A Totally Scattered Post

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This is a scattered post; it has no theme whatever, and I’m simply shooting off my mouth about the stuff that has been in the news lately.

The Supremes, the Hobby Lobby, and Birth Control
My stance on health care is that in the form it currently takes in the US today—July 2014—health care is only a little less broken than it used to be before 2012.  It is unconscionable that the Supreme Court (by a very narrow majority) has decided that businesses smaller than a certain size have the right not to provide (via the insurance plans that they offer) birth control for women (or any medical services at all) that are contrary to their religious views.  It is even more unconscionable, in my opinion, that businesses have to provide health insurance at all.  Why?  Because [1] businesses should not have to negotiate deals with health insurance companies at all.  Doing so puts them at a huge disadvantage, because they have to take administrative and planning expertise away from what they should be doing —running an efficient company— towards comparing health plans, and gambling on what sort of health plans will appeal to new hires.  Let’s face it: the existing employees will have to eat any sort of heath plan garbage that is imposed on them.  American citizens have lived with this twisted situation for a century.  As long as health services are paid for by insurance companies, there will be inequity, discrimination, and logical inconsistencies in the delivery of health care.

[2] Health care should be social obligation, paid for by taxes, not an employment benefit.  It is fashionable today to blame unemployment on the actual individuals who happen to be unemployed, rather than economic conditions, or the US tradition of not allowing government to create employment through public works, or developing the infrastructure, which is the most crying need we have at present.  It is even worse, next to being unemployed, that the health of unemployed persons and their families should suffer, so that if an opportunity for new employment does offer itself, the person concerned is too sick to take it.  Health care should be paid for by the government, and ideally the Federal Government.  If there are objections to it from the point of cost, compromises can be made.  Objections made on religious grounds must be ignored.  This “Life begins at conception” principle is sheer hogwash, and cannot be allowed to influence government policy.  The principle that all life is equally sacred makes better sense than human life begins at conception, but all other life is negotiable, which is what lots of orthodox Christians claim to believe.  Basic Health Care should be paid for with taxes, and I’m willing to discuss what sorts of health care should be considered elective, and so not covered.  If there should be a death panel, so be it.  Even a death panel cannot prevent a patient from paying for treatment that the death panel has denied.  (Denial is only denial of insurance coverage.  All these millionaires who pretend to be deathly afraid of death panels can easily afford any care that an Insurance "Death Panel" denies coverage for.  Anyone would think that a (so-called) Death Panel has the right to send someone to the Guillotine!  No.  In case you were wondering; a so-called death panel can only say that such-and-such a procedure is sufficiently exotic, or unnecessary, and expensive that the patient must pay for it him- or herself.)

I think the decision the Supreme Court (initially) handed down is the only good one it could have (except for some last-minute —evidently post-decision— finagling by the conservative justices, which expanded the rights of fanatically religious employers beyond the extent to which the Court had managed to compromise to arrive at the initial Hobby Lobby decision).

Intervention in the Middle East
I haven’t kept up with what is happening with these ISIS people; it appears that what they want most of all is attention, after which they want to make sure that Islamic women are not permitted the same rights as Islamic men.  The Christian religion, in my humble opinion, is a rational reformation of Judaism, in addition, of course, to some claims that Jesus was the Messiah, and so forth.  In all that has been reported in the first century writings about what Jesus said that we have been permitted to see, by the censoring arm of the Early Church and the Emperor Constantine, Jesus keeps up an unremitting assault on the inconsistencies of the Jewish observation of their religion.  In later centuries, successive reformations kept making the rules of the church more rational in small increments, until the inequities between the sexes were eroded systematically, in keeping with the social philosophies of each succeeding age.  In more conservative branches of Judaism and Islam, of course, the rights and privileges of the two sexes are quite asymmetric.

Until we take the logs out of our own eyes, of course, we cannot keep exclaiming about the motes in the eyes of the Islamic peoples of the world.  We can support Islamic women, we can provide sanctuary for them, we can give them a platform.  But if we were to make a raid on an Islamic country simply to liberate their women, it would be viewed as a mere excuse for aggression.  We must simply wait, until Islam comes of age.  It didn’t work for the US to liberate Iraq.  It didn’t work for the US to liberate Algeria.  It will never work.

Let us by all means take each call for “liberation” on its own merits.  But I for one am convinced that the liabilities of a move to liberate any foreign nation vastly outweighs the benefits.

Leaving the CIA to extend covert US support to foreign countries is just as idiotic an idea.  The CIA is managed by fools, and when, with the current US popular distaste for secrecy, the operation is brought to light, the US looks more foolish than ever.  We simply have to stop pretending to be the conscience of the world.

Lawsuits, and Obama Executive Actions
Recently we learned that the Speaker of the House, Mr. John Behner, has announced his intention of bringing a lawsuit against President Obama because of the number of Executive Action he has taken.  (For the information of those who are not aware of this fact: because Congress has failed to act on an enormous variety of issues, the President has gone ahead and given orders.)

Supporters of the President across the nation are incensed, because the Behner lawsuit will be expensive.  But this is a common thing: Congressional games involve appointing Special Investigators and Grand Juries and lawsuits to discredit various branches of the Government, be it Watergate, Oliver North, the Whitewater Scandal, the Monica Lewinski Scandal, or now the Too Many Executive Orders Scandal.  It is all part of the Hollywoodization of Congress.  Sarah Palin, a one-time GOP glamorous character, has come out in favor of impeaching the President.  The tragedy of the GOP is that its true leaders are a few cynical intellectuals, and a few oligarchs, such as the pair of brothers of the name Koch.  In contrast, the idols of the rank-and-file GOP are loose cannons and lightweights who are a general embarrassment to the party, such as George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, and this Senator from the south, whose name I forget [Ted Cruz. See here for more idiocy from this numskull].  It is a crazy circus, watching the cynical intellectual leadership trying to keep the goofballs under control.

All we can do is to keep careful track of how much money is spent on this lawsuit, and use it in the 2014 campaign, and the 2016 campaign, and keep using it as long as John Behner is in the running for absolutely anything.  One of the most fearsome prospects is that of having a total idiot running for President, such as, for instance, John Behner.  But there are worse idiots in the GOP stable, and the GOP knows it.  It also knows that the GOP rank and file likes these idiots.

Chaotic Weather, Global non-warming, rising sea levels, and Carbon Emissions
It seems clear that Human-Induced-Global-Warming is resulting in increasingly chaotic weather.  Even if you believed that the global warming is entirely natural, you have to believe that cutting down on energy use can help slow down the rate of warming.  But the neigh-sayers are in firm control, despite Neil deGrasse Tyson’s valiant efforts on the Fox channel.  At least one of President Obama’s executive orders, so troublesome to the Coal Industry, has had to do with limiting emissions from Coal Plants.

You probably realize that, at least in certain parts of the country, consumers have taken to buying Hybrid cars in droves, and sales of heavy SUV's are slowing down.  One of these days, Coal Plant owners will find themselves out on a limb, despite the agonizingly long-drawn out employment crunch.

The employment crunch
This is something that is not so much in the news, as affecting our family directly.  The rhetoric coming out of the Right is that it is Health Reform that is causing it.  That may be so, but it is more that the Right is aggravating the effects of health reform on the impact on the hiring practices of small businesses.

If only the US was friendlier to cooperative enterprises!  It would not be too difficult to organize unemployed young people together to create communal farms, cooperative stores, and to help themselves enjoy a moderately comfortable lifestyle.  But it is not easy.  If ever the time was ripe for a network of cooperative enterprises to be organized, it is now.  The culture is wonderful at proclaiming the value of the worker, while at the same time denying any real opportunities for workers, and working all the time to make things easier for the largest businesses.  The sheer power of the media is deployed to make it appear as though Big Business is the underdog, and anyone helping the worker is the oppressor.  It defies reason.

Well, keep calm, dear readers, and try not to get too many ulcers reading the news, or worse, watching the news, or even going on Facebook.  Political frustration is spreading among both liberals and conservatives, because nothing good ever happens in Congress, or anywhere in the world, except for an occasional tennis or football game.