Slouching Towards Oblivion

Monday, July 24, 2017

It's The Humanity, Stupid

The Roanoke Times:


As the health care debate rages in the nation’s capital, patients and providers at the RAM Clinic are anxious for change. Most of them have a resounding demand for politicians in Washington, D.C.: Fix the nation’s health care system.

Located near the Virginia- Kentucky border, the clinic at the Wise County Fairgrounds attracts residents from a wide area. The clinic, the largest of the year, has 1,400 volunteers who serve thousands of people in one weekend.

At 5 a.m. Friday — the first day of the clinic — RAM founder and British philanthropist Stan Brock stood at the entrance of the clinic as volunteers prepared to let people through the gate.

Hundreds arrived at the fairgrounds in the dead of the night to secure a decent spot in line. They slept in their cars or pitched tents as they waited for the clinic gates to open. Before the sun crested the surrounding mountains, volunteers had given out all of the numbers for the day and began turning people away.


So, while people are suffering and often dying for the lack of insurance that would allow them to seek treatment when they need it, Coin-Operated Politicians are busy playing their high-school-fuck-around games.

This is where I usually go into my screed about how the "clear-eyed pragmatic free-market capitalists" are being stoopid because of their unwillingness to realize the huge savings of Prevention vs Remedy, etc etc etc.

But that was me being kinda stoopid myself.  When you turn a profit on people being sick, you want them to be as sick as possible. Even if "the wanting" is sublimated, or you're somehow unaware that you want it, there's no real difference. You want people to be sick because that's how you pay your mortgage.

Enjoying the benefits derived from the endeavor demonstrates your support for the endeavor itself - consciously or otherwise. Silence implies consent.

So anyway - Daddy State Economics: Socialized Risk and Privatized Reward.


My mistake was in assuming these assholes have some vestigial sense of humanity because they're people of honor. They don't, because they aren't.

Today's Tweet





OK - the guy complains about "purity", and tries to use that as an excuse to make his own history disappear by deleting a boatload of his tweets. Which does what? It makes him appear far more in line with 45*'s "positions" - aka: the quest for Purity.

These fuckin' guys.

Sunday, July 23, 2017

Deep Thoughts


On the phenomenon of hardcore 45* supporters:

You believe the lies. Or in the context of the current political culture - for whatever reason, it doesn't matter to you that 45* lies a lot.

(80% of people self-identifying as Republicans support him in spite of knowing he lies to them almost every day)

So, I'll go ahead and call you a dumbfuck lyin' sack of shit.

Now, if you care about the truth, and you know you're not a dumbfuck lyin' sack of shit, then you have a case to make that I'm behaving very badly - and I'll back you up on that one all the way.

If you know it's not true but you've established that lies don't matter to you, then anybody can say anything about you - good or ill - and you got nuthin', bubba. 

Zero Zip Zilch Nada.

There's nothing for you to feel proud about if they say nice things about you.

And there's nothing you can bitch about when they spread the shittiest most damaging lies about you. And eventually it will come around to that. It always has, and I can see no reasonable expectation for that to change.

The only thing worse than your failure to stand up to some jagoff like 45*, is realizing there's nobody willing to stand up for you.

Today's Quote


Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins. 
--Ayn Rand

Today's Tweet



Today's Internet Winner


Overhear on Facebook:

William Henry Harrison had a better first 6 months than Trump and he spend 5 of them being dead.

Friday, July 21, 2017

Yeah - Even Those Assholes

Unite The Right rally is on track - Aug 12, 2017 at Emancipation Park in Charlottesville.

Reminding us of the foundation of the First Amendment, Lloyd Snook put up this post at Snook & Haughey (here in Charllottesville):

Many in the community want the City to withdraw the permit necessary for them to take over Emancipation Park for the day. There are many legal reasons that the City might scrutinize the permit application very closely, but we need to steer clear of the illegalreasons that have been suggested. Let’s look at what the City can or cannot do.

The City can regulate or deny a permit application for reasons of safety, but notbecause of the content of what the alt-right people are going to say. Any regulations must be content-neutral.

The City can impose conditions and restrictions on marches and demonstrations only if the conditions and restrictions are reasonably tailored to specific needs and problems, and only if the conditions and restrictions do not have the effect of being an undue burden on public speech.

The City cannot pass on the costs of security to the permit applicants, at least where the security costs are incurred to protect against the angry responses of others.

Content Neutrality:

There are a few points that need to be made here:

  • Hate speech is still protected under the First Amendment.
  • Unpopular speech is protected under the First Amendment.
  • Government cannot regulate or restrict protected speech.
  • There is no such thing as a list of domestic terrorist organizations whose members can be denied the civil rights given to the rest of us.


Advocating pro-white viewpoints and flanked by members of the Warlocks Motorcycle Club, local right-wing blogger Jason Kessler spoke outside the Charlottesville Police Department on Tuesday night to discuss his upcoming rally and to denounce his opponents.

Kessler’s “Unite the Right” rally, planned for Aug. 12 at Emancipation Park, will take place a little more than a month after about 50 members of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan held a rally in Justice Park that drew more than 1,000 counter-protesters.

-and-

Kessler has distanced himself from the KKK rally, saying that the leader of the Klan chapter that filed for the city permit is an FBI informant and was paid by “left-wing groups to discredit legitimate conservatives.”

hat tip = Walker Thornton

Policy Illustrated

As a child of Radical Privilege, 45* believes he gets to do whatever he wants to do, and if it doesn't quite work out (as it often doesn't), he ducks responsibility by delegating the project to a potential fall guy and pretending the only thing necessary is to find large piles of dollars he can throw at it.

Today's Tweet



The Rude Pundit

He Knows

Obama knows a lot.  One of the things he knows (that I never really recognized, much less gave him any credit for) is that sometimes not saying what's on your mind is an OK thing.


I'm not trying to rationalize here. I'm trying to get my head around how decent this guy truly is.


He knew what was going on - what "The Left" has been saying forever - but when he was being The President, he mostly kept his mouth shut about how shitty the Repubs had allowed their party to get. He only opened up when he was in full campaign mode.

Maybe he should've let fly. Things would certainly be different now if he had, but different doesn't necessarily mean better. So it's all speculation - Coulda Shoulda Woulda.

What we know for sure is that in the face of all the shit they threw at him, he was still doing everything he could do to be everybody's POTUS.

"When they go low, we go high."

I've always phrased that one a little differently: "Come at my knees and I'll take your fuckin' head off".

But I'm workin on it, Prez. Honest I am.

Thursday, July 20, 2017

Keith

"To be neutral between right and wrong is to serve wrong." --T Roosevelt