise' bill is unacceptable to the American public. Period. End of story.

The Republicans are, yes, sitting there with props (such as the 2400 page 'compromise' bill) but they are, at least, addressing the individual issues. They are trying to keep the Overton window from being dragged left to encompass the Democrat's 'compromise' bill.

All that aside, I am not hearing a discussion that addresses the issues. Some of the most salient points are being ignored.

First, we need to know what insurance is, so let me see if I can define it:

• Insurance is an economic device utilized by individuals and organizations to protect themselves against the risk of realizing unforeseen and extraordinary financial losses.


• By purchasing an insurance policy from an insurance company, an individual or organization can transfer the financial risk of a potentially devastating loss to another party, the insurer.


• Essentially, insurance allows individuals and organizations to pay a scheduled and affordable fee - a premium - to an insurance company today, and, in turn, the insurance company makes a promise to protect that individual or organization financially if they suffer from a specified unforeseen and devastating economic loss in the future.

It is important to understand insurance is an economic device and not a right or a social entitlement. It is a business and can only function as a business. Medicare is not insurance. Medicare and Medicaid are social entitlements. They are bankrupt and are in the process of bankrupting the country at various levels. If Medicare and Medicaid were private businesses they would have long since failed and gone away.

Once you accept the difference(s), you have to accept the reality that health insurance is completely separate from Medicare and Medicaid. By lumping them together in a single bill (whether it is all three of them or just health insurance and Medicare) you are socializing health insurance - making it into an entitlement and removing it as an economic device. Health insurance will no longer be a business, it becomes a government controlled social program.

As it stands, the 'compromise' bill is cover for the Democrats and their desire to:

• remove health insurance from the business environment and converting it to a social program;
• use the premise of healthcare reform as cover to alter (I did not say reform) Medicare and Medicaid.