I had an epiphany today, about hillbillies. I thought – well, wait a minute, let me back up…

So the other day, I’m outside doing some work. Down the street, one of my hillbilly neighbors is using a leaf blower to push all his leaves out into the street. This is not necessarily an uncommon practice. Perhaps, some people feel it’s easier to bag the pile once it’s on the pavement. Maybe they plan on burning them? I don’t know.

In this case though, the hillbilly found himself with a huge pile of leaves in the street, and not the initiative one needs to do anything responsible with it. So… With the help of hillbilly resourcefulness, he backs his truck out of the drive and up the road a ways, and, repeatedly, speeds it through the pile, each time, lengthening the pile until it stretches half the block. I guess he figured that was cool. Now even people without trees have a bunch of his leaves all over their easement.

Now back to my epiphany today. I thought “We need to end ‘reproductive rights.’” I’m all for personal freedom and so on… but we have to stop the hillbilly cycle. The trouble is, anyone can become a hillbilly. You just feel self-entitled and turn seriously lazy. But children of hillbillies… They’re screwed. What can they do? Even if they are a naturally industrious type, all they have to follow are benefits-drawing fat smokers.

Pragmatically speaking though, ending reproductive rights isn’t realistic. The technology isn’t there yet, nor is the political will. And even if the political will was there, it wouldn’t, because the big mommy government side of the aisle relies on hillbillies for election.

 So how can we approach this creatively? Let’s outline some knowns:
1.       Liberals like to spend money on useless stupid shit that makes hillbillies happy.

2.       Hillbillies like to do stupid things.

3.       Hillbillies especially like to do stupid things when a video camera is available.

4.       Hillbillies like internal combustion engines.

 Based on these facts, I’d like to propose the development of a motorized unicycle, one that’s affordable enough to package with a video camera. Then, we need to lobby for a program in the next stimulus bill to provide them to hillbillies free of charge, along with food stamps.

Sure. Sure. Sure. Not everyone on food stamps is a hillbilly. Also true, not all hillbillies are on food stamps. However – and this is a point that will be lost on the Liberals – the non-hillbillies will sell their motorized unicycles. And who in the world would buy a discount motorized unicycle? A hillbilly of course.  

 Thoughts?

1. Expensive Death

We spend 1/3 or more of our overall health care resources in the last year of life, often exceeding hundreds of thousands of dollars, and only achieving a few months of weeks of poor quality life.

But how do we deal with this? Death panels? Will a population that doesn’t trust bureaucracy well enough to send cash in the mail trust one to manage The Plug?

What about the market? Currently, commercial insurance pays away while the family - does whatever can be done – nursing grandma along for months, or years, senile, hopeless, unaware, with a final price tag often exceeding a million dollars – an amount that if spend elsewhere might vaccinate 100 school districts and check another couple hundred for scoliosis.

Dying is scary. But we need to find a way to face death without fighting it tooth-and-nail. We need to stop using enormous amounts of resources on hopeless cases in exchange for prolonged agony. We need to let dead people die – but we won’t.

2. Heath Care is Expensive

When you buy a computer you either go shopping around, looking for a good deal on a system, or you buy a system that specifically meets your needs. Then you pay for it, either with cash right then or with a credit card and pay it off later. You don’t appear at Best Buy and expect everyone to wait on you and bring you the most advanced system available; a state-of-the-art $1500 processor, $450 for water cooling, 1200 watt $300 power supply, $200 case, $800 RAM, $800 RAID of HDs; and ignore the prices, because someone else is paying.

But that’s how we buy health care. We complain about the price of our insurance, but when we need treatment we expect space age miracles, and when we really get sick, we expect the insurance to show up at the hospital with dump-trucks loaded down with cash.

Anything treated this was is going to get expensive, as it should. We are talking about prolonging our lives and improving the quality of life. It shouldn’t cost less.

We need to accept the price of our long comfortable lives, but we won’t.

3. Chronic Illness

Why don’t we treat health insurance more like car insurance? Certain parts of health care, although sometimes expensive, aren’t unforeseen, like regular tests like cholesterol levels and simple treatments for mild illnesses like a sore throat. Why can’t we just pay for this kind of thing like we do everything else, and save insurance for the sudden horrible things no one can afford?

Regardless, chronic illness fits neither the medical insurance model nor the car insurance model. Some people, for whatever reason, are burdened with regular, constant, indefinite health care costs – disproportionate to the population, like diabetics.

We talk about poor people who don’t have access to health care resources. But that’s not the issue. The issue is sick people who don’t have access to health care resources, or don’t have access to enough. In other words, many poor people don’t worry about getting health insurance, even when it’s free, because they don’t need it, they aren’t chronically ill. While some people do have health insurance but they still struggle to get by, because they have numerous expenses due to their chronic illness.

If we want to address inequality, and fix the shortcomings of our health care system, we have to recognize the inequality of chronic illness, but we don’t.

Check out this CNN article:

“Ask the card-carrying socialists: Is Obama one of them?”

That author is being cheeky. By his use of words, Regan didn’t support “free markets” or “capitalism”, the USSR was not “socialist” or “Communist”, and the Democrats don’t believe in practicing “democracy”.

Who wrote this – John Blake – a high school kid learning Civics vocabulary? LOL

When people in America say “Socialist” in this way, they’re describing policies that move toward a socialist society in the way Canadian, (pick a country) French or English Socialist or Liberal parties currently govern those countries. They aren’t accusing anyone or anything of being a socialist according to the socialist definition held by Marx or one of the current – we just haven’t done it right yet – hard socialist organizations that want all national border dissolved and replaced by a one-world workers’ democracy. 

Hey, let’s ask hard-and-fast advocates or pure democracy if Obama is a democrat. Or let’s ask an anarchist if Obama supports Liberty. Let’s ask a child pornographer if Obama supports free speech. Let’s ask a fanatical fundamentalist Christian is Obama is ‘saved’. Let’s ask a pot-smoking chains-himself-to-trees-to-stop-green-energy-construction hippy if Obama supports the environment.

Get the picture, mister definition? One more hack attempt at making Obama critics look ignorant instead of facing their logic and math.

I still don’t have much love for the Creationist movement, but this Ben Stein movie is hilarious. It, among other things, follows scientists who were blacklisted for being associated with “intelligent design.” It’s pretty well done. Made me laugh.