I was very harsh in a response to Steeplejack in the previous thread. I want to publicly, on the front page, apologize to Steeplejack for overreacting and being a specific jackass. I am sorry, that response was uncalled for, and I will endeavor to do better in the future. I am also deleting that specific comment.
It’s Funny Because it Would Be True!
Has anyone met a Marine who does crossfit who is also a vegan? Because that would be the single most annoying person in the world.
— Angry Staff Officer (@pptsapper) January 12, 2017
Uncle Joe!
Our wonderful President just pulled a fast one on the Veep he calls his brother. Class honoring class:
If you want to cut to the chase, go here:
I’m so going to miss both these guys. Or rather, come January 21, they can each take, oh, say, two weeks. Then I’m gonna need them back, full steam ahead.
Lyrics from songs
What are your all-time favorite lyrics from songs? For me, I’d go with this from Shane MacGowan because it’s the code that I try to live by everyday:
And in the Euston tavern you screamed it was your shout
But they wouldn’t give you service so you kicked the windows out
They took you out into the street and kicked you in the brains
So you walked back in through a bolted door and did it all again
I also like this from Bob Dylan, though I’m not as big a fan of Bob as some:
Life is sad
Life is a bust
All you can do is do what you must
You do what you must do and you do it well
And I’ve always like this from Robert Johnson:
When the train, it left the station, there was two lights on behind,
When the train, it left the station, there was two lights on behind,
Well, the blue light was my baby, and the red light was my mind.
What are your favorites?
ACA Element inventory
The ACA is a complicated law. It has a lot of moving and interacting parts in it. It also has parts that can be severed from the rest of the law without significant operational impact. I want to conduct an inventory of the major elements that we will need to be familiar with during the second round of healthcare and health finance reform debate. A basic understanding of what the different parts of the law do and how they play nicely with the other parts of the law will put you in good shape over the next couple of months.
I will break things down to the broadest stand alone structure and make comments as needed. This is long and wonky so it is all below the fold.
Brow-Raising Read: Peter Not-Bathory Thiel Has No Patience with Your Illogical Humanity
relieved that my belief Peter Thiel is actually just stupid is being vindicated pic.twitter.com/Le9emSG1ir
— EXILED PROPHET (@Bro_Pair) January 11, 2017
As Thiel would no doubt explain — possibly via a letter from his lawyers — someone who can plausibly style himself a ‘chess prodigy’ cannot be called stupid. (Clueless would be my term.) He simply fails to honor certain metrics popular with lesser beings, ‘soft’ terms like empathy and humor, or self-awareness.
To interview such a challenging subject, the NYTimes‘ Maureen Dowd is perhaps uniquely suited, given her long career of sucking up to those celebrities her bosses admire in combination with her natural instinct to take the mickey. As a brief interval of laughter — “Peter Thiel, Trump’s Tech Pal, Explains Himself“:
Let others tremble at the thought that Donald J. Trump may go too far. Peter Thiel worries that Mr. Trump may not go far enough.
“Everyone says Trump is going to change everything way too much,” says the famed venture capitalist, contrarian and member of the Trump transition team. “Well, maybe Trump is going to change everything way too little. That seems like the much more plausible risk to me.”
Mr. Thiel is comfortable being a walking oxymoron: He is driven to save the world from the apocalypse. Yet he helped boost the man regarded by many as a danger to the planet.
“The election had an apocalyptic feel to it,” says Mr. Thiel, wearing a gray Zegna suit and sipping white wine in a red leather booth at the Monkey Bar in Manhattan. “There was a way in which Trump was funny, so you could be apocalyptic and funny at the same time. It’s a strange combination, but it’s somehow very powerful psychologically.”…
He recalls that he went through a lot of “meta” debates about Mr. Trump in Silicon Valley. “One of my good friends said, ‘Peter, do you realize how crazy this is, how everybody thinks this is crazy?’ I was like: ‘Well, why am I wrong? What’s substantively wrong with this?’ And it all got referred back to ‘Everybody thinks Trump’s really crazy.’ So it’s like there’s a shortcut, which is: ‘I don’t need to explain it. It’s good enough that everybody thinks something. If everybody thinks this is crazy, I don’t even have to explain to you why it’s crazy. You should just change your mind.’”…
(This is the high-IQ, expensively-educated version of “How do you know it’s dangerous to drink bleach? Just because a bunch of quote-unquote scientists told you so?”)
… I ask if he’s comfortable with the idea that Vice President-elect Mike Pence, regarded in the gay community as an unreconstructed homophobe, is a heartbeat away from the presidency.
“You know, maybe I should be worried but I’m not that worried about it,” he replies. “I don’t know. People know too many gay people. There are just all these ways I think stuff has just shifted. For speaking at the Republican convention, I got attacked way more by liberal gay people than by conservative Christian people.”…
Dreaming of impossible dreams and guaranteed disappointment
The Wall Street Journal has a good quote on what Americans say they want for healthcare and what has to happen for that to happen:
Cheap insurance means either very little gets covered or the people who need a lot of coverage can’t get insured. Covering sick people means either massive subsidies (public or private) from the healthy to the sick and restricting the size of those subsidies means limiting choices. Democrats got hammered for choosing to cover sick people via either Medicaid expansion or through subsidized private sector insurance with a coercive participation mechanism. Republicans will get hammered for telling people to go die quietly in the corner and here’s a tax deduction that only matters if you’re healthy and wealthy.
This is the core problem of health policy. There are no pure win-win solutions for the healthy and the sick at the same time.
Dreaming of impossible dreams and guaranteed disappointmentPost + Comments (107)