Nom de plume: Rivrdog

Tuesday trespass...

...wherein we show some more examples of how the Left tramples on traditional American values.

Example One: Nanny Medicine. Watching the noon news on Channel eight here in Stumptown, I heard the newsbabe try to explain a new definition of "obese", which, BTW, USED to have the meaning of more than 30 pounds over ideal weight. The "new" definition of "obese" apparently means flabby-looking, because the reporter explained that one can be "obese" AT one's ideal weight. This is nothing more than a blatant attempt to use scare tactics to scare people into being underweight, or becoming gym rats, or both. I reject it.

Example Two: Qualification of Presidents: Obama does not meet the qualification listed in the Constitution because he is NOT a "natural born citizen" as required, then defined in the SCOTUS case Minor v. Happersett. In that case, a "natural born citizen" was defined as, "all children born in a country of parents who were it's citizens". There is no argument that Barack Hussein Obama was not born of parents who were both citizens. There is argument that he was born here. US District Court Judge Anderson of TN  has cited Minor v. Happersett as being on point. Sheriff Arpaio thinks that this is important enough to let superior courts decide whether Obama should even be on ballots across the country. Read about this new angle on the "birther" controversy here. I support Sheriff Joe in his quest to have the truth come out. This Nation could stand the minor constitutional crisis caused by discovering that Obama was never qualified to hold office, at this point, but if Obama wins another term of office, and THEN a court tells him he is not qualified, there is a high potential for a MAJOR Constitutional crisis. A gun sort of crisis, if you know what I mean, Verne.

Example Three: The Fourth Estate as Obama shills. It seems to me that there are rules about this. At what point do the rules get enforced? When is someone going to start accumulating all the minutes and hours of TeeVee time used strictly to re-elect Obama, and the column-miles of newsprint used for the same reason, and decree that said media either have to give equal time to the Romnizer or be classed for tax purposes and purposes of license renewals as political shills?

Example Four: We're not Los Angeles, and don't need their air pollution rules in Oregon. It seems that City of Portland garbage rates are about to rise by almost 10% just so the garbage collectors can buy new trucks that meet the most stringent emissions rules. Those would be Kalifornica's rules, which are written for the extreme example of the Los Angeles Basin airshed, arguably the worst place a large city has been built, on the entire planet. The topography and local micro-climate makes it impossible to get rid of man OR nature-generated air pollution, and rules for emissions were written to consider those facts, but then, those rules have been foisted off on the entire rest of the Nation, which does not need them because the rest of the Nation does not have the airshed problems that Los Angeles has. No matter, the insane Portland City Council, led by the Gay Pedophile Mayor, Sam Adams, brought in the CA rules, and so all the trucks have to be changed out. No matter that the current trucks still have life left, the haulers must buy new ones, and oh, while you're at it, City Council, did you remember to mandate that those trucks use "bio-diesel" fuel at $7.00+ per gallon? That stupid rule, which the City Fleet is, itself, saddled with, would make the perfect capper for this insane additional expense in an already insanely-expensive city.

Example Five: When the history books tell us that Liquor Prohibition failed as a social-control experiment, let's try it all over again! The self-same insane City of Portland, which has forced foodcart entrepreneurs into what used to be called by the Nazis, "lagers" or concentrations, smarted recently when the Oregon Liquor Control Commission, acting on their legal counsel's advice that such establishments, once forced to tie themselves down, had to be treated, for purposes of liquor licensing, as brick-and-mortar restaurants. They issued a liquor license (beer and wine only) to one food cart, in the lager known locally as "Cartlandia", no doubt, after the TV series "Portlandia". So the city is mightily cheese(burgered)ed off, and has filed suit against the State liquor agency. The Rivrdog blog, no real friend of the OLCC, nevertheless sides with them on this one, and hopes their legal beagles turn into legal pitbulls and rip the City a new one.

That's enuff for today. Suffice it to say I do NOT forgive these trespasses.

The "Single-Payer" Fallacy

Even the most die-hard liberal seems to believe that the SCOTUS is about to either gut or utterly destroy Obamacare, so there's angst all over the media.

Too bad it's misplaced angst, for angst can be a good thing if it leads to logical solutions.

The misplaced angst here is the failure of the entire liberal side to look at the One Big Question* in the single-payer scheme of health insurance.

That question is simply this: shouldn't any mandated insurance plan have, at it's core, efficiency in payment? Let us not forget these points:

An insurance plan is just that, and that only: a plan to arrange payment for a service: rebuilding your home after a fire or other loss, rebuilding YOU after an illness. All those restorative services have COST associated with them, so PAYMENT is required.

It almost seems like liberals think that a health insurance plan must first change health care delivery. No, it doesn't have to, all it has to do is arrange PAYMENT for services. This is where Obamacare over-reached, it attempted to reconfigure health care delivery, then pay for the new delivery system.

Obamacare was a deliberate attempt of the President and his party to use health care services, or the control of them, to drag the USA into a new political system, socialism. You see, the health care insurance system we have now is not mandatory. People can and do forgo health care. They can and do shop around for the best price for health care AND health insurance, and their choices lead directly to the efficiencies in the health care marketplace. The LACK of efficiency in the health care marketplace is due entirely to non-payers. Yes, a health-care services bill is the easiest one to refuse to pay. All you have to do is declare that you can't afford to pay, and the bill will either be put off, or reduced, or some arrangement made to pay it from public funds.

The lack of certainty in payment for health care services causes the ineffiencies. To solve that one, relatively easy problem, Obamacare proposed to re-write the entire idea of delivering AND paying for health care services. This is the equivalent of using a SWAT team to bring an overtime-parking violator to justice.

BTW, your Rivrdog won't keep you in suspense. The way to solve the problem of uninsureds in the system is to have a pool of money for payment. This has been done in the auto insurance industry almost since the start of auto insurance some 80 years or so ago. It's called "assigned risk", and the system works well. If you are in the assigned risk pool, you pay higher premiums, but you get insurance, the equivalent of using a SWAT team to arrest an overtime-parking violator. The higher premiums encourage you to do whatever it takes to improve yourself so that you get OUT of the Assigned Risk pool.

All the Feds had to do to execute Universal Health Care was establish the Assigned Risk Pool for those payers who couldn't find normal insurance, and make paying for medical care the same level of debt that everything else is. Establishing that pool would have required only a small fraction of the bureaucracy and a small fraction of the money which Obamacare demands from us in it's various forms. Assigned risk wouldn't have imposed insurance, it just would have paid for all those who don't have insurance to get it.

The health insurance system in this country works. It can and should be made more efficient, but most of the job of making it more efficient would be done by establishing the Assigned Risk pool.

The Assigned Risk solution isn't glitzy though, it doesn't require a "Czar" to run it, and it certainly wouldn't require the pogrom against health care that is now in place and hopefully, will soon be erased by the SCOTUS.

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* The "One Big Question" is a construct of Joe Huffman, who blogs frequently, here. He says that most propaganda can be unraveled by the simple technique of digging out the One Big Question, and examining it for the truth.

Thursday Potpourri

Item: The Right comes up on the wrong side of this idea, that all OTC (Over The Counter) drugs are a better deal than prescription (R/X) drugs of the identical formulation. Example: Omeprazole, aka, Prilosec. It's been out for decades, and it's been OTC for at least a decade, but the price is still on the order of a dollar per pill, when by now, it ought to be down to a dime or less. There are other examples. What is going to happen with this FDA ruling is that some widely-prescribed drugs that are losing their patents (patents timing out) and would have become very inexpensive for sufferers to use, will now NOT get cheap, and their OTC prices will be maintained at artificially high levels. So, just moving a drug out of the R/X class and into the OTC class is not a guarantee of saving anyone any money, and in fact, some of these patent-expired drugs will show steep price rises when they hit the OTC counters. Mostly, the drug companies benefit from this, not the patients. Oh, and that thing in the article about having to go to see the doc every time a R/X is adjusted? BullTweet! You CALL your doctor's charge nurse, and the nurse handles that. I do that all the time and there is never a bill for it.

Item: The case against Roger Clemens. If you know baseball, and I'm a fan, you know that there was a sea change in top-line pitchers about 10-15 years ago. The very best pitchers, like Clemens, USED to be "location" pitchers. They could consistently put the ball within a couple of inches of where they wanted it, and scouting told them where they wanted it. Now, the best pitchers are "power" pitchers, who have the ability to throw 95 mph fastballs and sliders, at ordinary accuracy, for 6 innings or better. "Location" pitchers are now closers, who only have to throw for two innings at most, never more than 35-40 pitches total. That just the evolution of the game, but Clemens was caught up in it. As the best "location" pitcher on the mound, the game passed him by because he couldn't toss the screamers time after time. He tried to pump himself into better shape via chemicals, so as to prolong his career at the top of the heap. I can't blame him for that, and the idiotic doping trial is just that, idiotic.

Item: Afghanistan. I had occasion, night before last, to listen to a local college Professor expound on the 'Stan. Very knowledgeable guy, Prof. Grant Farr of Portland State University, spent a lot of time over there, including through the Soviet occupation. His take, in a nutshell, is that Obama's Grand Plan won't work. Why it won't work is that Obama doesn't understand the nature of the country. First of all, Afghanistan is NOT a "country" in any real understanding of the term. It's a region of three main tribal groups, each having major problems with the other, and each being unlikely to ever cede ANY authority to the others within it's own tribal influence area. If that wasn't bad enough, our whole "nation building" exercise in the 'Stan is based on building a modern national Army which can hold it's own, and hold the Nation together. The major problem is that there is 70% total illiteracy in the 'Stan, and of the Army recruits, maybe one in ten can read and write, but probably not. You simply can't raise a modern Army from recruits who can't read or write, and expecially from those who not only can't read or write, but don't want to learn to do so, lest they be labeled as blasphemous by their local imams, who DO read and write, and want to hold that over their parishoners' heads. It all adds up to FAIL, just as it added up to FAIL for every major nation which has tried in the past century (we are the third world power in the past 100 years to try to "civilize" the 'Stan).

Item: STFU, Christie. Yep, others look at Tubby and see the same potential horror story I've seen.

Final Item: I realize that Zoos are places where humans may learn about other animal species, but you have to have just a LITTLE smarts before you go. Consider NOT dressing your little tyke to look like a baby zebra (prey animal) and parking him in front of the lion's den...

Earth Day, 2012

There's some history behind Earth Day, you need to go to the Wiki and read it. You actually only need to read the first paragraph, because it will tell you (between the lines, I'm sure it wasn't written that way on purpose or the Wiki would have been deleted by now). Note in the Wiki that the original Earth Day was all about stewardship of the planet and it's natural environment, which is what it should be about today, but isn't.

Note also, in the Wiki, that the United Nations hijacked Earth Day three years ago. It is now just another tool of that anti-national-sovereignty body, which uses and recommends socialism as it's mechanism to destroy sovereign capitalist governments.

When the UN hijacked Earth Day, they brought in the "Mother Earth" thing. Back when the original Earth Day was proclaimed, the Mother Earth or Mother Nature thing was a joke, as in the margarine commercial. Now it is a religion, and as such, is the only religion the United Nations recognizes (overtly, they recognize Islam under the table).

So, we have had a progression here, a progressive change. It's just another one of the progressive changes that wound up as a socialist tool, but environmentalism went from "conservation", as advanced one hundred years ago by Teddy Roosevelt, to Earth Day (let's ALL save the Planet) in 1970, to today's version (we're acolytes of Gaia, the Earth Goddess).

The only true version is the original. We can use the bounty of nature, but we must conserve it, so there will always be some.

That's what your Rivrdog follows as his outdoor creed. I recycle, too, in fact, devoted yesterday morning to getting the non-curbside recyclables together to take to City Hall, where, once a year, their huge parking lot is used for actual GOOD, and becomes a massive recycling center for the hard-to-recycle items.

If you conserve nature, you've done your duty to the planet. Socialism does not count as doing your duty to the planet, nor does prostrating yourself before the false idol of Gaia.

I knew Ronald Reagan, and you may NOT compare yourself to him, Obama

I knew Ronald Reagan because being stationed in CA during the late 1960s then the late 70s to early 80s, he was the talk of the State. The much-more-respectful MSM reported more accurately on the President then.

Ronald Reagan started out as a union guy, President of the Screen Actor's Guild, but at the time, the "wild-eyed socialists"* in Hollywood were in the minority, not the majority like now. There were a LOT of WW2 veterans calling each other Brother and Sister at Union meetings then, and there was at least SOME respect for the USA amongst the members of SAG.

After his SAG stint, Reagan went on to get elected Lieutenant Governor, then Governor of California, which, at the time really WAS "paradise on earth" (yes, readers, I could easily have been a dope-smoking hippie myself, they were graciously accepted most places then, as somewhat of a side-show, but they were accepted there).

Reagan went on to become President, taking over from Jimmy Carter, who dispite being a Naval Academy graduate, and a small businessman, made a piss-poor President. I had a fellow B52 crew-member who bought a residence in Riverside in '81, and had to pay a 18% mortgage rate (and the rates were FALLING then!), IIRC. I rented, was scared out of the home-buyer's market.

President Reagan's Airborne Command Post used to land at my duty station, March AFB (Now March Air Reserve Base), which was then the headquarters for the Strategic Air Command's Fifteenth Air Force, and it was home to double-Squadron wings of both B52s and KC-135 tankers. The Presidential Airborne Command Post was a brand-new E-4 (Boeing 747), which was outfitted as the President's place to fight a nuke war with the USSR from, even before Air Force One, it was THAT important. I got a VIP tour of the top-secret aircraft, which was later featured (a mock-up of it was featured) in the HBO movie "By Dawn's Early Light".

Gawd, this is digressy, isn't it?

*The point here was supposed to be: I knew Ronald Reagan, I probably knew him better than you do, Presient Obama. He was NOT a "wild-eyed socialist", but YOU ARE. Plus, you're a liar to boot, Obama, and I never knew Reagan to lie. 

Oh, BTW, President Obama, Warren Buffet, who has put up with you to an excessive degree, has just signaled you to quit calling your "tax the producers out of existence" plan the "Buffet Rule". Do the old, sick guy a favor and stop with that nonsense. Don't bother to try to call it the "Reagan Rule", either. Reagan wanted to lower taxes for EVERYONE, not just the dependable sloths who will always vote to get their "free stuff". Oh, and quit smoking that history-revisionist crack-pipe, Mister President. It's not legal yet. If you want it to be, fire Biden from your ticket and put Ron Paul on there.... 

I might not be a fish biologist, but...

Here's a new meme re-branded meme.

"I might not be..." presents the common-sense approach to issues that have "gone all technical" and now ordinary folks get disparaged and laughed down for trying to expound on them.

Curse those technocrats who claim the entire world of knowledge to themselves, anyway.

So, your Rivrdog blog will spend some time with this meme.

In fact, I already have. My recent post on electric cars was an "I might not be an automotive engineer, but I know what I want and should get in an electric car" post.

The "I might not be..." posts also point out something that this blog has become noted for, and that's holding up our poor educational establishment to the light of history, showing what it could be, has been, but isn't now. I might not be an engineer, but I can read engineering articles and become somewhat informed. I might not be a fish biologist, but I can and DO read up on invasive species, and coupling my interest with that of a conservationist having a 1950s-1960s basic science education (much better than today's), I can see why there is huge danger in crossing ecosystem boundaries with different species. In Oregon, we put our money where our mouths are on this subject, and every boater pays a $5/year fee (including the Holy Paddlers, who howl about having to pay the fee, because paddling is supposed to be freeeeeee) to support research into and control of, invasive species.

So, never be afraid to stand up for your basic education. Just because someone else might have degrees in a narrow field which you lack, and maybe even be or have been employed by the Government to use those degrees for Government Planning Bureaus, or perhaps received grants of money to study those narrow subjects, it does not mean that YOUR common-sense approach to that same subject is somehow insufficient for human understanding.

In fact, these narrow fields of academic and scientific concentaration frequently become "in-bred" with their high priests and acolytes forming what is nothing but a belief system, or religion, around that body of knowledge. When those fields of endeavor and study become inbred like that, no good can ever come of the furtherance of those missions.

If you don't believe me, look at how the Endangered Species Act, a good concept involving the basic precepts of conservation of species, became fouled with political ambition and is now used almost exclusively as a tool for furtherance of Government control and seizure of privately-held resources, as well as re-distribution of wealth from the private/successful sector to the public-assistance (unsuccessful) sector.

I could go on, perhaps even write books, and I will, eventually, but for now, I'm just taking notes, and YOU should take note, too.

YOU might not be a historian, but if you can write down your observations, you fill the role of one in a good and useful manner.

Ruh-roh! IDF cancels all military leave...

Yeah, ruh-roh. The Israeli Defense Force usually lets lots of troops go home for the High Holy Days.

Could be nothing, could be war coming.

You decide, but I'm filling all my jerry jugs...

Eric Holder remembered Day One of Constitutional Law 101

...and for that, we should thank the Attorney General.

Thank you, sir.

Marbury vs. Madison, which even this poor scholar has read, was all about defining the role of the Supreme Court, and it's majority opinion was a firm statement of the enumerated power of that Court.

Now, why didn't President Obama remember Marbury vs. Madison before he opened his yap last week? I'm sure he had to have taken the same course, and by most accounts, he was a bright law student with a good memory.

Could our President have deliberately ignored Marbury vs. Madison in order to inflame his under-educated "base" to step up their ignorant screeching in support of the soon-to-be-declared-Unconstitutional Health Care Reform Act? Would a REAL Constitutional scholar have swtooped that low? Would a REAL Constitutional Scholar have put his USAG into the position of having to hold out his knuckles for the Fifth Circuit to smack them with their ruler of law?

Is this President worth re-electing with this and all his other FUBARs?

We ask the questions, you decide the answers, dear readers.

Question for Mister President

Were you really just taken in by the pathos of it all, or did your peeps actually do any research before having you declare, "If I had a son, he'd be just like Trayvon"?

Info here. If that blog can come up with such info, why couldn't all your advisers? I maintain that they should have, and could have, since the investigation into the kid's death was almost a month along by then.

That leaves us with the un-avoidable conclusion that your "Son just like mine" comment was actually meant to deceive. If it was, you owe us all an apology, Mister President. Even if you WERE caught off-guard by the cover-up of this lad's thuggish background, you owe us a follow-up, and that follow-up had better work to turn off all the "blood-in-the-streets" rhetoric we keep hearing from the race-pimps and their Black Marxist enablers.

If there is race-rioting over this issue, Mister President, you are more at fault for starting it than any who throw the first firebombs or use the first guns.

You have a role here, Mister President. Turn off this race war before it starts. If your people think you can hide a failed economy and a failed foreign policy behind the acrid smokescreen of a race war, you are mistaken. Election Day WILL happen, and you will lose anyway, because you will have been fired by We The People. Your Chicago-stype machine will not be able to stuff enough ballot boxes to prevent your being thrown into the dustbin of history.

The only difference is, that without a race war, you will have been fired for simple incompetence, and we've had a few incompetent Presidents before, several still living, in fact. If there is a race war, you will also have been fired for fomenting it, and you will NEVER live that down. You will be reviled for the most shameful chapter of our history that any President ever wrote, and there have been plenty written before you, such as FDR's WW2 Japanese ancestry internment orders or the many railroadings of the American Indian tribes.

You owe us, Mister President. You were elected to effect positive change in this society, and no matter how you lie, you can't fit either race war OR racial appeasement politics into the category of positive change.

If you want to make positive change, support this Nation, it's economy and it's heritage. It's your duty to suppress the hegemony of racial politics, not support it. We can live in harmony in these United States ONLY if we live as One People, not as a collection of races each with it's own racial heritage celebrated as if it was a positive thing. Racial heritage is nothing, NATIONAL heritage is everything. Support your Nation, sir, or step aside for someone who will.

That is all.

Bully, the not-PeeCee version

I could write that screenplay because when I was growing up, my father cared enough about me to give me specific, hands-on instruction on how to deal with bullies.

None of it applies today, because his methods, meeting the force of the bully with superior force caused by quality pain, is not allowed now. Kids being bullied are somehow supposed to call for a truce or time-out and let adults settle the situation.

Well, Pilgrim, real life doesn't work that way.

My father wasn't a big guy, only 5'4", and as a practicing Jew in the early Portland public school system, he probably got picked on some. Remember, at that time, there were zero "hate" laws, and even though his parents had fled the Tsar's "pogroms" in Russia, most Americans didn't know or didn't care about anti-semitism.

My father WAS an athletic guy, though, and he was a decent gymnast, specializing in the rings, which requires huge upper-body strength and control.

As I grew up, it was obvious that I didn't have my father's upper-body strength nor would I ever. No problem, he showed me some defensive moves I can still use today, as I approach the age of 70.

The primary defense against being grabbed from behind is to immediately tuck your chin into your chest, so your assailant doesn't get an arm under your chin and around your neck to choke you out. You then have two choices: twist out of the hold you are in by pulling down on the assailant's wrist and pushing up on his elbow while ducking under the hold, or you apply immediate counter-pain.

The counter-pain is applied with a technique called shin-rake. If the larger bully lifts you off the ground, it is even more effective. You raise your knees into a tuck, and extend the feet outward (like you would do on the rings), and then swing the legs down so that your heels make contact with the bully's shins, violently. You then maneuver your upper body so that the bully starts to lose control over his hold, and keeping your heels in contact with the shins, rake downwards. The human shins are the place where a major bone is very close to the surface, so the flesh is shredded between the edges of your shoes/boots and the bully's own leg-bones. Great pain is caused, and if your technique is perfect, a lot of skin damage as well.

What if the bully doesn't lift you off the ground, but merely holds you in a bear hug from behind? Reacting to this rear-grab is even easier. The bully will have at least one of his feet exposed to a foot-stamp. The top of the human foot contains more bones in a small space than any other place, except maybe the hands. It takes very little force landing directly on top of that foot to break some of those bones, and breaking even the smallest of them will cause huge pain. The technique is simple. You look to see where the bully's foot is (this should be easy because you have ducked your head and are keeping it ducked), you raise the appropriate leg about a foot, and stamp down on the bully's foot. If you miss high, you will likely effect a shin-rake, as in above, and if you almost miss low, you should get at least the toes. When the bully feels the pain in the top of his foot, he is going to let you go. Flight or continue the fight is then your choice, but now you have a bully who can't stand properly, pursue, or move quickly side-to-side. You should then be able to get in some telling blows, kicks to the groin, whatever would be your winning technique.

I had two occasions to use anti-bully techniques. One was in the English boy's school I went to in 1954 when my Dad was stationed in London. There, the classic school bully picked on me, both because I was small and because I was a "Yank". It came to blows, but because the English educational system still had it's head screwed on properly then, I did not get punished for fighting the bully, but I was invited to continue the fight in the boxing ring! I lost to him in the boxing ring, going the full three rounds, since he had me in reach by 6" and weight by 40#, but we respected each other afterwards and there was little bullying from him again.

The second time happened about 10 years later. My little brother (now dead) was in High School, and I was going to night school college classes, so I usually picked him up at the school and we both went home, me to study and he to do whatever. As I parked in the usual place, I noted a throng of kids in a tight knot on the sidewalk. As I walked towards it, I noted my brother was in there, fighting a much larger guy. My brother was 4" taller than I, and this guy had to be 6'5" at least. My brother was taking some pretty good blows, but in his style, he was laughing them off and talking trash. I saw that the fight wasn't going to end without him getting beaten down, so I stepped up behind the bully, and tapped him on the shoulder, and when he turned, I gave him my best shot to the jaw, almost breaking my hand. The blow had little effect except to make him stop beating on my brother. He concentrated on me. The guy had close to a foot of reach and at least 100 pounds on me, and even with my guard up, I knew I wasn't going to last long, the blows I was taking on just my forearms were killers. He dropped his guard just for a moment, though, and I put everything I had into one shot to his nose, which easily broke. Two forceful streams of blood started, and the big lug used both his hands to grab his own face, and sat down on the pavement. My brother and I left. My brother told me when we got home that I had run 5 stoplights, but I didn't crash. I was that pumped. My brother then told me I had just beaten the school's heavy-weight wrestling star (who later went on to become State champ). I told my brother he needed to pick on some lesser opponents. It turned out that my brother's own trash-talking to this guy had egged him over the edge. I would have been doing my brother a favor to let him take the whipping, but blood is thicker than water.

Lesson here: few, except maybe hockey players who get many broken noses, can stand up to one when it happens to them. Another very vulnerable part of the body, yes.

Not much point in this reminiscense though, since we aren't supposed to fight to defend ourselves or our family members anymore.

Oh, well.