Humor?

Satire: the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.

Real-life circumstances often align themselves to provide great jokes. If you want to rib the republicans, Dick Cheney shooting his friend while hunting comes to mind...the possibilities are endless.


I have run across two items recently through various media outlets.


After the liberal Massachusetts voted Scott Brown to the US Senate, Strategists and pundits are claiming that the Democrat party is on crutches.

...then we are presented with a visual...

Looking Ahead

Yes, this may be a random thought, but it will provide a foundation for future discussions.

I've been thinking about ways to predict the future. There are many claims about what we will deal with in the future; specifically regarding the environment, politics, and economics.

There is one method that will allow us to predict the future with some accuracy.

Step 1) Understand what happened in the past
Step 2) Understand where we are now

Following these two steps, we can see the trends for ourselves and determine the outcome.

Predicting the future does not require a PhD, winning an election, or being certified. It only requires a little honest effort combined with some common sense.

Justice

Question of the month:

Would you rather be the recipient of "social justice" or "equal justice"?

Some of this might hinge on how you define Justice, but to me the answer is clear. We can't go wrong if everyone is treated equally, yet the progressive left in this country is more concerned about upholding their version of justice; taking from those who disagree and giving to those who do.

Think about it.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas...and a Happy New Year.

A path to free market health care solutions

I am enrolling into a health plan at work that will offer a Health Savings Account (HSA), something that I have not had in the past. I am actually quite excited about this plan, we are covered from catastrophe and have more control over our care by having an account that we can spend out of, keeping insurance out of 'most' transactions.

This prompted a vision of an insurance-free society inside my head...

Patient walks into doctors office:, "before you begin, can I see the menu?" Of course, the patient needs to see what the costs are before proceeding. If prices were openly available and subject to scrutiny, just imagine how the doctors would compete, and how the prices would fall.

With a little efforton from the patients (consumers), I think we can bring down costs drastically. Currently patients communicate with doctors, doctors with insurance; while the insurance company and doctors work out the payment, then the doctors forward additional costs to the patient.

Much of the overhead involved in the doctors office comes from the fact that the doctors office is handling all the paperwork. Let's take them back out of it.

I think the patient should sit between the doctor and the insurance company. Let's take the doctors out of the middle. Let the patients do the paperwork and work on getting payment from the insurance companies. Let the patients see the bills!

Many people say that insurance comapnies pay less to doctors than a patient would. I believe this is false. If the patient was involved, asking questions, challenging charges, prices would drop even more. Patients currently don't care because they aren't spending money from their pocket, they just assum insurance will take care of things.

The removal of beauracracy will lower prices. More government involvement will not lower prices, but a little more patient involvement will.

Keep in mind that you can't insure health, only the ability to pay for health care.

Climate Change Update

"SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece

Remember when a small group of scientists convinced the world that man was causing global warming? That is the question we'll be asking ourselves in a few years....then we'll laugh and laugh.

My worldview has prohibited me from simply taking this global warming theory and believing it. See, I believe that this world was created by God; created to sustain itself and support life. Asserting that carbon is causing global warming, essentialy places the blame for warming on human existence (since humans breath out carbon). If the existence of humans was bad for the environment, God would have created an alternate race called the Na'vi on a planet called Pandora, a race that didn't exhale carbon.

Worldview matters. There are a thousand scientists with a thousand different explanations. They all interpret the same data, the same facts, but their conclusions are different because of their worldview.

Everyday, I see more and more evidence that supports my worldview, one with God at the center; this is encouraging.

The Missing Link

Every year around election time, banners go about a plethora of local issues. Fire, police and school levies abound; the local government just needs a little bit more so they can provide better services. The problem is that we all need just a little bit more.

As I was driving the other day, I realized that what is missing is not a little bit more funding for our local services, but a little bit more community - within the community.

When your house is burning down, it's good to get everyone to safety; but then maybe we should think about saving our house. When your neighbors house is burning down, it might be a good idea to help them rather than just stand back and watch. Our society is gradually becoming trained to stand back and let the "professionals" do their job. Granted, some fires get huge and require special equipment, some criminals can't be reasoned with and some kids just don't want to be in school, but let's take some responsibility for ourselves.

Who's job is it to teach our children how to read, write, add and subtract. It is nice having a system that teaches the basics, but we cannot stand by and expect that system to do everything the way we want it. We cannot expect any system to be funded perfectly and not ever miss a step.

Do we expect our government to feed every hungry person in the country, when we have access to them every day? How much more efficient would it be to simply give a meal to someone, rather than pay someone to setup a program that organizes people to collect food and hire others to distribute it? There is always waste in the buearacratic system.

It may be necessary one do gather with your fellow brothers and sisters on this earth to stand together and say STOP!, when an armed robber steals from a bank. Can we really expect the police to simply be everywhere all the time ready to stop all lawbreakers? Perhaps we should stand together and defend our own communities. Do we really expect the police to handle things while we stand idely by?

Of course some of these examples may be extreme, but the concept is important. Giving more of our resources to the government will never solve the problem, it will only continue to fuel our reliance on government, ultimately forcing us to forget how to care for ourselves and how a community should act in mutual support of each other.

Conservative principles that put people first, lift up the poor and needy, and create success in our own spheres of influence start inside ourselves. We need to stop expecting everything from others and start expecting a little bit from ourselves.

We see the hearts and minds of liberals in the right place in most places, but the left in this country must be insane if they think the problems they champion can ever be solved by more waste and less efficiency.

My unanswered questions are brought up again: When has more government and a socialist mindset ever increased the standard of living for everyone? When has government ever solved the problems they set out to solve?