Sanctus Real - Lead Me

I heard this on Pandora, found the YouTube video and thought I'd share it with you. I thought it was a beautiful testament to what a man ought to be.

Enjoy.

Negative People Are Bad For Lambs

Have you ever noticed that whenever you're around people who want to tell you how lousy things are - their jobs suck, the traffic was horrible, the weather is unbearable, etc., you feel like you've got to go along and tell them how awful something is in your own life? It's like they're Serious and Important and if you're not suffering as well, you live life like a lamb playing in a meadow. For me, at least, it's a real effort to remain cheery under such conditions.

Personally, I prefer the lambs playing in the meadow.

Image Of The Day

I was going in a totally different direction today when I came across this blog post with the image below.

Awesomeness squared.

God Help Me, But I Think This Looks Pretty Good

This Is Me

... with my Newcastle United mug, my Jonas Gutierrez jersey, my daughter's NUFC baseball cap, our son's Newcastle wool cap ...

I think life is best lived with many passions - your teams, your kids, your spouse, your faith, your parents, your hobbies, whatever you can put your heart into. Howay the lads.

The Best And The Brightest

... created Obamacare and it ended up a total train wreck.

In watching the Obamacare catastrophe evolve, one thought in particular has been going through my mind: there aren't any excuses this time. The law was passed without any need to negotiate or compromise with the infidels on the right and then it was implemented by an Administration full to the gills with Ivy League (and equivalently credentialed) geniuses. If this sort of thing was ever going to work, this was the time.

I've read the comment threads of many articles describing the unfolding chaos and there's an undercurrent of excuse-making that suggests the implementation was somehow polluted by conservative impurities or profit-mongering on the part of the insurers and contractors. That leads to the question, just how perfect did the world have to be in order for Obamacare to work?

Maybe we just don't spend enough money on colleges and the people creating Obamacare weren't sufficiently educated. (Image source.)

Nothing Says "Compassion" Quite Like Blowing Our Kids' Money

The Chicago Tribune has a must-read piece today on the Windy City's massive debt problem. They've borrowed and borrowed and borrowed and it turns out they've been spending the money on normal operating expenses. That's like using your credit card to buy groceries week after week and not paying it off.

Chicago. Because Detroit was lonely being the only big city to declare bankruptcy.

I don't have time to do this right now, but an interesting graphic would be to take the debt projections for Chicago and mark the years when the city leaders retire and then also mark typical life milestones for someone who is currently, say, 22 years old - marriage, kids, buying a house, etc. It might bring home the point that Rahm Emmanuel and Richard Daley will be gone and on our kids' tab when the debt bomb goes off.

I wonder when the youth of America will get wise. Soon, I hope.

A Magpie Miracle?

True story. This morning, Newcastle played the early game. I was able to watch the first half before I had to get ready to go to the Cursillo Mass and get together. Newcastle were playing Chelsea. You had to figure Newcastle was going to lose by at least four goals, Chelsea is that good. Thanks to a very gutty performance by the Magpies, at the end of the first half it was still a scoreless tie.

I got ready for church and drove down to Chula Vista for Mass. I checked Twitter before I got out of the car and found out that Newcastle had scored a goal and was leading 1-0 with 8 minutes to go. I went into church and debated whether or not to leave my phone on to secretly check Twitter for game updates. I decided not to, so I turned the phone off, figuring I was offering it up to God.

Three minutes later, a shaft of light no bigger than my chest comes in through the stained glass window on the far side of the church and the only thing it illuminates is the Newcastle logo on my t shirt. At that moment I knew exactly what had happened. And sure enough when I checked the score after church on Twitter it had. Newcastle had scored another goal and beat Chelsea 2-0.

A sign from God? A miracle? Total, ridiculous coincidence? You decide. All I could do was laugh.

:-)

Obamacare Is Fascism

I was clicking around the Interweb Tubes this morning and I came across Charles Krauthammer's latest piece. Here's the snippet that jumped out at me.

Sure, you freely chose the policy, paid for the policy, renewed the policy, liked the policy. But you’re too primitive to know what you need. We do. Your policy is hereby canceled.

Because what you really need is what our experts have determined must be in every plan.

The essence of fascism is that you can keep your private property and personal decisions, so long as you do what the government wants you to do.

You're out of line with the Supreme Health Board, citizen. We cancelled your policy and have issued you one appropriate for you.

Forward.

Libertarian Jesus

I saw this image on Twitter and loved it.

H/T: Dan Mitchell

I think it hits home, not for political reasons, but because it represents reality. Obamacare, education spending, gun control, whatever your favorite government-based solution might be or a combination of all of it plus total socialism and printed money isn't going to make a change here. You're going to have to do that yourself, one person at a time.

A Moss Bathmat

This is so incredibly cool!

Want!

The Coming Obamacare Recession

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict a recession in the near future. First, there's this.

WASHINGTON—A drop in auto purchases weighed on U.S. retail sales last month, though underlying figures show that consumers picked up the pace of spending on electronics, eating out and some other nonessentials.

Retail sales fell a seasonally adjusted 0.1% in September from a month earlier, the Commerce Department said Tuesday. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had forecast a 0.1% rise.

The analysis at the end of the article has this to say.

(M)ore recently job creation has stalled and consumer confidence has taken a hit, raising concerns that spending could fall off. The Thomson-Reuters/University of Michigan consumer-sentiment index fell for the second straight month in September. This month it dropped again, falling to its lowest level since December 2012.

Consumer attitudes soured as Washington gridlock worsened, leading to a government shutdown that ran from Oct. 1 through Oct. 16. It's not yet clear if that darker mood will translate into less spending.

Millions of people losing their health insurance and almost everyone having to pay more than they used to is going to necessarily lead to less consumer spending and less consumer confidence. In an already weak economy that is driven by consumer spending, that sure looks like a recipe for a recession.

These Ivy League, society-reshaping ideas never work out the way they did in the faculty lounge bull sessions.

H/T: Flopping Aces

Krugman: All I'm Saying Is Give Communism A Chance

Normally, I consider Paul Krugman and Robert Reich to be fascists. I may have been wrong all along about these two. Dig this.

It’s true that the Affordable Care Act isn’t as complex as opponents make it out to be. Basically, it requires that insurance companies offer the same policies to everyone; it requires that each individual then buy one of these policies (the individual mandate); and it offers subsidies, depending on income, to keep insurance affordable.

Still, there’s a lot for people to go through. Not only do they have to choose insurers and plans, they have to submit a lot of personal information so the government can determine the size of their subsidies. And the software has to integrate all this information, getting it to all the relevant parties — which isn’t happening yet on the federal site.

Imagine, now, a much simpler system in which the government just pays your major medical expenses. In this hypothetical system you wouldn’t have to shop for insurance, nor would you have to provide lots of personal details. The government would be your insurer, and you’d be covered automatically by virtue of being an American.

Ah, how much simpler things would be if the government decided to simply own every element of health care. As the fascist Obamacare solution unfolds into a total catastrophe, it makes Krugman long for the communist solution of universal Medicare. How efficient! How just! Everyone covered and it's all paid for by the government.

Sort of like the old GUM department stores in the Soviet Union. None of that wretched "corporate greed" getting in the way, just pure, efficient, government-provided goods and services.

The SAT Test Formulation Of The Issue: Government health care is to modern medicine what this is to Nordstroms.

Into Space Via ... Balloon?

Dig this.

More info here.

Nobody Tells Me Nothin'

... is what President Obama must be saying all the time.

First, he thought if you liked your doctor and health plan you could keep it, only to find out you couldn't. Then he thought the website was going to launch just fine, but it didn't. After that he was peddling a 1-800 number where you can sign up for health care except that you can't. Now we find out he had no idea the NSA was bugging Angela Merkel and other world leaders.

The account suggests President Barack Obama went nearly five years without knowing his own spies were bugging the phones of world leaders. Officials said the NSA has so many eavesdropping operations under way that it wouldn't have been practical to brief him on all of them.

They added that the president was briefed on and approved of broader intelligence-collection "priorities," but that those below him make decisions about specific intelligence targets.

Roger Simon has a great post about this today. Here's an excerpt.

No wonder Obamacare and practically everything else from foreign policy to energy policy is an unmitigated mess. This president and his administration have taken hands-off leadership and leading from behind to unprecedented levels.

What exactly does our president do for a living? What’re we paying him for?

That's kind of what I was thinking, too. He has lots and lots of meetings and lots and lots of briefings, they just don't seem to contain any actual, you know, information.

Weird.

The Party Of No

... no rainbow unicorns, that is.

Surfing around the Interweb tubes, soaking up the excuses for the cataclysmic disaster that is Obamacare, I've come across three general classes of whining.

1. It hasn't been implemented yet. Err, well, yes it has. That's what a roll-out is. It's the start of implementation. Saying that it hasn't been implemented because it crashed and burned upon release is like saying you didn't give our new car a chance, we'd have put the fires out eventually and besides, you don't really need all that molten upholstery on the inside anyway.

2. It was all your idea anyway. This is the position of our favorite little fascist "thinker," Robert Reich. Like the equally demented Paul Krugman, Robert is closer to a minister of propaganda than he is to anything else. From the comments in that post, it's clear Robbie has plenty of cannon fodder in the Obama Youth* to back him up.

3. OK, smartypants, what's your plan? This is the most common and my own personal favorite. It's the "Party of No" accusation. Having failed to deliver on their promises of rainbow unicorns through Obamacare, they now demand that opponents come up with a plan to deliver rainbow unicorns. It doesn't seem to occur to them that, their deepest wishes aside, there aren't going to be any rainbow unicorns. Ever.

But I want one! I want it, I Want It, I WANT IT!

* - It's worth nothing that the term, Obama Youth is used quite loosely. As the Youth discover how ferociously Obamacare screws them, the demographics of the Obama Youth is going to become much, much less youthful.

Cheezburger of the Day

Consumer Confidence And Obamacare

Just had a thought wander into my head. What's going to happen to consumer confidence, consumer spending and business spending as the turmoil and uncertainty of the Obamacare disaster continue to grow? Personally, I'm going to be paying at least $1000 more each year for health care, but at least I'll have it. What about the hundreds of thousands or millions of people whose health care is being terminated because their policies don't meet Obamacare standards?

Would you be out there buying a new car or new washing machine under those circumstances?

Link Of The Day

This is spot on.

"Obamacare was designed to fail; to fail slowly and incrementally; to fail in a way that would convince people that private, for-profit health insurance companies are the reason why America's catastrophically overpriced and malfunctioning health care system hasn't worked, doesn't work, and will never work. The architects of the Affordable Care Act wanted to 'prove' that third-party private insurance should be scrapped entirely and replaced with a single-payer system: straight socialism.

"The ACA was supposed to fail slowly and painfully over the course of two or three or four presidential election cycles (which is why Obamacare's namesake, Barack Obama, saw to it that it wouldn't be implemented until the second half of his second term). When the backlash came, it was supposed to come on some other president's—preferably a Republican president's—watch.

"But instead of failing on schedule, four or eight or twelve years from now—it has failed instantly, upon contact with reality.... Obama, Reid, and all of the other architects of the Affordable Care Act have created a problem for themselves that was designed to be insoluble."

Read the whole thing.

The Biggest Advantage Of DSLR Cameras Over Pocket Cameras

... is the viewfinder.

We've got two of the newer, relatively high-end pocket cameras. One has excellent optics including a 22x zoom. However, you frame the shot by looking at the LCD screen on the back. If the lighting isn't good, that image is washed out and you're essentially firing blindly. I've brought it with me a couple of times in the car for photos of opportunity and struggled with that. I end up backing the zoom out until I'm guaranteed it's going to capture the image I want somewhere in the shot.

My Nikon D60 artillery piece is another thing entirely. You look right through the camera lens with your eye shielded from glare and know precisely what you're getting. You shoot with confidence. It makes a huge difference to me.