William Henry Hates

Here’s what I’d like to know: has William Henry Gates ever been arrested before? Stopped by a cop and hassled? Has anyone in in his immediate (or once-removed) family been subject to racism-by-cop?

I’m not going to deny that cops hassle black men more than they do anyone else. (I’m also not going to deny, even if I get called racist, that young black men commit crimes with the same enthusiastic prevalence and incidence with which they play excellent basketball.)

As the facts continue to trickle out, these seem to be the things we know: Gates got a cop response to a possible break-in at his house faster than 99% of other Americans would. I seriously doubt that Adam-12 had just finished quieting down a teenage party down the block and got this call, and that’s why they got there in a very few minutes.

People on the right are trying to spin this as a class issue (jackassical professor versus blue collar cop), but I haven’t seen any of them tackle this particular class aspect–the sheer speed of the police response. A few months ago, my wife and I came home from a plane trip and had to break into our own house. Nobody called the cops and had they called the cops, I bet we would have been asleep for 2 hours before they showed up. And we would have welcomed them, and made coffee for them. That’s because we’re not racists, we’re homeowners.

Had William Henry Hates had a similar hierarchy of values, this never would have been a big issue. But since he’s more importantly a racist than anything else, we now have to deal with this asinine kerfuffle.

• There was no racism involved in the police dispatch. Report of two guys shouldering a door late at night in a really nice neighborhood. And that’s all. Not black guys.
• Gates had a huge chip on his shoulder about people wearing blue. Maybe he was raped by a smurf at some point, perhaps when he was defending 2LiveCrew’s artistic license.
• Gates is a pampered little bitch in the heart of the system (what a great name that would be for a rock band). Notorious PLB is living proof of how flaccid racism is now in this country, except in the minds of people like Hates who jump up on chairs and scream “yo mamma” everytime anything happens to them that can possibly be interpreted as racist.
• The cop called to the scene had great bona fides–teaching classes on avoiding racial profiling, I assume he had decent skills dealing with racially-charged situations. But those skills weren’t up to the task of dealing with a Grey Poupon professional racist like Gates.

By the way, the notion that Gates is a highly respected exemplar of black scholarly achievement is idiotic. Gates is as ideologically jejune and doctrinaire as your standard issue Women’s Studies professor. He’s just crossed out Women and written in Black in crayon. He’s just another identity politics demogogic jackass. I was quite aware of him as a known credentialed idiot long before this most recent proof of it.

And that last gets to the heart of the matter. Nobody I’ve heard has said this yet:

• Gates is a professional racist and grudge collector, and that’s what caused this whole problem. This is the heart of the matter, and it’s not about forgiveness.
• And Barack Obama appeases and butt kisses jerks like Gates and that’s what has caused Barack’s whole problem.
• Barack let us know what he really thinks about race, and it’s not post-racial thinking.  Or any kind of thinking. He roots for the home team, regardless of facts.

BarryO might have gotten a pass from me for initially jumping to conclusions had he not been such a punk about Iran. When BarryO says I will say nothing without facts, and I will ignore the YouTube videos and the violence, because the mullahs didn’t allow UN observers at all the polls, and without the UN being present nobody should have an opinion and you can’t tell Wright from wrong–

And then you open your big mouth about William Henry Hates by saying you don’t have all the facts, but you’re not going to let that stop you…

Screw you, Barack. If there’s one thing Bush lacked and you exemplify, it’s moral vacuousness. At least he could be wrong, while you can only be Pretty Vacant.

Officer Crowley is a good guy and all the effort he spent trying to make race not matter doesn’t matter when you’re ensnared by dishonest master race baiters who have their own dishonest racial agenda. I  mean both Barack and William Henry Hates.

Now we have the beer thing. No matter what Crowley does with that, he’s my hero. Imagine how he’s being leaned on and how much he’s being seduced. All he did was his job, did it well, and all William Henry Hates did was once again spit on the people who protect him.

Seriously, people, google William Henry Gates, read the nonsense he publishes. He’s dumb as a box of hammers.

Universal Health Scare

Here’s a thought experiment:

New universal health care plan:

The government will pay in full for any medical treatment for any American who wants it, if that treatment was available 50 years ago.

If you don’t want rich people getting subsidized aspirin, go ahead and add a means test. I’m just trying to keep it simple. This is a thought experiment, after all, and a thought experiment aimed at liberals, so I’m just trying to keep it simple.

One of the strongest arguments against socialized medicine is that it will destroy or at least retard medical innovation. The above proposal neatly solves that problem.

In terms of the economic dynamics, health care innovation is very much like the development of flat screen TVs. 10 years ago, a 40″ Pioneer was $50,000 and it was way less sophisticated than the similar model available for $800 today. Really rich people paid the R & D cost for plasmas, and now we can all have flat screen TVs with better technologies (like LCD).

What would have happened if the government had tried to guarantee that everyone got a plasma TV the first year they came out? Either they would have bankrupted the country handing out those TVs, or would have had to ration, or would have had to force Pioneer to accept much less money for them (in which case Pioneer would have said, screw this, and we’d be watching 32″ CRTs still). Hmmm… to me that sounds much like the health care choices being offered by the government right now.

RESOLVED: All other things being equal, it is better that fewer people suffer or die of causes that are medically preventable, not just now but going forward to some point in the future. A medical system that covers everyone but causes 100,000 people a year to suffer or die of preventable causes every year for the next 50 years is worse than a medical system that allows 500,000 people to die this year, and 250,000 the next year and 125,000 the next year, and so on.

I’m assuming that medical innovation is the most important factor in how good medical care is. Like in how good TVs are. And I’m quite willing for some people to die now who can’t afford the latest and greatest medical care in order that in the relatively near future many more people will be saved because of innovation and the cost and benefit of R & D for innovation being borne by the rich. This is exactly like poor people not being able to afford a first generation plasma TV, except that the poor person didn’t die from not having a TV, and will die from not having access to the latest and greatest medical care.

So you have to get really cold and rational, Spock-like, and look at the needs of the many in the future outweighing the needs of the few in the present, and realize that this person who will die now because they can’t afford a medical innovation would have died anyway had we stifled medical innovation 20 years ago. This present person would have been one of those future persons who wouldn’t get a treatment.

The same incentives that improve TVs improve medical care. Innovators will no more produce better medical care than they will TVs if not given the same kind of economic incentives. It would be really nice if medical innovators were so driven by the desire to save lives that they  would keep innovating for free, but that’s not how it works.

Now you may disagree with me about the value of medical innovation. In that case, you should have no problem with my modest proposal to cover everyone at 50 years ago state of the art. That would be really cheap too.

The real reason that medical costs are rising is because medical innovation is accelerating incredibly. TVs are more expensive these days too than they were 20 years ago. It’s because they’re so much better. The reason the government is so worried about medical costs is they’ve stupidly bought into funding all this new capability for everyone. Like they’ve noticed TVs are getting better and have agreed that every American deserves the best new TV money can buy, during its R&D phase.

One of my best friends in my life had stage 4 lymphoma and now has no detectable cancer. It was several years of touch and go and experimental expensive treatments. Had this happened in 1980, he’d be dead now. The richest man in the world in 1980 couldn’t have bought survival for a billion dollars. My friend got his life ransomed for a quarter of a million.

Health care will be rationed. It already is, which is why people are so pissed off. The only question is, will it be rationed like plasma TVs, so that the rich get a jump but the poor get it all 10 years later, or will it be rationed in such a way that all the money to be made is in the black market and in bribing officials into letting you jump the line? Will the rationing system continue to support relentless, ruthless innovation?

If you fall for Obamacare, you deserve to die. But you’ll get away with it, mostly, and your grandchildren will die, even though they could have been saved if you hadn’t been such an envious, panicked, greedy fool.

Obama’s Pets

My wife and I got nothing from the Bush rebates.  We earned too much money. So we’re not worthy.

Some of this unworthiness comes from getting paid more per hour than most people, but most of it is caused because we work more hours than most people.

I’ve whined about this before: If you pro-rate over our productive lifetimes the huge number of unpaid/underpaid hours both of us have worked to get to the point where we can charge more per-hour than the typical Chrysler assembly line worker, we make less per hour than that stupid guy. Does that mean we’re the really stupid ones?

No, but the differential is not so much economic as it is spiritual. Our work is fascinating, challenging, demanding and creative. Unlike stupid Chrysler guy, my wife calls me up because she’s worried about me and I’m supposed to call if it’s after 9pm, and I thought for sure it wasn’t past 6. It would kill me to work on an assembly line (I’d kill myself, I mean). The price we pay is we never work for the weekend. Weekends where we don’t work are few and far between.

We’ll get nothing from the Obama house-buying incentives (or from any of Obama’s other bread&circuses voter loyalty programs).

We will pay asinine increases in the prices of everything because of the corrupt cap and trade plan. Cap and trade started out as a libertarian proposal to apply “tragedy of the commons” thinking to environmental issues. Barack and the Obama-nations have turned it into a a corrupt rerun of 14th Century indulgences. The same goes for the “carbon offsets” charade. Everything old is new again, when you’re a politically correct dumbass. These pinheads are no more serious about solving environmental problems than the priests collecting indulgences were about suppressing sin. Environmentalism has become a self-flagellating, self-abusing cult of effete hypocrites who think they can pay their way into an enclaved heaven while turning up the air-conditioning in their SUVs.

We will pay the VAT which is coming next.

We will be raped and pillaged for a while.

At a certain point, we will resist. Not to make a splash, not to make a point, but quietly, to survive, and effectively.

This weekend, I was at Costco, as usual. They’re selling $15 trade copies of Atlas Shrugged at Costco. I don’t think Costco, a notoriously liberal touchy feely corporation, is pushing a point. They’re selling what sells.

New litmus tests:

• If you qualify for any of this new government “help,” and you are older than 30, you have officially screwed up your life so far.
• If you take any of this new government “help,” you officially suck. I am your enemy.

I’d suggest that Michelle Antoinette and President Boy Toy not go out anymore on dates that the rest of us are sensible enough not to afford until unemployment is under 6%. And she might want to re-think her shoe and purse budget. Pulling off noblesse oblige requires nobility, and neither of these too-cute-to-fail social climbers has that.

Sarah Palin, R.I.P., P.Y.T.

I voted for Sarah Palin for president.  I didn’t vote for John McCain. I wrote Palin in. She was the only person other than Ron Paul that I thought would stand in the way of the Bush bailouts.  I could have voted for Paul, but friends don’t let friends vote Libertarian.

(I say this as a former Libertarian Party apparatchik and congressional candidate. The Libertarian Party is more Party than Libertarian. Only if you believe that politics really don’t matter should you waste time on the LP. They’re like a Star Trek convention. Actually, there’s probably a lot of overlap, and they could double book with the Trekkies. Go ahead, say Trekker. Only a Trekkie cares if they get called Trekkie or Trekker.)

The reactions to her announcement that she is resigning as governor of Alaska aren’t all exactly predictable. Lefties are, of course, having to find new ways to keep from shooting off in their pants. On the right, the majority are shucking and jiving. But a lot more right wing people than I would have expected are standing up and saying she stuck her shotgun up her own butt and so let’s call in the crime scene cleanup people and be done with her.

There is no excuse for what she just did. Brave Sir Sarah chickened out. There is no new information needed. There is no acceptable excuse. Unless she or one of her kids has inoperable cancer. In which case, she should have already said so.

If the GOP has half a brain (and I’m sure they do, if you add up all the Republicans in the world), Sarah should be anathema now. This ends her career. She is not your girlfriend puking in your car and you forgive her even though you can smell it every hot day and even though everyone keeps saying you should break up with her. Actually, she is just like that.