The Sayings of Kung Fu, the First Season
February 16, 2012
Reblogged from THE SOPHIST: TWO SIDES TO EVERY QUESTION:
The Late David Carradine in Kung Fu as Kwai Chan Cain
From the Crane, we learn grace and self-control. The Snake teaches us suppleness and rhythmic endurance. The Praying Mantis teaches us speed and patience. And from the Tiger, we learn tenacity and power. And from the Dragon, we learn to ride the wind. All creatures, the low and the high, are one with nature.
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WHY THE DEMS DON’T GET IT
June 11, 2009
Unfortunately, in light of recent domestic policy directions, I think the Dems have it all wrong.
Health care reform is an idea left over from 1991. The only reason the Dems want to push it through now is because they have the votes to pass the bills they didn’t get passed in the first session of the first term of the Clinton Presidency.
But is this a good reason to pass a law, because you proposed it before and you’ve been trying to pass it for so long?
Universal Health Care is an idea born of POST-DEPRESSION affluence–it’s a fringe benefit to be offered to a population that’s already employed, that already has a guaranteed vacation, a guaranteed pension, and has guaranteed housing. In short, guaranteed health care is the LAST welfare benefit that should be federalized.
In addition, and this is a revision from my original post, according to a recent article posted in a respected publication, the health uninsured are not universally distributed throughout the United States.
In point of fact, less than 3% of Massachusetts residents lack health insurance, thanks to the state law health care coverage efforts of people like Gov. Mike Dukakis and his successors in office. The fact that Massachusetts has nearly universal health care coverage proves that this is a STATE problem and not a FEDERAL problem.
Looking more nationally, the Midwest and Northeast have fewer than ten per cent uninsured as to health care.
It is the South and the West that have 15-25% health uninsured rates; the highest being the state of Texas.
You don’t have to be a statistics major to know that Texas also is a non-union state, has a large number of illegal immigrant resident aliens, and that these conditions are pretty much true throughout the Sunbelt, where the problem of lack of health care coverage is an issue of non-union shops and illegal immigrants competing for jobs, which drives down the employers’ incentives to provide health care benefits.
Consequently, why is this a federal problem? This seems instead to be either an immigration problem, a union/labor law problem, or a combination of the two (as Janis Joplin and Big Brother used to sing). (She was from Texas, by the way, before she got out the San Francisco).
Moreover, if Texas wants to solve their own problems, why not let them experiment? They’ve already reformed tort law to make it much harder to sue MDs–welcome relief to the medical profession, which has flocked in droves to practice in Texas, now considered a medical mecca.
Obama wants to ruin all this. His health care proposal, according to reports, would result in a massive transfer of wealth from the largely democratic and already overtaxed midwest and northeast, and transfer it to the sunbelt states, the south and west, in order to mainly put on federal health coverage, non-union workers who are scabs (union busters) and illegal immigrants (also scabs and union busters).
Do we really want to spend our tax dollars paying for health benefits for strikebreaking scabs and unionbusting immigrant labor? And for illegal aliens to get health care?
Also, additionally, Obama’s health proposal will cause deep cuts in the current level of medicaid, medicare and drugs provided to the elderly under medicare.
In short, the proposal will triage the old and deprive them of expensive end of life care, and let them die more quickly, in order to provide basic health care to young, healthy labor that is non-union, largely hispanic, and living in the sunbelt.
The demographic implications of this over the long run will be a much younger, more hispanic united States, even more concentrated in the sunbelt than it already is, and will likely lead eventually to a bilingual nation that speaks Spanish and English, as well as to the ultimate downfall of unions, since one of the major arguments for unions is that they provide their members with health care and pension benefits during job and contract negotiations.
If unions are deprived of health care as a benefit to negotiate for, fewer workers will opt into unions. Obama and the democrats, paradoxically, are going to drive the death nail into the coffin of the union movement in this country. They haven’t thought through clearly the implications of what they are doing.
In short, this is a regional problem, and a union/immigration problem, and not a national problem. National mandates for the states would probably fix this, along with a public/private partnership with some insurance companies that could work with some of the southern and western states.
Part II
The REAL problem today is not health care at all.
The real problem today is that people don’t have jobs and they’re losing their houses. We have lawyers, bankers, traders who have blown up, car companies laying off, people all over America losing good jobs. Everywhere you go in this country, houses are for sale or being sold off by the sheriff.
I’ve never seen so many homes for sale in my own neighborhood. Twenty-Two years i’ve lived here, and three houses were a lot to be for sale here; now we have 25 and none are selling. There is a glut on the market where two years ago there was a boom in the market. The bottom has fallen out of the real estate market and no end of the downward spiral is in sight.
People’s equity in their homes, the main source of wealth for most Americans, has vanished, and the federal government has done NOTHING about it.
Except, of course, to bail out the rich fat cat bankers, and appoint a salary czar to oversee their million bazillion dollar bonuses.
Is this for real? Federally funded trickle down? If Reagan had done this, there would have been riots in the streets.
What we need precisely is a sort of FDIC, but instead of guaranteeing your banking deposits against banking failure, you would be guaranteed your home’s equity value, an FDIC for home equity, that will guarantee up to $1,000,000 of value in your home’s equity value against falling home prices, that is either automatic through fannie mae or freddie mac, or that you can purchase as insurance, for a small sum of money.
Now isn’t THAT a SENSIBLE idea?
Second, everyone with negative home equity should be forgiven their loans in excess of 80% of their debt loads immediately, and the banks commanded to write that debt off immediately.
Third, anyone who files for bankruptcy should be able to modify his or her mortgage under sections 1322 of the Code or anywhere else as pertinent, or under a Chapter 11 Plan, and cram it down the bank’s throat against their wishes if the bank’s loan exceed’s 80% of the value of the home and there is a negative equity spiral, the debtor should be able to eliminate all but 80% of the loan.
My point is, what good is free health care if you have no job and no house? It’s like serving gelato to a man who is homeless and has no money and hasn’t eaten in days–health care is like dessert.
Back in the 90s, when everyone had a job, it was ok to talk about health care–it was the LAST thing we needed. But now we’re back to square one–we need to talk about guaranteeing incomes, jobs and housing. We’re back to FDR and Truman and LBJ.
This administration just doesn’t get it.
Paradoxically, I think the right Republican approach might get it and win back the white house if it’s sufficiently populist in nature and goes after the big banks, which the democrats appear to be, pardon the expression, in bed with.
The Democrats need to examine an NRA-style national Jobs Program that will put everyone in the United States to work. Second, the Draft needs to be re-instituted. Kids that are in the army will be employed. Third, we need to nationalize the universities and make education free of charge. Fourth, we need to nationalize the cable companies and make the internet free of charge to the poor and to the rich equally, as well as making basic cable tv a free resource to everyone.
Fifth, for anyone that’s not employed, a Guranteed Annual Income or GAI must be mandated and paid by the Government, along with a negative income tax to avoid work related disincentives. The welfare reform measures of the Clinton era will have to be undone for the time being, because right now, middle class families are starving and in danger of homelessness, and THEY need welfare. The program needs to be federal, and the income level to be guaranteed needs to be large, around $15,000-20,000 annually, and adjusted for children and circumstances.
Sixth, the government has to embark on a massive program of propping up the housing market, investing in public housing, investing in Section 8, expanding the HUD budget, and so forth.
Seventh, we need to start investing in having one spouse stay home and take care of the kids. I know this is controversial, but two wage earners has destroyed many marriages and the american way of life.
Eighth, we need to reform the real estate brokerage business so that commissions from family homes are much less than for commission from commercial real estate. Instead of six points, let brokers earn only one point. This way, brokers won’t churn real estate and people won’t use their homes as profit tools.
Ninth, reform the tax code so that people have to pay MORE income tax on the sale of their primary homes, e.g. remove the exemption entirely, unless they stay in them a minimum of five years, unless they have to move for cause, such as a job-related transfer to another city, or medical reasons. This would stop people from buying and selling homes constantly and churning the market.
Tenth, more closely regulate lenders, brokers and sellers of real estate. Let people buy and sell and profiteer on second homes, commercial real estate and so forth, but those parcels will be taxed, etc.
I think this is the approach we need.
This is what the democrats are ignoring.
They’re going to raise taxes and bring down the house as it were on average joe while they raise up false idols like the bankers.
We badly need a new prophet in the land, and i’m not talking about Rush Limbaugh here.
–art kyriazis, philly/south jersey
home of the world champion philliesght
Cap and Trade – A Horrible Idea – Let’s Abolish Cars and Build a Real Rail System Instead
May 13, 2009
Cap and Trade Is a very bad idea, right now.
First, a history lesson. President Clinton’s first term was a disaster, in large part, because he spent most of his first two years pursuing three very liberal ideas—gays in the military, universal health care, and a federal tax on BTU usage.
These three ideas were, at the time, in 1993-1995, so controversial, that they not only threatened to sink President Clinton after only one term, but resulted in 1994 in the largest shift in a mid-term election in the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate in United States History.
The House lost more than fifty Democratic seats and went Republican for the first time in a long time; and the Senate also suffered huge democratic losses; all due to Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America, which was a direct and overwhelming refutation of Clinton’s liberal agenda.
Much the same thing happened in the first two years of Jimmy Carter’s term; Carter pardoned all of the draft-dodging Vietnam protesters hiding out in Canada, and virtually declared war on the CIA and all of the US military operations around the world, which led to terror operations and revolutions around the world intensifying, culminating in the Iranianian Revolution and the taking of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran and the holding of 52 U.S. hostages for over a year, a spectacle so embarassing to the United States, repeated night after night on national TV as it was, that virtually every Democrat in office lost his seat by 1980, and the Republicans and Ronald Reagan were swept into power, with a whole new agenda of re-arming America and restoring her lost prestige abroad.
Getting back to Clinton, the BTU Tax was an idea very similar to the current notion of Cap and Trade. Cap and Trade, like the BTU Tax, is essentially a tax on carbon usage. The idea is, if we tax carbon-based fossil fuels enough, and make them costly enough, it will force everyone, including consumers and energy companies, to seek non-carbon based alternatives.
There are three basic problems with cap and trade (actually, there are many more, but I will discuss three here) that make it a bad idea for now. First, we are in a recession that is actually more of a depression. Cap and Trade is a large TAX INCREASE that will suck spending power out of the hands of consumers. Consequently, it will kill the marginal propensity of consumer demand, and attack the very object of the Stimulus Bill.
I don’t have to be a doctor to know, that you don’t give a man a sleeping pill, just when you’ve given him a shot to wake him up, while he’s still groggy and coming around.
Right now, the American economy is like a man who can’t wake up. Cap and Trade would be like a sleeping pill to that man. The Stimulus Bill was like a cup of coffee or a shot of epinephrine—a stimulant to wake him.
Cap and Trade is like a sleeping pill that would suck away his vital energy.
Second, in order to invest in, and build, energy alternatives, there has to be a venture capital and investment banking, and regular banking systems, in place. Today, those systems are impaired, crippled or functioning at about half capacity. Consequently, Cap and Trade can’t work under today’s economic conditions. Consequently, no infrastructure would develop under Cap and Trade to produce renewable energy alternatives until the banking and lending systems come back on line.
All we’ll have is a tax that makes oil and gas and coal more expensive, but no alternatives will develop for many years yet, due to the impairments of the banking, VC and R & D systems.
Third, even if the banking, VC and R & D systems were perfect, there is no energy alternative that could come on line sooner than ten years from today to replace current oil, gas and coal based consumption.
Wind and solar currently provide less than 1% of current energy needs; energy needs keep GROWING at an exponential rate, if you include the third world, and none of the so-called renewable energy forms are anywhere close to being ready to assume more than a micro-share of the energy load, whether we’re talking about wind, solar, geothermal, capturing energy from ocean waves, and so forth.
It’s been fifty plus years since the hydrogen bomb, but no one has yet developed and sustained a fusion reaction that can last and power an energy generating plant. That technology seems as remote as the so-called “WARP” engines on the starship Enterprise on STAR TREK.
That leaves us with one, and only one realistic alternative, and that is nuclear power plants. They are tanned, rested and ready, and the newest generation of nukes have much higher capacity factors and higher safety factors than ever before.
The problem with nukes is, you still need about two billion dollars to build a single plant, about 3-4 years to get the necessary permits to build a plant in the U.S. and another 3-4 years to build the plant and get it on line.
That’s 6-8 years and two billion dollars to get each plant on line, and most of the two billion dollars will have to be absorbed by the consumer in electricity costs. Let’s figure that we build fifty of those plants—that’s a hundred billion dollars in construction costs alone that have to be absorbed back again by means of utility bills to the consumer over the next ten-twenty years. That’s on top of the cap and trade tax costs.
In short, it’s a very expensive proposition to jettison oil, gas and coal.
It’s too bad that the United States didn’t commit to a nukes policy back in 1955, when nuclear power was cheap and we could have covered the US with nuclear power plants for a fraction of the cost of today.
If we had committed to such a policy then, we could have been completely independent of Middle Eastern Oil as of 1970.
Even as late as 1975, we still could have committed to nukes for a fraction of today’s costs, and been independent of Middle Eastern Oil by the 1990s.
However, the wacky left and particularly eco-wacky californians, continuously opposed nuclear power in this country for decades. Nuclear power could have given us full independence from the Middle East a long, long time ago, and spared us these last two wars in Iraq and Kuwait.
The problems we face today are a consequence of our leaders living life as if we can’t shape the future. But we can and must shape the future.
The future is not shaped by dice rolling or by random events. The future is shaped by decisions we make and by policies we need to hew to in order to shape the probabilities and likelihoods of the future outcomes to be.
A responsible United States Government would have made us one hundred percent reliant on nuclear energy for our power production as soon as humanly possible, once we unlocked the secrets of the atom, back in the 1950s.
Our failures to do so may have been the result of many causes, and I won’t speculate here on the role of the oil and gas companies, the so-called, Seven Sisters, and their multinational interests linked to Middle Eastern oil producing states, but clearly nuclear energy would have a lot cheaper over the last sixty years than two wars fought directly by the US in the Middle East, and five wars fought by proxy between Israel and the oil-producing states.
Had we eliminated oil dependence early by committing to the atom, we would have changed history decisively and for the better.
Cap and Trade is not the answer.
A federally-sponsored program of accelerated conversion to Nuclear Powered electric generation, followed by a fifty to one hundred year phase in of solar, wind and fusion power, is the answer.
All electric companies should be abolished in favor of one company modeled and based on the Tennessee Valley Authority, that will erect Nukes until the United States is 100% nuclear based electric power, and zero percent coal or oil.
Combing this with a program of converting all cars to electric power would also solve another problem as well. This is clearly doable in the next five-ten years.
This is the kind of program that would involve spending money on a specific problem, creating jobs, and stimulating the economy. It’s better than cap and trade because it puts dollars into the economy instead of taking them out. Also, it federalizes the utilities, which do a horrible job.
Finally, the electric grid needs to be updated using superconductors and the latest electric technologies, including quantum conductors and new metals to conduct electricity. With superconductors, electricity can be sent from location to location without any loss of power or current. This would eliminate the need for transformers and high voltage lines, etc. Again, a vast federal program committed to upgrading the grid is needed.
These steps would be much better than cap and trade.
A final note about cars–Why do Obama and the Democrats want to prop up the car industry if they are truly worried about Global Warming? Cars contribute more than 50% of the hydrocarbon emissions in the US that contribute to global warming.
Instead of paying consumers a $4,000 tax credit to buy new cars with high gas mileage, wouldn’t it make more sense to get people to STOP DRIVING CARS AND TAKE MASS TRANSIT?
In short,
1) Let the U.S. Auto Industry DIE.
2) Put an enormous carbon tax on all car purchases. Make any new car cost around $50,000 to buy.
3) Apply that tax backwards to used cars as well.
4) Massively subsidize AMTRAK and all local mass transit across the nation, and let people ride the trains and Mass Transit free for the next five years. Yes, I said it, FREE OF CHARGE for the next five years. Why? To get them used to doing it. The massive federal stimulus bill to build rail, subway, light rail throughout the US would be in the TRILLIONS of dollars, as well as to subsidize AMTRAK everywhere so it’s FREE OF CHARGE. That would be a net STIMULUS to the economy and create the world’s finest light and heavy rail systems. We could also finally build HIGH SPEED RAIL SYSTEMS modeled on France, England and Japan to cover longer distances that could go 300-400 miles per hour, that could eliminate many shorter airplane routes, unclogging the skies of needless plane flight. This is a win, win, win plan. We get rid of filthy autos and planes and replace them with electric trains. And net net net create jobs.
5) Starting in 2014, you can slowly re-introduce fees again for Mass Transit and AMTRAK once we’ve started to eliminate all of the automobiles.
6) Start reclaiming the inner cities by closing roads and creating pedestrian zones and mass-transit zones, and creating more and more parks in which no cars can come into the city, until finally, all cities will have no cars or trucks at all.
7) The goal would be to eliminate cars and trucks by 2025, and convert everyone to mass transit and rail.
8) Electric cars only would be allowed eventually, powered by the nuclear grid. These would be cheap and affordable.
This is a far reaching and thoughtful plan. Abolish the internal combustion engine as we know it and force all americans out of their cars and onto trains, buses, subways and light rail.
This is the true path to ending global warming and reaching a green economy.
Art Kyriazis
Philly/South Jersey
Home of the World Champion Phillies
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