[2020 addendum: Below I point out that Federal healthcare spending would blow up the budget in the 2021/22 time frame, but I’m of a mind that there are a lot of moving parts there. It could still happen, but it’s obvious that monstrous money printing will cover the gap for as long as it can, which might be a day, might be a half a generation.]
Sports
With the impending death of Chief Wahoo sports is slowly becoming dead to me. College football, something I never cared for before, is one of the last pieces of my interest since the team can’t move and the programs seem more responsive to fans than the pro sports who seem to ranks fans somewhere right below the staff at the stadiums. This isn’t to say that college sports aren’t an absolute scam; the “fans” of which I speak are the wealthy alumni who help underwrite the sports programs while the colleges themselves sacrifice every moral that they have (and many, many that they don’t) in order to stock their teams with unpaid people who couldn’t make it out of high school.
I guess though, isn’t that part of the appeal, one of the last vestiges of monstrous un-PC behavior in pursuit of nothing more than a regional sports program? I mean, can you imagine any program anywhere treating black people worse than the NCAA does? It’s positively confederate of them. Hope still for the rest of us that our mild un-PC transgressions will be forgiven.
White Hate
Some news about the (white) CIA leaker spouting off about how white=evil or something like that. Now she may have been earnest in her belief a’la Obama’s mom, but I suspect that she wasn’t meaning whites generally, but more like, whites specifically. What brought this to mind was a commentor elsewhere framing the whole play as being another rendition of the constant battle of WASPs versus proles, or, white elites versus the white working stiff. In previous ages this would manifest itself as class warfare, but no more since exerting one’s class in such away, especially over non-white/Asians would be very un-PC. Do note though that much as Obama did all he could to make things worse for the black working class, these elites hate all races that are not in their clique. This was masked by the large American middle class for quite some time, but with the war against the middle class largely being won by the elites, this fissure is becoming more exposed. Hint to elites: such events usually do not end well for you.
Worldwide PC hate-a-thon
Am I the only one who ponders why any of the rest of the world has so readily adopted the American mind virus of Political Correctness. I mentioned elsewhere the puzzlement of “not-white guilt” experienced by a young guy from the Dominican Republic lamenting his nation’s treatment of Haitians in the past. Really? Doesn’t your country owe more to it’s citizens than what some professor in Berkeley thinks your government owes to other people? It’s disappointing to see places like Germany and Sweden swallow this drivel up wholesale while in America I would posit that there aren’t many true believers. Sure there are people on campus, but just about everyone else sees it for the scam it is. Granted, there is a seemingly inexhaustible supply of people who want to be in on the scam, but it still looks like “PC/SJW” is just a holding-pen for people with grudges who were going to have those grudges no matter what. What grudges were Swedes harboring that they would want to actively become the rape capital of the world? What do Italians owe anyone to have their navy sail all the way to Libya to pick up overloaded ships?
Hostile Immigrants
Along those lines, I wonder what the mindset of those for immigration free-for-all would think if North Korea sent over 500,000 of their troops to our shores, on large tankers say. “Well that’s different”, I imagine them saying “they’re armed”. But what if they weren’t? Indeed, what if they weren’t in uniform at all? Now their hatred for the American nation state is such that I sorta doubt that they’d care if they were armed or not, but the point is a little more clear, and how is it much different than “migrations” going on now? Are we, and especially Europe, safer because their Muslim immigrants weren’t armed when they came over?
Healthcare
This beggars belief, really. I once took the stand that our high costs of healthcare were related to our spending money on our health. However, between Karl Denninger’s diatribes against the health industry, visiting a more effective and less expensive hospital in Communist China, and watching my friend slowly pass away due to cancer I’ve become convinced that the whole thing is a sham. I, like many people, have several stories related to weird billing practices, seemingly random coverage issues, and ineffective care.For what we spend, there should be zero issues, but we didn’t get to the point of spending four to five times what citizens in other countries spend without there being many things wrong. The only reason I bring this up is that the aforementioned Karl Denninger has run the math and found that healthcare costs will obliterate the Federal budget in the next four to five years (and even four years may be optimistic). For example, the U.S. spends about $325B just on prescription drugs. People inside healthcare that I ask have a blinkered view, the justification always seems to boil down to “stuff costs a lot because stuff costs a lot”. Well that’s no good any more. We’re either going to get market reforms to force costs down or, more likely, death panels (aka “waiting lists”) to get things sorted. Push will come to shove to the Federal leviathan and even in their sheer incompetence they will not want to lose.
Trump
I’ll note that Trump’s healthcare plan is awful, but still better than anything else D.C. is putting forth. After seeing that Congress will never go against its interest, he is pitching solving the Federal healthcare spending program by pushing it back to the states. This will, of course, instantly blow up every state budget in the country without serious reform, which Trumps seems to know it will never be forthcoming from Congress. I personally wish Trump could be doing better and I suspect that he’s in over his head by just a touch. However, he’s still much more preferable to the Presidents that we’ve had the past 24 years. We need better, but this is probably as good as it’s going to get.
