A Friend For Pajama Boy

They're going to have a lot to talk about over the holidays!

Money For Nothing

Last night I got on healthcare.gov and checked out what it would cost to insure my family of five through the exchanges. More than $12,000/year for Bronze plans with family deductibles as high as $12,000

Up to $24,000 per year in out-of-pocket medical expenses before I get anything at all for my money (because the money you pay for insurance you never use is a medical expense).

The premium cost is actually less than my 2014 employer-provided insurance (which is more than my 2013 insurance, with worse benefits, because my existing plan was canceled due to Obamacare. If you like your plan....), but my employer subsidizes 80% of my premium, so I don't feel the bite so much. But the bite is still there, if I pay attention, because that 80% "subsidy" is money the company could otherwise pay me directly in salary!

It's the deductible that's radically different. Currently, my deductible is only $1,200 for the family -- a tenth of the Bronze plan deductible. A $12,000 deductible means your insurance is really catastrophic health insurance, but it's priced like comprehensive health insurance, because after the deductible it covers all sorts of ridiculous things.

Pre-Obamacare, if I could have arranged for the company's share of the premium to be paid to me and bought my own insurance, I would have. But that's not an option under the perverse, industry-warping set of tax incentives we're saddled with.

We are not a heavily medicalized family. We don't go to the doctor at the drop of a hat. We typically don't meet the $1200 deductible, no less the $12,000 dollar deductible. All I would really want is catastrophic health insurance. I'm totally good with paying out of pocket for non-catastrophic expenses -- I can manage my own money, thanks. But I am now prohibited by Obamacare from buying catastrophic insurance through the exchange because I am not under 29.

I'm so grateful that a bunch of politicians and bureaucrats in Washington know what's best for me.

That's the ultimate indignity of the nanny state -- the presumption of incompetence.

Step 1: Don't Tour North Korea

The WSJ has a video up, "Keeping Safe While Touring North Korea":

An 85-year-old American was arrested in North Korea due to his service in the Korean War. Simon Cockerell of Koryo Tours, which arranges group visits to the country, tells the WSJ's Deborah Kan what American tourists need to do to keep themselves safe.

The desire to tour North Korea should be your first warning that you suffer from serious mental health issues and have no business plopping yourself down in the middle of one of the most brutal, repressive regimes on earth to engage in tourism! Seek help.

Later: Man, having watched the video now, I'd say it's extremely disappointing, except that it's exactly what I expected. It's a self-serving propaganda pitch from a tour operator. The WSJ interviewer, Deborah Kan, declines to give him anything but softball questions that allow him to present his "nothing to see here, move along, no trouble at all" spiel.

I get angry that journalists today feel apparently no obligation to ask hard questions. She asks about instructions that tourists are given -- do's and don'ts, mostly don'ts -- but never digs down into specifics or asks about the regime's brutal repression of its citizens, the Potemkin village experience it provides to tourists and the morality of pumping tourist dollars into this ugly, ugly evil system to help it keep itself afloat.

For the Useful Idiot file: In another article on the detention, a commenter says: "I would probably agree with North Korea. I don’t think we would look kindly on a 90 year old Japanese Emperor sight seeing Pearl Harbor."

How can a statement that idiotic not want to make you pound your head against a wall? The Emperor of Japan is a ceremonial figure, recognized and honored by the U.S. government. Should he or any member of the Japanese imperial family decide to visit Pearl Harbor, they'd get the VIP treatment. As far as aging Japanese soldiers, the U.S. welcomes all Japanese citizens, is no longer seeking any Japanese war criminals and would not do this to any Japanese citizen visiting our shores.

I'm disappointed that the man, Merrill E. Newman, dutifully confessed to all crimes. I'd hope that even at 85 -- especially at 85 -- I'd have the stones to tell the North Koreans where to stuff their confession.

Human Nature As Revealed Through My Kids

There were a couple little interactions between my two youngest daughters that happened this afternoon that I thought were very revealing of human nature.

In the first, the youngest found a chess medallion that belonged to her older brother. "He won a medal for chess?" the youngest asked, excited, because she's getting interested in chess a bit.

"Not really," the older one replied. "We both got them. They're just pity prizes. Everyone who played got them."

Pity prizes. The term and my daughter's tone said it all. These kinds of "trophies" and "awards" are ridiculously common now, and they don't do anything for the kids' self-esteem (as if that were important). If anything, they're reminders of failure: "You got this because you didn't win." The kids realize this. Don't the adults think the kids realize this? Adults who come up with these idiotic "participation awards," I ask you: exactly how stupid do you think these kids are? It's pretty damn insulting that you expect them to be pleased by receiving these.

In the second interaction, we'd just gotten out the Christmas advent calendar: It's a little wooden Christmas tree with 24 drawers. Each drawer has a little ornament, and each day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 24 you're supposed to take the next ornament out of its drawer and hang it on the tree.

The youngest asserted that she wanted to hang all the ornaments right now. Her older sister was adamant that the ornaments must be hung once a day, because that's how it's supposed to be done!

"Rules! Pfft!" was pretty much the younger daughter's attitude. "I don't see a rulebook for it! There's no instructions! We can do it any way we want!"

"But that's not how it's supposed to be done!" The older sister tried to explain. One a day until Christmas.

The younger daughter showed no appreciation for the explanation. The existence of a set of codified expectations for how the advent calendar is supposed to work didn't impress her at all.

I took out a sheet of paper and wrote "ONE AT A TIME" on it in marker and set it down in front of the advent calendar. "See? Rules!" She thought that was pretty hilarious. I let her put all the ornaments on. She'll probably be more interested in putting them all away and putting them on one at a time later after she's had a chance to play with the tree for a while. Or not. As if I care. The real purpose of the tree is for the enjoyment of children: if the rules are a barrier to her enjoyment, of what use are the rules? There are plenty of times in her life when the rules must be followed. Freedom to ignore the rules is something kids also need, sometimes.

But it's interesting how two girls, raised in the same household, have very different attitudes toward rules. That interaction was characteristic of the two. The older (the fourth of five) is much more the type to like things very orderly, to think that there is a "Way Things Should Be Done." The younger isn't completely devoid of that instinct -- I think all people have it, but she is much more inclined to discard the rules when the rules get in her way. How much of that difference between the two is innate and how much due to differences in how we have parented them? My experience after five kids is that no two kids get parented exactly the same, even by the same parents at the same time. Your parenting and your interactions with your kids are influenced by their personalities, your age and experience, your life situation at the time (job, income, free time, mental health, etc.), and your natural relationship with the child, for better or worse.

Bait and Switch -- Women Letting Themselves Go

I know there are men who let themselves go, too, but there are certain women who seem to make the transition from Wow to Whale overnight. It's got to be a shock to a guy to marry this:

And then in only a couple years find himself walking down the street with this:

It's like if you bought a Ferrari, and one day you came out and found it had been replaced with a Dodge Vanagon, and then when you checked the contract -- yeah, that was the deal. You missed it. Ferrari to be replaced with Dodge Vanagon after two years. Sucks to be you.

If you're the kind of guy that gets turned on by young Bryce Dallas Howard, is there any chance at all that the Bryce Dallas Howard who looks like Roseanne Barr's sister will get your motor running? Probably it's all he can do to pretend not to be repulsed. I mean, we're supposed to love the inner person, but there's a limit. When the inner person is buried under several hundred pounds of newly-acquired fat, you shouldn't have to pretend that's just OK.

This isn't just baby weight. The mother of my five children is pretty much the same weight now that she was when I met her. She never put on this kind of weight when she was pregnant.

Bryce looks like she was just shoving anything within reach into her mouth. She might have accidentally eaten her midwife.

I can imagine her husband, "Honey, maybe you should slow down...."

"I'm eating for two!"

"But that's an awful lot of ice cream!"

"Eating. FOR. TWO. DAMNIT! MORE ICE CREAM! MORE! MORE! ROAR!"

Eventually they just had to toss the ice cream containers from a distance after a couple people lost limbs.

I've known more than a coupe husbands whose wives did this, and women of my acquaintance who did this between their late teens and late 20s. I see their wedding pictures or high school photos, or remember them personally as cute little hotties -- and I now kind of recognize the face on top of the blimp. It's not OK.

If anyone read this blog, I'd be expecting some serious hate mail.

Obama: Insanely Conservative

"Insanely conservative" is how one leftist poster (who seemed to have a lot of like-minded company) described Obama in a recent thread on a forum site I frequent thats primary topic is non-political and whose membership, I'd hazard to characterize, is comprised of people far less politically aware and sophisticated than that of the many political sites and blogs I read.

I sit and I think about that phrase as a descriptor for Obama, and I try to wrap my head around it. It seems to me that to hold a belief like that is only possible if you know absolutely nothing about what it means to be "conservative" or "liberal" (it hurts me to use liberal in this context and I must note that "progressive" is the more historically correct term for the ideological pedigree in question, but in the popular mind, Republicans are conservative and Democrats are liberal).

I can only assume from the context of the thread that Obama is "insanely conservative" because in many practical matters of governance they see him to be "Bush 2.0." Indeed, he failed to close Guantanamo, renewed the Patriot Act and used it with much vigor, practices rendition and greatly increased the use of drone strikes, and has presided over unprecedented domestic surveillance.

Unfortunately for these people, they are under quite a misapprehension if they think these are conservative policies. Bush was a Republican, true, but he was not particularly conservative. He had mostly big government, statist instincts. Obama's first opponent, John McCain, is notable for being among the most moderate of all Republicans, most willing to cross the aisle and work hand in hand with Democrats (per McCain-Feingold), but during the election it was he that was presented as some "insanely conservative" war-monger for wanting to continue Bush's policies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Romney, likewise is a man of very modest, mainstream, moderate instincts. In any other era, a decent, middle-of-the-road sort of guy with good business instincts. Again, he was portrayed as some sort of radical conservative in the election. We badly needed someone with his sound business and managerial experience. Not a former community activist and lecturer who's never held a real job in his life.

There is nothing conservative about the Patriot Act. In fact, when you think of surveillance states in the real world, you're kidding yourself if the nations that come to mind aren't predominately leftist: Great Britain -- more video cameras per square mile in London than any city in the world, and you can get sent to jail for speaking an uncivil word about a protected minority. Even its so-called "conservative" parties are basically on board with leftist, globalist fads. The old Soviet Union (and the current Russia), China, North Korea. Cuba. These are places where you expect your words to be monitored and incorrect attitudes to be adjusted.

There's nothing conservative about foreign wars of choice. Taking out the Taliban was one thing, but in going in for the long haul, Bush was following much more in the footsteps of the liberal Presidents who led us into the bloodiest foreign wars of our history: Wilson, FDR, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson.

Taft, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Eisenhower, and Reagan were notable for keeping us out of bloody, ruinous conflicts. Nixon came in with Vietnam going full force after being initiated by Kennedy and escalated by Johnson. He's often vilified in conjunction with Vietnam, but the truth is, he deescalated and ended the war.

Violations of constitutional rights -- the Patriot Act, rendition, Guantanamo Bay -- are not the intellectual heritage of conservatism. They're the intellectual heritage of Wilsonian progressivism. I don't think any high school courses cover it at all today, but under Wilson's rule during WW I, there was widespread suspension of constitutional rights and suppression and even imprisonment of political dissenters. And of course FDR's incarceration of innocent Japanese-Americans is infamous.

Obama did indeed end the war in Iraq. Arguably "losing the peace" in doing so. But he loses any cred for being a peacemaker by the facts that casualties in Afghanistan multiplied under his leadership, he led us into undeclared war in Libya, and executed U.S. citizens without due process -- including a 16-year-old American boy.

So, when people call Obama "conservative" for his "Bush 2.0" behaviors, what they're really talking about is that Obama acts like Bush when Bush wasn't acting like a conservative. But how about in other areas? Can you really call a president "conservative" when they've presided over a radical re-imagining of our health insurance and health care systems? Is it "conservative" to blatantly ignore immigration law and grant blanket de facto amnesty to millions of illegals? Is it "conservative" to restrict drilling on federal lands, to oppose the Keystone pipeline, to saddle coal power plants with ruinous regulatory burdens (that's a promise he kept -- to destroy the coal industry and make energy more expensive), to preside over an EPA that dubs carbon dioxide, a fundamental atmospheric gas and a vital part of the plant life cycle (and by extension all life) a pollutant?

Is it conservative to support increasing the capital gains tax, even though it wouldn't result in more revenue, in the interest of "fairness?"

Finally, there's nothing "conservative" about the man that believes this:

"If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court. I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order as long as I could pay for it Id be o.k. But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasnt that radical. It didnt break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states cant do to you. Says what the Federal government cant do to you, but doesnt say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasnt shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendancy to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that." 

Who Did You Think Would Be Paying For It?

From the L.A. Times

Most young, middle-class Americans I know are happy that millions of previously uninsured people will receive free or heavily subsidized insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

We just didn’t realize that, unless we had health insurance at work, we’d be the ones paying for it.

Then you were fucking idiots. God, really? Have we really raised a generation or more of adults so incapable of thinking through cause and effect that they really believe the government can pull rainbows and puppies out of its ass and hand them to everyone at no cost? I can't feel sympathy with these people. Only anger that they dragged me into it, too, with their willful stupidity.

Oh, in answer to my post title, I'm sure they thought that greedy corporations and the evil one percent would be paying for it. Again, I can't feel sympathy with anyone who buys into such obviously ridiculous propaganda.