particularly your dumping of tons of snow in arizona (and yes, i know it’s northern arizona, mountainous and thus snowy, but still…arizona!) but hitting CT with near record warmth and a bunch of rain. it should not be anywhere near 60° in january. ever.
UPDATE:
seems the weather gods were moderately pleased with my sacrifice. alas, i am out of goats.
i don’t understand anymore.
lose a bid for the olympic games to come to chicago = hooray!
win the nobel peace prize = this is terrible!
what the fuck? seriously, i don’t understand anymore. not that certain lunatics hold idiotic opinions like this. more that such blatherings are picked by the media and treated as valid, rational and representative of public opinion.
times like this, repeatingly banging my head against a brick wall seems the only sensible thing to do.
likely i’ve mentioned my loathing of politics before. still, one cannot escape it, since nearly every medium blares the godawful stuff at you constantly. mind you, that is one of the reasons for my loathing. another would be the oxymoronic lunacy that shat itself onto my tv last night, in the form of a paid political advertisment (for some silly PAC, as far as i could tell). i have this annoying habit of paying attention to what people say, even if it is a commerical. what these people were saying (via a bad actress dressed as a doctor) was stupid. they are against health care reform and spewed forth the typical talking points about government rationing of care (cause insurance companies don’t) and fabrications about existing systems of socialized medicine (ie: canadians wait up to a year for “vital” surgeries, if, by “vital”, you mean “elective, non-emergency” surgery. and by “a year” you mean “about 2 months”). what really got me, though, was the take-away message: don’t let the goverment get between you and your doctor [by reforming health care to include a public option], tell your congressperson to focus on funding medicare. i’ll let that sink in a bit, before the befuddled “what the fuck?”.
i’ll admit to be a regionalist. frankly, i consider the northeast too intelligent for this crap to fly here. apparently i think too highly of my fellow new englanders.
back to the message. i just don’t understand how groups like this think. what are they trying to say? no government run health care, except for the elderly? it makes my brain hurt, to try and unravel the madness. now, my understanding of a public healthcare option might be off, but it is just that: an option. the government sets basic criteria for insurance plans (which, um they already regulate), offers a public plan that is the baseline and people have the option to choose the public plan or a private plan. i know the fear: it will put private companies out of business. kind of like how public universities have done away with private ones (wait, they haven’t?).
well, so fucking what? hey, i work for an insurance company (not health insurance, but insurance nonetheless). they exist to make money by investing your premiums. insurance is a hedged bet, particularly health and property/casualty insurance. term life insurance too. you pay to have coverage in case something bad happens. the more likely it is that something bad (sickness, car accident, etc.) and covered will actually befall you, the more you are going to have to pay. if a company feels you probably won’t ever make a claim, they are fine with charging you lower premiums. lower risk, after all. the ideal form of the business model is that people pay for insurance and never make a claim. the goal is to avoid paying out. this is something we should strive to preserve…why, again? consider, if you will, what happens if insurance companies don’t make money off a particular form of coverage. flood damage, for instance. homeowners insurance never covers it. you have to buy government flood insurance. why? because the risk is too high for insurance companies to want to cover it. no profit in it. why, again, would we want to make sure these companies thrive?
the whole thing makes me angry. like education and dependable public transportaion, health is something we should consider part of the nation’s infrastructure. i’m not a fan of having to pay taxes, but since i have to, the things i want them spent on are making sure everyone can get an education (free, up to a bachelors, if they desire), get to where they need to and receive the care they need to stay healthy. maybe thinking the government should provide the baseline for these things makes me a socialist. so be it. public versions of education and transportation haven’t eliminated private versions. i see no reason why the same shouldn’t hold true for health care.
wait, we lost a game that, going into the 7th, we were leading 10-1? with, arguably, the best bullpen in the AL, if not MLB? to the Orioles?!?!?!?!
watching baseball is supposed to relax me, not piss me off. damnit.