It is true that too many people use the ER as their primary physician, and it's also true that some people rely on the ER as a source for narcotics by faking injury or illness.
The guy in charge confidently asserts, "There will be no chance that the patients who need pain relief will not get pain relief." But I don't believe that one whit; either doctors must be more skeptical of pain complaints (leading to fewer prescriptions) or they must not be. Simply limiting the supply of prescription painkillers to an arbitrary number of days' worth (three, in this case) is not going to do what they think it will do.
I find it inconceivable that the people in charge don't know this. How many times have we seen--just since 1965!--of the myriad of ways in which government programs fail, and fail spectacularly? This kind of policy never works as intended, and the examples are legion. Why do these people think they're any better?
Hubris. *sigh*
* * *
Not enough children. A social body that fails to reproduce is a social body in decline.
California's real problem stems from the confiscatory taxation and prohibitive regulation (ie "the blue model") emplaced by fifty years of liberal governance. They need people to live there, work there, and (more importantly) pay taxes there just as the excess of government is making people leave the state.
Even worse, births have fallen below the replacement rate:
The report found that the birthrate had tumbled for every population group. In 2010, it was below replacement level for whites, Asians and African-Americans.Japan faces a similar crisis: marriage and childbearing have fallen so low that Japan faces a serious demographic collapse.
The birthrate for Hispanics, who account for 51% of children under 18 in the state, was slightly above replacement level. But Hispanic birthrates are seeing the steepest drop of any group and are expected to fall to the replacement level in 2020, the report said.
Hint: allowing abortion-as-contraception is not the answer. Particularly when people deliberately use it for sex selection, so as not to be saddled with a troublesome daughter.
If you want unrestricted abortion-on-demand, this kind of thing is the logical conclusion of it. You can't let people kill their unborn children solely because they don't want to be inconvenienced without serious sociological consequences. If you support "a woman's right to choose" to carry a baby, I fail to see how you cannot also unequivocally support "a woman's right to choose" the sex of that baby by selectively aborting the undesired sex. I mean, "it's her body", right?
* * *
As you can see from the blockquoted text in this Anchoress piece on the minimum wage, none of the arguments for or against it have changed one whit since the law was emplaced. The only difference is, the argument against it has been demonstrated correct by reality, time and time again.
Yet we still have the laws.
* * *
And right on schedule, from the socialist playbook comes laws restricting the ownership of gold and precious metals. When times get tough that's among the first things governments do, because tangible commodities--gold in particular--have intrinsic value, and the last thing any overreaching government wants is for its people to be able to barter.
Besides, registration is the first step to confiscation, always-always. If things get bad enough the government wants to know who has the gold and how much so they can go get it should the need arise.
No surprise whatsoever that it's the Peoples Demokratik Republik of Illinoistan that's doing this.
* * *
The PDRI is leading the nation in people abandoning totalitarianist states for greener pastures. Illinoistan is the last state in the union to ban the carry of firearms; even now the law banning such is still technically in effect and will be until July.
Perhaps Illinoisans are finally fed up with the rampant corruption and abuse of those who hold the power in their state. On Wednesday, the state general assembly swore in three legislators currently facing criminal charges.Perhaps, but instead of saying "those who hold power in their state" why didn't the guy just say "Illinois Democrats"? Is he paid by the letter?
I actually believe that subjects of the PDRI are fed up with the high taxation and concomitant lack of fricking jobs, as well as the totalitarian gun control laws.
* * *
Looks like Boeing's answer to the A380 is also a piece of junk. But still not as big a kludge as the A380 is, so the word of the day is still "If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going."
* * *
2012 was only the hottest year on record if you look at the historical data that's been fiddlated and adjustered by climate "scientists".
if we look at the current NCDC temperature analysis (which runs from 1895-present) we see that for Arizona in February 1934 they have a state average of 48.9°F, not the 52.0°F that was originally published.In other words, the guys doing the study have "normalized" the historical data such that it cut the 1934 average by three degrees, which makes it look as if 2012 is hotter than the hottest year ever.
Sorry, but no cigar. We're used to this dance by now: climatologists declare that global warming is real, happening now, and man-made, and post studies demonstrating same...only to have it crop up later that they basically made up data to "prove" their thesis yet again.
* * *
Borepatch says that gun control is a distraction meant to take our minds off the federal spending problem and impending tax increases.
We're going to see a serious Democrat push to raise taxes before August. 2014 is a campaign year, so it's got to happen this year and it's got to happen before the fourth quarter so as not to unduly effect holiday sales.
The GOP, it must be said, is not going to provide anything other than token resistance. The Other Party of Big Government is not about to upset the status quo, not when they have control of the House of Representatives and therefore nominal control of the purse strings.
Besides: if the GOP (or OPBG) was interested in resisting the Democrats, they would be doing something. You know--maybe passing a budget every week and then harping about how the Democrat-controlled Senate is not taking up the bills, or doing other legislative shenanigans in order to keep them from passing. We haven't had an actual budget passed in more than three years, now, and the GOP has been entirely complicit in this.
I think Borepatch is right: this is a smokescreen, meant to get us all riled up--a bonus for Democrats if they get it (or even some of it) but not the main point. The main point is to give them cover for more socialism.
After all, once the people are totally dependent on government, then you can easily take away their guns.
* * *
Wednesday I set out to watch the car shows, faithfully recorded by the DVR in the cable box. I got perhaps 2/3 of the way through one episode when I got curious to see what was actually on television, and ended up watching most of Futureworld.
Couple of things about that movie. First off, Peter Fonda phoned in his performance. Second, the blue-collar everyman, Harry, toiling away in the dank tunnels under the Delos complex--I realized that he's gay.
That's not the kind of thing you pick up on when you're a kid in his early teens watching a show about robotic fantasy worlds. But when we first really see ol' Pete talking to Harry, Harry says a few things when talking about his robotic sidekick, Clark, (quotes not exact):
1) "Clark used to be the Ironman in the Roman orgy scenes back in the old Delos"
2) "You begin to develop a taste for the iron" ("iron" meaning robots, and speaking in the sense of having sex with them)
3) And later on, as Harry is preparing to leave, he tells Clark, "People wouldn't understand about us."
Since Clark is male, and "fully functional", what would you think? I think you'd think what I thought, which is approximately, "Holy crap--I never realized Harry was gay!"
Well, sort-of gay, anyway. "Man who has sex with male sexbots" anyway.
...and once that movie was over I discovered Cozi, channel 252, which was running back-to-back episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man.
Apparently they do that on Wednesday of every week. Thursday is Magnum, P.I. night, and some other night is The Bionic Woman. But I watched The Six Million Dollar Man faithfully when I was a kid, and had an assortment of toys and paraphernalia which have been lost, stolen, or thrown into the trash. (I do still have the first board game. Woohoo!)
That last link doesn't include the crystal radio set the Steve Austin figure was meant to wear as a backpack. I had that for perhaps a week before making the mistake of taking it to a friend's house. When it was time to go, mysteriously the backpack and matching helmet could not be found; several months later I was at his house and came across the helmet in the toybox while looking for something else. Friend: "I thought you gave it to me!" *sigh*
Anyway: I had not realized just how good the writing of the series was, at least the early episodes. These were all copyrighted 1974, which was the beginning of the run of the TV series, and in fact the stories were pretty good--it wasn't nearly as cheesy as Battlestar Galactica was in the late 1970s.
...but then there was one episode, Burning Bright, in which Steve Austin's astronaut friend Josh is exposed to some strange electrical field while in orbit, and he gains psionic powers from it before his brain burns out at the end of the episode.
Josh was played by William Shatner. That was pretty cool, especially since Josh was emphatically not Captain Kirk. I don't think there were half a dozen TV actors in Hollywood in 1974 who could have pulled off that role without looking ridiculous; and that's no mean feat considering how ludicrous the premise of the story was.
The series had all kinds of bizarre premises in it, like ESP and Bigfoot and the Soviet Venus probes which crashed into the United States with startling regularity, went nuts, and began destroying everything in their path. (Probably a covert weapons system, then. Why on Earth would a malfunctioning scientific instrument turn into a doomsday machine anyway?) It's a product of the 1970s; what do you want?
But the episodes I watched still managed to be engaging and entertaining, as long as I kept thinking this is 1970s television and kept myself from becoming too critical. Perhaps the later episodes sucked a lot, but the ones I saw Wednesday were not too shabby, all told.
So the series went on my record list. Further bulletins as events warrant.