Democracy Or Idiocracy?

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Have you ever wondered how the United States of America has managed to accumulate debt of $18 trillion and rising?

Part of the answer is pretty easy really.

The country is being run by people who can’t count. By people who do not realize that you cannot indefinitely live beyond your means.

Try doing what the government does at home and see how far you get? You can’t print money (legally) as a short-stop measure so the effect on you will be immediate. You’ll go broke!

The government and has been printing billions and billions of dollars, but all this has done is to postpone the inevitable and pass on the problem to future generations.

But not being able to count is just one part of what’s wrong. It’s a big part, but it does not tell the whole story.

What is also wrong is the amount of money that the government and their stupid minions waste.

A small, but good, example of this was accidentally uncovered during the 2014 investigation into the handling of interrogations of terrorists by American intelligence agencies.

Here we discovered that $81 million of taxpayer money had been paid to a pair of so-called ‘psychologists’ who were at the head of these interrogations.

Not only that, but it turned out that neither of these two people had any prior knowledge of al-Qaeda, no experience in interrogation techniques and no background in counter terrorism.

That’s zero experience on all three counts!

To add insult to injury, they were also promised an additional $5 million in indemnity costs to cover all legal expenses for any potential criminal investigation and prosecution through 2021 as well as paid more than $1 million individually.

This sort of idiocy permeates all sections of government. The waste is colossal. So colossal that the tax paying public very seldom, if ever, gets to hear about it. And if and when they do it is invariably too late to do anything about it. The money is gone. Wasted!

That’s part of the reason the United States imposes the world’s highest corporate tax rates and why it is one of the few countries in the world to impose a “worldwide tax” on domestic firms and on its citizens.

America likes to try to impose ‘democracy’ on other nations in the world, especially the ones that don’t understand it and don’t want it.

But with ‘democracy’ should come ‘accountability’.

Clearly is does not.

Therefore the system we really have is an ‘idiocracy’, not a ‘democracy’.

Let’s start and call it what it is. It’s a much more appropriate name for what is going on!

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The Government Just Doesn’t Get It – “Affordable” Means You Can Actually Afford It!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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The Sunday Sermon

So there are more difficulties plaguing the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

Now there’s a shocker folks!

I’ve already highlighted the mess that the government has made in trying to bring it’s computer systems online to enable enrollment in the new program. (See “What Am I” post from about a month ago)

Now people who thought they were already adequately insured are finding that this may not be the case, at least not for much longer. The private insurance issue is affecting lots and lots of people all over America, particularly those who were trying to be responsible and had adequate insurance for themselves and their families.

Most of them bought their insurance on the open market. Obama promised that would still be secure after his new Affordable Care Act was implemented.

He said, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.”

He lied.

Obama’s new law actually outlaws all but a small percentage of “grandfathered” individual insurance policies and requires carriers to instead offer coverage that is more comprehensive.

And there’s more trouble ahead. In 2018, an Obamacare tax on high-cost insurance plans kicks in and could cause upheaval in that part of the market as well.

The truth is that the law was designed to gradually eliminate the old system altogether.

The result?

All across the country those who thought they had adequate insurance are being issued with notices from insurers explaining that their plans are ending. Ending thanks to the Affordable Care Act.

It has understandably caused confusion, fear, anxiety and a great deal of anger.

Losing health insurance can be a terrifying possibility in America. Particularly as one gets older and policies are more difficult and expensive to replace.  

So is this the last of the Obamacare problems?

I think it would be a very safe bet to say no it won’t.

Affordable Health Care is a laudable goal. I’ve always said that. But the way to tackle it is to make the existing system more affordable by curbing the excessive profiteering of drug companies and medics, not burdening this and future generations of ordinary Americans with another government white elephant that the country can’t afford.

Unfortunately the government just doesn’t get it – “affordable” means you can actually afford it!

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Things Your Grand-kids Will Probably Never Know

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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We all happen to be living during a time when there are great advances and changes being made in the way we live our lives. Some of them are to our benefit, other not so much so.

Politically and financially the world is in turmoil. There is an accelerating and inevitable shift of power and influence towards the east, with former great powers like Britain and America declining in their influence and their economic might.

Perhaps that is a natural phenomenon, after all as they say “every dog has its day”, but I happen to believe that a lot of it is due to stupidity and mismanagement allied with a self-defeating philosophy that the west somehow has a duty to police the world and to create nanny states for its citizens where they will neither have to work nor want.

Technologically there have also been many changes and many more to come. During the past twenty years with the advent and growth of the internet everything has changed, from the way we interact socially, to how and where we work, and how we manage our affairs whether that be banking, shopping or whatever.

What a lot of these changes mean is that future generations will have no idea of how our lives used to be. Already many of us who have lived through the changes have forgotten how we used to have to do things. What would it be like trying to explain the ‘old days’ to a generation with absolutely no point of reference to the world we were born into?

To remind you of how it used to be here is a list of some of things we have known and lost, consigned to the rubbish bin of history. Feel free to add your own items to this list of things that your grand-kids will probably never know.

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Libraries as a place to get books rather than a place to use the internet.

Dewey Decimal System

Finding books in a card catalog at the library.

A physical dictionary — either for spelling or definitions.

Reference books such as phone books, encyclopaedias

Finding out information from an encyclopedia.

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Having to manually unlock a car door.

Looking out the window during a long drive.

Using a road atlas to get from A to B.

Getting lost in a world without GPS.

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Being able to add and subtract without a calculator

Long division and multiplication

Trig tables and log tables.

Slide rules

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House phones

Phone books and Yellow Pages.

Rotary-dial telephones.

Pay phones.

Phones with actual bells in them.

Answering machines.

Fax machines.

Not knowing who was calling you on the phone.

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Super-8 movies and cine film of all kinds.

Betamax tapes.

Video tapes and renting movies

Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.

Laserdiscs.

8-track cartridges.

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Casette Tapes

Vinyl records. Even today’s DJs are going laptop or CD.

CDs and DVDs

Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo.

Taping songs off the radio

A Walkman.

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Rotary tuners that scanned the radio dial and hearing static between stations as you went through the ether.

Shortwave radio.

CB radios.

Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control.

Waiting for the television-network premiere to watch a movie after its run at the theater.

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DOS.

The buzz of a dot-matrix printer

5- and 3-inch floppies, Zip Discs and countless other forms of data storage.

Booting your computer off of a floppy disk.

Tweaking the volume setting on your tape deck to get a computer game to load, and waiting ages for it to actually do it.

Counting in kilobytes.

Joysticks.

Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive.

Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something.

When a ‘geek’ and a ‘nerd’ were one and the same.

NCSA Mosaic.

Netscape

Alta Vista

Being able to get a domain name consisting of real words.

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Cash.

Writing a check.

Doing bank business only when the bank is open.

Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday.

Being able to buy something in Walmart that isn’t made in China

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Privacy.

Being able to take a drive or walk down the street without being surveilled on numerous cameras

Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment.

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Carrying on a correspondence with real letters, especially the handwritten kind.

Neat handwriting.

Spelling

Grammar

The fact that words generally don’t have num8er5 in them.

Typewriters.

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Putting film in your camera

Sending that film away to be processed.

Having physical prints of photographs come back to you.

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Vacuum cleaners with bags in them.

Ashtrays

Roller skates, as opposed to blades.

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