Zimmerman, national debt, and bunny inspectors

View 719 Wednesday, April 04, 2012

I’ve been fooling around trying to find out what we did wrong with Alien Artifact, the gorgeous new Sandy Bridge system built on the Thermaltake case. The problems have nothing to do with Thermaltake, and probably stem from advanced hardware features not fully understood. My fault, really.

I also tried the new Microsoft Sidewinder gaming keyboard, which is nice. Alas, the keys are just a little smaller than those on the Microsoft Comfortcurve keyboards, and spaced more closely than those on the Ortek. Nothing important here. One thing, Windows 7 once fully updated knows more about the Microsoft gaming keyboard including its macro programmable keys than does the software disk that comes with the machine. I find that if you want to install this keyboard, you’re better off shutting down the system. I simply plugged mine in as a second USB keyboard, and the result was fun but time consuming as the system tried to figure out which keyboard to accept command for while it tried to install drivers. Once it knows about everything, that’s no longer a problem. Ah well.

The Sidewinder is a good keyboard, and is now a candidate for the standard Chaos Manor keyboard, but so far I’m still mostly using Comfotrcuve and of course my old Ortek. The Ortek cleaned up pretty good with a can of tuner cleaner. And besides I have stuffed foam rubber under the caps lock key so it takes a really had push to activate it. Far as I am concerned the Caps Lock key could be over on the side but that’s another matter.

Thermaltake makes a gamers keyboard that’s got lots of features, but it’s even smaller than the Microsoft. More on all these when I get the column done.

I’m climbing my way out of the hole I dug myself.

The Zimmerman case is too complex to be written about in a few sentences, and I haven’t had time to do it properly. Now there’s this:

A good write up on the zimmerman "case" by a former police offer and current high school teacher

https://statelymcdanielmanor.wordpress.com/2012/04/04/the-trayvon-martin-case-rational-procedure/

Phil

This summarizes the situation about as well as anything I know. There are principles here, and some conflicting rights; but the conflicts come from disagreements over just what happened? Who struck the first blow? Those are not matters we can resolve from this distance and most of the press doesn’t seem to have put much effort in trying to find out the facts. Anyway, this is a good summary.

I continue to observe that if you want self government, you need to have citizens participate in governing. One way to preserve public order is with the participation of the citizens in organizations like neighborhood watch.

I am informed that I have been misinformed: the requirement that emergency rooms treat all comers regardless of condition was not imposed by courts but by a law passed by a Democrat Congress and signed by Reagan as part of a consolidated budget reconciliation. The courts later added illegal aliens to the requirement. It was well intentioned, but the result was the closure of more than half the emergency rooms in Los Angeles county and the destruction of the trauma care network that had been built over the years. The same has happened in other places.

There is no general agreement over why hospitals all over the cpuntry close, but the ones in Los Angeles that closed their emergency rooms have made it clear that they can’t afford to leave them open.

There are discussions everywhere. One that looks in some detail at matters in New York is http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/iotw/20050926/200/1600

The real question, as usual, is entitlements vs. responsibilities. Modern health care is expensive, sometimes excessively so. A friend who survived an aneurism has been billed for more than $14,000 for a few day’s drugs. Few live through the experience so few need them so they remain expensive: that’s the best explanation they were able to get. It may be true. Modern health care is expensive. It’s a lot easier to talk about in the abstract than when it gets personal.

I have also been taken to task for using the phrase “borrow money from China” when talking about needless government, as in, should we borrow money from China in order to pay Federal inspectors to attend stage magician shows to see whether or not the magician uses rabbits in his act, and if so, does he have a Federal license from the Department of Agriculture to keep that rabbit? And no, I am not making that up: the regulation exists, and there are inspectors whose job is to enforce it.

My correspondent accuses me of unfair tactics when I use the phrase “borrow money from China” because most of the money we borrow doesn’t come from China. Most of the money the Federal government borrows is through bonds bought by American individuals and investment firms. We don’t owe that money to foreign governments. In Samuelson’s famous phrase about the National Debt, ‘we owe it to ourselves’. That was said in President Roosevelt’s time. Since then the debt has gotten much larger. It grew from 1776 fairly continuously until, for a couple of years, the Gingrich/Clinton combination managed to halt the debt increase and even pay down on it a little, but “Big Government Conservatives” started it growing again, a tradition continued after the Republican lost the Congress and then the White House.

Most of that is owed to Americans, but a substantial amount is owed to foreigners. It’s still debt. We may feel that it’s better to default on money owed Americans than on money owed to China – we owe it to ourselves! In fact there are some pretty severe consequences to owing so much to ourselves, but leave that: is my point about borrowing money to pay for needless government particularly affected by from whom we owe the money? The real question is, should we be paying Federal officers to see that stage magicians had Federal bunny licenses? There are also inspectors who see to it that a teenager keeping rabbits at home in North Dakota, or Missouri, or Oregon, have Federal licenses – but only if the bunnies are sold as pets. If they are raised to be eaten and skinned to make baby blankets, or to be fed to pet pythons, no Federal license is required. Only if you are selling the rabbits as pets or to others who will keep the rabbits alive and breed them, only then do you need a federal license.

One wonders just where in the US Constitution is the grant of power to allow bunny inspectors to wander about looking for stage magicians to harass, or teenage kids who raise rabbits in their back yards. One might think that if this is a matter for government at all, it would be state or county or city or village officials who should be involved, not Federal civil servants. But even if we concede that this is a Federal matter, is it of such vital importance that we ought to borrow money in order to do it?

And I do note that despite all kinds of promises from political candidates to go through the Federal budget page by page with a laser-like focus to eliminate programs we don’t need or can’t afford, the bunny inspectors are still with us, are still being paid and collecting health care and pension entitlements, and we are still borrowing money to pay them with. And the question remains, even if we had so much money we have budget surpluses, would this be the right way to spend the money before we have paid off the National Debt?

Incidentally, I see there is a web site called www.bunnyinspectors.com that collects stories of needless budget expenditures. It says it was started as a result of my ruminations on this matter,