I believe...

My American Beliefs

I believe the Constitution says what it means and means what it says and it doesn’t take a genius or a law degree to read it and understand it.

I believe that the Constitution can only be properly understood in light of the people who wrote it, whether it is the main body or an amendment.

I believe the Constitution defines what government can do, and that government can’t do anything the Constitution does not give it permission to do.

I believe the Preamble to the Constitution is a description of what the rest of the Constitution puts into place, and cannot be correctly understood to be binding in and of itself.

I believe that changing the “understanding” of a standing portion of the Constitution is changing the Constitution itself, and is therefore anti-Constitutional. Only one method exists for the changing of the Constitution; that method is by amendment. Otherwise, any phrase in the Constitution means today and tomorrow what it meant yesterday and it has the same effect today and tomorrow as it had yesterday, unless it is modified by amendment. That is true for any set of three days since the signing of the Constitution into perpetuity. If a court determines something to be unconstitutional, it is only properly done if the action determined would always have been unconstitutional, as long as the phrase proposed to have been violated was in effect.

I believe that the next order of legislation that should taken up by both federal houses is the disallowance of specifications in legislation that are not materially connected to the stated title and purpose of the legislation. In this vein, all legislation must be required to have a stated title and purpose, and said title and purpose cannot be compound.

I believe that the body politic and the body social are not the same body, even though comprised of the same people. Political solutions do not solve social problems and social solutions do not solve political problems.

I believe that equality before the law can only possibly apply to opportunity. If failing to avail oneself of an opportunity occurs because of a personal decision (whether immediate or historic) or a personal capability (as opposed to a non-personal restriction), the law cannot address these in a free nation. Any attempt to make the law address either of these is attempting to apply a political solution to a social problem and is therefore doomed to failure.

I believe that convenience is no justification for legislation, under any circumstance.

I believe that in our present population, there are at least two generations of Americans who have been taught by precedent that convenience is sufficient to establish need, whether an objectively bona fide need exists or not.

I believe that the moment any elected official takes the oath of office, that their political affiliation should become moot, and I believe that their constituents should hold them accountable for this characteristic first and foremost.

I believe that all constituencies should have the ability of recall of any elected official at any time, when a simple majority of the constituency indicates so by personal signature, or by an equivalent accounting to the method of election when a simple majority is not the method of election to that billet. I believe that this should be the subject of the next amendment to the US Constitution, and to every state constitution, and that this must be undertaken before this nation can recover the concept of government of the people, by the people and for the people, which concept is now lost. In this application, recall should be a separate action from replacement.

I believe that because leadership can be sometimes stern and serious, that actual leadership was rejected in a previous generation in favor of convenience and the sanctioning of ease and irresponsibility; therefore leadership is now unrecognizable by the overwhelming majority of Americans.

That is what I believe.

Liberty for the Brave,

Al

Veterans/Armistice Day

This venerable poem about says it all.  Written at the edge of a battlefield by a Canadian Army doctor who had just buried his friend who was killed in action.  If the deep meaning of these verses escapes you, then thank those who did not let it escape, some of who came home whole, some who gave some, and some who gave all...

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

To those who served with honor, and who honor the nation founded by the US Constitution today, thank you with all my heart.

The United Sta... uh, U-nannied States of America

[a poster who calls himself rhinodriver gets the credit for the basic idea that resulted in this posting]

Saw this on a message board today, and it's not a bad way to put it.

No, I'm not saying the current efforts are a total sell-out to a total nanny state, but they are a move in that direction, from the political power center that least minds moving in that direction.

So, in what formerly was the United States of America, 50 sovereign states voluntarily giving up some of that sovereignty to the United States, comprised of individually sovereign individuals, who give up some of that sovereignty to the state (both federal and state "states"), we now change "United" to "Unannied" States, 50 far less sovereign states no longer attempting to preserve their sovereignty comprised of members of a collective who are unaware that their forebears had individual sovereignty and who have no desire for it today.  They only have a desire for the Nanny State (or should that be Sugar Daddy State?) to take care of them.

Liberty for the brave (and for those who remember living more like the founders intended)

Al

Healthcare and simple lessons

The discussion regarding health care proposals, and getting everybody in the US covered by some health insurance company, in the multiple threads and places it’s being thumped back and forth on the internet, has come to the place that I don’t think I see anybody actually addressing what the person they are arguing with is saying, nor is the person they are arguing with addressing what they are saying.

Ergo, I’m gonna lay this out as best I can, given the limitations of the written word. We’ll see if anyone can get onboard with this.

I’m 54. I remember a time when NOBODY stayed away from the doctor if they had something home remedies (aspirin, orange juice, rest, etc) couldn’t fix. NOBODY did. Doctors worked it out, patients worked it out, they came together and made it happen, because the doctor was committed to healing people and the patient was committed to paying his own way as much as possible. It’s how normal people used to think.

By the way, that situation is properly called “universal health care.” Nobody went without what was needed. If nobody goes without, that’s universal (as regards the US, which is what this discussion is about).

Not that way now. Why?

The 122 people dying per day on average is probably a decent enough estimation to work with. It ought to make every American sick. Personally, I think it does, whatever side of the aisle they are on. It surely says to anyone “It’s not the way it was, today.” Again, why?

For one thing, health care is not a calling anymore, it’s a business. It transmogrified from decent human beings helping human beings (and having to deal with a business side of getting that done) to the crap we have today, where a decent doctor that puts patient above bottom line shines like a searchlight in a cave. I know. I’m trying to change general practitioners because I just moved. I have 3 people in the family who practice health care, and ALL their suggestions for good Docs are met with “full up and am unable to take new patients, just have no room, very sorry” or some version of it.

The second factor is insurance companies. No, not the way they are run, that’s transitive, short termed, can chance with the winds of fortune. The factor here is the fundamental idea that it’s a good thing for somebody else to pay my way. As soon as insurance companies became the person who paid the doctor, instead of the patient, insurance companies got the power to say what they would and would not pay for.

So now, instead of two players in the game, the patient and the doc, there are three: the patient, the doc, and the payer. The trouble is, the payer is not there for humanitarian reasons, the payer is there for business reasons. If he gets enough money from premiums, he’s betting he can invest that money and make more than he has to pay back out. Nothing wrong with a business, but if anyone forgets that player #3 in the game is not there to make the patient well, but is there to make money, then that could be a fatal mistake, literally.

So, here we are. The mistake that has been made is inserting something not medical (business) into medicine, and the outcome is absence of treatment for people who need it (as well as some other bad stuff that should be the substance of another discussion, not this one).

If I flip a switch, and everything goes bad, I flip the switch back. If I open a valve and things go bad, I shut the valve back. If you do something, and it goes bad, the very best first response is to go back to where things were stable, and THEN figure out IF something else needs to be done.

However, that’s not what’s being proposed. We let medicine stop being medicine and let it become a business, and now, the proposal is to make medicine government. So, I’m supposed to believe that government is a better third player in the game than insurance is? Why? Some proposals leave insurance in the game and insert government, too. To me, that’s even worse. Instead of going back to when it worked, now that it’s been complicated so that it doesn’t work, our “leaders” are trying to go to something else even more complicated. Now, we have to hope that the govvie cares for us just as much as the doc does. We did that before. We said before “no, they wouldn’t make soley business decisions, nobody could be that cold” of the insurance companies. We were wrong.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. There is one and ONLY one solution to people not being able to go to a doctor, and that is going back to the ONLY way we’ve ever seen it work. NOBODY is trying to do that. One group wants to keep their insurance buddies happy, one wants to make political hay while the sun shines, and others want to bridge the two at one place or another. It is stupidity following stupidity. We did this right, once, but we can’t go do it like that again, God forbid. NO, the govvie forbid, because enabling this will simply make the govvie be one step closer to being the god for more Americans yet.

Liberty for the brave, with sadness,

Al