Muda69

R.I.P. Ray Liotta https://www.avclub.com/r-i-p-ray-liotta-goodfellas-1848981438 Wow. He was too young. Truly an American Icon. He will be missed.

Witnesses, Video Suggest Stunning Inaction From Uvalde Cops During School Shooting https://reason.com/2022/05/26/witnesses-video-suggest-stunning-inaction-from-uvalde-cops-during-school-shooting/ Video taken by Hugo Cervantes shows cops corralling parents outside the school, even pinning one man down. (It's unclear at what point in the ordeal this video was taken.) Keeping people from rushing into an active shooter scene is typical police practice, of course. But it takes on a sinister tone when police themselves are failing to intervene. A school cop allegedly encountered the shooter on his way into the school but was unable to stop him. "Officials say [Ramos] 'encountered' a school district security officer outside the school, though there were conflicting reports from authorities on whether the men exchanged gunfire," notes the A.P. From inside, Ramos shot at and injured two officers outside the building, according to a Texas Department of Public Safety official. ("Officials have said repeatedly that they sustained just minor injuries," notes Vice.) After that, local police apparently decided to wait until a tactical team could be put together before going in. In the wake of tragedies like this, people often suggest that what we need is more security—more police in schools, more police in general. But this isn't even the first school shooting where school law enforcement failed to act. How can more school cops help if we can't even trust them to do their jobs when they're needed most? Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw said somewhere between 40 minutes and an hour went by between the time Ramos encountered the school security officer and when he was killed by the tactical team that included Border Patrol agents. ("But I don't want to give you a particular timeline," McCraw told reporters.) Over the course of those 40 minutes to an hour, Ramos barricaded himself inside a classroom and started shooting those within it. All of the children and teachers Ramos killed were in that one classroom, a Department of Public Safety spokesperson told CNN on Wednesday morning. "A law enforcement official familiar with the investigation said the Border Patrol agents had trouble breaching the classroom door and had to get a staff member to open the room with a key," the A.P. reports. Uvalde is a relatively small town—just 16,000 or so residents. Yet it has its own SWAT team, as Radley Balko pointed out on Twitter. Police departments justify the need for such heavy-duty teams by warning about scenarios like this and the need to act quickly in them. And yet here we are. As of now, no one has any idea why Ramos went on this abominable rampage, leaving 21 people dead and at least 17 others injured. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Ramos was not known to have a criminal record or mental health issues in his history. ....

NPR Tries To Cancel Stoner Metal Legend Matt Pike https://reason.com/2022/05/25/npr-tries-to-cancel-stoner-metal-legend-matt-pike/ Nothing about the NPR profile of Pike will surprise people who have been following the various permutations of cancel culture throughout the media. It's part of a particular trend in music journalism that sees as much value in "taking down bad actors" as it does in celebrating good art. That shift in focus can be useful if it involves uncovering truly heinous or criminal actions of artists. Too often, it instead seems to collapse into refereeing weird or obnoxious behavior that has no wider effect on the world. When applied to extreme and underground music, it can be truly destructive to the art itself. If an artist is going to be active in a scene, venues will need to book them, fans will need to buy their t-shirts, streaming platforms will need to carry their content, and reviewers will need to appraise and promote their new albums. That all requires people to have some level of comfort associating with the person making the music. And that can't happen if fans, journalists, and anyone else who engages with their content is expected to, first and foremost, vet, challenge, and reject their most absurd, off-putting, or offensive beliefs. There's a trade-off between ostracizing people with weird or even bad views and maintaining a thriving artistic scene where creators have the social license to experiment and push boundaries. We seem to understand this in more mainstream contexts. Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novels are still taught in schools, despite her far more persistent, and far more explicitly antisemitic defense of Icke's work, for instance. It's particularly true of alternative or extreme genres of music. Weird music requires weird people. In Pike's case, It's hard to imagine making 10-minute-long songs about Babylonian Gods and marijuana moon miners if you're not a bizarre conspiracy theorist. Cracking down on those weird people, or having incredibly specific standards for the kinds of weirdness they can express or indulge, inescapably means a crackdown on weird music. Fewer Matt Pikes means fewer bands like Sleep and fewer High on Fire. The corollary is that the continued production of weird and good music requires a pretty broad tolerance of people with weird or even bad beliefs. For the record, it doesn't sound like Pike is a bad person. He just sounds like an odd duck. In the Quietus interview, he acknowledges as much while also describing himself as an "anarchist libertarian" that wants to be left alone. That seems like a reasonable enough request.

I disagree. IMHO this legislation is not discriminatory.

So fair and equitable athletic competition is not important?

https://www.cato.org/blog/new-study-end-tax-exclusion-return-1-trillion-workers-who-earned-it#readmore Taxpayers need control.

Not so fast: https://myips.org/athletics/elementary-school-sports/

What were the 2019-20 fiscal year revenues? Be nice to compare them.

Minutes after lawmakers override veto of transgender sports ban, first lawsuit is filed https://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2022/05/24/indianas-transgender-sports-ban-first-lawsuit-filed-over/9904915002/

Princeton Finally Fires Katz: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/princeton-finally-fires-katz/ More: Anybody with two brain cells to rub together knows that if Joshua Katz had not written an op-ed criticizing a totalitarian power grab by racialized Princeton faculty in the Summer of Floyd, he would still be teaching at the university. Princeton’s board might have fired Joshua Katz, but what it has really done is killed its reputation as a place where academic freedom exists. Again, even if we concede, solely for the sake of argument, that Prof. Katz had not been sufficiently forthcoming in 2018, it could not possibly be clearer that this was a political firing. Here is a link to the 2020 Quillette op-ed that led to his firing. Behold, the crypto-Klucker rhetoric the distinguished Classicist deployed in objecting to the ultra-woke proposal to racialize Princeton life. Excerpt: If you say that it’s wrong to give extra pay to Princeton professors simply because they are black, then, well, you’re basically Lester Maddox. What a shitshow American higher education is, especially at the elite level. Who but persecutorial woke commissars like Eddie Glaude and Dan-el Padilla Peralta could possibly want to teach in them? It’s going to take a lot more than things like this to ruin the reputation of Princeton, or any other Ivy, as a portal into the American ruling class. But young Americans who value intellectual freedom and old-fashioned American liberties ought to be put on notice by Princeton’s throwing Joshua Katz to the woke mob. Steer clear of this university. It is a place where professors now know that to get on the wrong side of the woke mob is to risk career destruction. This could happen anywhere wokeness rules institutional culture. Which is just about everywhere. You may think, Too bad for Joshua Katz, but that couldn’t happen to me. You are wrong. And when they come for you, do your best to hold your ground and your head high, like Joshua Katz did. They fired him, the bastards, but they did not break him.

Pretty hypocritical for someone that has his gasoline & jet fuel usage paid for by the American public. Last time I checked Air Force One didn't run on batteries.

Bill Maher: Trans Kids Are ‘Cannon Fodder’ in the Culture Wars https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bill-maher-trans-kids-are-cannon-fodder-in-the-culture-wars/ Maher said that increased frankness is likely a factor in the polls showing more and more sexual minorities, saying, “And that’s all to the good.” But he added, “Some of it is: It’s trendy. ‘Penis equals man? Okay, boomer.’ Remember, the prime directive of every teen is: Anything to shock and challenge the squares who brought you up . . . And if you haven’t noticed that with kids, doing something for the Likes is more important than their own genitals, you haven’t been paying attention.” Maher pointed to the skepticism of Dr. Erica Anderson, a transgender 71-year-old psychologist who questions the spike in transgender children. “The L.A. Times summarizes, ‘She’s come to believe that some children identifying as trans are falling under the influence of their peers and social media.’ If you attend a small dinner party of typically very liberal upper-income Angelenos, it is not uncommon to hear parents who each have a trans kid having a conversation about that.” Why are kids in major liberal enclaves suddenly announcing they were born in the wrong bodies in numbers never dreamt of even a decade ago? Maher suggests there is a mind contagion at work. He asks, “What are the odds of that happening in Youngstown, Ohio? If this spike in trans children is all natural, why is it regional? Either Ohio is shaming them or California is creating them.” Maher thinks a little frankness is in order: “If we can’t admit that in certain enclaves there is some level of trendiness to the idea of being anything other than straight, then this is not a serious science-based discussion. It’s a blow being struck in the culture wars using children as cannon fodder.” When it comes to the long-term health of our kids, some parents seem to think gender transitioning is the one safe thing that children can do: “I don’t understand parents who won’t let their nine-year-old walk to the corner without a helmet, an Epipen and a GPS tracker — and God forbid their lips touch dairy — but ‘hormone blockers and genital surgery? Fine.’” To summarize: “Never forget children are impressionable and very, very stupid . . . Maybe the boy who thinks he’s a girl is just gay. Maybe the girl who hates girly stuff just needs to learn that being a girl doesn’t mean you have to act like a Kardashian. Maybe childhood makes you sad sometimes and there are other solutions besides ‘hand me the d*** saw.’’ And we seem to have forgotten that kids have phases: “They’re kids, it’s all phases. The dinosaur phase, the Hello Kitty phase . . . genderfluid? Kids are fluid about everything. If kids knew what they wanted to be at age eight, the world would be filled with cowboys and princesses. I wanted to be a pirate. Thank God nobody took me seriously and scheduled me for eye removal and peg-leg surgery.” Some great points here by Mr. Maher.

Colts sign Super Bowl winner Nick Foles as backup quarterback https://www.indystar.com/story/sports/nfl/colts/2022/05/23/colts-sign-super-bowl-winner-nick-foles-backup-quarterback/9891125002/ Another Eagles castoff signs with the Colts.

Also from the article: Also embarrassing that taxpayer money had to be spent on this obvious publicity stunt, designed to boost Mr. Biden's moribund approval rating. If the federal government really wanted to fix this problem they would permanently repeal the ridiculous tariffs and FDA labeling requirements on this product, and let the free and open market take the lead.

NIL is already driving big-time college coaches insane: https://deadspin.com/jimbo-fisher-declares-war-on-nick-saban-in-press-confer-1848949727

I always enjoyed the Frankfort-Western game, the season opener for both squads for almost 20 years. Too bad it came to an end.

https://mises.org/wire/nato-plans-rip-americans-even-more-sweden-and-finland-set-join Although neither statement mentions Russia, it is clear that both statements were aimed at Moscow in terms of communicating that—regardless of what the formal membership process may be—both Finland and Sweden will immediately become de facto members of NATO. Joe Biden's move expands the number of counties for which Americans could be expected to die and the number of countries that American taxpayers will be expected to subsidize with their tax dollars. Also within the Biden statement was the often-repeated—and false—claim that the expansion of NATO benefits Americans overall: But there are numerous problems with this claim. NATO membership has nothing to do with enhancing the defense of ordinary Americans. The American elites love NATO, of course, because it expands regime spending and influence in Europe. But when it comes down to actual military defense, expanding NATO only increases the odds that Americans will be pulled into a major conflict while offering Americans nothing in return. Moreover, the Russian regime's inability to overrun Ukraine has demonstrated that Moscow presents no threat to Europe that the Europeans cannot quite thoroughly counter themselves. But there's one way to make the addition of Sweden and Finland to NATO a good deal: NATO can add whatever countries it wants so long as the United States leaves as part of the bargain. Two More Countries for Americans to Subsidize Back in March, we examined the extent to which the US taxpayer overwhelmingly covers the costs of NATO. For example, the total military spending of all NATO members combined is more than $1 trillion. So how much of this total is provided by US taxpayers? In the first graph, we see that the US's share of this is 70.5 percent, and that the top ten contributors constitute 95.0 percent of all military spending. That is, the US contributes 70 percent of all NATO defense dollars while the next nine states contribute an additional 25 percent. The other twenty NATO member states contribute a meagre and forgettable 5 percent of all spending. With the addition of Finland and Sweden, those countries that contribute negligible amounts to NATO's defense spending will increase to twenty-two. But the situation will remain essentially the same. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Sweden's total military spending in 2020 was $6.2 billion, which places it between Romania and Norway. Finland's total spending of $3.9 billion places it between Portugal and Denmark. These tiny numbers aren't surprising. Finland has a gross domestic product about the size of Missouri's, while Sweden's GDP is about the size of Massachusetts's. It's possible that adding Finland and Sweden into the mix could drop the US share of total NATO defense spending to 70.0 percent or 69.0 percent. In any case, Europeans can continue to milk the US taxpayer dry for security guarantees. After all, as non-NATO members, Sweden and Finland spend approximately 1.2 percent and 1.5 percent of GDP on military spending, respectively. (It's 3.7 percent for the US.) As NATO members, there is no real incentive for Finland and Sweden to spend any more. Given that NATO doesn't really enforce its "rule" that all members must spend 2.0 percent of GDP, we can expect more business as usual should Sweden and Finland join the alliance. What do Sweden and Finland contribute to US security? Biden claims both countries will "benefit the entire Transatlantic Alliance." Of course, they will do no such thing. Finland, especially, is a net liability due to its long land border with Russia and its maritime border in the vicinity of St. Petersburg. Here's the problem with that. NATO started out as an arguably reasonable alliance of Western European states with multiple buffer states between NATO and the Soviet Union. The only land border shared between Russia and a NATO state at that time was in the distant north of Norway. Yet, after years of expansion, NATO has expanded right up to Russia itself throughout the Baltic and around Kaliningrad. Since NATO demands an "attack" on one member be treated as an attack on all members, this can turn small regional disputes into a global war. Now, NATO wants to add to the potential for such a situation by adding the Finland-Russia border into the mix. Should Finland or the Baltic states get into a regional conflict with Russia, how many Americans will be asked to die to defend the distant reaches of eastern Europe? The Ukraine War Shows Europe Doesn't Need the US for Defense If anything illustrates now is a good time for the US to leave the alliance, it's the lackluster performance of the Russian military. The US should never have pledged itself to Europe's defense on legal, moral, and practical grounds. But, there always remained the consequentialist argument that without the US in NATO, the Soviets would roll through Paris and Rome and Madrid, imposing Soviet despotism everywhere. Once the enormous Soviet military disappeared from the globe, this same argument was then recycled with "Russia" replacing "Red Army." The threat of the Soviets to Europe was always exaggerated, but the claim that Russia presents an existential threat to Europe is not even plausible. The situation in Ukraine has made this abundantly clear. The international Western media, after all, has itself told us that Russian military personnel are incompetent and woefully inept when it comes to carrying out the assumed occupation of Ukraine. Western reports routinely assert that Russian troops are retreating, failing, and sustaining heavy losses. Meanwhile, Ukraine is a country with a GDP per capita that's less than half of Russia's. Ukraine is thoroughly undeveloped industrially, and relies heavily on weapons gifted by outsiders. If the Russians can't even make short order of Ukraine—a country right on Russia's border—how will that same military roll through Prague? Yet, even while the media labels the invasion a complete debacle, we're also being told by pundits and "experts" that without defense guarantees from the Americans, Helsinki will soon be Russian territory. It's extremely doubtful that both claims can be true. In any case, whatever the Western propaganda narrative currently claims, the fact is Russia has a second-rate economy coupled with demographic decline at least as bad as that seen in the rest of Europe. Russia's GDP—and thus its access to military resources—is a small fraction of that of the European Union. In other words, Russia simply lacks what is needed to present any real threat to Europe. The lack of quick progress in Ukraine is only the latest evidence of this. The Europeans are welcome to keep NATO going if they like. They're more than capable of doing so. But the time has come for the United States to exit. Agreed. The USA need to exit NATO and let Europe fend for itself against the laughable Russian "threat". It's perfectly clear here in the USA that the MSM (main stream media), controlled by the military-industrial complex and the CIA, are making Russia then next global threat to democracy and Mr. Putin the devil himself.

Biden's Baby Formula Airlift Stunt Should Never Have Been Necessary https://reason.com/2022/05/19/bidens-baby-formula-airlift-stunt-should-never-have-been-necessary/ Agreed. Another failure of government regulation and "planning". The free and open market will always, always perform better.

Michigan Couple Says Town Seized Their Building and Offered To Return It if They Bought Two Cars for Police https://reason.com/2022/05/19/michigan-couple-says-town-seized-their-building-and-offered-to-return-it-if-they-bought-two-cars-for-police/ The evil of civil asset forfeiture rears its ugly head again. I used to live in western Wayne County, glad I got the hell out of there.

I saw this. Completely ridiculous.

Nina Jankowicz's Faulty Record, Not Her Critics, Doomed the Disinformation Board https://reason.com/2022/05/18/disinformation-board-nina-jankowicz-taylor-lorenz-pause-dhs/ More: Even more: Yet more still: That's the explicit message of the article, and it's hammered home over and over again: expressing concerns about Jankowicz and the Disinformation Governance Board is an act of sabotage by bad-faith right-wing harassers against a noble public servant. The Washington Post does not grapple with legitimate criticisms of Jankowicz. The article doesn't even acknowledge that any exist. Bad people oppose Jankowicz, in the Post's framing, and if you oppose Jankowicz, you're probably one of them. Yet there is good reason to be skeptical of both the Disinformation Governance Board and Jankowicz's fitness to run it. Informal efforts to police disinformation on social media are beset with serious challenges, as moderators and fact-checkers routinely make odious mistakes: Just today, Facebook dubiously censored a recipe for homemade baby formula. The social media site's fact-checkers have previously flagged Reason articles as spreading false information, only to later admit the articles in question were accurate. John Stossel, host of Stossel TV and a contributor to Reason, is currently suing Facebook for characterizing his videos as misleading, even though fact-checkers eventually conceded he was right. Government disinformation cops are no better; time and time again, public health officials circulated false information about COVID-19, and suppressed perfectly legitimate discussion of the theory that the virus originated from a lab leak. And when The New York Post reported on the salacious contents of Hunter Biden's laptop just weeks before the election, the story was widely dismissed by so-called disinformation experts and government security experts on grounds that they presumed it to be Russian malfeasance. "Hunter Biden Story Is Russian Disinfo, Dozens of Former Intel Officials Say," reported Politico back in October 2020. Jankowicz repeatedly made public statements indicating that she held this view, too. She shared national security officials' "high confidence" that the Hunter Biden story was part of a Russian influence campaign. She described the idea that the laptop had been left behind at a repair shop as "a fairy tale." This was a critical test of whether disinformation experts could check their innate tendency to ascribe everything unfavorable to the Democratic Party as Russian nefariousness, and they utterly failed. Jankowicz failed as well. Somewhere in Lorenz's article, amid the repetitive praising of Jankowicz's qualifications, anonymously sourced lamentations that DHS will no longer be able to recruit effectively, and broad characterization of criticism as nothing more than sexist harassment, perhaps that failure deserved a mention. The article reads like it was ghostwritten by Jankowicz herself, which makes the underlying scoop less impressive: It's easy to get a government official to cooperate for a news article when the news article takes the form of PR.

For my kids it those coupons for a free personal pan pizza at Pizza Hut. They read a lot of books to get those.

https://mises.org/wire/medical-revolt-coming This, of course is what the cartel has worked so hard to change. Without question, hospitals and their industry pals have bribed legislators and bureaucrats to avoid the same competitive market discipline that made the economic miracle of this country the envy of the world. For this reason, we must always focus on the consumer's interests and completely discount any poor-mouthing claims of the sellers, claims which give cover to the dysfunctional arrangement we now endure. Let's go back even further, to the nineteenth century, when French economic Frédéric Bastiat penned his famous satirical essay "The Candlemakers' Petition" in 1845. Here's what he had to say about giving the seller the advantage over the buyer: Mises and Bastiat knew full well what would happen if the buyer was placed at a disadvantage, whatever excuse the sellers or producers used. Before I continue, we should distinguish between mutually beneficial exchange and a zero-sum, or leveraged, exchange. Always remember that the buyer and seller never voluntarily come together to exchange unless it is to the advantage of both. The seller of the milk values three dollars more than his milk, and the buyer values the milk more than his three dollars. Both parties emerge from the transaction improved from their prior position. A zero-sum exchange, in contrast, is where one party wins at the other's expense. In this type of exchange, the buyer or the seller is victimized by the other party. This is the business model of government, and this is the business model of the medical cronies government enables. Think predator and prey. Think of yourself as clean sheets and the cronies as Amber Heard. While there are two methods of exchange, there are two types of buyers: legitimate and illegitimate. A legitimate buyer respects mutually beneficial exchange and is represented by individual patients and any others who work as a good-faith proxy on an individual's behalf, whether a self-funded plan or a cost-sharing ministry. Government and traditional insurance companies are illegitimate, zero-sum buyers, whose hit-and-run model is based on leveraged exchange and whose interests are diametrically opposed to the interests of patients. Patient and consumer misery are consistent with their goals. Government buyers in countries with universal care plans take this to the extreme with coerced euthanasia plans, as a citizen death helps their balance sheet. Doctors in Great Britain are actually paid a bounty for any sick or elderly patients they can lead to the euthanasia slaughterhouse. There are also two types of sellers: those who seek to maximize revenue and those who seek to maximize delivery of value. The resulting combinations of these buyer and seller types can result in one or even both parties, buyer and seller, acting in bad faith. Think pure bad faith when a hospital owns an insurance company. Think pure bad faith with an accountable care organization model, where a hospital basically owns an HMO. The patient is completely disenfranchised, vulnerable, without an advocate, as both the buyer and the seller are illegitimate. Things are a little better for the patient when only one of the parties to the exchange is illegitimate—say, when a legitimate cost-sharing ministry or self-funded employer buys from a price-gouging hospital. The patient experience is maximized when both parties are legitimate and seek mutual benefit. In this instance of symbiotic legitimacy, the provision of a substandard service invites the merciless market forces that will put one out of business. The quality question is therefore solved when both buyer and seller are legitimate. Quality is "baked in," as FMMA cofounder Jay Kempton says. When government places consumers at a disadvantage, prices soar and quality plummets. This is clear in any market where hospital consolidation has taken place. It became crystal clear when the number of insurance companies was intentionally downsized by the Unaffordable Care Act's medical loss ratio. The before- and after-Obamacare stock price of UnitedHealthcare makes the point that when consumer choice is limited, prices soar. When government places sellers like hospitals or physicians at a disadvantage, with price controls or a heavy regulatory burden, shortages materialize and quality plummets. Burdensome regulations are crafted by industry participants large enough to survive—and as smaller sellers surrender, the ensuing consolidation that leads to higher prices results. The result of all this: government can more easily sell disadvantaged consumers than disadvantaged sellers, because the sellers are more willing to spend big money for advantages that can make them rich. The one thing the cronies fear is an equal playing field, the real competition of the free market. This is the core goal of the crony cartel, escaping real competition and ensuring that the seller always has the advantage. Don't be fooled when a big insurance company and a big hospital system provide a theatrical display where one agrees to play the victim to the other, hoping people will pick sides. This is an important part of ensuring the scam stays alive, as this theatrical distraction provides an important decoy for the real play, one where the hospital and the carrier work side by side. It hasn't always been this way. I was fortunate during my premed years to shadow two great and extremely busy surgeons, Dr. Don Garrett and Dr. Richard Allgood. There were two hospitals in town, neither one of which could survive without these two. Drs. Garrett and Allgood never hesitated to move patients from one hospital to the other if one hospital failed to provide what the patients needed. These hospitals had to compete with each other for their referrals, and failure to do so meant disaster for them. The hospitals were accountable to all the referring physicians, essentially the proxy buyers for their patients. I should point out that the better the physician's reputation, the busier they were, and therefore the hospital that couldn't cater to the great doctors was punished even more severely, a quality control measure largely absent today. This was the case all over the country. As late as 1990, when I started my practice in Oklahoma City, physicians and surgeons, some of whom—like Norman Imes, who is in this room—moved their patients or threatened to move their patients to other facilities if the hospital didn't provide what their patients needed. In Oklahoma City, Deaconess Hospital, right across the street from the huge Baptist Hospital, provided a quality check and ensured that both hospitals had to provide a quality experience for the patients and for the referring physicians. It was not uncommon for a physician to move all of his patients from one hospital to another until conditions improved. The Surgery Center of Oklahoma was successful early on due to the failure of area hospitals to provide orthopedic surgeons what they needed to care for their patients. The role of the federal government in this power shift, away from patient and physician choice, is painfully clear and, once again, the obvious result of the auctioning of our consumer choices to the medical sellers. Medical sellers have been purchasing the choices of consumers and patients for a long time, and they are good at it. In Nashville a few weeks ago, a Washington insider told me the following story about the passage of Obamacare. Industry representatives and lobbyists had locked arms in opposition to Obamacare, assuming they would almost certainly be victimized by it. One by one, opponents were picked off. Those remaining and opposed wondered what was going on. The administration simply followed the money. Where were the biggest lobbies? The American Hospital Association, initially opposed to Obamacare, was told that their biggest fear, it seemed, was competition, primarily from physician-owned facilities. Therefore, if the AHA would support this law, Barry Soetoro (Obama's real name), would see to it that new physician-owned facilities were banned and those in existence would be prohibited from expanding. The hospitals abandoned the opposition. The insurance carriers, initially opposed, were promised a medical loss ratio, which would put all but four or five of them out of business. They, too, left the opposition. Last but not least, Big Pharma was told that it seemed their future profitability would come from biologic drugs, as the growth in generic drugs would eat into their margins. They were promised a twenty-year ban on competition from biologics produced in foreign countries. They, too, left the opposition, and the next week, the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] declared foreign biologics unsafe. As outrageous as this is, it is a broken record. Government intervenes on behalf of the few who can afford to buy their intervention, and the vast majority, the rest of us, pay the price. One incredibly disruptive intervention was when the federal government through its bankrupt arm Medicare decided to pay double for physician services delivered by hospital-employed physicians. It should come as no surprise that the percentage of independently practicing physicians has been on the decline ever since. This cynical move was meant to protect hospitals from the competition and demands for quality that physicians like Drs. Garrett, Allgood, Imes, and many others had made. Currently, hospitals are no longer accountable to their medical staff, having purchased a large part of their staff, essentially making geldings of them all. Patients are now largely denied the advocacy they had in the past, when independent physicians went to bat for them, voting with their feet. If a hospital was no good, physicians walked away. Now, if a hospital is no good, the hospital continues to see the flow of referrals from their kept referral sources, who are financially penalized for doing anything else. "Whose bread I eat, his song I must sing." When someone asks me how I know free market facilities and physicians can provide quality, I tell them that referrals in a free market are not guaranteed, buyers can walk away. I would argue that the quality of care delivered by a medical facility is directly related to the extent to which that facility is accountable to its medical staff. "What percentage of your medical staff is employed?" should be a question those attempting to measure quality should ask. To be clear, hospitals with an employed staff do not have to be any good to retain business, a result of the corporate rather than physician control of patient care. Clearly, the root cause has been a shift in the balance of power, where the medical seller, the hospital, has gained the upper hand over the patient and their advocate. This shift in power to the seller, in most cases the hospital, has become the new normal, and so ingrained in the industry that those who provide more efficient, cheaper, and better services are paradoxically criticized rather than applauded, as these fragile hospital systems might not survive a challenge to the fortress they've built. Not only has the balance of power been shifted, but any challenge to this balance also meets a swift and brutal response, usually on "fairness" and "social" grounds. When the late Tom Coburn, one of the Surgery Center of Oklahoma's greatest defenders, was told by a hospital executive that it wasn't fair to compare his hospital to the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, Coburn said, "You are right. They pay tax." Tax advantages are one thing. Certificates of need, blacklisting by insurance carriers, banning of physician-owned facilities by the Unaffordable Care Act: these are just a few examples of power granted to the sellers by the legislative concubines, always at the expense of the buyer. This power shift has been with us so long that even those who claim to be free marketeers can get sucked in. Here is a comment at the website mises.org in response to a very positive article about a patient experience at the Surgery Center of Oklahoma. This comment is a tribute to the success of the hospital poor-mouthing propaganda campaign: Ah. The poor hospital, suffering with so much uncertainty. The author of this comment is not unique, having succumbed to the supposed plight of the seller, discounting the buyer's role. "In what other industry are the problems of the seller the buyer's problem?" asks Jay Kempton. How is it that craftsmen and others in the market provide quotes with the uncertainty they face? Many years ago, I solicited a bid from a carpenter to build a deck in my backyard. He made some measurements, asked what type of wood I had in mind, and gave me a bid. He encountered some difficulty setting his posts due to a rock formation not far under the surface, but this wasn't his first rodeo, and he had made an allowance for this. Difficulties that he had encountered in the past were baked into his margin. If these difficulties didn't materialize, he was more profitable. If they did, he had made an allowance. A margin based on the idea of a bell curve is not that difficult and is exactly how our prices are constructed at the Surgery Center of Oklahoma. Why are hospitals exempt from this discipline? Why is the uncertainty every other industry must endure intolerable in the medical industry? Or to the point of our message today, why are the difficulties of the seller of any interest whatsoever to the buyer or the public at large? How can this ever change? This will change when the medical buyer, like every other consumer, lays true claim to his proper place and votes with his feet when treated with contempt. Hospital executives don't worry about buyers with choices. They cannot fathom the idea that there is any such thing as a choice in an industry devoted to limiting choice. With their heads in the sand, drunk with arrogance, the time is now for buyers, particularly the self-funded buyers, to act. They can begin by understanding and embracing their rightful place and therefore the power they wield and then acting with confidence. As Matt Ohrt has said, "Quit feeding the beast," and demand that sellers accommodate your preferences. As the awareness of our free market movement spreads, the shift in power to the consumer is inevitable, a shift that is already increasingly visible. The eternal challenge of government has been the subjugation of the many by the few, for if the few awaken to government's countless scams, the mass of people will become unmanageable and ungovernable. They will revolt. The challenge of the medical industry complex has also been the subjugation of the many by the few. The healthcare system in this country is not a disaster for everyone, after all. It is an orgy of robbery of the many by the few. Governments and this medical cartel use the same methods to maintain control, using fear, primarily. Fear, along with the purposeful placement of the seller at an advantage, and therefore placing the consumer and patient at a disadvantage, has kept the masses from rising up. Until now. The revolution has begun, and the traditional mold is crumbling. The alternative healthcare nation is within view. The time for the confident medical consumer has arrived, and the time has also arrived for price gougers and the rest of the bandits to fear a discriminating buyer and in enterprise recognize the customer as captain, as Mises did. Agreed. We need a medical revolution in the country, one where the consumer is the captain of the ship.

https://www.jconline.com/story/sports/college/purdue/football/2022/05/18/purdue-athletics-begin-paying-bonuses-academic-achievement-fall-us-supreme-court-v-alston-case/9818706002/ Hmm, so I assume students attending Purdue on a academic scholarship, who probably spend as much extra time on achieving academic excellence as scholarship athletes spend on achieving athletic excellence, can also receive a similar bonus?

https://www.indystar.com/story/news/education/2022/05/18/purdue-back-a-boiler-loan-program-students-income-contract/9590978002/ Note: Story is behind a paywall. Caveat Emptor rears it's ugly head again.