Mark my words. This will happen again, perhaps before the year is out.

Let’s start with hipsters. Deliberately ironic, mustache wearing PBR drinking cool kids, generally insufferable, and generally white. Wiggers, of course, are white kids who try to act and dress like black inner city rappers. Their overlap? Well, one ironic overlap is that the word “hipster” was the 1940′s equivalent of the word “wigger”. But the real overlap? Nerdcore of course, white hipsters rapping about things like math and dungeons and dragons. It’s a small contingent, obviously, but there they are.

Goths claim to take everything so seriously that they are depressed all the time. Wearing all black and often black and white makeup to emphasize just how depressed they are. They seem to believe that they are the only authentic voice in a world of phonies. They are, in effect, Holden Caufield in makeup. But combined with wiggers and who do they become? Juggalos, wiggers in black and white clown makeup obsessed with the Dark Carnival, a sort of purgatory.

But what happens when you cross Goths with Hipsters? I struggled with this for a while, because Goths are so deadly serious, and hipsters, well, not so much. But after a while I realized that combining the two creates the Steampunk, a guy obsessed with esoterica from a more gothic age. The Steampunk gets to dress up like a goth and act serious, but about totally frivolous things, imagining a world where everything is run by steam. It is the ultimate hipster/goth fusion.

Which of course brings us to the final combination, the so-called theoretical Steampunk-Nerdcore-Juggalo. What is this creature exactly? Does he sport a mustache? Does he homebrew? Does he rap? The one thing we can be absolutely certain of with respect to this person:

He is white.

The answer, I think, lies in an additional Daylight Savings Time.

That’s right. We have Daylight Savings time from before the Spring Equinox until after Halloween now. But what we really need is a second daylight savings time, one in which we move the clocks forward a second hour, between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Look, two daylight savings times isn’t going to be significantly better than one, but if we don’t give the daylight savings time fanatics something else to mess with, eventually, they’ll keep pushing the boundaries of daylight savings time, until they cross over in the other direction, with daylight savings time ending before it even begins. That concept is entirely intolerable.

So let’s give them another hour in the actual summer. Keep them busy with something else. What do you think?

First of all, I am now married with children, which I believe precludes me from becoming pope of any sort, interim or otherwise. But even if I were able to become pope, there is no need for an interim pope because the current Pope will apparently reign until the new pope is selected. So the question itself is moot, unless I suppose Benedict dies suddenly.

The larger question is what to make of the resignation of the Pope. Many people have conspiracy theories, mostly revolving around blackmail about what Benedict knew about the child rape scandals that have plagued the church in recent decades. I doubt that these theories have much merit. I suspect that Benedict is old and tired as he says. But his resignation goes deeper than that. His resignation directly involves the Prophecy of St. Malachy.

I have written previously about the prophecy. Let us review:

It’s gotta be tough predicting the future, via psychic means, that is. I mean surely, the further out into the future you try predicting, the more hazy the future must become. No wonder so many prophets use coded language like quatrains to try and describe what they’re seeing. It’s because they’re not really sure what they’re seeing in the first place. It’s no different than trying to gaze over long distances, where two objects standing next to each other may appear to be one.

And so undoubtedly it was with St. Malachy, who famously prophecized about every pope from his own time until the last pope ever. The funny thing is that his list has basically run out. Going sequentially from his time forward, Pope Benedict XVI is the penultimate pope, the so-called Olive Pope.

The previous pope was “De labore Solis”, or “Of the Labour of The Sun”. This correlates to Pope John-Paul II because he was born and died on a solar eclipse. The penultimate pope is described as “De Gloria Olivae” or “glory of the olive”. This has been interpreted in a number of different ways, including that the pope would hail from an olive growing region of the world, or that he would be olive skinned or even black. None of these adequately describe the current pope, though he did place an image of a Moore on his papal crest, a piece of iconography that comes form his home town in Germany.

I went on to posit that Malachy got his final pope confused with that of the President of the United States, Barack Obama, who would, according to the prophecy, be overthrown by “Petrus Romanus”, or General David Petraeus. With Petraeus out of government entirely, it seems unlikely that he could conduct such a coup, though I suppose he could raise an army Aaron Burr style, theoretically. No, what I suspect is that Benedict, knowing the prophecy well, knew damned well that he wasn’t the Glory of the Olive, and decided to step aside to let the correct pope take his place.

Benedict’s only real connection to the prophecy is the Moor he placed on his papal crest, a weak connection at best. And his selection as pope was generally a surprise. In a Catholic Church that is now predominantly southern hemispheric, choosing an elderly German because he gave a nice funeral oratory for the previous pope hardly seems like a wise move. In fact, Benedict himself must have been surprised by it, and felt it impulsive. And after 5 years of it, at his advanced age, he could pretend no further. He was never meant to be pope, and so he called it quits.

In short, Rob Sama was never the interim pope, Benedict was.

And so I suspect that the Church will now obtain its true Glory of the Olive, a dark skinned pope from the Southern Hemisphere who will be able to address the issues most important to the majority of its congregants, whether it be Mormon and Evangelical encroachments into Latin America, or Islamic incursions into Africa. The new pope will be younger, more energetic, and attuned to the issues facing the Church in the Southern Hemisphere.

The bigger question, to my mind, is does Benedict get to participate in the new conclave, or does he sit it out?

Q: What new products will Apple release?
A: Since I have already stated that they will do a watch and it has since appeared in print that they are in fact working on one, I’ll stick with that. I’ll also stick with my earlier prediction of an iPhone nano. Regarding a TV I’ll say this, if they so come out with a TV, it will be reminiscent of the new iMac, super thin with tapered edges.

Q: What will happen with the fiscal cliff?
A: We will go over it, and eventually negotiations will cease as everyone slowly realizes that this is exactly what the President wants. In other words, there will be no deal.

Q: What will happen with the debt ceiling?
A: Boehner will extend it in exchange for some token concessions or even promises of concessions some years out.

Q: How much longer does Boehner remain speaker of the house?
A: He’ll be out by Memorial Day.

Q: Who will replace Boehner as speaker of the house?
A: It will be a dark horse. Somebody unexpected.

Q: Is Hillary Clinton actually sick? What is she up to?
A: She is not sick. I think she is just done with politics, and wants out. She especially doesn’t want to answer for what happened in Bengazi, because she’s being set up to be the fall guy when she doesn’t think that what happened was her fault.

Q: Will David Gregory be prosecuted for violating Washington DC’s gun laws?
A: You’re kidding, right?

Q: Will any new gun control laws be passed at the federal level as a result of the Newtown massacre?
A: No new gun laws will pass the house, thus no new gun laws will pass.

Q: Will Scott Brown win the special election for John Kerry’s seat in Massachusetts?
A: I’m going to say no on this one. Radicals are pretty energized and they won’t let him win again. Plus Brown pissed off a lot of his base, making them less than energized.

Q: What will the price of bitcoins be at year’s end?
A: Around $30.

I guess that’s it since I can’t think of anything else. Let me know what you think. We’ll revisit this in a year as usual.

Q: Who will be the Republican nominee for President:
A: Mitt Romney
Result: Correct, Mitt Romney was the nominee for President.

Q: Who will win the apparent Romney-Obama matchup?
A: Obama.
Result: Correct, Obama did win the matchup.

Q: What will the electoral map look like?
A: Almost identical to 2008, though Florida may flip to the Republican column. NH will also flip. I should emphasize that this is true if Romney is the nominee, as predicted above. If Romney is not the nominee, then the electoral map will be very different.
Result: More or less correct. NH and FLorida did not flip, but Indiana did.

Q: Will the Euro survive 2012?
A: Probably, though it will be very weak by year’s end.
Result: Probably incorrect. Euro does not appear to be going anywhere.

Q: Will Scott Brown win re-election?
A: No, but it will be a close election.
Result: Correct.

Q: Who will Ron Paul endorse in the general election?
A: He will not endorse either the Republican nominee nor Gary Johnson.
Result: Correct.

Q: What percentage of the vote will Gary Johnson get in 2012?
A: Around 2%. He will break 1 million votes.
Result: Johnson did break 1 million votes, but thsi was only about 1% of the vote.

Q: Will SOPA pass and be put in to law?
A: Yes.
Result: I was wrong on this one, though it’s probably only a matter of time before something like it happens.

Q: Will the next major terrorist attack be carried out by Americans against their own government?
A: Yes, though it certainly won’t happen until after the election, and not likely to happen in 2012.
Results: No major terrorist attacks yet. This prediction was made too early. But let’s wait and see what happens as Obamacare is rolled out.

Q: What price will Bitcoins be in $US at year end?
A: $50
Results: Way off, we’ll be lucky to break $15 by year end.

Deny him the opportunity.

The President cannot speak to the House and Senate except by way of an invitation. So far as I understand it, he can’t even step foot onto the floor of the House without an invitation. So play hardball: deny him the invitation.

Every State of the Union address from Jefferson to Woodrow Wilson was written, not delivered as a speech. Wilson, a progressive who understood theatrics, began the modern tradition of delivering the address as a speech. But there is no requirement for the address to be delivered as a speech, or for the House to let the President deliver a speech.

So turn him down. And if you really want to show him up, have Boehner deliver a speech himself instead. Of course, you’d need balls to execute such a move, and one wonders whether our teary eyed leadership has such gumption. But we can always fantasize, can’t we?

I appreciate that Mitt Romney was never a favorite of D.C.’s green-room crowd or, frankly, of many politicians.

Seriously? Now that may have been true when he ran in 2008, but by 2012 he had lined up every conceivable endorsement imaginable. He had the full backing of the RNC from the get go. Remember how they kept screaming that this guy was electable? For Romney’s handlers to now claim that he was some sort of outsider to the RNC political circuit just compounds the rank dishonesty that mired the candidate and his campaign.

That’s why, a year ago, so few of those people thought that he would win the Republican nomination.

No, that’s why he was being called Mr Electable by every pundit and RNC consultant that Romney’s money paid for. The claim is especially rich when the Washington Post’s own Jennifer Rubin was perhaps the single biggest Romney apologist in print. Perhaps the author believes that the Post’s readers will have forgotten her incessant whining and defense of the man with whom she was smitten.

But that was indicative not of any failing of Romney’s but of how out of touch so many were in Washington and in the professional political class. Nobody liked Romney except voters.

Except when tehy had an opportunity to vote for someone else, anyone else, sure, the voters. That’s why they lurched form one “not Romney” to another “not Romney” until they all had fallen by the wayside in scandal or due to a lack of money. But yeah, they liked him, they really liked him…

What began in a small field in New Hampshire grew into a national movement. It wasn’t our campaign, it was Romney. He bested the competition in debates, and though he was behind almost every candidate in the GOP primary at one time or the other, he won the nomination and came very close to winning the presidency.

He may have bested Obama in the debates, but that’s not saying much. It certainly can’t be said he decisively won any of the primary debates.

Romney was a rotten candidate, who convinced many libertarian minded voters that he wasn’t substantively any different than Obama, and that they thus shouldn’t vote for him or the party apparatus that demanded he be nominated. That is why so many house seats were lost to Republicans, but could have been won had the Libertarian candidate’s votes gone to the Republican. Seats like those lost by Mia Love and Richard Tsei. Romney not only lost, he had negative coattails.

There is nothing to crow about in the Romney candidacy, either with respect to the candidate or with respect to the campaign. His campaign manager should be ashamed of what he did, and certainly shouldn’t be publishing defenses of it. What we need is not an apologia, but an apology.

A small tribe of people, who existed at the nexus of three major continents, Asia, Africa and Europe, was made up of some 13 tribes, some of whom departed from their homeland never to return. As it turns out, those very people were the original settlers of the American continents. In their homeland they were known as the Jews. In their new land, they became the Nephites and the Lamanites. One of them was white, and they got eliminated by the dark skinned Jews, who had completely lost their way with the Lord. At some point, the last white man alive in North America (before the arrival of Columbus) wrote down the history of these lost Jews on gold tablets, ad buried them in the hills of upstate New York.

Some 128 years after Columbus became the first non-Jewish white man to set foot in the Americas, religious zealots from England landed in Massachusetts. They nearly died in their first winter, but the Jews, who the pilgrims thought were from India, helped show them how to farm the land, and thus they had a bounteous feast that year. The centerpiece of their meal was a bird that the English speaking peoples had mistakenly named believing it has originated in the Ottoman Empire. This is the bird that we typically eat this time each year.

Some 210 years after the pilgrims arrived in North America, a man named Joseph Smith discovered the tablets buried by the last white North American Jew/Indian, and he launched the only true church according to the wished of Jesus Christ, all others being an abomination. Joseph Smith himself ran for President of the United States, as sort of a theocratic candidate. He lost obviously, but not before he made a prophecy: that someday the US Constitution would be “hanging by a thread” and that it would be a member of his Church who would become president, and set things right.

Almost 200 years later, the US Supreme Court declared that the power to tax includes the power to tax not for the purpose of raising revenue to act upon its enumerated powers (as the constitution says), but rather that it can be used to compel behavior in the citizenry. The case which was being decided was over a bill designed to eventually socialize the medical care industry, such socialism being well outside the framework of the Constitution or the thinking of any of the framers.

And so it came to pass that a Mormon was running for president, just at that moment, when the constitution was hanging by a thread. But alas, something was amiss. This Mormon had himself implemented a miniature version of this form of socialism in the state in which he was governor. And when running in the primaries, he had said that he didn’t want to repeal the offensive law, but just to fix the most offensive portions of it. And after obtaining the nomination, rather than going hard against the man after whom the legislation is colloquially named, he went hard after the most strict constitutionalist in the Republican party, the Ron Paul acolytes, who were playing by the rules to gain positions in the party to prepare for an eventual Rand Paul presidential run. Got that? Going against the man who is eviscerating the constitution, use kid gloves. Going against the Ron Paul folks, go for blood. Perhaps they weren’t white and delightsome enough for him.

Eric Fehrnstrom, the Mormon candidate’s campaign manager or whatever you want to call him, was so devoted to the Mormon candidate that he was fond of saying to the rest of the staff that they should all feel privileged, thankful even, to have had the opportunity to work with such a great man.

Whatever.

So what am I thankful for this year? That we’re rid of that douchebag once and for all.

If Republicans lose the independent vote 58% to 42%, they will lose. And that’s not even considering the fact that Mihos in fact took 7% of the vote for himself. I think we could expect similar results if Gingrich goes rogue and runs third party.

So I hope you’re a bit more informed about Mitt Romney’s electability now. Nominating Mitt Romney will, I believe, lead to a massive loss in November. My hope is that is doesn’t have an effect down ticket.

More or less, Obama ran the entirely wrong race in all the wrong ways.

Back in 2004, when Bush beat Kerry, I was in a car with some liberal friends who asked me what I thought of the election. I told them that I thought Howard Dean would have had a better chance of beating Bush, a thought which intrigued them. They asked me to elaborate, which I did. I told them that in an election between someone who believes in something, and someone who believes in nothing or whom at least appears to believe in nothing, the something will win every time. I told them that Bush was a poor President who was very beatable. But Kerry, rightly or wrongly, came across as a guy who believed in nothing. And as a result he was seen as unfit to lead, and so voters stuck with what they knew, despite their reservations about the current President.

Given the poor state of the economy and the generally poor performance of Obama as President, the best he could have hoped for was a scenario similar to 2004, in which the challenger is deemed unacceptable for some reason. In some sense, the Obama camp knew this, which is why they went so negative so early in the campaign. But the way in which they did it was completely idiotic, to put it mildly.

Evidently, the Obama camp lives inside its own echo chamber. Instead of going after Romney as a man who changes his views on a whim, who apparently believes in nothing, an accurate and potent criticism of the man, they decided to try to portray him as a right wing extremist.

Because the Republicans spent the entire primary season wringing their hands over Romney because they were concerned about nominating someone too right wing.

Romney was the quintessential politician who believed in nothing, who ought to have been beaten by anybody who believes in something. Instead he was portrayed by the Obama camp as someone who believed in something, just something different from Obama.

This blunder more or less handed the election to Romney. But that was only the beginning.

It would seem as if the Obama team really spent the election shitting its pants over the Tea Party. In case you were unaware the Tea Party is more or less un by middle aged middle class women. This marks a very dangerous fissure in the Democratic coalition. If middle class women peel away as a reliable source of votes, the Democrats are in trouble. So they spent their entire convention screaming about birth control and abortion. It was absurd and certainly didn’t convince anyone of anything. More importantly, it squandered another opportunity to show how Romney is a guy who believes in nothing.

Finally, for reasons that puzzle me, they failed to go after the Mormon angle in the way I assumed they would, namely by pointing out that Romney proselytized what was then a racist religion for two years. Obama surrogate Andrew Sullivan has only just mow started asking those questions, way too late.

So say hello to President Romney. I don’t hold out much hope that he’ll be any good as president. But he certainly can’t be as bad as Obama has been.

UPDATE: So obviously, I shouldn’t have written this, and should have just stuck with my original prediction. I certainly appears that Obama simply had a better ground game in the battleground states, and got turnout that was at or near 2008 levels, something that I wasn’t considering could seriously take place. Now we all have to brace ourselves, for the implementation of Obamacare and the debasement of the currency. It’s gonna get ugly.

UPDATE 2: Ira Stoll mirrors my thoughts.

Yes, Apple Maps has issues, but someone needs to speak up about the upside. The issues, as I understand it, can be itemized very simply: (1) some satellite images are warped; (2) searching for locations by name is flawed and risks taking you to the wrong place. No one cares about item 1 — and even Google has had the occasionally funny happenstance with their satellite imagery, so woop-di-doo to everyone with their panties in a bunch over that. Satellite view is very useful on occasion (as a mountain biker I depend on it often), but hardly used as much as map view. And for item 2, yes, everyone cares about this. But I’d venture to say that nearly half of the critical navigation use cases for maps on the iPhone consist of the user entering an address, not searching by name. For the situations where you have to search by name, the workaround is simple: lookup the address first and then ask Siri to take you there. Apple will straighten this issue out over time, as we all know.

But the advantages for using Apple maps (as a user, not even regarding Apple’s corporate needs) are HUGE. Why isn’t anyone talking about these advantages?

Do you remember what it was like zooming in on Google maps and having to wait for the tiles to load? Do you remember zooming in and out and seeing blurry pixelated stand-ins while you waited for discrete zoom steps? How about those awkward in-between zoom levels? How about tiles that never refreshed and you were left with a map that was half zoomed in and half zoomed out? Or tiles that never loaded at all and all you get is a gray square? With Apple Maps, this is a thing of the past. The maps are INSANELY responsive. Zooming in and out is seamless and smooth. Panning is seamless and smooth. No more stutters, no delays, no dropped tiles. No fragmented imagery. No more waiting for something that eventually times out and then your connection sucks and you can’t get it back. Ok, part of that is me switching to Verizon instead of AT&T, but part is also Google’s stupid tech. I know this because I suffer the same some-tiles-that-never-load on my desktop computer even over a high bandwidth cable modem.

Do you remember walking around downtown somewhere, trying to find that bar five blocks over, and being lost… so you pull out your iphone, but north is on top and you’re walking south-east so you get confused about turning left or right at certain intersections. What did you do? You enabled compass mode so you could tell which way you were going. But now you need to zoom in or out again. Bam, compass mode would disengage and you’d lose your orientation again. Now that’s a thing of the past, just rotate freely and pinch to zoom in or out without losing your rotation.

Turn by turn? We got it now. 3D view (not even talking the flyover stuff here, just basic 3D view) kicks butt and pans really intuitively and helps give you a feel for the layout.

In short, usability — Apple’s hallmark — has increased a hundred-fold. Google maps was practically useless for me. Really, it was. Apple maps on the other hand, is everything I ever expected from a mapping app and it’s obviously only going to get better. Google, their supporters, and the screaming anti-Apple banshee contingent can suck it.

Yes, Apple’s database needs some filling in, but much of the criticism has been based on errors Apple maps generates that in fact Google and other maps also generate. When I first saw people were having issues, I asked Apple Maps to show me the Tobin Bridge, only to have it show me a bridge in Kentucky. I assumed that this was a problem with Apple Maps alone, until a friend showed me that Google Maps also got it wrong/ Only Bing Maps got it right. (Bing Maps, in my experience, is the currently the best of breed in terms of mapping content, both in terms of knowledge and in terms of directions.)

So why do Bing and Google maps both have better databases? I think the answer is obvious: they are connected to search engines, which provide all sorts of address data to the search engine, which in turn feeds the mapping database. If Apple is really going to catch up, I’m afraid they are going to need a search engine of their own. There are a number out there worth buying (I wouldn’t try starting from scratch) and I’ll tell you my pick in a bit. But suffice it to say, Apple needs a search engine if they’re ever going to get Maps right.

So let’s spend a moment to think about an Apple search engine, and what it would be like. The first think it needs is to be ad free, and respectful of privacy. They should introduce it by saying that “you have a right to search without being tracked and having your searches sold to sleazebag marketers” or something like that. Then, I would say, “because we believe that things are better when they’re open, we’re opening the search algorithms to people who have an Apple ID. So if you’re on an Apple device, and you want to customize your search in some way, you can do that. Because open is better than closed.” Something like that, kick Google right in the nads.

Because if you really want to conduct thermonuclear war against Google, then you need to give their main product away for free. What’s good for the goose, all that…

The search engine they buy ought to be one that already works largely by text input. Sounds silly, but there is in fact a lot of clicking around on most search engines. I like blekko myself. Everything can be entered in on a command line kind of way. Which is important, because I think we’re all going to be using the command line quite a bit more, orally, by way of Siri.

Because Siri is the new command line interface.

And really, you want to be able to do everything via the command line. So the Siri API needs to be available to other apps, so you can make restaurant reservations via Siri while cruising down the highway. Or pay bills. Or rate the song you’re listening to and tell the world about it. Or tell everybody how much the traffic you’re stuck in sucks.

Or maybe not.

Maybe what you need is for Siri to have access to a command line social network that can handle all of these things by way of apps that reside on it. The command line social network, of course, is Twitter, and I’ve already described how Twitter should be making money by selling commands for apps to run on itself. I only wished I’d coined the phrase “command-line social network: when I’d written that piece.

So yeah, Apple would probably have to buy Twitter to make that happen. So they should do that too.

Such a combination of services would be powerful in the extreme. A search engine, customizable to your needs, and completely private, feeding information to a maps database, which is also feed by users with iPhones all over the world. An auditory command line, into which you can run social network apps via Twitter. And with Twitter, you also own the ultimate universal login. All integrated, making the database stronger. And none of it to sell advertising. All of it to make a better phone experience that you’ll want to buy and upgrade again and again.

So what am I missing here?

If you’re wondering what this is about, watch here.

The increased size is in no way an improvement. Yes it has bluetooth, which I was hoping to get in the previous form factor. But instead they made it rectangular, like for playing video. So what’s going on?

Here’s what I think is going on. Apple is planning to release a watch, and probably an iPhone nano as well.

Let’s start with the watch, which I think is more likely. When Apple introduced the square nano and Jobs suggested it could make a nice watch, that was a trial balloon, to see what would happen. From my vantage point, it would appear to have been a successful trial balloon. Not only are there no shortage of watch bands for the nano, but there is now a newfound interest in smart watches, lead by the rather unbelievable success of the Pebble watch on Kickstarter, of which I am a backer. Clearly, there is an interest in a product like this.

One thing which struck me about the Pebble watch was this fact right here:

Android users can also receive Text Messages (SMS) on their Pebble. Unfortunately iPhone does not expose this data.

Now why would that be? My guess is that is because it’s being reserved for the actual Apple iWatch.

Tim Cook has repeatedly said that Apple would only enter a market where Apple can bring significant innovation, and which is large enough on a global scale to warrant entering. So can Apple bring innovation to the watch market? I think they can. Let’s try to figure out what features an iWatch might have:

• Bluetooth Connectivity, to play music and stream content via the iphone which remains in your pocket, and display and dismiss text messages, calendar reminders, scroll through and view emails, and other items from your notification center
• Local Storage to be an iPod on its own.
• Airplay, to be able to send music out to boomboxes and the like
• Front Facing Camera, to do Facetime over bluetooth to your iPhone
• Accelerometer, for fitness and other items
• NFC for payments
• Apps, not native, but ability to interface to apps on your phone

There may be other things I’m missing. Such an item would be almost a must have for anyone currently carrying an iPhone. And even for people not carrying an iPhone, just as an iPod in a watch form factor, it would be an extremely attractive piece of electronics.

So how about the second criteria for entering a market? Is the watch market big enough for Apple to want to enter it? Well the global watch market is $46.5 billion annually. That looks big enough to me. My guess is we could see a watch announced, maybe even before the Christmas season. Imagine if that were the “one more thing” announced at the iPad mini/air event? It would be truly explosive.

The other thing that i think Apple will release is an iPhone nano. I use the term nano because it will be comparable to the iPod nano, same basic form factor. Analysts have been calling for Apple to release a cheaper smaller version of the iPhone since the original was released, and I think the new nano portends of its imminent arrival. In fact, I think the iPhone 5 was elongated precisely to make the newly coming iPhone nano seem just that much smaller. I suspect that this new iPhone will be more or less app free, namely it will run on iOS, but it will be more like the original iPhone, what you see is what you get. It will also work with the new iWatch, but more or less it’s target market is the price conscious android buyer, who never loads apps on their phone anyhow, and just wants something small, pretty and easy to use. This is not for the hard core Apple geeks, it’s for mom and dad. Or even for kids whose parents don’t want to monitor which apps they purchase. And it will eliminate any price umbrella that the iPhone currently provides.

I’m guessing the new iPhone nano comes out after the Christmas season, so as to not bigfoot on the sales of the iPhone 5.

And that’s it. Let me know what you think.

what we lost, who we lost, or that we lost…

UPDATE:

I don’t mean to gloat, but some of my words from last year seem awfully prescient now:

I’m going to go ahead and predict that iran will roll up influence across the Arab world after each of these Arab countries disposes of their dictator. While the Iranians have the good sense not to attack the US directly, they don’t have the good sense not to try and start WW3 by nuking israel. The result of this will not be good. Particularly since we’re broke. We don’t have the money to rectify this mistake, even if we had the will, which we most certainly do not have. The best we can hope for here is that the Iranian roll-up of the Middle East doesn’t start WW3, and that we have enough new energy sources to bring online within the US and Canada that we will be able to safely ignore the middle east for some time.

So the Roberts Obamacare decision comes down to this: the power to tax as expressed in the 16th amendment to the Constitution is unlimited, and any objective that cannot be met by using any of the enumerated powers can be coerced of the citizenry by means of the tax code. So while the commerce clause doesn’t give congress the right to compel people to buy insurance, the tax code in effect does.

It goes without saying that this interpretation of Congress’ power to tax, an interpretation which contradicts Supreme Court rulings from the time of the 16th amendment’s adoption, grants effectively unlimited powers to Congress to compel or outlaw whatever behavior it so chooses, so long as it is clothed in the power to tax. Anybody with half a brain can see how such a power is incompatible with the idea of a free society, and can and likely will lead to abuse in the future. And so we ought to propose the tax rectification Amendment, which would read more or less as follows:

The power to tax is limited to raising revenues to enable the federal government execute the enumerated powers given it by this constitution. Congress may not, under any circumstances, require abusive or excessive taxation, or taxes which are which encourage changes in the behavior of the citizenry.

I am not a Constitutional scholar, and I would be open to better wording from someone who has been trained in the art of such things, but you get the drift.

The problem with such an amendment, of course, is that it would not just invalidate Obamacare. It would lay waste to much of the tax code as it currently exists. I am in favor of such destruction, but it seems to me that many in congress are not, especially on the Democrats’ side of the aisle, given their proclivity towards Obamacare (and telling people what to do generally). And so should the Tax Rectification Amendment be rejected, we shall motivate those who differ from us by exercising our newfound powers under the Roberts decision, and enact the Tax Rectification Act. The Tax Rectification Act, of course, is just a series of punitive taxes against hot button cultural items that are adored by the SWPL crowd. I came up with a few ideas off the top of my head. Surely by the time the new congress takes power, we can come up with a mile-long list that will infuriate the left. But here’s my start for now:

• 100% tax on organic produce
• $1,000,000 annual excise tax on food trucks
• $1,000,000 annual excise tax on any restaurant or food establishment that does not serve meat
• $2,000,000 annual excise tax on any restaurant or food establishment that does not serve animal products of any kind
• $1,000,000 annual excise tax on every institution that performs abortions. Couple with a $10,000 excise tax on every abortion performed
• 500% sales tax on any sticker, flag or other item sold with a rainbow on it
• $10,000,000 excise tax on every motion picture produced in the United States
• $1,000 excise tax on bicycle helmets
• $500/lb excise tax on the production and sale of tofu
• $100 excise tax on every bumper sticker produced
• $1,000,000 annual excise tax on medical marijuana dispensaries

I could go on, you get the drift.

But you object, and exclaim, “But Rob, I despise Obamacare as much as you. But I enjoy some or many of these things on this list too. I watch movies, and eat at food trucks, and ride a bicycle..” To which I say: you’re missing the point. The point is not to actually put all these things out of existence, but rather to tell those on the other side that we are willing and able to use this new fangled power in crazy ass ways to destroy the things that you hold most dear. And that the longer you wait on ratifying the Tax Rectification Amendment, the more likely you will reap irreparable damage to those you hold dearest. So Join with us and pass the amendment. Yes you lose Obamacare, but you also gain the assurance that we won’t tax the accouterments of the SWPL lifestyle just out of spite. Indeed, it is designed to give those on the other side a newfound appreciation of why limited government is a good thing. And such an appreciation will only have good consequences over the long term.

Now, I’m not claiming to be the smartest man in the room, but it seems to me that both parties are missing the boat. Yes, I get charging consumers for a service that they use, and that when the user is paying for the service, they can demand a certain modicum of privacy. But privacy is kind of BS on Twitter. Nearly everything happens in the open anyway, except for direct messages and hidden feeds (the point of hidden feeds being completely lost on me), and nobody seems to think that Twitter plans to sell these to anybody for anything anyhow.

And as for Twitter’s plans, well they seem even more silly. Maybe some mathematical genius has a means of mining people’s snarky comments for information on the perfect ad to serve up to that person and the exact right time. But it seems more likely to me that they’ll just creep people out in an uncanny valley sense, rather than successfully serve up ads people will click on.

No, the value in Twitter is in the fact that people are connected on the thing, and it can serve as a universal login for other services. So if I were running Twitter and looking for revenue, that is where I would look.

For example, let’s say I could send the following tweet:

@friend $5 Hey buddy, here’s the money I owe you

And have the money move directly from my account to my friend’s account via Paypal or Dwolla. Is that worth something? What would Paypal or Dwolla or someone else even pay to own the dollar sign command on Twitter?

Or how about this?

@friend Hey buddy, lending you Game of thrones on kindle. K http://cl.ly/083y0b3x280I

Or maybe this:

@friend Hey Buddy, here’s that movie you wanted to borrow from me. I http://cl.ly/3Q1O1m3G3r02

So why does this work? Because for iTunes or Amazon to offer services like this, they need to build a social network of their own. Apple tried that with ping and it didn’t work out. Part of why these things never work out is that people don’t trust retailers, and so they give them email addresses that they use for retailers alone. Thus when you let Game Center rape your address book looking for your friends, it finds virtually no-one, because nobody gave their personal email address to iTunes.

But if you connect your Twitter account to Dwolla, Amazon, iTunes, Dropbox and who knows what else, you enable all the benefits of social networking without having to recreate the wheel each time, and without having to share more than you really need to with the retailer, or even the person you’re trying to share with.

Twitter could charge companies for access like this either by transaction or just a flat rate per year. And they could auction off single or maybe double letter combinations for use as commands, such a $ for sending money. And in that world there’s no reason to limit how third parties access and display Twitter for people. In fact, the more varieties there are, the better.

There’s probably zero chance of Twitter changing course at this stage. But I always thought that was the real potential for Twitter, a single interface for connecting and sharing. That’s where the economic potential lies. The tweeting itself is just a fun sideline.

You know, there are people with night tech support jobs who work from home, for whom 24/7 service is a matter of absolute necessity. How dare they think they can just turn the Internet off on their customers, without recompense or even A LITTLE WARNING!!!!

Thank god I have a wireless hotspot from Clear. That is how I’m posting this now. But shame on Verizon. I will be calling back later to demand my credit. You should too.

So you may or may not be aware, but a lot of the Ron Paul folks have been organizing to become delegates for the Republican National Convention in Tampa in August. Why are they doing this? Well, they have no illusions about who the nominee is or who they will be voting for. What they are doing is making a long term play: they are attempting to grab control of the party apparatus so that they can help pave the way for a Rand Paul nomination for President. They assume that Romney will lose in this election cycle, but on the off chance that he wins, they’re prepping for Rand Paul’s nomination in 2020.

So this caused something of a minor embarrassment for Romney when his delegates all LOST the delegate elections in his home state of Massachusetts. So what did Romney do in response? Well, he cheated, changed the rules, and got the delegates booted. You can read the full story here and here.

I seem to remember him having done something similar to this before, to a gubernatorial candidate, Christy Mihos…

Look, Romney is an imperious prick, who thinks very short term and is entirely risk averse in all the wrong ways. Instead of trying to win these new delegates over, instead of welcoming them to the Republican party, he tried bullying them and then cheated and got them thrown out of the party.

It may not have occurred to you or those of you in the Romney camp, but the left is already cooking up a plan to delegitimize the election should Romney manage to pull a rabbit out of the hat. Just google “republican voter suppression” and see what comes up (UPDATE: in fact, here’s an article from today’s paper!). And in the midst of this plan, Romney goes ahead and does what? Suppresses the votes of Ron Paul Republicans trying to win delegate seats. This after having previously done much the same thing with regards to Christy Mihos. Way to establish a pattern and throw fuel on the fire. Does it not occur to him that he’s playing right into this meme?

Oh forget it.

I was giving some thought to voting for Romney after the Roberts decision. Now I’ll prolly just stick to my plan to vote for Gary Johnson.

I am reminded of an Ann Coulter column on John Roberts back when he was being nominated. Not that I’m a huge fan of Coulter, but her words were prescient, and deserve repeating in full at this time:

After pretending to consider various women and minorities for the Supreme Court these past few weeks, President Bush decided to disappoint all the groups he had just ginned up and nominate a white male.

So all we know about him for sure is that he can’t dance and he probably doesn’t know who Jay-Z is. Other than that, he is a blank slate. Tabula rasa. Big zippo. Nada. Oh, yeah … We also know he’s argued cases before the Supreme Court. Big deal; so has Larry Flynt’s attorney.

But unfortunately, other than that that, we don’t know much about John Roberts. Stealth nominees have never turned out to be a pleasant surprise for conservatives. Never. Not ever.

Since the announcement, court-watchers have been like the old Kremlinologists from Soviet days looking for clues as to what kind of justice Roberts will be.

Will he let us vote?

Does he live in a small, rough-hewn cabin in the woods of New Hampshire and avoid “womenfolk”?

Does he trust democracy? Or will he make all the important decisions for us and call them “constitutional rights”?

It means absolutely nothing that NARAL and Planned Parenthood attack him: They also attacked Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Hackett Souter.

The only way a Supreme Court nominee could win the approval of NARAL and Planned Parenthood would be to actually perform an abortion during his confirmation hearing, live, on camera, and preferably a partial-birth one.

It means nothing that Roberts wrote briefs arguing for the repeal of Roe v. Wade when he worked for Republican administrations. He was arguing on behalf of his client, the United States of America. Roberts has specifically disassociated himself from those cases, dropping a footnote to a 1994 law review article that said:

“In the interest of full disclosure, the author would like to point out that as Deputy Solicitor General for a portion of the 1992-’93 term, he was involved in many of the cases discussed below. In the interest of even fuller disclosure, he would also like to point out that his views as a commentator on those cases do not necessarily reflect his views as an advocate for his former client, the United States.”

This would have been the legal equivalent, after O.J.’s acquittal, of Johnnie Cochran saying: “Hey, I never said the guy was innocent. I was just doing my job.”

And it makes no difference that conservatives in the White House are assuring us Roberts can be trusted. We got the exact same assurances from officials working for the last president Bush about David Hackett Souter.

I believe their exact words were, “Read our lips; Souter’s a reliable conservative.”

From the theater of the absurd category, the Republican National Committee’s “talking points” on Roberts provide this little tidbit:

“In the 1995 case of Barry v. Little, Judge Roberts argued ? free of charge ? before the D.C. Court of Appeals on behalf of a class of the neediest welfare recipients, challenging a termination of benefits under the District’s Public Assistance Act of 1982.”

I’m glad to hear the man has a steady work record, but how did this make it to the top of his resume?

Bill Clinton goes around bragging that he passed welfare reform, which was, admittedly, the one public policy success of his entire administration (passed by the Republican Congress). But now apparently Republicans want to pretend we’re the party of welfare queens! Soon the RNC will be boasting that Republicans want to raise your taxes and surrender in the war on terrorism, too.

Finally, let’s ponder the fact that Roberts has gone through 50 years on this planet without ever saying anything controversial. That’s just unnatural.

By contrast, I held out for three months, tops, before dropping my first rhetorical bombshell, which I think was about Goldwater.

It’s especially unnatural for someone who is smart, and there’s no question but that Roberts is smart.

If a smart and accomplished person goes this long without expressing an opinion, he’d better be pursuing the Miss America title.

Apparently, Roberts decided early on that he wanted to be on the Supreme Court and that the way to do that was not to express a personal opinion on anything to anybody ever. It’s as if he is from some space alien sleeper cell. Maybe the space aliens are trying to help us, but I wish we knew that.

If the Senate were in Democrat hands, Roberts would be perfect. But why on earth would Bush waste a nomination on a person who is a complete blank slate when we have a majority in the Senate!

We also have a majority in the House, state legislatures, state governorships, and have won five of the last seven presidential elections ? seven of the last 10!

We’re the Harlem Globetrotters now ? why do we have to play the Washington Generals every week?

Conservatism is sweeping the nation, we have a fully functioning alternative media, we’re ticked off and ready to avenge Robert Bork … and Bush nominates a Rorschach blot.

Even as they are losing voters, Democrats don’t hesitate to nominate reliable left-wing lunatics like Ruth Bader Ginsburg to lifetime tenure on the high court. And the vast majority of Americans loathe her views.

As I’ve said before, if a majority of Americans agreed with liberals on abortion, gay marriage, pornography, criminals’ rights and property rights ? liberals wouldn’t need the Supreme Court to give them everything they want through invented “constitutional” rights invisible to everyone but People for the American Way. It’s always good to remind voters that Democrats are the party of abortion, sodomy and atheism, and nothing presents an opportunity to do so like a Supreme Court nomination.

The Democrats’ own polls showed voters are no longer fooled by claims that the Democrats are trying to block “judges who would roll back civil rights.” Borking is over.

And Bush responds by nominating a candidate who will allow Democrats to avoid fighting on their weakest ground ? substance. He has given us a Supreme Court nomination that will placate no liberals and should please no conservatives.

Maybe Roberts will contravene the sordid history of “stealth nominees” and be the Scalia or Thomas that Bush promised us when he was asking for our votes. Or maybe he won’t. The Supreme Court shouldn’t be a game of Russian roulette.

BANG!

If anybody has any suggestions I’d like to hear them. Otherwise I suppose I’ll give the Dropbox gallery a shot.

Thanks

The song I want to add to the list is the theme song to the show Super Why. You can watch below:

As you can see, it makes perfect sense that this song be added to the list. Moreover, It also makes sense that the song wasn’t on the list previously, as it didn’t exist at the time that the original list was published.

The first part is that leftists have this fantasy that they will be able to walk into a clinic or pharmacy and get whatever they need in a timely fashion and just walk out, without thinking about it and more importantly, WITHOUT PAYING. This is a fantasy, and free stuff ultimately doesn’t work as a public policy (see Free Stuff vs. Freedom). And in light of that fantasy, contraception is just one more health related thing they want for free.

But ultimately, it’s more than that. It’s tit for tat sexism, coupled with an utter lack of understanding as to what insurance actually is. I want to show you a tweet that someone in my timeline retweeted. It’s been retweeted over 50 times, which is a fair number for an individual tweet. But it’s a meme I’ve heard from women around blue parts for some time now:

Why aren’t erectile dysfunction drugs as controversial as contraceptives? If God wanted you to have that erection, He’d give it to you.

2/10/2012 10:47 am via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@_joycastro

Joy Castro

The meme is offensive on a number of different levels. First up is the God reference. Certainly, few Christians believe in faith healing (though I wonder if those who do, such as Christian Scientists, get waivers from the penalties Obamacare imposes on the uninsured). And more importantly, few people who oppose Obamacare or even the contraception mandate do so on specifically Christian grounds. It is fascinating to me that the author should feel the need to load her comment with the reference to God at all.

And of course, the author completely misunderstands what insurance is. Insurance is a bet you make that something bad might happen to you. Obviously, you hope to lose the bet. The insurance company (or cooperative) charges based on the likelihood of the bad thing occurring and the cost of dealing with the bad thing when it does occur. Any extra money is either profit to the company or a dividend to the cooperative shareholders.

But what you can’t do is insure against an eventuality. All that amounts to is a weird kind of financing scheme. Even life insurance isn’t insuring against one’s death (a certainty) but against the timing of one’s death (an uncertainty). By way of example, imagine going to your insurance company to obtain toilet paper. Literally, everyone poops, on a more or less predictable schedule. Therefore. there’s literally nothing to insure. You’d be paying a premium to a company to handle your money and give it back to you in the form of toilet paper. Such a scheme can’t possibly make sense, and can only run up the cost of toilet paper for everyone involved. (Conversely, if for some reason you stopped pooping, then that would be an insurable event.)

But the real reason for the Obama administration mandating that contraception be covered by insurance is that they perceive men getting sex pills paid for, and so they feel their sex pills should be free too. Never mind that one is for a disfunction, and the other is for a normal, properly functioning body. It’s tit for tat over minutiae of the sort that plagues child siblings and those stuck in dysfunctional marriages. “Dad, he got more french fries that me!” “Mom, he’s played with it for 5 minutes, it’s MY TURN!!!” It’s the sort of attitude that causes a parent to yell at their child, to tell them to zip it. Life isn’t precisely fair, and attempts to make it so are futile and distracting. As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous:

God, Give us the grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed, Courage
to change the things which should be changed,
And the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

Now one may argue that erectile dysfunction in men above a certain age is so common that it shouldn’t be covered by insurance. But that is a dangerous argument if you believe in the likes of Obamacare. That is an argument for catastrophic coverage, as opposed to comprehensive coverage. And in that kind of world, the sort I argue for in my Grand Plan, anything short of cancer would likely be paid for out of pocket. I would argue that such a setup would result in health care costs coming down dramatically. But such a setup would not be in keeping with the “get my healthcare for free” fantasy. Not that leftists won’t make the argument. Consistency has never been one of the left’s strong suits.

I’ve become convinced that a fair amount of modern leftist ideology is little more than thinly veiled man hatred. Count this argument as one more data point in favor of that argument.

Mitt Romney is in fact the least electable candidate in the race. His past performance in Massachusetts indicates as much. The only thing required to understand this is a touch of knowledge about Massachusetts political history.

When Mike Dukakis left government after attempting to run for President, he left state government in shambles. He lied about having balanced the budget, and the people of Massachusetts were fed up with him and the Democrats. Into this environment, the people of Massachusetts elected Republican Bill Weld as governor, and gave him enough of a minority in the legislature so as to be able to sustain a veto. That was in 1990. Bill Weld was re-elected in 1994, and grew bored with being governor, and resigned in 1997, leaving the office to his Lt. Governor Paul Cellucci. Cellucci was a real local (locals would call his sort a “townie”), who ran up an extraordinary amount of personal credit card debt, calling into his question his ability to be a good manager. Nevertheless, he managed to get elected to the governorship in his own right in 1998. Cellucci resigned in 2001 to become the US ambassador to Canada, leaving the office to Jane Swift, who gave birth to twins while serving as acting governor, and chose not to run for the office herself.

It was into this string of Republican wins that Mitt Romney threw his hat into the ring. In other words, he was the third Republican governor in 12 years of continuous Republican governors in the state. So his win was not nearly as impressive as he made it sound. Massachusetts had Republican governors for 12 years running before he showed up. So they were used to it.

But really, he provided no reason for people to vote for him in 2002. He ran a similar campaign to what he’s running now, that he’s a good manager who can help fix problems. The real reason why he won was because his opponent, Shannon O’Brien imploded after likening teenage abortions to getting a tattoo, and then tried to make light of it by offering to show her tattoos on the campaign trail. In light of such rank idiocy, Massachusetts opted for Romney.

I’m going to skip over how he governed, except to point out that Romney made a real effort to get Republicans elected to the state legislature, and his effort was a complete and utter failure. Republicans lost seats while he was governor.

After being governor for four years, Romney could see the writing on the wall. he would lose re-election. And so he made the preposterous argument that he’d accomplished everything he’d wanted to accomplish as governor and that as a result he was going to go. And he set up his Lt. Governor to be the next Republican nominee, a woman named Kerry Healey.

Now Kerry Healey was someone few had heard of prior to Romney picking her to be his Lt. Governor. She’d never held political office before, but she’d had a good showing in some race or another before Romney tapped her. She held a PhD in criminology and married a centimillionaire. She was a caricature of herself and of a pearl wearing country club Republican. In fact, she was such a caricature that she was donned the nickname “Muffy”, not from her adversaries, but from the state’s premier right-of-center columnist, Howie Carr.

But that is not all, oh no that is not all. See Muffy had what would have been a primary challenger, a man by the name of Christie Mihos. Mihos was a self made businessman in Massachusetts, having started a chain of convenience stores from scratch. And he had been active in Republican politics for some time. He deserved a spot on the primary ballot. but Romney’s henchmen played games with the Massachusetts State Republican convention, refusing to let Mihos’ supporters in. As a result, he didn’t get the requisite 15% of the vote required to get on the ballot. In response, Mihos went apoplectic.

But before we get to Mihos’ response, let us recall that much the same thing has been happening in this current race. Romney’s cronies got the FLorida primary moved up in contravention of Republican Party rules, as a firewall of sorts to stop any possible challengers. And they are rumored to have had a hand in keeping Perry and Gingrich off the ballot in Virginia.

When you win a primary legitimately, opposing candidates tend to get in line and endorse you. But when you win by dirty tricks, you engender permanent opposition. Which brings us to Christie Mihos’ justified jihad against Mitt Romney.

Mihos ran an independent candidacy, running exclusively against Muffy, ignoring the Democrat in the race (whom we’ll get back to). Mihos ran what has to be one of the most outrageous ad campaigns in the history of televised politics. His ad literally depicted Beacon Hill politicians sticking their heads up their own asses, in cartoon form. And not just generic representations of politicians, literally, Mitt Romney and Muffy. See for yourself:

I shudder to think what newt Gingrich is going to do to this man in the general election once he has nothing left to lose.

So back to our story. Muffy’s real opponent in the general election was a man named Deval Patrick. He was a well spoken black lawyer, who had served on some major corporate boards and has been in Clinton’s justice department for a period of time. He ran on a theme of “Yes We Can!” If that sounds familiar, it should. His campaign manager was David Axelrod and the campaign he ran for Deval Patrick was a dry run for the one he would eventually run for Barack Obama. Which is to say, 2012 will not be the first time that the Romney and Obama teams will have faced off. They faced off in 2006, and the result was NOT pretty.

The key to understanding Massachusetts politics is to know how much of the vote is really up for grabs in any election. In Massachusetts, 30% of the voters will vote for the Republican candidate no matter what, and 40% for the Democrat. This leaves 30% up for grabs, the independent vote so to speak. While at first glance it doesn’t seem like that big of a difference, if you do the math you will see that a Republican needs to win 2/3 of the independent vote to win an election. This is what Scott Brown did. So that fact that Muffy lost and Deval won shouldn’t be a serious concern, at least if the independent vote was reasonably split.

But it wasn’t.

Here’s how the vote broke down:

• Muffy: 779,807 35%
• Mihos: 161,012 7%
• Patrick: 1,230,065 56%
• Green: 43,032 2%

Let’s translate this. Assume that Mihos’ votes were really republican votes, and the Green Party’s votes were Democrats and run the percentages. We get:

• Muffy/Mihos: 42.5%
• Patrick/Green: 57.5%

And to get the independent vote breakdown, we subtract 30% from the right and 40% from the left:

• Independents voting right: 12.5%
• Independents voting left: 17.5%

Or put differently, the independent voters split as follows:

• Independents voting right: 41.6%
• Independents voting left: 58.3%

If Republicans lose the independent vote 58% to 42%, they will lose. And that’s not even considering the fact that Mihos in fact took 7% of the vote for himself. I think we could expect similar results if Gingrich goes rogue and runs third party.

So I hope you’re a bit more informed about Mitt Romney’s electability now. Nominating Mitt Romney will, I believe, lead to a massive loss in November. My hope is that is doesn’t have an effect down ticket.

Free stuff and freedom are inherently incompatible concepts. You can choose the free stuff, or you can choose the freedom, but if you choose the free stuff, you will eventually lose the freedom. Here’s why:

1. As any economist can tell you, appetites are unlimited, but means are not. Which is to say, we all can consume unlimited amounts of stuff, but we don’t because we don’t have the money. Thus when you tell somebody that you’re not going to interfere with their freedom to consume, you’re just going to foot the bill, it should come as no surprise that they gorge like pigs at the trough. When the bill comes due, you are then forced to make a choice: curtail the freedom or the free stuff. Either you end the subsidy or you put all sorts of limits on how it can be used. Or, I suppose, you go bankrupt like Europe is doing now, and like the US is about to do soon, in which case the free stuff will go away.
2. Even if the people consuming the free stuff don’t gorge at the trough, even if they are limited in the amount of free stuff they’re given, eventually the choices they make in consuming their free stuff will offend somebody. And because it’s their tax money, indeed everyone’s tax money, that is paying for the free stuff, those people will seek redress that their tax dollars not go to fund the free stuff that so offends them. Likewise, others will believe that because some free stuff is funded that they for some reason or another cannot put to use, that their other free stuff must also be funded in order for things to be fair. This creates endless conflicts and fights. One may think that these fights are mostly between prudes and libertines. Yet one can easily imagine passionate fights between vegetarians and Atkins dieters, or between Mayor Bloomberg and anyone who enjoys anything whatsoever. Literally, the available permutations are endless.

   Moreover, there will invariably be people whose economic interests are at stake as well. They want the stuff they produce available to be purchased as free stuff, and the stuff their competitors make eliminated. This means that they too will lobby, and adopt the arguments of their idealogical brethren mentioned in the preceding paragraph as their own.

   Eventually, someone wins out. That someone is either the lobby with the most to gain financially or the lowest common denominator amongst public opinion. But whatever it is, the freedom to choose for the person receiving the free stuff has been curtailed.

If you want to see this work in a concrete way, find a teenager at the mall and hand him your credit card. Tell him he can do with it what he wants for the time he is at the mall. By the time the bill comes due, the teenager will undoubtedly have spent more than you would have foreseen, and would have spent it on items that you would not likely have approved of. The same thing happens in the public sphere.

You can see these forces play out whenever some politician calls for banning the use of food stamps for candy and cigarettes. But food stamps are a program for the poor only. Obamacare, by contrast, is designed to manage everybody’s health care. The goal is for everybody, or at least most people, to be able to get whatever health care they need without paying for it themselves. The bill is picked up by the employer or the state. And because every decision you make in your life has an impact on your health, and the state is paying your health bill, the state will presume to have a say on those decisions. Put aside the specific reasons why the Obama administration wants contraception covered by insurance (a subject for a later blog post). The fact is that these kinds of fights and loss of freedoms will become a normal part of our life under a state run health care system. The loss of our personal freedoms, religious included, is inevitable. Just wait until the state starts monitoring your daily routines with technology like this. It will happen, it’s only a matter of time.

So apparently the Catholic Church were big boosters for Obamacare when it was being passed, being fans of free stuff for the poor and all. One should hope that they have learned something from this episode about the incompatibility of free stuff and freedom. Though I’m not holding my breath. But perhaps the rest of us might learn something instead.

Again, I’m not holding my breath.