Obamacare: it’s lies all the way down*…
…and all the way up, as well.
If these dismal enrollment figures for Obamacare so far are correct, the situation would be bad enough. But even those low figures are probably inflated by some numbers shenanigans on the part of the administration:
When the Obama administration releases health law enrollment figures later this week, though, it will use a more expansive definition. It will count people who have purchased a plan as well as those who have a plan sitting in their online shopping cart but have not yet paid.
It becomes more apparent every day that not only was Obamacare passed in Congress through some very shady dealing and parliamentary twisting, with fence-sitting legislators on the Democratic side only persuaded to vote for it by false statements (otherwise known as lies) on the part of the administration, Pelosi, and Reid, but that the lies that have followed have been multiple and various as well. The above is merely the latest, and hardly the most serious, of an entire edifice built of lies: foundation, walls, and roof.
Here’s another lie of far greater import:
Did Chao [project manager of the Obamacare website] lie to the [House Oversight] committee about not having seen the Sept. 3 memo [about major security problems on the website] before or was there a deliberate effort within CMS to withhold the extent of the site’s problems from supervisors like him so that they’d greenlight it for launch as scheduled? If the latter, who’s responsible? As it turns out, the memo was written by ”” ta da ”” Tony Trenkle, lead tech officer for Healthcare.gov who left last week under mysteriously vague circumstances. As CBS reported, Trenkle himself never signed off on security for the site in September; it was his boss, Marilyn Tavenner, who signed the authorization, supposedly because she thought that a project this big should carry the John Hancock of the head of CMS. Is that the truth, or did Trenkle refuse to sign because he knew the site’s security was a travesty and couldn’t in good conscience authorize launching it? The fact that he wrote such a dire memo about “limitless” risk suggests that he knew the extent of the problem ”” and yet, if you believe Chao, that information somehow never made its way to the project manager. Why? Why are there so many unorthodox procedures related to approval of the site’s security here? Did Tavenner, at least, see Trenkle’s memo before she authorized the launch or was it withheld from her too? If she did see it, why didn’t she tell Obama and Sebelius that security was too weak to justify rolling it out now?
Maybe I shouldn’t have written “lies all the way down.” It’s more like “lies and corruption all the way down.”
And speaking of corruption…but I repeat myself.
[*NOTE: That saying “[blank] all the way down” is a riff on a funny story related by Steven Hawking in A Brief History of Time. But Hawking didn’t make it up; it’s an oldie but goodie.
Here’s Hawking:
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s tortoises all the way down!”
But J. R. (Haj) Ross’s, in his 1967 linguistics dissertation, indentified the scientist is identified as William James:
After a lecture on cosmology and the structure of the solar system, William James was accosted by a little old lady.
“Your theory that the sun is the centre of the solar system, and the earth is a ball which rotates around it has a very convincing ring to it, Mr. James, but it’s wrong. I’ve got a better theory,” said the little old lady.
“And what is that, madam?” Inquired James politely.
“That we live on a crust of earth which is on the back of a giant turtle,”
Not wishing to demolish this absurd little theory by bringing to bear the masses of scientific evidence he had at his command, James decided to gently dissuade his opponent by making her see some of the inadequacies of her position.
“If your theory is correct, madam,” he asked, “what does this turtle stand on?”
“You’re a very clever man, Mr. James, and that’s a very good question,” replied the little old lady, “but I have an answer to it. And it is this: The first turtle stands on the back of a second, far larger, turtle, who stands directly under him.”
“But what does this second turtle stand on?” Persisted James patiently.
To this the little old lady crowed triumphantly. “It’s no use, Mr. James—it’s turtles all the way down.”
There are written versions of the story going back all the way to 1779.]
Once it’s all out in the open the level of corruption built into ObamaCare will be off scale. “The store is open”
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/morning-jay-store-closed_591314.html?page=2
Bill Clinton has suggested that one lie (you can keep it…) be undone by Obama by allowing people to keep their plan. It will be interesting how that plays out.
Pingback:Bookworm Room » The unending depth of Obama’s lies
“Physics joke. Don’t hear enough of those.” — House, M.D.
Do you recall during the signing ceremony for O-care Slow Joe leaned close to Urkel’s ear and said,”This is a big f’ ing deal!”?
Seems Slow Joe was right for the first time in his miserable excuse for a life; just not in the way that he had anticipated.
Much in the way that the Japanese attack on Pearl harbor was a failure, so too, Obamacare. (The Japanese didn’t attack the dry docks, they didn’t attack the POLS, and they attacked the ships in the shallow water of Pearl Harbor. Result: We were able to get our fleet back into action in a short time.) So too, with Obamacare. The progressives have failed to anticipate the complexities of implementing such a giant enterprise with the limited capabilities of bureaucracy. In the end, it’s a mistake that can open LIVs eyes to the cumbersome inertia and mediocrity of big government. Progressives have committed a monumental error that affects too many for it to be covered up and wished away.
That said, it’s going to be dicey for the next few years because this flimsy excuse for health care “reform” is going to create havoc among providers and patients until the ACA can be repealed and some real reforms put in place.
I’d bet dollars to donuts the story is a complete fiction meant to ridicule the religious.
In order to believe it one has to think that a person in the most modern age in the history of the universe would really think that.
Probably someone recalled some archaic myth and put the myth into the mouth of a fictional person who asked an “enlightened’ anti-religious pr elite-religious type person the question, or made the statement.
As a rule, an story that puts down religion is almost surely a lie or a conceit of the teller.
Steven Hawking, if you read his books, is quite simply an ignoramus on the issues of religion and philosophy.
He does equations well. As Obama says, Period.
Once he steps across that thin line he is out of his league.
If one goes by one of the urban dictionary’s definitions of “turtling”, it may be appropriate to say that O-Care is turtling all the way down.
Mike:
I think it’s fairly obvious that the story is meant to be just that: a story, and a joke. I don’t think it’s meant to be taken seriously as a narrative of an event that actually happened at some scientific lecture or other.
And I actually don’t think it ridicules the religious any more than it ridicules anyone else. I think it ridicules all attempts to understand and explain the mysteries of the universe (including the scientist who’s telling the story). Because it is unanswerable, isn’t it? And science has no answer to the mystery of the uncaused cause, either.
Notice that it’s the person in the audience who has the last word, not the scientist.
Mike,
Are you saying it really is not turtles all the way down?
😉
neo-neocon, 6:17 pm — “Notice that it’s the person in the audience who has the last word, not the scientist.”
But we all [except maybe for parker, 6:47 pm (good natured grin)] agree that despite the audience member indeed having the last word, it’s really not “turtles all the way down”, and the “turtles” point of view is in fact being held up for ridicule.
The audience member is not being held up for ridicule, but she is being patronizingly indulged out of respect for (I’m guessing) her longevity on this planet, and because the Bertrand Russell / William James character has sufficient class so as to not get into it with a dear little old lady.
M J R:
Actually, maybe I’m odd, but I do not agree. I don’t think the speaker is being ridiculed any more than anyone else—at least if you really reflect on the story.
Note, for example, the first sentence of the Wiki entry for “turtles all the way down” that I linked to:
The speaker in the story sounds silly, but no more silly than the cosmologists dealing with the same problem; merely less erudite. I’ve always seen the joke as a very philosophical one, rather than a simplistic one that ridicules the speaker. The scientists are just as essentially unable to truly explain as the lady. When they say “the singularity” is it really any more comprehensible even to scientists, much less to the rest of us, than “turtles all the way down”?
IIRC, the turtles idea is actually Chinese — going back thousands of years.
It’s a gag based upon an early seismograph that was artfully crafted as a fresh water turtle with marbles set such as to roll in the orientation of P-waves.
This instrument has to be the true source of the zany notion that the earth is riding on the back of a turtle. ( writ large )
I’d bet my last dollar that the joke was first used on the Chinese kids — who would be so young as to believe such a tall tale.
The British have at least one of these, sort of a technological exchange for the mechanical clock. At the time, the British didn’t even realize that P and S waves were involved. Britain is simply not subject to many earthquakes. Not so for China and Japan, so their gadgets were thousands of years ahead.
“The scientists are just as essentially unable to truly explain as the lady.”
Somethings can not be explained by rationality, science, or faith. Turtles all the way down is a way of admitting one does not have the answer to that which can not be proven by faith, rationality, or science. So, some people adhere to religion, others to science, and others to turtles. I readily admit I have no answer to those vast questions about our sentient existence on a planet orbiting a star in a galaxy that is just one galaxy in a universe filled with an unknown number of galaxies. IMO its all beyond our feeble intellects and imaginations.
If you have the answer good for you. I envy your certainty. But, turtles all the way down is as good as any other answer as far as I am concerned. Think Rumsfield: there are things you know you do not know, and there are things you do not know that you do not know. Its a mystery.
neo-neocon, 8:27 pm — “Actually, maybe I’m odd, but I do not agree. I don’t think the speaker is being ridiculed any more than anyone else–at least if you really reflect on the story.”
neo, I get your drift; I’ve dabbled in cosmology since undergraduate school. The philosophers’ answers do strike me as little better than the little old lady’s answer. Once we insert God into the cosmology, however, it gets different. God always was, God transcends time, etc. But then it veers into theology rather than “just” philosophy/cosmology.
But we’ll disagree in that I do think the little old lady is being patronized, because of course (*everyone* knows) it’s not turtles all the way down — whereas the philosophers’ answers, being more erudite and impressive-sounding, are intellectually acceptable (whereas the turtles are not).
While we’re at it . . .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O4TqdhtDJQ
Technically the solar system orbits the center of the Milky Way Galaxy and that galaxy is moving around in the universe in relation to the origin of the Big Bang.
If we were to say, anchor an objective reference point somewhere else, would it not then prove conceivable that the sun indeed orbits the earth?
There are several things or concepts in physics that can help people expand their thinking beyond the box of society and “common sense”.
This was a comment I wrote in reply to the jab that “god does not exist in higher dimensions any more than paying taxes in higher dimensions satisfies the IRS”.
Which, besides the obvious joke, warranted this kind of response from me.
Multi dimensional thinking requires a bit of out of the box thinking. A square is two dimensional, but a line is one dimensional. Yet a square is just 4 lines connected together. If you told a line that a square could be made from 4 lines, it wouldn’t be possible to visualize since a line only exists in one dimension.
Omniscience is equivalent to seeing all of space and all of time, at the same point of reference. Thus in order to see all of space at the same time, someone has to be in a dimension that combines space (3d) with time (+1d). A cross section of 4 dimensional space time is just the reality we experience in space, with 3 dimensions.
The same is true of hyper volume physics. An area is 2d, a volume is 3d, and a hypervolume is adding another dimension to the third’s volume. Which means, if you can visualize it, it won’t look like anything you were taught in school it should look like. It’ll look impossible, because it is impossible from a 3d pov.
That’s more or less accurate, if I recall. Although there’s a couple of complications if I remember, concerning points and cross slicing a hyper volume which I never did accept fully: mentally speaking.
Like most things in life, humans need to train, change, and improve themselves if they want to exercise sound judgment. You can always sit around and let Authority tell you what to do, what to believe, and what is true, but we all know how that ends.