A Depressing News Day

The really depressing thing is that I am sitting here writing this blog rather than in my car driving to the golf course.  The building's garage door broke late yesterday and they are fixing it today without informing us that we would be unable to take our car out of the garage.

1st, it appears there is no effective secular military force in Syria other than Assad's army and they are backing an evil guy.  Unfortunately, the effective military on the Sunni side is jihadist or equally awful. this is going to be bad for a long time.

The press is scrambling to try and find a way to blame some organization for not knowing that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a potential terrorist.  Well, his name was one of 700,000 on a list and that is an awful lot of people for the FBI to check out and they did at least interview him.  The Russian's unfortunately do not always use their intelligence gathering to find simply bad guys.  They also use it for political manipulation.  The bottom line is the government cannot protect us from anarchists 100% of the time; be they Muslim, Aryan Nation, crazy people, or some other ilk.  They can hopefully find 90% or more of these guys before they attack and arrest the successful one's before they commit a 2nd attack.  When I was growing up, children died in a variety of ways.  They still do, it is sad when it happens, but we don't live in a police state and sometimes anarchists will strike.

ADHD may be a sleep disorder much of the time.  I have been distressed for sometime now that so many kids are being diagnosed with this and given drugs.  No one had this when I was growing up and people got educated and got jobs.

So it turns out that income is the best definer of the probability of whether a child will get a good education.  No surprise there, but the really sad thing is what it says about lower middle income families today. My upbringing was probably lower middle income, but my parent's cared about my education and I got what I needed to be accepted at elite schools.   No preschool back then, that was what kindergarten was for.  Now, kid's need preschool and they need to be pushed to excel all through elementary school and junior high, not just high school.  The people of my generation who did not leave the rural area of their upbringing were not equipped to do that for their children.  If they were, they wouldn't be there.  Now the jobs have left many of those area's and people cannot find work.  My home town is still relatively well off with jobs despite losing over half the jobs.  But the school is viewed as substandard 40 years after sending the top 15% to schools that are now considered elite.  The kids are not dumber, they just don't get the same oversight at home that the more wealthy families provide. (I probably didn't explain that well, but I hope you get my drift.)

Thomas Friedman again highlighted things I have commented on.  Muslims want to strike Americans for conducting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they don't want to improve their societies.  Now that is not true for all Muslim's.  After all, the Arab Spring was aimed at bringing about democracy.  Iraq is a democracy caught up in the realities that the Shiite are the majority, and unfortunately, Shiite's want to kill Sunnis, Sunnis want to kill Shiites.  The extremes of both Sunni and Shiite want to kill American's and Israeli's.  The Islamic world is a mess and needs to be fixed from within.  Only if unhappy people try to become educated and work on change from within, will there be real progress.  I will be dead before that happens because Islamic clerics think of everything in 1,000's of years.  All we care about in the West is our lifetime and in the U.S. political ranks, the next election.

With the GOP blocking everything, the only way forward with compromise is to hope that the GOP somehow loses the House in the next election.  I am not holding my breadth for that.

Maybe the garage door is fixed and I can slide into a late tee time.

More Gun Irony

I put all ways of killing people in the same basket.  Guns, knifes, bombs, automobiles, airplane hijackings and so on.  They need to be licensed, have safety courses, screenings, rules and, at least, some minimal societal control.

I cannot help but be struck by the irony that a bomb that kills 3 and injured horrifically 140 or so people is seen as worthy of calling out the National Guard, the FBI, many police departments and multiple Congressional Committees and not a whisper of objection from the NRA or its supporters.

Furthermore, the Congressional Committees want to know why didn't we know about this, who do we blame for this, and what can we do to prevent this from happening again.

However, 30,000 people a year are killed by guns in the United States and we cannot pass a bill asking for background checks on them because the NRA cannot support that.

30,000 vs 143.  Why don't the Congressional Committees want to know what we don't know about death by guns?  Why don't they look for someone to blame for this?  Why don't they ask how we can prevent this happening?

Perhaps they look at the answer every morning in the mirror and know all the answers.

What a terrible irony that is.

Musings after walking the dog

I spent the last 3 days getting an update on sovereign risk issues.  The bottom line is there is no good path in the Middle East.  As his legacy, The Ayatollah wants the bomb to preserve Iran as an Islamic Republic forever.  Meanwhile, after someone killed a bunch of people in Iran, Iran called in Hezbollah and told them that if they wanted $ from Iran, they'd better conduct a War on the West wherever they can.  There are also Shia Sunni issues wherever you look and Hezbollah needs an Islamic base along the Syrian coast to keep their supplies coming, which is where Assad will make his last stand.  Where Syria goes is unknown, but I believe it likely that eventually the US will have to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities and I cannot imagine the chaos that will result from that.  While the sanctions are delaying and disrupting the Iranian effort, as Moore's Law tells us, you don't slow down the pace of technology, so unless there is a change in will on the part of the Iranians, some kind of action will have to be taken.

Thomas Friedman's column today was a thoughtful piece.  He and other paid columnists consistently take my ideas and package them better than I do.

Thomas Friedman Today

As for the background checks on gun purchases, I am upset and gave a middle finger to the Congress when I got in my taxi in D.C.; but I do understand the political dynamics.  It is exactly what happened with Prohibition.  In that case, 25% to 30% of the population wanted to ban alcohol and voted on that issue alone until they got what they wanted.  And only when a majority of Americans decided to vote against prohibition as a single issue did the Congress finally have the critical mass to overturn Prohibition.  This is what it will take in the states where the majority support background checks and can overwhelm the single issue NRA voters. But as long as the majority decides its vote on other issues, the NRA will be a swing factor that cannot be ignored by politicians in those states.

I have only read a bit on the Bomber Brothers, but I can imagine the following line developing in certain conservative circles.  We can't have a background checks on guns because that opens the possibility for a national gun registry that will allow the gov't to some day potentially take everyone's guns.  But we need a national immigrant registry so we know who to check for radicalization periodically.  Remember the Bomber Brothers were brought as children to the US as asylum refugees and were here legally.

Of course the real debate we should be having is the following.  Where do we draw the line on society's protection of the individual from harm?  While we can try to protect everyone from bad things, we cannot be 100% successful.  What things provide the most protection to the most people?  What things are we prepared to try and stop but know there will be failures?

We know driver's licenses help protect everyone from bad driver's but this is not 100% successful because accident's happen.  We know taking guns off of streets reduces gun deaths, but does not eliminate them.  We try to protect people from anarchists, but we are not always successful.

Friedman says that we have forgotten what we are debating and what we are trying to accomplish and the debate is more about the issues of combat rather than the goals and means of accomplishing those goals over time.

GOP is NOT serious about anything other than winning elections

In a reprise of "Death Panels", which never existed in Obamacare, and the 2012 Presidential Campaign, where Romney/Ryan vowed to restore $700 billion in Medicare cuts, Representative Greg Walden, Republican Oregon and Head of the National Republican Campaign Committee, vowed to protect Social Security from President Obama's change in the inflation rate.

Social Security will eventually only be able to pay 75% of scheduled benefits without going into general revenues.  The change in the inflation assumption fixes somewhere between 5% and 7% of the gap and is a relatively painless way to accomplish that.  It slows the growth in payments, it doesn't reduce anyone's payment, like the AARP suggests.

Now, members of the GOP go after Obama for that minor change.  They would rather have Bernie Sander's approach which will require higher taxes?  I don't see them supporting that, so what do they support?

Unbelieveable!!!!

The Insanity of the Gun Control Debate

No one questions the need for a Driver's License.  No one questions the need for drivers to have auto insurance.

Why do conservatives (of all parties) not want 100% universal background checks on gun purchases?

Why does the NRA oppose a law that would make it illegal for one person to buy a gun for another person?  After all, that is one way bad guys can buy guns.

And why, when every one uses the health care system, do conservatives not believe that everyone needs health insurance?

40 Hours later, Intelligent Medicare Sign Up

Well it took about 40 hours of effort on the part of RSL and myself, but we have decided on the best plan for post turning 65 health insurance  I recount this so that any reader will hopefully learn something and save themselves some time.

Why did it take so long?  Well it wasn't the Medicare part.  They sent the card automatically, and we don't have to do anything.  It was how to decide upon the best way to cover the things Medicare doesn't cover.

Here is what we learned.  Not every Dr or facility is part of every Medicare Advantage or Medicare Supplemental Plan.  There are many choices within Medicare Supplemental plans.  There are many providers of Medicare Advantage Plans.  If you choose one path, that has implications for future choices.  And in a worst case scenario, there can be a $2,500 cost per year difference, but in a likely case, the higher worst case can save you $3,000 to $4,000 per year per person.  There is no family plan in post 65 healthcare.

So, what is the key thing to know.

It is not easy to find out which Dr's are in which plans.  Websites are not always accurate and the Dr's offices often give out incorrect or inconsistent information.  After we spent many hours figuring out the difference between Advantage and Supplemental/Part D plans, that NY options are different than other states, and identifying the need to figure out the Dr's participations, we through a quirk of fate found someone who does this on a consulting basis in return for being the Insurance Agent who places your coverage with the provider.  We still spend 10 to 15 hours helping her figure it all out, but in the end we  think we are making a fully informed decision.

It shouldn't have to be so hard, but it is, so if you are turning 65,  find an expert.  It will save you time.  We know one if you want to contact me.

Sheriff's Getting Shot When not on Duty

We now have another case of a purposeful murder of a rural Sheriff.  These guys are armed and trained to defend themselves.

Please NRA, tell me how the rest of us are supposed to defend ourselves when these guys can't?

And please Mr. Sheriff's Association, tell me why you will not support background checks, magazine limitations and assault weapon bans?