Muda69

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.

Tucker Carlson Not Surrendering: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/tucker-carlson-not-surrendering-liberal-hypocrites/ His point — and it’s a good one — is that the Left is totally gaslighting us on the “Great Replacement” thing. If you believe that whites are being displaced politically by immigration and the growth of non-white communities, and that it’s a good thing, you’re fine to say so. But if you believe that and you think it’s bad — well, you are a white supremacist who encourages loonies to commit mass murder. Carlson brought up this 2013 story from Politico, which is as mainstream Washington political reporting as it gets. Here is a screenshot of the headline: From the piece: Again, if you notice this from a progressive or neutral point of view, it’s fine. But if you notice this as a conservative, and you say you don’t like it, you are a RACIST. Check out the headline on this Michelle Goldberg column in The New York Times: It more or less concedes the white nationalists’ point, and says too bad for them. Excerpts: More: You can’t have it both ways, liberal media. I mean, you can, because you usually do, but finally at least some conservatives are not intimidated by your hypocrisy. Take a listen (or a look at the transcript) of how NPR yesterday tried to blame these murders on Tucker Carlson and Fox News. Excerpts: Yeah, so Tucker Carlson isn’t anywhere in the 180-page manifesto the alleged killer left explaining why he did what he did … but it’s Tucker’s fault anyway, according to David Folkenflik. More: I remember when that Helms ad was controversial, and I understand why it was controversial. But here’s the thing: that’s what affirmative action and quota hiring do! This is the most amazing thing about the liberal/progressive mind: they celebrate things that actively stigmatize and discriminate against people on the basis of race, sex, and sexual orientation … but if you are one of those stigmatized and discriminated against, and you don’t agree that you deserve it, then you are a bigot for saying so! Notice that what Donald Trump said in the quoted piece above is pretty much what Politico said in 2013, and what a panoply of liberal politicians, academics, and pundits have been saying for years. But when Trump says it, well, shut the front door, that’s RACIST! About the Covid comments from Trump, here’s an MSN report from when he first said it, and the context in which he said it: Did Trump “exaggerate”? Maybe. But note this Jan. 7 Wall Street Journal op-ed from left-wing academics John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, criticizing the very New York state policy that Trump criticized. Excerpts: Judis and Teixeira cite data pointing out that disparities are more due to class than race. More: So Trump might have exaggerated, but his basic claim was true — and here you have two prominent left-wing commentators warning the Left not to go down this route, because it helps Trump. Back to the NPR story. Here is Folkenflik griping that Fox won’t fire Tucker Carlson: This is how they roll, the Left. They want to fire people who say things they don’t like. They want Tucker Carlson cancelled because he notices the same things they all notice, but he thinks it’s bad, not good — and says so. This leftist crybullying increasingly doesn’t work anymore. At last! I urge the usual left-wing commentators to watch the 15-minute Carlson monologue before phoning in your usual complaints.

Please elaborate.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/lawyers-cause-homelessness/ Agreed. It doesn't do anything to promote the common good.

Good for Nevada. Do you think every state in the union should have the exact same law?

I find it quite enjoyable.

But don't we have a "state-by-state patchwork of laws" regarding a whole host of other issue right now? And sure, it may be a sh*t show, but it was how our founding fathers intended it to be. A relatively weak federal government where the real legislation that affect citizens the most happens at the state/local level.

Lookin forward to the CCAC. Clinton County Athletic Conference.

It is what this forum is all about. If you and other don't like hearing other people's opinions just leave. tl;dr on the woke rant.

This Is the School Choice Moment. Will the GOP Screw It Up? https://reason.com/2022/05/17/this-is-the-school-choice-moment-will-the-gop-screw-it-up/

I've been predicting this for years. As these three communities get pulled more and more into the Indianapolis-area urban sprawl they are no longer going be interested in completing against rural schools like South Montgomery or rust belt towns like Frankfort.

Which is why they need FBI or CIA informants to do it for them........................

https://www.cato.org/blog/rock-bye-trade-restrictions-baby-formula Agreed. Onerous government regulations created this shortage.

#11. Frankfort. The Hot Dogs need to either a: switch conference affiliations with West Lafayette (a Sagamore conference with the River Rats, Bruins, and Warriors battling it out year after year would be interesting) or b) petition to join the Hoosier Heartland Conference.

https://mises.org/library/taxation-robbery A somewhat long read. But very much worth it. Taxation is theft.

Don't Trust Biden's Dystopian 'Disinformation Board' https://reason.com/2022/05/13/dont-trust-bidens-dystopian-disinformation-board/ This is very frightening news.

Facing Education Crisis, Biden Admin Seeks to Restrict Charter Schools This is what public policy looks like when a major political party plays kissy-face with public sector unions. https://reason.com/2022/05/12/facing-education-crisis-biden-admin-seeks-to-restrict-charter-schools/ Indeed they are putting students last.

It's an old forum post from here: https://umpire-empire.com/topic/58108-present-the-ball/

Maybe this?: "Meaning he had the ball in this throwing hand when engaged with the rubber to present the ball to the batter and runner."

More Warmongering From The Swamp: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/ukraine-russia-mitch-mcconnell-warmongering-swamp/ Forty billion dollars. More Robin Wright: How many Americans understand that we really are at risk of getting into a direct war with Russia? That our elected leaders in Washington are voting for this. We aren’t even hiding the fact now that Washington regards this as a proxy war with Moscow. Do you know that this is happening? In Europe, Hungary’s Viktor Orban is once again being portrayed as History’s Greatest Monster because his government is holding up European Union sanctions banning Russian oil and gas. Why? Because those sanctions would destroy the Hungarian economy. Hungary gets 85% of its natural gas and 60% of its oil from Russia. And it is landlocked, meaning it could not receive shipments of oil and gas via tanker. I agree that Putin is a bad man who should not have invaded Ukraine. But ask yourself: why is it in America’s interest to go deeper and deeper into the hole, committing itself to a shooting war with Russia, over Ukraine? Why is it in the EU’s interest to destroy its own member nations’ economies to cut off Russian oil and gas? Who is any of this benefiting? UPDATE:More power to Damon Linker, who writes: Read it all.I don’t believe we should be fighting a proxy war with Russia, but if we are, then we damn sure ought not to have our officials bragging about it! UPDATE.2: People can’t buy baby formula in this country, but Democrats and Republicans in Washington and sending $40 billion to Ukraine.