Obamacare: collapsing of its own accord?
Daniel Henninger of the WSJ believes that, if passed, it will do just that:
This thing called “ObamaCare” carries on its back all the justifications, hopes and dreams of the entitlement state. The chance is at hand to let its political underpinnings collapse, perhaps permanently.
If ObamaCare fails, or seriously falters, the entitlement state will suffer a historic loss of credibility with the American people. It will finally be vulnerable to challenge and fundamental change. But no mere congressional vote can achieve that. Only the American people can kill ObamaCare.
Henninger goes on to explain how entitlement programs, once established, perpetuate themselves even if they aren’t working all that well. He gives examples not only in this country but from others.
So why does he go on to write that it now seems likely that the public will reject Obamacare even after it’s implemented? In other words, what would be so different about Obamacare?
Henninger doesn’t quite say. He cites the fact that dislike of Obamacare has been growing rather than shrinking, and he adds that indications are that Obamacare will be “a disaster.” I assume that’s why he thinks Obamacare will be different—it will be a disaster on a larger scale, and people will make the connection and reject it.
I wish he were right, but I think he’s wrong. His prediction rests on the assumption that (a) it will be a big enough disaster that most people will turn on it; and (b) most people will connect the “disastrous” results with the bill itself. But if history is any guide (and I believe it is), it ain’t necessarily so. Did people reject the New Deal because it didn’t end the depression and in some years actually seemed to worsen it? Did people reject President Obama for a second term even though the economy was doing so poorly? Has Greece rejected the welfare state?
In fact, even if Obamacare is a disaster for a lot of people, they may go in the other direction and double-down on big government control: they may be just as likely to say that the problem with Obamacare was that it didn’t go far enough, and reject it in favor of single payer.
Of course, Henninger doesn’t think that’s likely. But it’s always dangerous to let a bad policy go forward on the assumption that there will be a backlash in the direction you’re hoping for. Best to nip it in the bud. With Obamacare, of course, it’s too late for that.
As I wrote above; I’d like for Henninger to be right. So feel free to disagree with me; it would cheer me up.
[ADDENDUM: A version of this is cross-posted at Legal Insurrection.]
No, I think your more depressing take is right on. It will limp along causing some pain and annoyance, but not enough en masse for people to really act. Dispersed pain but not acute enough, the proverbial cooked frog. The worst of it will be the Type II errors- the missing dynamism from technology gains that aren’t quickly approved for funding by the various secretaries and boards and bureaucrats responsible for administering this behemoth. No one feels the pain, or is aware of the pain, of the path not chosen.
Neo, Henninger is wrong and you are right.
Once liberalism/statism gets its claws into something it simply doesn’t let go.
For example, one thing that I see coming with Obamacare is the loss of medical innovation.
Big pharma and medical device companies will see their profits under Obamacare vanish. With no profits to be gained, no one will invest in medical research.
Will this cause the public or elected leaders to re-examine the root cause of this loss? Nope, not at all.
Instead it will cause elected leaders, pushed by liberal more-power-to-the state ideas to increase government spending to finance what was previously private, for-profit, innovation.
And, of course, government “research” will not necessarily lead to break-throughs. Instead public researchers will claim it is because they don’t have enough money causing taxes to increase. (think of how inner-city schools always claim the same thing, get more tax dollars, and still fail)
Sadly, this will not happen overnight; so most folks will not make the connection between cause and effect.
So, Neo, you are right. We can kiss American know-how and the miracle of modern medicine goodbye under Obamacare.
Henninger is wrong. You are right. The statists, or soft fascists, can only see more government involvement and expenditure as the answer. They literally don’t see the alternative. They and their oligopolistic capitalist cronies don’t recognize the value of private enterprise or the market place. It’s like reading Greek to a Chinese person. An analogy can be seen in the great “climate change” debacle, where despite over 15 years of lower storm frequencies and stable temperatures, the believers literally change the science to fit the narrative, and their eyes and minds go blank in the face of contrary facts.
Agree with holmes, Charles, and ricardo — and neo.
Another factor to take into account is the dumbing down of the citizenry, the willingness of the populace to ingest whatever garbage is presented to them by the mainstream media.
There is no longer a sufficiently large plurality of sentient, thinking adults in this country to accomplish anything requiring critical judgment and analysis.
Three things to consider:
1. Once Obamacare is in place, any large increase in insurance premiums or decrease in benefits will be blamed on this program.
2. This is based on something James Taronto of the WSJ wrote a few days ago: Social Security and Medicare are expensive but almost all of us have older relatives who benefit. With Obamacare, most of us will pay more for worse coverage and we do not know the people getting subsidized coverage.
So on one hand, the program gives additional incentive for a class of voters who already vote overwhelmingly Democratic, to continue voting that way. The much larger class of people who pay their own way, may have been more R than D, but all will know that they are getting screwed by this program.
3. As far back as I can recall, the youth have been solidly liberal. The requirement to purchase unneeded insurance will push this natural constituency away. People love their ideals, yet I’ve noticed that their ideals almost always align with their interests.
Sorry, JAMES TARANTO
Neo is correct. Like hungry animals pushing their way into a one-way trap for a treat at the opposite end, they only see the food that diminishes their hunger. Once the hunger is satisfied the circumstances change as the animal comes to realize he’s trapped. He has no alternative now until the trapper comes along to decide his fate. The American public have no sense of the trapper. That requires a sense of urgency that has not developed yet. It may well be too late for any hope of the public to realize this all ends in a single payer system that understands rationing health care is the only means to satisfy growing demand in a world of diminishing resources! “Grandma may have to take an aspirin!” Obama
This to me is why the WSJ is an irrelevant paper.It maybe the most popular in the US, yet it’s writers have no sense of politics and think eventually the voters will see the light on issues and vote accordingly.They are too abstract, like the academics they sometimes mock.They write for the business class that votes fro Romney because he’s a good manager, yet never grasp how it’s the culture that frames modern politics.So they embrace mass immigration on libertarian principles, sounding just like materialist lefties.
It’s turned into a rag and I can’t stomach it anymore.IBD is much better.
I know one thing that is true.
They will try again. They will not give up. This is not the end.
their eyes and minds go blank in the face of contrary facts.
When a cult demands child sacrifices and demands believers move to South America to live in a compound like Jim Jones, the cultists get that very same glazed look in their eyes.
I share most everyone’s concern here that once social programs are enacted, they won’t go away. But this sucker is one huge mess. The structure of the Social Security system, for example, by comparison, isn’t. It’s a bureaucracy that actually gets the job done.
As Henninger points out:
As more and more of this stuff happens, and more and more exemptions are made, the thing may just possibly remain in name, but retain only some specific aspects.
And, as Henninger says, perhaps those “private insurance exchanges being adopted by the likes of Walgreens suggests a parallel alternative to ObamaCare may be happening already.”
I’m going to cling to this hope, at least for a while, mostly because the U.S. is just too damn big for this thing to work — again, the example from Henninger about what Rep. Bill Thomas said about Medicare:
“One of the biggest problems is that the government tries to administer 10,000 prices in 3,000 counties, and it gets it wrong most of the time.”
Regarding Roosevelt’s New Deal, I think people did not categorically reject it because the New Deal wasn’t just one program. It was a constantly evolving set of policies. When one policy didn’t work, a new one was devised. By constantly experimenting, Roosevelt was able to keep people’s loyalty because “at least he was doing something”. It wasn’t until much later that revisionist economists started to write about how Roosevelt’s policies in aggregate actually made the depression worse.
People will hate it, and congress will react with more Band-Aids and throw money at it and whole campaigns will be run on who has the best solutions to fix it. They created a crisis, and they will spend years fighting for the power to control it. They’re the arsonists and the firemen – a permanent ruling class of shitheads on both sides of aisle.
To answer your question about FDR’s New Deal policies, they were wildly popular from a political standpoint. The majority of the American public loved them. The fact that all of the tinkering and idiotic controls that FDR leveled on the economy only made things worse, had no bearing on the public’s understanding at the time. The average joe believed they were reasonable ways to make things fair and everyone prosperous. The only thing that ended the depression was FDR getting distracted by the war, so that he didn’t have time to focus on his wage and price controls and dimwitted micromanaging the economy.
Europe pulled out of the depression several years before the US because they abandoned similarly destructive policies, but FDR couldn’t help himself, and our country suffered for years after the rest of the world had begun to recover.
From the Ludvig Von Mises Institute Website, there is a great short article that discusses this and it is fascinating stuff and I think is foreshadowing for the future of Obamacare. Here’s an excerpt for fun:
“A principal feature of New Deal economic policy was government-sponsored industrial cartels (the National Recovery Act), agricultural cartels (the Agricultural Adjustment Act), and labor cartels (the Norris- LaGuardia and Wagner Acts). The antitrust laws were set aside.
The purpose of any cartel is to restrict output and raise prices. Lower levels of production leads to higher unemployment, which is exactly what the NRA and AAA did.
Over 700 NRA industrial codes were created and were rigorously enforced by thousands of government code enforcers who, according to Roosevelt biographer John T. Flynn, “could enter a man’s factory, send him out, line up his employees, subject them to minute interrogation, take over his books on the instant.” A hapless New Jersey tailor named Jacob Maged became nationally famous after he was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned by the code police for the “crime” of pressing a suit of clothes for 35 cents when the Tailors’ Code fixed the price at 40 cents.
The whole article is here: http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=42
And you can download “The Roosevelt Myth” by John T Flynn for free, among all sorts of interesting stuff.
The upshot is, this stuff has been tried before in one form or another, to a much more severe degree. Funny — it was all left out of my history books…
I guess the people who lived it are mostly dead, or too old to give a damn at this point. I don’t know. But maybe Henninger is somewhat right – nothing that is an utter disaster can last forever, although we may not see the end of it in our lifetimes. FDR’s New Deal was far worse about government control — of everything under the sun. If it had not been for WWII, it’s hard to say how long the madness would have continued, but nobody expected a war to come along. Things always change – for better or for worse, but they always change.
Dont worry, this will distract people:
Greek government authorities are on alert after a union of Greek army reservists of Special Forces issued a statement urging the Greek administration to step down and make way for a national unity government. As Keep Talking Greece notes, the statement on the union’ website included 15 demands – including the resignation of the Greek President – and urged people to gather at the infamous Syntagma Square on Saturday. The statement was interpreted by some as a call to a “coup d’etat” – denied by the union – but prompted Greece’s Supreme Court to meet to discuss it.
As more and more of this stuff happens, and more and more exemptions are made, the thing may just possibly remain in name, but retain only some specific aspects.
The exemptions won’t hollow it. In fact, it’s a feature. Check out IRS and ATF, their exemptions are for the political elites. So this is an incentive not to buck the bandwagon.
Those rest of you out of political favor, will be hammered hard and fast.
The “free market” talk ain’t cutting it, even with an old traditionalist like me.
First, the existing medical delivery system is anything but a free market.
Second, the systematic looting of the economy by the banks and the cronies in the Fed, followed by a bail-out for the con artists has destroyed just about any belief that we live in a “free market.”
So, I’m neutral on Obamacare. Why shouldn’t middle and lower class folks get some swag? The upper level of the economic and governmental structure looted the system to their heart’s content.
Been reading a lot of these versions of one story. the end of the progressive era’s changing this or that..
there is one thing that all of them leave out and so conclude that such would go gently into that goodnight…
what it does not perceive that people do, is fear.
in case you guys have not noticed, you were raised in fear and trained to respond to it. from feminists calling male chauvinists, to yelling racist (and confused people thinking its about skin), and terrorizing boys not to play like boys, and arresting and dropping the charges afterwards, and on and on…
you all dont even remember what it was like to live without that fear.
you already have a form of red terror in which groups are separate and afraid of other groups and that fear is getting the people in those groups to seek to have the state control the other, while the other seeks to control them. and the whole way, the rules apply to all groups and individuals, as their fear is locking each other down.
we fear the hobo that pushes the young girl on the tracks because she didnt give him money, and he wanted to be “taken care of”…
the blacks who are beating and murdering people in masse while the state hides the stats from view, and supresses public knowlege. this is familiar of the early days of the socialist revolutions. where the “brutal class” will keep the others in check as they will be too busy dealing with them (and the state not helping and protecting the thugs).
soon, people wll be isolated, and will drink more.
ie. no one will trust anyone, not even family, after all, that will be destroyed by the financial difference between married with obamacare and not married wiht obamacare. the experiment proved that it worked when they applied it to the black folk to get them in their situation so that they vote to end suffering that is applied to get them to vote.
your gonna love it…
and when they finally have enough, you can be sure that the protests will end, and the people who got used to it, will be too confused and surprised.
you know. kind of like the people who boarded a gazprom oil platform… boy are they having fun in the adventure of a lifetime (but where is their leaders)
I agree with dbp: the constituency that benefits most is unknown to the payers. I don’t count the “elites” as especially benefiting because they already had enough money to take care of themselves.
Taxpayers will get less (maybe much less) by paying more (maybe much more).
Those screwed will far outnumber those who benefit, and in the end the Dems’ cries of “for the children!” will be at first ignored, then resented.
Still, I agree with Neo that counting on the opposition to fail isn’t much of a plan. Republicans better have their game in order when the collapse happens.
So, I’m neutral on Obamacare. Why shouldn’t middle and lower class folks get some swag? The upper level of the economic and governmental structure looted the system to their heart’s content.
perhaps because you are not going to get it..
your being played. exchanging your freedom for beans
socialism is the way the upper level looted the system, and it will eventually finalize the deal into a two class system with NO MIDDLE class to bridge the gap and allow passage.
without socialism they could not justify that much money being taken and with so much make it easy to divert.
you havent noticed who your thinking is fighting to get the rich guys for you…
Bama’s net worth is $11.8 Million (and he is just starting and that may not include his wife stuff)
“High marginal tax rates don’t hurt those who already made their money,” said Ryan Ellis, tax policy director at Americans for Tax Reform. “They hurt those trying to get theirs. It’s pulling up the ladder.”
Jarrett’s net worth is between $3.3 million and $13 million
Lu is worth between $2.3 million and $5.2 million
Plouffe is worth as much as $3.6 million,
Carney as much as $3.2 million
Pfeiffer as much as $2.1 million
Buffet, Gates, Soros, all chuming around are three of the richest men on the planet..
and you think they are going to even it?
duh… under the auspices of evening it, you all gave them the power to take the rest of it!!!
getting the ball moving is the hard part
once it moves, they can sink it where they want it
you make 1 dollar over the limit in obamacare and you may see as much as a 16,000 dollar difference in payments…
As they now get it first like taxes before you can get it. so rather than being able to make a spending choice, they are now featured to take as much as 65% of what you make to pay for all this. and once it starts and cant be paid for, they will authorize a raising to the old time levels near 90% by many pipelines and before you ever even get to see it.
Obamacare is going to implode. It doesn’t have anything to do with popular opinion since the public wasn’t clamoring for a government run healthcare exchange in the first place.
It will collapse simply because there is no technology to support it. It is impossible to implement a program of this size that will serve all citizens in all states under all exchanges under one central comptroller. There are easier fixes than one big fix, but there are too many cooks in the kitchen to allow that to go forward in a timely manner. Their webpages aren’t even up and running for calculation.
Additionally, the costs are prohibitive to the consumer. There are penalties for married couples as well as giving the IRS the power to place a lien on one’s home if payments aren’t met for costs incurred during treatment.
Laws aren’t permanent and this is bad law. It is ultimately in the hands of the congress to overturn this unconstitutional legislation that breeches HIPPA laws and is rife with fraud and cutouts.
It won’t happen this year, but Obamacare is on deathwatch.
artfldgr – maybe you’ve read “State of Fear” by Michael Crichton. It’s about the global warming fraud, and outlines the case for it being a global scam by socialists and people with vested interests and things to gain. but the title gets its name from the exact same theory you describe, as presented by one of the characters – global warming being just the latest catastrophe we all need to fear, for the sole purpose of control – in the book, global warming filled the vacuum for population and thought control when the Berlin Wall fell, and the Cold War ended.
When you think about it, the “state of fear” technique seems to be a pretty effective way to regulate and control a lot of people without generating resistance. And worse, it motivates majorities of ignoramuses to vote for more control over themselves, and those who don’t buy into the scare tactics.
It’s brilliant for lots of reasons, exploiting peer pressure among other techniques to manipulate.
I can support Henninger’s rationale on one condition: Add a provision requiring that Obamacare operate exactly as written and as passed. Fund it as passed, or don’t fund it at all. Eliminate every and all of the Administration’s carve-outs and exemptions for Obama’s elites, cronies and political pals. Make everyone start paying on Tuesday, exactly as set out when Obamacare was passed. If the Democrats want to change the language in the law they passed, let them introduce amendments in Congress. Meanwhile, tens of millions of voters across the country are going to be rioting.
About the best I can say is that we’re lucky to be getting socialized medicine just as the debt-driven social welfare state is on the brink of collapsing under its own weight.
2008 was just a warning. We haven’t seen the real economic crash yet. We’re in a depression; it’s just being masked by government borrowing and spending. Karl Denninger says that if the government were to balance the budget right now, we would see an instant drop of 40% of GDP. I believe the official definition of “depression” is a 10% decline.
It’s going to happen one way or another, and it will be extremely painful. All the politicians and the Fed are doing is postponing the day of reckoning, and guaranteeing that it will be even worse when it does happen.
But even so, we will be luckier than countries that have had socialized medicine for decades, and whose people literally can’t imagine a health care system that is not controlled by the government.
I agree with leigh. So many people who now have insurance are going to be paying more. In most cases 50-200% more, depending on the state and the exchange companies.
Another thing that’s a huge problem – the “navigators.” These people are not well trained and not well vetted, yet they will have access to people’s very private and important information – SS numbers, income statements, health records, etc. All the stuff a person can use to steal a person’s identity. It will be a huge debacle.
The exemptions are a big problem. All the Republicans need to do is to show those who are hit hard by Obamacare how the unions, big corporations, and government employees are getting treated much better than them. Obamacare is not an equal opportunity program. Many people are getting a better deal.
Laws, especially bad laws, can be changed. In this case most of the middle class are going to be paying more and getting less. It’s a pocket book issue. And people vote pocket book issues.
The Republicans have got an alternative plan. It is to allow all insurance purchasers to take the same tax write off that employers do and cut the employers loose from providing insurance. That way people can own their insurance coverage and carry it from job to job. Open up insurance purchases on a national basis. In other words put some competition into the insurance industry. Right now, and under Obamacare, we have a limited number of insurance companies that provide coverage in my state. It’s a kind of a state sanctioned cartel. The competition isn’t there. The Repubs also offer malpractice tort reform. There is a huge amount of wasted money going to defend ambulance-chaser law suits. The Republicans have had an alternative plan, it just doesn’t get any coverage because: the MSM.
We have a system of laws and procedures for changing them. This stinker can be changed. Don’t give up hope.
Leigh gets it right. It will implode. The computer systems needed to make Obamacare work are too complex to be implemented by October 1st, 2013. They are no where close to having the exchanges ready. Result: massive failure.
I’m looking forward to it. I’m relishing the prospect of Obama voters realizing what a cluster f**k Obamacare really is.
I don’t count the “elites” as especially benefiting because they already had enough money to take care of themselves.
I would say the elites benefit by rationing medicine so that it doesn’t run out. Things like antibiotics become less effective the more they are used and the more the poor create bacterial strains resistant to the antibiotics they misuse.
This preservation of resources is part of the Gaian belief in sustainability. For sustainability to occur, resources must be generated at the rate they are consumed. For medical resources, that means some people will have to be deprioritized so their drain on the resource levels disappear.
Medicine, like oil, will eventually run out and the elites are thinking they will get their monopoly in starting now.
If I were a hacker, I would destroy Obamacare with a clever hack.
Anything that depends on computer networks is very vulnerable.
@Capn Rusty
I can support Henninger’s rationale on one condition: Add a provision requiring that Obamacare operate exactly as written and as passed.
Sorry, that won’t work. Separation of powers requires that the executive branch be the executors (duh). Congress can pass whatever law it wants, but if Obama refuses to implement it, who’s going to stop him? Holder? Reid?
The Senatorial “Gang of Eight” collapsed just recently, with the two latest defectors citing Obama’s refusal to enforce the laws as their reason for leaving.
What is the purpose of Boehner’s plan to delay Obamacare by one year? Does he think they will be able to defund it at that point, or is it just to smooth the transition to Obamacare?
I do know one enthusiastic supporter of ACA–had a discussion a couple of years ago–who recently made a passing, negative remark about it.
I think at least one supporter is subject to change by fact.
In most other liberal issues, it is true, the eyes glaze over and the face goes blank when contrary information is received.
On Bloomberg yesterday, Megan McArdle had a good piece about the seriousness of the IT problem.
Something I also saw yesterday was Michelle Malkin’s rant entitled, “Obama lied. My health care died”, which she opens with this statement: “Like an estimated 22 million other Americans, I am a self-employed small-business owner who buys health insurance for my family directly on the individual market.”
I hate having to admit my own ignorance, but I was quite surprised to see that ’22 million’ figure. Are there really only 22 million self-employed people in the USA? Do all the other workers work for employers? If true, I suppose that many of us (the self employed) may well have been living in our own bubble, afflicted by fundamental false assumptions about the worldview of the “average American”. If Malkin’s number is accurate I guess it must be true that most real ‘average Americans’ work for some variation of “the Man” and have (and have always had) employer-provided (or subsidized) health insurance. If so, maybe many (many millions?) of them are about to find themselves being left to fend for themselves, with cut-back hours and canceled group health insurance. And maybe these many will find common cause with Malkin’s ’22 million’ who have always had to fend for themselves?
Not predicting anything, but there’s no telling what this could lead to….
A post in the name of history that should not be forgotten (as so much is).
Thirty years ago, on 26 September 1983, the world was saved from potential nuclear disaster. In the early hours of the morning, the Soviet Union’s early-warning systems detected an incoming missile strike from the United States. Computer readouts suggested several missiles had been launched. The protocol for the Soviet military would have been to retaliate with a nuclear attack of its own. But duty officer Stanislav Petrov – whose job it was to register apparent enemy missile launches – decided not to report them to his superiors, and instead dismissed them as a false alarm.
we return to our thread in progress…
southpaw – maybe you’ve read “State of Fear” by Michael Crichton. It’s about the global warming fraud, and outlines the case for it being a global scam by socialists and people with vested interests and things to gain. but the title gets its name from the exact same theory you describe, as presented by one of the characters
interesting… but lots of people could have said what chrichton was cashing in on. and i have not read ANY chrichton works (and there is no good reason why).
all it takes is knowing history, and knowing it outside the realm of the icons and the dates they acted, but knowing it where the peoples teeth hit the pavements.
there are not many ways to motivate people, and if the system has individuals self motivated through self aquisition of material and assets as they live and trade with each other, that does not leave much room for someone to say, stop what your doing, and do what i say. does it?
but note. the whole idea that oil only comes from fossile materials was never actually settled and publicly known. as one traces things back, one finds that lots of stuff fall into historical funnels where they converge on the same people or peoples ideas and the same old same old.
And if you know a lot, not a poseur pretending to know a lot, you see the smartest people up front being not smart at all, but looking smart, not being smart.
the whole idea of oil ONLY coming from fossils came from guess where? And like everywhere else, the people who put forth any message aginst the point get marginaled and always the same way.
remember the scientist that put gas, lightning and stuff into a char and let it work for a long whie? Stanly Miller was his name, and that is one way to get oil without life coming first. also, asteroids have biological type molecules on them as well. and under the earth, in all kinds of pockets and places are methanes and sulfurs that cook for long periods of time and leech upwards.
we have all been taught that oil is a fossile fuel, and that when you run out of fossiles, you will run out of oil. but rendering million year old creatures is not the only way.
who knows the truth? the same old same old. the soviets did. as the papers on abiotic oil came from slovakia and the czech republic. but its the soviets who have drilled the deepest. and note… we are not going so deep, the question will soon be, how did this material get so deep?
given that people are not willing to admit ignorance and look to people of substancev who know, and demonstrate that this knowing is IMPIRICAL, not otherwise. we go with the big lie whether its a lie or even truthful. its more like the big message.
you can read about the Kola Superdeep Borehole anytime you want. and i can point over and over to things. but in case you havent noticed. most people read what i write and thats that. some people go completely over it. others, being useful they think, try to advise me how to fit a universe in a nutshell and forget my name is not hamlet. 🙂 almost no one ever asks me questions and tries to get more out of me.
cargo cultists never admit to being so, but they never delve. they are incurious. they completely discuss whatever surface nilly is floating on top of the scum pond. they refuse to dig any deeper than that, and so theynever have answers that dont reflect the oxidized and worn patinga of the outer shell that is NOT at all whats underneath! they could. but they wont as that would require their being willing to admit they lack omiscience… 🙂
[Kola] is the result of a scientific drilling project of the Soviet Union in the Pechengsky District, on the Kola Peninsula. The project attempted to drill as deep as possible into the Earth’s crust. Drilling began on 24 May 1970 using the Uralmash-4E, and later the Uralmash-15000 series drilling rig.
A number of boreholes were drilled by branching from a central hole. The deepest, SG-3, reached 12,262 metres (40,230 ft) (2.21 leagues) in 1989, and is the deepest hole ever drilled, and the deepest artificial point on Earth.
For two decades it was also the world’s longest borehole, in terms of measured depth along the well bore, until surpassed in 2008 by the 12,289 m (40,318 ft) long Al Shaheen oil well in Qatar, and in 2011 by 12,345 m (40,502 ft) long Sakhalin-I Odoptu OP-11 Well (offshore the Russian island Sakhalin)
so if you knew about kola, and you knew that they kept getting all kinds of materials deeper and deeper, and then knew about these other wells.
would you beliieve that fossiles are 40,000 feet deep?
thats 7.61 MILES…
just think of the greenies thinking we would run out of materials. i have asked them how deep could we mine. they never say 10 miles… they have no concept of the size of the planet.
so… how did oil get 8 miles deep?
or… how did 8 miles of soil get piled on top of prehistoria ?
if you look you will notice that if you dont produce second order products from raw materials, then the only way to get more money for your raw materials is to create scarcity. and given that the actors or material in this play work on belief, belief in scarcity is easier than actual scarcity, but both will do in a pinch.
and you cant convince the people tougint other things as they would have to admit they were duped, they didnt know and all that. and the emperors clothing story shows that they wont do that.
in abilenes e paradocxical way, they will all murder themselves in choice rather than reveal them selves as they actually are. so self confident they are ashamed of the natural state of things and how they have control ver it.
at one point we all didnt know how to whipe our arses… so everything after that is aquisition after a period of error making that exceeds the errors of later.
so… they teach us to have egos that wont let us even try. and that by copying others, we can pretend to have the right answrs, we just have to keep pushing our sides sound bites, even if we dont understand them.
trust strangers is the feminist creed
hate family…
and that leads to utopia? no, it leads to the extermination of family lineages that ahve existed over a billion years as we were something else and came to be ourselves.
desease did not prune the tree
wars never killed them
murders and plots and schemes they avoided
mass catastrophe and a few ice ages they transcended
and how was that lineage destroyed after so much?
an idea given from strangers tempting them with promises of future somethings for payments now, never reciving the future somethings promised.
(and since you dont get a second chance at this… too damn bad, eh?)
most people do not know that a lot of their biggest ideas and things bouncing aroudn their heads is plain outright wron. next to that is stuff that is warped from right. other things are inverted or showning their obverse. and all of it can be easily corrected IF the person with that had a mind to listen and see and lok and be alive enough to be curious enough to find out.
at least for the while when we can find out.
no one asked me why people sit around and dont do much in the other country where they dring so much. and thats bcause most dont get h igh schooling, and there is not the network of libraries and groups, and mentors, and programs and assistances for them IF they tried. here we have all that and we dont try. heck. not only dont we try, we actually spend most of our time pulling other crabs back into the bucket while preaching how nice it would be if we helped them rather than dragged them down the minute they got ahead.
and me?
just killing time till time kills me as they have deemed my life over and i can do nothing to change it for the better. and fear the worst
carl in atlanta
beautifully put!!!
(And i dont give compliments very often. just ask others!!!)
I also agree with Neo.
When sheep, like sheeple, are in something they cannot do anything about, like a thunderstorm, they put their heads down while the rain and hail continue to fall upon them. They do not and can not do more except to tolerate the adversity thrust upon them.
And as to Shouting Thomas’ claim that “First, the existing medical delivery system is anything but a free market”, he confuses “delivery” with “finance”. He is simply confused, like a parrot trying to rationalize Shakespeare.
@mw
What is the purpose of Boehner’s plan to delay Obamacare by one year? Does he think they will be able to defund it at that point, or is it just to smooth the transition to Obamacare?
I’m not a mind reader, so I can’t tell you what he’s thinking. But there are two likely outcomes:
1) Kicking the can down the road. This delays the creation of a permanent voting bloc that supports the ACA, in the hope that Republicans re-take the Senate.
2) It may give the govt. time to iron out the wrinkles to an acceptable level. In that case, such a move would be counter-productive to the Republicans if they don’t re-take the Senate.
Boehner is going to be out of a job inside of a year, so what he thinks isn’t really germane.
As for ironing out any problems with the ACA? The problems are Leviathan. It is incapable of being ironed out.
The politicians are never out of a job. The idea that they need money from a job is what they like people to think.
By out of a job, I mean he will no longer be Speaker. He may very well continue to represent his district, but I believe his leadership will be challenged.
If only we would do the same with Obama.
Most of these responses seem based on opinions and analysis about ACA in isolation to the overall economic environment. When I think of the macro economic environment from public debt and private job formation to disappearing manufacturing and high oil prices, ACA can only be summed as a negative. As the health care industry is 1/6th of our economy, a big negative. Within the larger failure to grow jobs or the economy there is every reason to believe that not only will ACA fail but it may be the final Obama economic policy element that drags the entire economy into complete collapse. A program on this scale has never been successfully initiated before, especially by the IRS. The only way it could fail to collapse is at the point of a gun.