This is part 4 of the three-part “Everything is Rationed” series.

The primary point of this part, sub-titled “ethical dimensions of a responsible business” is that I hate bean counters.

Who (or what) are “bean counters”? These are the people who make the decisions concerning the costs of the parts used in their product. Part A1 costs the company $1.00 to purchase. Part A2 is by another manufacturer, is almost as good as Part A1, however the company can buy it for 90 cents. The “Bean Counter” will almost always go with Part A2 on the sole basis its 10 cents cheaper.

Bean Counters also like to produce products with “planned obsolescence.” This means one or more parts in a product are designed to fail after a certain period of use, usually several months past the end of the warranty. When (not if) those parts fail, a newer model is now out at the same or less price, with more features. So you have the choice to either fix the broken equipment (at a cost close to or exceeding a new unit) or discard the broken unit in favor of a new unit. This is the downside to our consumerism economy.

Thinking about this, I was reminded of a collection of Sci-Fi short stories from the 40’s that I read as a teenager called Venus Equilateral (Wikipedia, Amazon). It was about a station that relayed messages between Earth, Mars and Venus when the Sun interfered with direct communications.

In the story QRM—Interplanetary, a pointy-haired boss came on the station to “cut expenses.” He ended up spacing a room full of genetically-modified sawgrass that was used to replenish the oxygen in the station’s air. He thought “equipment” replenished the air and he saw this room was “full of weeds.” The PHB thought the plants were wasting space. This “cost-cutting” almost suffocated everyone on the station.

To cut costs for the sole reason to “maximize profits” or “boost the quarterly report” is a bad reason in the long term. Because you are probably sacrificing future profits for short-term gains today.

Case in point: the 6-pack plastic ring used to keep aluminum cans together. They are easy to make and inexpensive (at less than a penny each). The bad news is, while the rings are photo-degradable (and thus not likely to end up strangling wildlife like they used to) and while they do break down into smaller bits, they do not fully disappear. There is a long-term negative environmental impact from them and all similar plastic products.

Then we have these:

A fully biodegradable product that is compostable and edible by wildlife. The problem? A current cost of 15 cents per unit.

If companies that sold their product in cans made enough demand for this kind of holder, the economy of scale would kick in and the price per unit would drop. If Anheuser-Busch and one or two other “big name” companies decided to use these, it would not be unreasonable to expect the cost per unit to drop under a nickel.

Would you pay a nickel more a six pack if that recyclable, compostable and edible can holder held your beverages together? I don’t think you’d even notice the price difference. If you knew the better environmental impact of that holder, you might even switch brands, who knows.

I also found this article, Christian-Based Firms Find Following Principles Pays from the 12/8/1989 Wall Street Journal. Sorry, you have to pay to see it. in the article, it talks about business who adhere to Christian principles and how their growth is significantly higher than those who do not engage in these principles. You don't have to be Christian to adhere to these principles, which entail actually serving the customer to help them grow their business, treating the customer fairly and most importantly treating the employees fairly. When Hobby Lobby made negative news due to their stance on abortive birth control, the MSM never mentioned that they pay their employees $14/hour to start. The MSM never clearly said that Hobby Lobby offered sixteen barrier methods of contraception and only opposed four abortive methods.

In case you didn't know it, In-N-Out Burger puts Bible verses on their shake cups, burger bags and other packaging. They are small, so you have to hunt for them.

James Freeman Clarke is quoted as saying, “A politician thinks of the next election - a statesman, of the next generation.”

I can reframe this slightly to say, “A bottom-line businessman sees only the next quarterly numbers – an ethical businessman sees the impact of his business in a hundred years.”

If we had enough “ethical businessmen” in our companies and corporations, we would have little or no need to governmental bureaucracy to micromanage them.

How about all of us start treating our planet as something that we should leave to our children better than how our parents gave it to us?

This is was to be the last installment in the “Everything is Rationed” series.

A woman taking care of her children while the man is out gathering food for the family is the very foundation of everything we have today. That’s because what kind of society we end up with depends on what the mother instills into her offspring long before the father gets hold of the children to show them the world.

The ground floor of society built upon that foundation and upon which everything else stands is... the private business in a free-market economy. I can hear the snorts of derision and eye-rolling from here, but hear me out.

I know the United States is founded upon the myth of the “rugged individualist,” the guy (or gal, I’m not sexist) who can survive on their own out in the wild. This is a myth because one person can’t do it all. You might think of frontiersman like Daniel Boone and his ilk. Those guys actually had a pretty extensive logistical train behind them. The rifle and ammunition they carried, the saddle and shoes on the horse, the preserved food they carried and more. All these goods were produced by someone, not to mention the reason why those men were out there in the first place was to provide a service, namely to explore the land, determine its resources and how to move people farther West.

I’m talking the “Man vs. Nature” level where you have nothing but your mind and your hands. Think of the tasks a single person has to do every day to make sure they have a good chance of survival:

• Gather/kill food
• Build/maintain shelter
• Develop tools/weapons for protection
• Gather wood to build a fire
• Build/maintain a fire with the gathered wood for warmth and cooking food

A single person does not have enough hours in a day to do all of these things at a level where they can survive for an extended period.. You spend a day building a shelter and you go hungry because you didn’t gather food to eat. Build weapons and spend a chilly night without heat.

This is why people started communities and societies. One or two people can hunt/gather for the entire village, one can build tools and weapons for everyone and so on. This was how bartering started. Trading whatever you have developed/gathered for what another has developed/gathered. Half a pig can get you a stone axe or a spear. A couple of chickens can get you some treated animal skins for clothing and so on.

The barter system is the first stage of a free-market economy. The shortcomings of a barter system is you can have more goods and services that you need, yet the people who offer what you need aren’t interested in what you have to offer. If the Tanner already has a bunch of chickens and all you have to offer him are more chickens, he won’t trade with you. You have to trade your chickens for bread from the baker, then trade half of the bread with the butcher to get some beef, then take those items to the Tanner to get your skins. A lot of your time gets wasted in trading for other things to get what you need. This is how money got invented, but that’s another article at a later time.

A business who combines ethical practices with reasonable profits is our goal. All businesses should and need to “charge for all the market can bear,” meaning that it is a balancing act between the available supply and the overall demand of the product or service.

Using the free market to determine the price of a good or service is not perfect, however it is the best system we have. If a business charges (or is forced to charge by government) a price that is below the costs incurred, then the business must close.

Example: net cost (all expenses, no profit) for a business to produce a widget is $100. The business sells it for $110 to make some profit. If the market won’t buy it at $110, but will at $90, the business either has to find a way to product it for a net cost of $80 or close. Same thing, if the government mandates that it be sold at $90, there is no reason for the business to stay open (unless it’s at the barrel of a gun).

In times of crisis/unrest/upheaval, prices will swing drastically in response until things are normalized.

Let’s say there are 50 gas stations in a town, when the town gets hit by a hurricane. 49 of those stations have their gasoline ruined by floodwaters. For whatever reason, that last station keeps their gasoline uncontaminated. This station owner now has a choice. He can either sell his product at the pre-hurricane price, not knowing when he will get a new supply (a day, a week, a month), running out in an hour and facing thousands of angry people demanding his product,

OR

He can charge an elevated price to discourage many customers, have more money for himself and employees to live off of until the supply resumes, and he can pay the elevated price for the next tanker truck to restock his tanks. Because if the refinery is nearby, they will also likely have damage, contaminated products and the refinery faces the same dilemmas the gas station owner does.

In the overall sense, the consumer is at the end of a long train of transactions that culminate in the product or service they purchase. There are hundreds of businesses mining the raw materials, producing components, assembling the final product and the transportation for all of the bits and pieces between companies and delivered to your door.

When I grew up near Warren, Ohio, I drove by the Lordstown plant all the time. This plant made the wiring harnesses for GM vehicles. Metal and plastic went in one end and completed wiring harnesses came out the other end. They made the wire, coated it with the insulation, made many of the clips and connectors and put it all together, under one roof. This kind of manufacturing does not happen anymore.

Today a constant stream of pre-made wire, clips, connectors, and all the other parts are made by sub-contractors, which ship their product to the new plant (Lordstown closed in the 80’s) who then does the work necessary to turn the components into wiring harnesses. Then those finished products are shipped off to the various assembly plants across the country and the world, to be one of the many components that make up an automobile.

I just realized that I need to expound on the “ethical dimensions of a responsible business” to tie this whole series up and that will take up a whole article in and of itself. Research for that one is ongoing and hopefully I will have it done in time.

Look back here next week for the fourth part of this three part series.

Notice the order I put the title. Just sayin'. Miss USA 2014, Nia Sanchez stirred up Liberals and Twitter by making a very offensive comment. One of the judges, Rumer Willis, asked this question:

“Recently 'Time Magazine' said 19% of U.S. undergraduate women are victims of sexual assault in college. Why has such a horrific epidemic been swept under the rug for so long and what can colleges do to combat this?”

This is what this "hatemonger" said:

“I believe some colleges may potentially be afraid of having a bad reputation, and that would be a reason that it could be swept under the rug because they don’t want it to come out into the public but I think more awareness is very important so women can learn how to protect themselves. Myself as a fourth degree black belt, I learned from a young age that you need to be confident and being able to defend yourself and I think that’s something we should start to implement for a lot of women.”

This statement has feminists spinning their heads and spewing pea soup, probably specifically for these words:

"...you need to be confident and being able to defend yourself..."

I mean, shouldn't everybody be confident and be able to defend yourself? Or, as Liberals want us to do, call 911 (A MAN WITH A GUN) and wait for minutes or hours for that man with a gun to arrive and protect us?

Please, let me be clear. RAPE is not about the sex. It's about one person forcing their will and control on another person, with the intent to perform serious physical and mental harm. As with all things, there are a thousand different situations that rape can and does occur. All the way from date rape (where he says "yes," she says "no" and they still have sex) to the forced individual and gang rape scenarios.

A MAN will not engage in any kind of sexual activity with an impaired or unconscious woman, or a woman who says, "No," period. A BOY or ANIMAL (the difference being, they boy has not been taught the proper way to treat everybody, the animal knows the proper way and still rapes) will use alcohol, drugs or force to get what he wants. I don't care how a woman dresses, or acts. She is not "asking for it." If she initially says "Yes" and then it changes to "No" later, you stop, get dressed and everyone returns to their homes, right then and there.

I have long said, and continue to stand by the belief that Liberals believe a woman, raped and strangled to death is morally superior to a woman who has a smoking gun in her hand and a dead rapist at her feet. I don't monitor Twitter. I refuse to do so. However, when you have things like this in the articles I am reading, I can't resist:

Mandy Velez @mandy_velez

Let's hope Nevada uses her media tour to reiterate that teaching girls self defense is NOT the best way to protect against assault #MissUSA 10:05 PM - 8 Jun 2014

Sage. @SassySage_ Follow

If Miss Nevada wins this, I quit. You CANNOT say teaching women how to protect themselves is a way to combat rape.

9:37 PM - 8 Jun 2014

Mary-Kate Begin @mmmkay526 Follow

Sorry Miss Nevada, but we should probably teach men to respect women, not just teach women self defense #YesAllWomen

9:45 PM - 8 Jun 2014

Bi Nguyen @Bi_Is_Asian Follow

No Miss Nevada. To prevent rape, how about we teach men to not rape women? #stopvictimblaming#missUSA#rapeculture

9:44 PM - 8 Jun 2014

This comes from the crowd that advises women in the process of being raped to urinate or puke on themselves. To loudly declare to the imminent rapist(s) that you have an STD or you are in the middle of your menstrual cycle.

So, as an exercise in futility, I will attempt to answer these tweets:

Mandy, you probably don't realize it, but a rapist usually doesn't rape just one woman and leave it at that. So, if you learn those yucky, nasty self-defense classes and actually kill the bastard or injure him to the point he can't (not won't) do this again, think of all the sisters you kept from getting raped by this man in the future.

SassySage, your logic escapes me. If a properly trained woman kills or disables a rapist, you are not "combating rape?" And yet urinating or vomiting on yourself (which probably won't stop him) does, somehow prevents it?

Mary-Kate, I hope you can get this into your Feminist Pin-Head brain: MEN (adult males who are mature and respect all persons, male and female) don't rape. Two-legged male animals who have evil in their heart and view a woman as an object, he can take when and how he wants to, that's your rapist.

Bi, responsible MEN teach their sons that aggressive violence (attacking without reason, NOT defensive violence when you defend yourself from attack) against anybody is wrong and is not tolerated.

Okay, I think I've said all I can say on this. I do have three words for Miss USA: YOU GO WOMAN!

I am constantly amazed at the scale of the mental gymnastics and hypocrisy of Liberals.

Classic case in point: The gun control debate.

Liberal organizations like The Brady Campaign to prevent Gun Violence, New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence and the like do not want to get rid of firearms.

They want to get rid of civilian ownership of firearms. They are all for the military, police and their security details having guns, just not you.

The children of the powerful go to schools that are protected by armed guards, right there and ready to go with advanced weaponry. The children who attend public schools are "protected" by gun-free zones and lightly-armed police who are usually minutes away when seconds count.

You really have to ask yourself, why is what's good for the goose is not good for the gander?

While I cannot speak to their thoughts, I am sure their motivations are quite clear. They are "in charge" and they would like to stay that way.

They realize there are more men armed with scoped rifles who can hit a dinner plate at 200 yards in the woods of Pennsylvania on the first morning of deer hunting season than any army in the world (including ours!). Those "in-charge" people fear these people.

A citizenry that does not have tools for self-defense similar to the weapons possessed by the police and military, lacks the ability to resist any action that the police or military wants to visit upon them. When that happens, the citizenry exists entirely at the whim of the government. You can just ask the over 20,000,000 who were killed by Stalin, Mao, the Khmer Rouge and other Socialist governments during the 20th century who disarmed their citizens. Oh, wait, you can't because they're dead.

These pro-gun control people know the bloodbath and civil war that would ensue if they tried to confiscate all the firearms. So, until they are sure that they can go door-to-door and just take them, they are trying to "convince" you. They don't orchestrate mass shootings, they create the conditions where such mass murders possible, then loudly proclaiming them from the rooftops, while ignoring or stifling incidents that were cut short or prevented by a legally armed-citizen.

Consistency is not a term meant exclusively for things like cake batter. When I stand on a position I realize that there may be other facets to my position that I have not considered. If presented with them, I will incorporate the additional facets into my original position. Only if I am way wrong will I change or modify my original position.

In 2015, I wrote the post Identification, fully supporting Rachel Dolezal on her declaring herself Black. Actually, I asked that we drop all of the labels we use to pigeon-hole everybody, because that only separates us, not unites us.

I do not have the power nor authority to tell other people how they should identify themselves, in either gender or racial characteristics. If given the chance, I would not accept that kind of power. I have multiple acquaintances who are transgender. I like them and interact with them when I can because I think they are good and interesting people. If they ask me to use certain nouns or pronouns when addressing or describing them, I use them. It's no big deal to me.

Liberals, however love to eat one of their own who even gets a toe off the ideological reservation. Case in point, Rebecca Tuvel, who wrote a paper titled, In Defense of Transracialism. It was published by Hypatia, A Journal of Feminist Philosophy.

In this paper, Ms. Tuvel extended all of the Liberal talking points that Liberals use to advance transgenderism to transracialism, where a person can and should be able to freely declare their racial identity. It makes perfect sense to me as a Conservative. If you're going to open the door to allow people to freely declare their gender as either biological sex or something between, then the same has to apply to a persons views regarding their racial identity.

All I can say is Liberals, collectively and individually, went totally apoplectically ape-shit over this. Spastic, spit-spraying, grand mal seizure, off-the-rails incensed. Enough that Hypatia issued an apology on Facebook:

We, the members of Hypatia’s Board of Associate Editors, extend our profound apology to our friends and colleagues in feminist philosophy, especially transfeminists, queer feminists and feminists of color, for the harms that the publication of the article on transracialism has caused. The sources of those harms are multiple, and include: descriptions of trans lives that perpetuate harmful assumptions and (not coincidentally) ignore important scholarship by trans philosophers; the practice of deadnaming, in which a trans person’s name is accompanied by a reference to the name they were assigned at birth; the use of methodologies which take up important social and political phenomena in dehistoricized and decontextualized ways, thus neglecting to address and take seriously the ways in which those phenomena marginalize and commit acts of violence upon actual persons; and an insufficient engagement with the field of critical race theory. Perhaps most fundamentally, to compare ethically the lived experience of trans people (from a distinctly external perspective) primarily to a single example of a white person claiming to have adopted a black identity creates an equivalency that fails to recognize the history of racial appropriation, while also associating trans people with racial appropriation.

Of course, this is only the latest bump in the ideological road that Liberals are intent on running all of us down this hill with no brakes. Which leads to this quote by Kathy Jackson I recently found:

A civilized society is one where it is safe to be small, safe to be weak, safe to hold contrary opinions, and safe to express those opinions to others.
Those who argue for physical assault in response to mere speech, are those who argue against civilization and in favor of barbarism.

I do not think it is strange that people on the right do not riot when a prominent Liberal comes to campus or wherever to speak on their Liberal ideology. I have come to expect riots and civil unrest when Conservative speakers arrive to speak freely in the same manner Liberals are afforded.

Ask yourself, are you for civilization, or barbarism?

A friend turned me on to this article, I had a health crisis in France. I’m here to tell you that ‘socialized medicine’ is terrific. Which is, amazingly enough in the Op-Ed section of the LA Times. It documents the ordeal of a “long-term official resident” of France, who had a defective aortic valve malfunction.

I like this guy’s sense of humor:

In the intensive care unit, I learned that I had been born with a defective aortic valve. Basically, I’d been walking around my entire life with a ticking time bomb in my chest. How could I not have known? In high school, I ran track and played football; every summer, my wife and I took long hikes in the Swiss Alps. But an experienced nurse was not surprised. “With your condition,” she said, “the first symptom is often sudden death.” OK, I replied, what’s the second symptom?

All well and good, I’m glad that Mr. Lamar managed to survive, spending 47 days in the hospital and rehab and was only out-of-pocket $1,455.

However, I deal in statistics, not anecdotes, which is what the above article describes. You can read my views on that in my earlier article, Anecdotal vs. Statistical.

Now let’s take a look at a socialized health care program that’s been rolling for almost 70 years. That way we can see the inevitable result of long-term use of socialized medicine. Rationing of NHS services ‘leaving patients in pain and distress’, says new report. Mind you, this is a UK paper reporting on a NHS (National Health Service) report. This report is detailing and scathing in its assessment of the quality of care for the Subjects of Britain.

The NHS was created in 1948 when the Labour Party (their Liberals) created it. The bad news is, shortly after that when Conservatives gained power, they kept and expanded it. It’s been rolling along ever since.

Another article broaches the idea about drafting “junior doctors” from India and Pakistan, as well as forcing all graduating doctors from medical school for five years to make up for the lack of practicing doctors.

Then you have staff performing procedures they are not trained to do and doing them without supervision. As in student Nurses being required to do Nurse level and higher (Physician’s Assistant/Doctor) procedures. Add in a medical death rate 45% higher than the US is and that’s just on the staff side.

There are also reports where patients wait hours (and sometimes die) on gurnies parked in hallways. Because all of the surgical resources are tied up doing the emergency work, elective (i.e. non-emergency quality of life) surgeries wait months. Like, 12-18 weeks on average.

Please, don’t take my word for it, here is the report itself.

Because there isn’t enough money being allocated by the government to adequately address the needs of everyone, many go without and the quality of care those that do manage to receive care is declining rapidly. Once you understand the situation the UK is in with their NHS, multiply that by 5 and then some, because the US has five times the population.

Please, tell me again how wonderful the NHS is and how much of a blessing it would be to the citizens of the US. With a straight face.

I see people freak out every time the subject of the US Senate invoking “THE NUCLEAR OPTION” surfaces in the news cycle. Let me explain in simple and clear terms what that is and why it’s there.

The Senate, as envisioned by our Founding Fathers, represented the interests of the States, notably the State governments. Up until the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified in 1913, Senators were appointed by the State governments. Now the People directly elect them.

The purpose of the Senate was to be “the cooling saucer” to balance the passions of the House. The term comes from the common way people drank hot beverages back then. You drank from the cup, the saucer held directly below the cup. If some should escape your lips and spill, it would be caught by the saucer, where it would cool off before you drank it.

The Senate was meant to be a deliberative body, which is why they have the enumerated power of “advice and consent” to the President.

Most, if not all legislative bodies follow Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised (RONR) to conduct their business. I have a copy on my desk. Robert’s Rules of Order, Newly Revised, 11th Edition.

In RONR, there are two kinds of majorities in the voting process. Depending on the body and what they are voting on, these majorities can consist of either “members present” or “total members.” You have a simple majority (50% plus 1 more vote) or a supermajority (two-thirds, or 66% plus 1 more vote).

Now that I have explained all of that, the term that is at the center of “the nuclear option” is “Cloture.” Because the Senate is such a deliberative body, they like to talk. A LOT.

Just in case you didn’t know it, Senators Richard Russell, Strom Thurmond, Robert Byrd, William Fulbright and Sam Ervin, all Southern Democrats, filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act for 60 “working days” (the Senate is only “in session” 162 days a year, or 3 days a week).

Cloture is a parliamentary move to limit debate. In RONR, it is called Previous Question and can be found in RONR Chapter 6, Subsidiary Motions, §6, Page 197 Line 22. The only reference to Cloture itself is in RONR on page 201, first footnote, last sentence. If the vote for Cloture passes, then all debate on that item (bill, nomination, etc.) in front of the Senate is halted. Then and only then can there be a second, separate vote on the item itself.

Let me say that again. A successful Cloture vote (3/5ths) tells the whiny crybabies who are holding their breath (figuratively) to shut up so a simple up-or-down vote on the item at hand can be made.

Up until the filibuster above, Cloture required a 2/3rds vote of the full Senate. In 1975, the Senate Rules were changed to invoke Cloture at a “3/5ths majority.” In the case of the 100 member Senate that means 60 votes.

In November 2013, during the Democrat-controlled 113th US Congress, the Senate Democrats amended the Cloture rule so that Cloture could not be invoked on votes for presidential appointees and judges other than the Supreme Court. That way, the Democrats could halt Republican filibusters for Obama’s nominees to senior administration positions and his nominees to federal benches inferior to the Supreme Court.

Just recently, the Republican majority in the Senate returned the favor and exempted Supreme Court nominees from the Cloture process so Neil Gorsuch could be appointed to the Supreme Court. A 3/5ths majority is still required on bills before the Senate.

In the end, Cloture is nothing more than a rule made up and changed at will by the members of the Senate. It is not in the Constitution. Like weather in Hawaii, if you don’t like it, stick around, it will change pretty quickly.

It’s a grown-up version of a sandlot rule for kids baseball.

This will be the first of three interrelated articles. This article and the concepts I will discuss here provide the foundation for the others.

The first concept I need you to understand is nothing is unlimited, everything is rationed. The term ration is defined thusly:

As a noun: a fixed allowance of provisions or food, especially for soldiers or sailors or for civilians during a shortage

As a verb: to restrict the consumption of (a commodity, food, etc.)

Everything there is on this planet, oil, iPhones, even the air we breathe is limited to some extent and has to be rationed. Don’t think air can be or needs to be rationed? Go SCUBA diving. The air you need to breathe and live, you can only take one ration (what’s in the air tank) down there with you. If you exhaust your ration of air, you either have to leave the water and go back to where air is plentiful or die from the lack of air.

There is also a price and a cost associated with everything. A price is what we pay in monetary units (Dollars, Rubles, Yen, Euros and so on) for a good or service. The cost of an item is what we have to do to acquire the necessary amount of monetary units.

Say you want to buy an iPad. The price for a basic one is $329. The cost for me to acquire that $329 is about a weeks’ worth of work. For someone making minimum wage, it’s more like two weeks of work. The amount of work to acquire this item can be reduced if we are willing to pay other costs. This may mean eating ramen for a week, or paying this month’s utility bill next month. Those costs (low quality food, late fees and/or possibility of getting utilities cut off) can be used to temporarily offset the total cost to obtain that iPad. You will still have to repay the other costs later but those are decisions are for you to make.

iPads themselves are rationed because there are a finite amount of iPads out there available to purchase. If there are 10,000 iPads for sale and 20,000 people want to buy one, then the seller can raise the price until only 10,000 people can afford to get one, or leave the price alone and have 10,000 people go without until more are manufactured. Or one person who owns one can decide to sell their iPad to someone who really wants it and is willing to pay more than the $329 MSRP/RRP (Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price/Recommended Retail Price).

Healthcare is also rationed. A single doctor can reasonably see about eighty-four patients a week. This is 15 minutes with a patient and 5 minutes to do the paperwork (prescriptions, tests, chart documentation, etc) necessary to treat the patient. So that’s three patients an hour, eight hours a day for 3 and-a-half days a week. One day he does work in the hospital, the last four hours in his 40 hour week he is learning about new developments in the medical field and training to gain new skills.

What happens if a hundred people needs his knowledge and skills in a week? He can only see eighty-four. He has to ration his time. This can be done two ways.

First, he can apply free-market principles and if someone wants to pay the doctor extra to get to the head of the line, then those who can pay more get seen before those who can’t. Or

Second, he can apply a Socialistic principal and Triage (a French word, meaning to sort) his potential clients according to criteria that he (or a bureaucrat) sets. It could be those who have the direst need of his services, or who’s been waiting the longest, it doesn’t matter. Sixteen patients have to wait until next week or see another doctor. If one of those sixteen is Bill Gates, then he goes to another doctor or again applies free market principles to slip some extra cash to the doctor to get a priority slot.

Price controls (the price of a good or service that is set by government rather than free-market forces) guarantee rationing. How is that you ask? That’s a great question and I’m glad you asked!

Let’s go back to our iPad example. We still only have 10,000 iPads available and 20,000 potential customers. But the Deputy Assistant Under Secretary of Price Control decides, “That $329 price for an iPad is too high. Let’s make them $159 each.”

The chaos that bureaucrat unleashes is astounding. Because when the price hits that $159, there are no longer 20,000 potential customers, there are now 60,000. Sixty thousand people fighting over ten thousand iPads. The result is now massive rationing because only one person in six can get an iPad. Who decides who gets one and who doesn’t? First in line? Age? Political affiliation? Friends of the bureaucrat?

And what happens when Apple says, “We can’t make a profit selling them at $159, so we will stop making them.” The end result is several hundred people out of a job and 40,000 people who won’t get an iPad.

This is a universal problem because you can replace “iPad” with any good or service and “Apple” with the company that offers the good or service and you will get the same end result.

For those of you with Socialist leanings, you might put forth the supposition that the government should subsidize Apple and give them $170 per iPad so Apple could continue to produce iPads and the customers still get them for $159. What makes you think that the money itself is not rationed? If the government prints and prints money for these subsidies until the money is worthless (1930’s Germany, Venezuela today) the value of the money becomes irrelevant and thus you effectively run out of money.

In the end, all resources need to be managed to make sure that you have those resources today and tomorrow.

Imagine this scene for a moment:

Stan is riding down the street with his new-found friend Chris. They’re both passengers in a flatbed tow truck. Chris’ car is on the bed, Stan’s car on the hook behind the truck. You see, Stan plowed into Chris and his car because Stan wasn’t paying attention while driving. They pull into the parking lot of a State Farm office. Stan goes inside and meets Bill, one of the insurance agents.

Stan: I’d like to buy some car insurance. I have my car outside.
Bill: Great! Let’s go out and take a look at it!
[Outside]
Stan: Here’s my car. (the one with no front end)
Bill: ...Umm, you want us to insure this?
Stan: Yes. I need to get it fixed and on the road as soon as possible. And fix Chris’ car as well since I hit him. Does the insurance include a rental option while my car is in the shop?
Bill: I cannot insure this car. It’s already wrecked!
Stan: So it has pre-existing damage. So what? Are you going to sell me a policy or not?
Bill: No. Go away.
Stan: But-
Bill: Go. Away. Now.

I’m sure you can see the absurdity in the above story and think Stan is an idiot for trying a stunt like this. Ballsy, but stupid.

So why do people expect they can get a health insurance policy after they get a Stage 2 Pancreatic Cancer diagnosis or some other serious and/or expensive-to-treat medical condition?

The business model of Insurance is all about a pool of shared risk. The "pool" is all of their policy holders. The cost of Bad Things is spread throughout the entire pool, on the assumption that not everyone will suffer a catastrophic (and expensive) life event. Insurance companies use actuarial tables as a basis on how much to charge for premiums.

Actuarial tables, for example, looks at 10,000 white males, 20 to 30-years-old and sees that as a group, (these are made up numbers) 3% will develop cancer, 5% will suffer a serious injury from a vehicle crash, 8% will suffer a dismemberment due to workplace accidents and so on.

Each of these events have an associated cost for them. The insurance agency will then use this information (chance of an event and the cost) to determine how much to charge (along with administrative costs and profits) for the premiums.

The insurance model breaks down when pre-existing conditions (PEC) enter the picture. This is because with PEC's there is no chance that the person might get a particular disease, they already have it.

Right now, a “simple and easy” cancer diagnosis runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars to cure. Serious cases can cost way more than that. How can you reasonably ask an insurance company to take on something like that? It would be like you buying a $200,000 house for $200,000, knowing that it will take another $250,000 of materials and labor to repair it and make it worth $200,000 because it’s currently falling down from disrepair or some other major issue.

I am not a “heartless Republican” (I’m not even a Republican at all, but that’s beside the point), so I am flexible on this. If people are very up-in-arms over those people with PEC’s, we can talk about a healthcare entitlement program, run by the government. Let’s just not call it insurance, because at that point, it’s not.

Instead of forcing everyone under the same umbrella (“share the risk”) with those who have PEC’s, those who have insurance can pay the market price for insurance without worrying about the insurance company raising their rates astronomically because they have to take on the PEC “money pit” people. If you fall into the PEC category, then you will get your healthcare from the government.

Hey, the federal government is *only* $20,000,000,000,000 in debt right now anyway. What’s a few more trillion dollars to the rest of us and our children?

Do PEC’s suck? Unbelievably. I realize that. First-hand experience and all that. I emphasize with you. It isn’t fair that you have this condition. But is it fair that you are asking everybody else in your insurance pool to pay an extra $10 a month for your condition? If you didn’t have a PEC, would you voluntarily pay an extra $50 a month in insurance premiums to support those that do have PEC’s? I realize that we will eventually pay it, either through insurance premiums or taxes, however forcing insurance companies to shoulder the cost of those with PEC’s only forces the insurance companies to go out of business and put hundreds of people out of work because people with PEC’s broke the model.

Yeah, that’s the ticket! Let’s drive those E-V-I-L insurance companies out of business! Then we can go back to the old medical model of “cash, one payment, up-front.” Yeah, those were the good old days. If you couldn’t afford the doctors services, you died. (I’m being sarcastic here, for those who have no sense of humor.)

I am not in favor of anybody being refused healthcare. I am for us doing so in a fiscally reasonable manner, one that does not unnecessarily burden our fellow citizens and future generations.

This news article is not surprising in the least to me. 7 Jaw-Dropping Revelations From Hearings on the Motion to Dismiss the DNC Fraud Lawsuit. I remember from the 1996 Presidential election, at the Democrat National Convention, a lot of committees that formed the various "planks" that made up the platform of the Democrat Party, the process went something like this:

Committee member: "Mr. Chairman, I move that [this] be the position of the Democrat Party on this subject."

Chairperson: "All in favor say 'Aye.' Motion carries."

If you're unfamiliar with Robert's Rules of Order, it should have gone like this:

Committee member 1: "Mr. Chairman, I move that [this] be the position of the Democrat Party on this subject."

Committee member 2: "Mr. Chairman, I second the motion."

Chairperson: "Everyone, we have a motion on the floor, properly seconded. Discussion?"

At this point, each person on the committee would have the opportunity to speak for or against the motion. Motions could be made to amend the motion. After everyone has had an opportunity to speak, the chairperson then calls for a vote.

Chairperson: "We are now voting on this motion. All in favor of this motion say 'Aye' [everyone in favor of the motion says 'Aye']. All opposed say 'Nay' [everyone against the motion says 'Nay']."

This is called a voice vote. If it is evident that one side outnumbers the other, the motion either carries or fails. If it sounds close, any member can ask the chairperson to call for a show of hands or for the voters to stand when 'yays' or 'nays' are called.

Notice the difference? In the first rendition, there is no "second," nor is there any discussion on the subject. There is also no opportunity for a dissenting vote.

So when the DNC uses "superdelegates" paid for by Hillary to publicly throw the delegate count to her and insure that Sanders never had a chance at the nomination. As a result, Sanders supporters sued the DNC on the grounds of fraud. The DNC is using the reasoning, "We are a private organization. We can run how we select candidates however we want" to dismiss the case.

The Bylaws of the DNC (specifically Article 5, Section 4) reads:

...In the conduct and management of the affairs and procedures of the Democratic National Committee, particularly as they apply to the preparation and conduct of the Presidential nomination process, the Chairperson shall exercise impartiality and evenhandedness as between the Presidential candidates and campaigns. The Chairperson shall be responsible for ensuring that the national officers and staff of the Democratic National Committee maintain impartiality and evenhandedness during the Democratic Party Presidential nominating process. [emphasis mine]

Yet there is ample evidence out there that Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (the head of the DNC at the time) clearly and repeatedly leaked intelligence about the Sanders campaign and debate questions to the Clinton campaign beforehand, I doubt these actions come anywhere close to the definition of "impartiality."

The lawyers for the DNC actually state in open court and on the record, "We could choose our candidates in a smoke-filled back room if we so desired."

Let that sink in for a moment, because I can hear Stalin laughing manically in the background. It was Stalin who said, "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." The common people, the citizens of this great country who believe in the positions of the Democrat Party, who give money, effort and time to elect like-minded people to positions in our government from dog-catcher the the President, You are only sheep to be sheared by those in power at the DNC. You are expected to be obedient foot-soldiers who have no power or input on whom you're voting for. You vote for who you're told to vote for and that's it.

And just to make the point very clear, the Republicans do not do this kind of thing. I can point to President Trump to make that point. When just about the entire Republican power structure was actively against Trump, yet he played the RNC game by the RNC rules and won the nomination on his way to the Oval Office.

No, I do not mean that you passed by using the double negative of "failing to fail." This story, California Will Give Free High School Diplomas To Kids Who Flunked Out is about how California may be granting High School diplomas to about 249,000 students who failed the CASHEE (California High School Exit Exam). First of all, it's 8th grade material, second you only need a 55% score to pass. Second, if I scored 55% on a test, I'd have been beaten to within an inch of my life. That level shows no mastery of the material. 55% can be explained by eliminating the most outrageous answer and randomly picking from what choices remained.

A diploma is a certificate that the bearer possesses a standardized level of knowledge. To give an 18-year-old a certificate that indicates they have a minimum level of skills they were supposed to know as a 14-year old is a very low standard. To not be able to meet that level and still possess that certificate surpasses the level of negligence on the part of our educators.

I am personally dismayed about how little the young adults who are pushed out of the school system actually know. They might have knowledge, they might have facts, however they generally lack practical skills.

I have been thinking about this, and I have compiled a list of practical life skills that a young adult needs to know when out by themselves in the world. This list is in no way complete.

They are, in no particular order:

• Develop and follow a financial budget.
• Balance a bank account.
• How to purchase groceries.
• How to prepare a balanced meal.
• How to wash clothes.
• How to clean and maintain their living space.
• How to perform minor household repairs.
• How to budget their time (work/play, arrive early, etc).
• How to be interviewed for a job.
• How to perform minor clothing repairs.
• How to set a life goal and intermediate goals.

This is going to take more explaining than usual. Go freshen your beverage of choice and read carefully.

Hard Science (Physics, Astronomy, Metallurgy, et. al.) and Mathematics go hand-in-hand. Using Mathematics, the effects of Hard Science is measured and quantified.

Science starts as a hypothesis, which is then tested until the hypothesis is either validated as correct or incorrect. If the hypothesis is incorrect, then more research is performed to discover why it is incorrect.

Case in point, the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes are, as of writing this, are about 400,000 kilometers off where the astrophysicists thought the probes should be, 40+ years after launch. So after about 20 years of hypotheses and research, scientists determined that waste heat from certain components and the radioisotope thermoelectric generator that powers the spacecraft are microscopically ((8.74±1.33)×10⁻¹⁰ m/s², or .0000000001 times Earth's gravity. Imagine a 200 pound human weighing 3.2/1,000,000ths of an ounce) pushing the spacecraft off its intended course.

How did these scientists determine this? They transcribed the paper blueprints of the spacecraft into a CAD program and built a virtual 3-D model of them. Then the scientists ran thousands of test runs, having the virtual spacecraft emit various amounts of heat from various parts of the spacecraft until their virtual spacecraft matched the trajectory of the actual spacecraft. This took a level of nit-picking attention-to-detail that would make the heart of someone with severe Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder sing with joy.

I give this example to show that people who are not scientists (including myself) could not just walk into the laboratory where this work was performed and have any grasp of the fundamentals, let alone detail of astrophysics, mathematics, metallurgy, nuclear science and all of the other disciplines needed to solve this problem. You cannot walk in off the street and comprehend these concepts and methods without years of college-level classes.

Because of this, we have to implicitly and totally trust scientists when they explain these kind of things to us lay-people that they are not bullshitting us. Scietists by their position need to act with a high level of integrity because we have to trust them to deliver accurate information as to what is happening and why it's happening.

The bad news is, scientists are human beings, flawed like the rest of us. They have private agendas, or they can be influenced to "shave" or "parse" data which changes the base data and "proves" a predetermined hypothesis.

Then comes along this NYT article, 2014 Breaks Heat Record, Challenging Global Warming Skeptics.

If you read the article, about halfway down, there is this paragraph:

Such claims are unlikely to go away, though. John R. Christy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who is known for his skepticism about the seriousness of global warming, pointed out in an interview that 2014 had surpassed the other record-warm years by only a few hundredths of a degree, well within the error margin of global temperature measurements. “Since the end of the 20th century, the temperature hasn’t done much,” Dr. Christy said. “It’s on this kind of warmish plateau.” [Emphasis mine]

Let's get back to the Science thing. Let's say you have an air-powered cannon out in the desert. You use it to test how different shaped projectiles fly through the air. You fire the same projectile 20 times with all of the other variables identical (air pressure in the cannon, air temperature, wind, projectile weight, weather, etc.) and the projectile lands 100 yards away on average, with a margin of error of plus or minus (+/-) 1 yard. This means that some tests will hit 99 yards, or 101 yards, or somewhere between those numbers. To look at shots 8, 9 and 12 (which hit at 100 yards 6 inches, 100 yards 10 inches and 100 yards 14 inches) and proclaim that the range is increasing is absurd and unethical. Why is this unethical? Because while we can measure the distance down to the inch, there are subtle forces at work that make any exact measurement in that margin-of-error irrelevant. We cannot use numbers within that MOE to draw a trend because they are not statistically relevant. It's like a pre-election poll, when the pollsters give a MOE of +/- 3% and the two candidates are 47% and 49%. You can't say with any certainty that the 49% candidate will win the election because the results are within the MOE.

So when NOAA publishes a 2015 paper (behind a paywall, sorry) that "debunks" the GW "pause" (no statistically significant warming) that's happened over the past 20 years, upon review it is found that 1) they changed how ocean temperature data is collected (from ships that generate heat, rather than no-heat buoys) and 2) NOAA didn't even follow their own established procedures for data integrity for this paper, then you have to act under the premise that those scientists are bullshitting you.

This is why I am very skeptical about man-made climate change. I have no doubt that our climate changes on the micro- and macro- level every day. To say or believe otherwise is to prove yourself a fool and an idiot. I don't know if humans are any significant cause of the change, one way or the other. I personally can't tell because 1) I don't have access to the raw data, 2) I lack the tools, knowledge and resources to properly analyze the data and 3) I cannot trust those scientists who do have the data and tools because I can see them using data that is flawed from the collection or altered post-collection.

All I can say is, the people who want to convince me that man is the biggest and/or exclusive force that is changing the climate needs a shower, because they aren't passing the smell test.

Last week, officials from the Venezuelan government (unsure who, as the economic minister Ramon Lobo is denying this happened) seized control of the General Motors plant down there. This comes after Kimberly-Clark had a factory seized, Coke, Pepsi, Mondelez (they make Oreos) and many other companies have abandoned or severely curtained operations in Venezuela. Supermarket store shelves are empty, bread makers have been enslaved to make bread, the list keeps expanding.

The Venezuelan economy has collapsed 18% in 2016 alone, which has been going on since 2014 when the oil market bottomed out.

This is what happens in a government-controlled economy. Let me apologize ahead of time. If you think a government bureaucrat, either at the state or federal level, should be making decisions on how you should run your business, you're an idiot. Here is Bernie Sanders admitting to that at the 2:20 mark of this video:

Here are Bernie's words, in response to the business owner's question, "So my question is, how do I do that [provide health care] without raising prices to my customers or lowering wages to my employees?":

"You see, the difficulty is also, is that I'm not much of an expert on hairdressing in general, and certainly in Fort Worth."

Unless that governmental official has owned a successful business in a particular industry, they will not have the expertise on how to run/control/grow that industry, any decisions made by them will ultimately end in disaster. Sure, they might get a couple of things right, but only through pure chance.

So, when bureaucrats nationalize, then destroy an industry, what do they do after there is nothing left? Nationalize another industry! Wash, rinse, repeat.

This picture seems to sum up how command economies "expand." From the power that comes from the barrel of a gun.

Margaret Thatcher sums it up thusly:

I would much prefer to bring them [the Labour Party] down as soon as possible. I think they’ve made the biggest financial mess that any government’s ever made in this country for a very long time, and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money. It’s quite a characteristic of them. They then start to nationalize everything, and people just do not like more and more nationalization, and they’re now trying to control everything by other means. They’re progressively reducing the choice available to ordinary people.

So, now I need someone to tell my why governmental control of an economy would be a good thing. Venezuela is collapsing, the Soviet Union collapsed, China is transitioning to a market economy (at China's speed, which will take another 50 years). Don't point to the Nordic States. They have open markets with large social supports (and a tax rate that starts at 40%). No command-driven economy has ever flourished like open market economies.