Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Asshat of the day
From National Defense, via Sadly, No (hat tip to Daily Kos):
Now a fixture at Department of Homeland Security science and technology conferences, SIGMA is a loosely affiliated group of science fiction writers who are offering pro bono advice to anyone in government who want their thoughts on how to protect the nation.
The group has the ear of Department of Homeland Security Undersecretary Jay Cohen, head of the science and technology directorate, who has said he likes their unconventional thinking. Members of the group recently offered a rambling, sometimes strident string of ideas at a panel discussion promoting the group at the DHS science and technology conference.
Oh, those brilliant SF authors! However can we thank them for their altruism? And there’s no telling what gems they might come up with. After all, the late Arthur C. Clarke thought up geosynchronous satellites, and Jules Verne predicted “helicopters, submarines, projectors, jukeboxes, and other later devices.” Larry Niven gets credit for a variety of innovations such as the ramjet spacecraft, which propels itself between stars using intersellar hydrogen for its fuel.
Speaking of Niven . . .
Among the group’s approximately 24 members is Larry Niven, the bestselling and award-winning author of such books as “Ringworld†and “Lucifer’s Hammer,†which he co-wrote with SIGMA member Jerry Pournelle.
Niven and Pournelle are on this group? Awesome! I can’t wait to hear —
Niven said a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants.
Whaaaaa?
So Larry Niven channels Robin Cook, and he has the ear of Homeland Security. Lovely. Guess it was too much to ask that he would offer solutions to our dependence on foreign oil, global warming, or the world food shortage. No, all Niven has to give us is a healthcare crisis solution that has been with us for as long as there have been social classes: kill the poor.
Larry, I never liked your books. Ringworld, your “masterpiece,” is a bloated, boring dreckfest populated with secondrate cartoon characters. You and Jerry used Inferno to take potshots at an author whose belches were more engaging than your best work, and Mote in God’s Eye went on and on and on, with an ending that hardly seemed worth the bother. Oh, and don’t forget more characterizations straight from the back of a box of Captain Crunch. And that was you in your prime, Larry. Well, guess what, you just jumped the Puppeteer. Time to put up your feet, drink your Budweiser, and kvetch about those kids today, cuz that’s all you’re good for. STFU already and go to Hell, where you can be buried like you buried Vonnegut, beneath a gravestone reading “He went to an ER for a simple case of appendicitis, and they removed his liver and kidneys.”
Vile. Absolutely vile.
D.
Niven’s a crank; Pournelle’s only marginally better… David Brin’s part of SIGMA too, and he was pretty turned off by the whole thing; IIRC, he wrote a diary on dKos about it.
(This is kind of old news, actually… I was surprised it didn’t get wider play when it was first reported.)
I think Niven and Pournelle are like a lot of other boomer-class people. They were all for peace and love and the democratic party and sharing and being nice to people back when they had fuck-all. But now that they HAVE stuff, it’s hands off and all those grubby poor people should just go off and die or go back to MexiFranceIraq or whereever illegals and terrorists come from.
I think Niven and Pournelle were always kinda righty, but I know tons of people their age who were all for universal dental and down with the corporations back when they had nothing. Now that they have stuff, well, it’s a different story.
Such people bug me.
ps: oh, I’m all about old news 🙂
Dean: according to the DKos diarist, Niven is the grandson of Doheny, who was some sort of robber baron. Rich, in any case, so Niven has never been hungry. Otherwise, I’m with you. Nothing irritates me more than that idiotic saying, “If you’re young and you’re not a Democrat, you don’t have a heart; if you’re old and you’re not a Republican, you don’t have a head.” As if Republicans have been demonstrating their Great Braininess these past 7.5 years!
I don’t know jack diddly about Niven or Pournelle, SIGMA or the politics of anyone involved but I need to comment on Dean’s remarks about folks who had nothing and now have ‘stuff’. I’ve NEVER been for national health care even when we didn’t have insurance – it forces the working poor to get fucked yet again. There’s a massive, voiceless group of people who make a bit too much to qualify at the current litmus level for public assistance yet make far too little to be forced to pay for insurance. Having lived in that wretched hole for most of my life I have the utmost confidence that getting National Health Care means those people who work for a living and struggle every single day to keep a roof over their heads – a roof THEY pay for, not the government – and feed their families, will have an exorbitant amount ‘they can afford’ removed from their already small checks. It’ll either be a worthless ‘discount plan’ or it’ll be mediocre high-deductible crap that costs more than their monthly grocery budget, I guarantee it. With food, gasoline, and consumer goods prices rising, forcing the uninsured to purchase insurance will create that much more stress and hopelessness in a mass of people who already struggle to survive without a net.
Fuck that. I don’t care how rich or poor I am, I’ll never agree w/ any pro-rated by income national insurance scam. Edwards alone proposed something fair and practical: the same insurance options, selections, and PRICES, that congress gets to choose from, for EVERYONE. Anything else is vicious taxation of the working poor and struggling lower middle class.
That said, I hate corporations, the lying cheating bastard sumbitches. I can’t see my opinions on that change either.
But, then again, I’m not a liberal, nor have I ever professed to being one. I’m a moderate, through and through. 😉
It’s simple, IMHO. Make health care a flat percentage income tax. Make nothing and you pay nothing for your health insurance; make a ton and you pay a ton. I don’t know how big a percentage it would need to be, but I imagine the data is available to figure it out quickly.
I have a real problem with poor people (or anyone) being forced, by the government to purchase or do something ‘for their own good’. That ever happened to free will and the right to say ‘No thanks, I’m managing without it?
I wear a seatbelt because I want to be safe. It cheeses me that it’s the law and people HAVE to wear one. Hey, if you want to fly through a windshield you ought to be allowed to.
The problem is that many people without resources will choose not to have the income deduction. Then what happens if they require emergency care? As the system currently stands, these folks get their emergency care, don’t pay for it, and the rest of us do. Those of us with insurance are subsidizing the care of those who don’t. How is that fair?
More to the point, the way things are presently, people without insurance use the emergency rooms as their primary care facility, since they know they’ll get care and won’t have to pay. This overloads the ERs, which increases wait times, which degrades the quality of care to folks who truly need emergency services. If those same people could get care in a regular primary care venue, don’t you think they would?
And for the record, I’m in favor of the law requiring seatbelts for motorists and helmets for cyclists — because, once again, the rest of us are the ones usually paying out when those folks are injured.
In a perfect world where everyone took care of their own bills without fail and never imposed on their neighbors, your argument would make perfect sense. Since many people don’t take that kind of responsibility and since our government allows that to remain the status quo, we’re stuck in a situation where we need to infringe on the freedoms of others “for their own good.”
What other alternative is there? Do you really want our country’s ERs to turn away patients who can’t show proof of insurance (or ready cash) at the door? I don’t.
No, I don’t want them turned away, either. But if we get national health insurance the tax payers will be paying for everyone yet again. I don’t see how that’s a plus.
Fwiw, it’s not *that* expensive to go to the doctor. Office visits here are around $35-$50, depending on how in-depth they are. I know a TON of people with insurance who use the ER as their primary care. Instead of waiting till morning to see a regular doc because their kid starts coughing in the middle of the night, they take them to the ER. Or, like my old neighbors, their kid scratched her cheek, barely broke the skin, and off to the ER they went.
The ER put a band-aid on it and sent them home and billed their insurance god only knows how much. Why make an appointment for anything when you can get right into the emergency room for the littlest problem?
People need to be responsible for their own actions and lives. The government shouldn’t pretend to be our mommies.
As a recovering Libertarian, I agree with Doug’s support of helmet and seatbelt laws. As long as taxpayers have to pay for the outcome of people making bad decisions, then the government has a role in requiring people to make better decisions. An analogy is smoking. It’s the smoker’s decision to smoke and he/she will suffer various consequences. If, however, the smoker is in an enclosed space, everyone else in the same room also suffers a negative consequence of the smoker’s personal choice. So legislation steps in to keep the innocent bystanders from harm.
Of course, like everything, this has to be in moderation. As a fat person, I don’t really want to be kept out of certain sections of the supermarket or restaurants (picture the candy and cookies aisles fenced off and accessed by a body fat measuring machine or special thin people dessert lounges). I’m also in favor of legalizing personal use of certain recreational drugs, coupled with stricter DUI rules. But other areas could use more legislation – mandatory trigger locks for guns in houses where children live, for instance.
Libertarianism is a lot like other well-known -isms, great in the abstract and difficult to implement. Of course, everyone should bear the consequences of their actions (although I think everyone appreciates the times when their own stupidity wasn’t punished the way it deserved), but when the rest of us get a share of those consequences, we should have some say.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen you rant like that before. I like it.