How We All Miss the Point on School Shootings

http://markmanson.net/school-shootings

In 1998, a high school junior named Eric Harris from Colorado wanted to put on a performance, something for the world to remember him by. A little more than a year later, Eric and his best friend Dylan Klebold would place bombs all over their school — bombs large enough to collapse large chunks of the building and to kill the majority of the 2,000 students inside — and then wait outside with semi-automatic weapons to gun down any survivors before ending their own lives.
"It'll be like the LA riots, the Oklahoma bombing, WWII, Vietnam, Duke and Doom all mixed together," Eric wrote in his journal. "Maybe we will even start a little rebellion or revolution to fuck things up as much as we can. I want to leave a lasting impression on the world."
Eric was a psychopath, but he was also smart.
Despite what media outlets would later claim, Eric Harris was not the victim of bullying any more than other students, he was not a goth or a member of the "Trench Coat Mafia." Eric was a straight-A student. He read Nietzsche and Hemingway for fun. He had friends and girlfriends. He was charming and funny and had a disarming smile.
But Eric also understood people. And because he understood people, he changed everything.

There are a number of excellent point in this article, facts I did not know, and a very clear point - all the talking heads who use psychopathic killers to make their points for them miss the point of why did it.  They did it because they want to get attention, and right now the way to get attention is to kill people.  They kill people to get attention, usually in a suicide attempt, aka, they are crazy.

"But the Numbers Don't Lie"

The commonplace view of scientific method is that hypotheses ("Inequality will always rise", "Inequality causes depression", "Temperatures have just shot up", "Culling badgers cures bovine TB") can only be rejected, or falsified. Experimental data is used in an attempt to "disprove" the null version of these hypotheses (that is, their converses: "Inequality isn't rising", and so on), in a fairly antiquated and hugely flawed statistical process known as "significance testing". If a significance test is positive, people not trained in statistical reasoning – newspaper columnists, Leftists with books to sell – have a tendency to start claiming that "the science has been proven."

It hasn't (even those statisticians who continue to hawk significance testing as a valid approach to induction wouldn't make that claim), and in any case, this isn't how our reasoning about the universe works.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/graemearcher/100273348/climategate-the-spirit-level-the-hockey-stick-and-now-thomas-piketty-lefties-sure-do-have-a-way-with-numbers/

Competence - Not For Sale At Any Price?

The most spectacular failure in the country occurred on the watch of Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick. The Massachusetts website still does not allow residents to obtain insurance as the ACA requires, and state officials will not decide until late July whether to rebuild the site or use HealthCare.gov—even though we are now less than six months away from the next round of health exchange enrollments. In other words, the health exchange train wreck continues in Massachusetts.

Governor Patrick has stonewalled attempts by his heavily Democratic legislature to obtain an accounting of where the money went, but it appears that the state that once served as a model for the Affordable Care Act has already spent over half a billion dollars. In addition, as part of his chaotic implementation of the ACA, Patrick placed as many as 200,000 applicants who requested financial assistance onto Medicaid—whether they qualified for Medicaid or not. The state is just beginning to weed out the ineligible from the eligible, and it lacks the data to come clean with the public and CMS as to how many hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent on Medicaid payments for people ineligible for Medicaid. Where was CMS and where was the inspector general?

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/obamacare-blue-states_793908.html#

And there's the issue of how folks who are elected to office for their ability to say anything that is needed, whatever is needed, will be able to implement the ACA ...

Examiner Editorial: Government-run health care could be the ultimate SNAFU | WashingtonExaminer.com

But Obamacare is only in the start-up phase. The VA department has been directly providing health care to millions of veterans for decades and evidence is growing that relying on the system can literally be a fatal decision. The Washington Examiner's Mark Flatten reported May 12 that a Texas VA clinic implemented a cost-cutting measure in 2010 that required a patient to undergo three positive bloody stool screens before the government would approve a colonoscopy. Dr. Paul Krugman, who protested the policy while serving in the VA facility, told Flatten that "by the time that you do the colonoscopies on these patients, you went from a stage 1 to a stage 4 [colorectal cancer], which is basically inoperable."

http://washingtonexaminer.com/examiner-editorial-government-run-health-care-could-be-the-ultimate-snafu/article/2548880

A federal bureaucracy that is wasteful and ineffective - truly situation normal.

The VA’s socialist paradise?

The VA system worked for everyone but the patients — and the whistle-blowers. The daughter-in-law of a Navy vet in Phoenix who died after never getting follow-up for his "urgent" case was told, in lines that perfectly capture the spirit of socialized medicine: "It's a seven-month waiting list. And you're gonna have to have patience."

But the bureaucracy acted with alacrity when its reporting scheme was at risk. In St. Louis, the former chief of psychiatry says he was put under administrative investigation when he complained about wait lists. A whistle-blower who worked in Fort Collins, Colo., alleges that she and a colleague were transferred when they refused to hide wait times.

http://nypost.com/2014/05/25/the-vas-socialist-paradise-the-left-used-to-love-it/

Don't we all know this is inevitable with federal bureaucracies?  If not - kindly remove your head from the sand.

Here's the part we should all take offense to - they will pontificate about how unacceptable this is, then they'll make some pretty little speeches, then they'll turn their attention to the next little whatever, then all the same problems will be there to be rediscovered in ten years - at which point the cycle starts over.  They know it, I know it, you know it.  Why bother with the charade.

Poppop, Uncle Henry Clay, Glen Delong, Uncles Thad and Ellery

Remembering those we've lost and who have served - the ones that I knew where men I admired, men who I aspired to be like.  Space engineers, rocket scientists, priests, aviation professionals, and business builders/owners - they came back and got it done for themselves, their families, and the folks who employed them.

Thank you!  Fair winds and following seas on your journey, warriors!  I will do my best to savor the liberty you gave me, and teach my children to savor it also.

VA Scandal - Predictable (Sigh)

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/under-fire-for-va-scandal-eric-shinseki-faces-grilling-from-congress/

Shinseki, a retired four-star Army general who has led the VA since 2009, is prepared to tell the committee about the VA's response so far to reports that at least 40 veterans died while waiting for care at the Phoenix VA Health Care system. The Phoenix facility reportedly worked to cover up patients' long wait times by creating a secret waiting list and later destroying the evidence.
"If these allegations are true, they are completely unacceptable--to Veterans, to me, and to our dedicated VHA employees," Shinseki's prepared opening statement says. If they are substantiated by the VA Office of Inspector General (OIG), the agency's independent watchdog, Shinseki says that "responsible and timely action will be taken."

Totally predictable - and still outrageous.  Of course the VA is a disaster of efficiency and truthfulness, the relationship between client and payer is broken.