Category Archives: What? Are They Nuts?

Grubergate

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Yesterday’s Burlington Free Press editorial says, “First get Vermont Health Connect right.”

Editorial Page Editor Aki Soga is right that the “relaunch of the Vermont Health Connect online insurance exchange is a crucial test for Gov. Shumlin’s efforts to bring a single-payer health care system to Vermont.”

It is a crucial system test but not the right test.

Let’s recall how we got here.

Dollar Sign• 1994: Then-Gov. Howard Dean tried unsuccessfully to institute a single-payer system with then-Sen Peter Shumlin’s support.
• 2009: “If you like your plan you can keep…” Uh huh.
• 2010: Candidate Shumlin outlined his plans for a single payer health care system in 2010.
• 2012: Gov. Shumlin hired CGI Group (the same Canadian ne-er-do-well company that crafted the extraordinary healthcare.gov debacle) to do it on a smaller scale in Vermont. Vermont paid CGI about $67 million.
• 2014: Gov. Shumlin rehired Obamacare architect Jonathan (“stupidity of the American voter”) Gruber for an extra $400,000 in July to study how Vermont could squeeze an extra $2 billion out of taxpayers to fund the statewide single-payer health-care system. (Mr. Gruber also drafted much of the original single-payer system proposal in 2010.) Sadly, Mr. Gruber has never known when to shut up.
• 2014: Gov. Shumlin hired some third graders who failed arithmetic to run Health Connect billing.

I haven’t had insurance under Health Connect/Obamacare for many months. I think the third graders have stopped billing me for it although the arrearage they “calculated” for insurance I haven’t had was in the thousands of dollars.

That could have been the chosen Gruber method: bill people who don’t even have coverage for insurance premiums they don’t owe. It will take only 333,333 Vermonters paying in an average of $6,000 to come up with that $2 billion.

It is a crucial system test but not the right test.

The right test answers these three simple questions:

Does the system cover me?
Does the system improve medical results?
Does the system reduce health care costs?

That’s a system that Vermont’s liberal economists are incapable of planning (“all we need is to find $2 billion in new ‘revenue'”) and Vermont’s liberal politicians are incapable of implementing (“all we need is to find $2 billion in new ‘revenue'”).

It’s too bad Vermonters have to suffer through Grubergate with the rest of the nation, but when Vermont’s political left wants to sleep with the big dogs, they are bound to get fleas.

 

Used Food

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Pugnaciously parsimonious.

Regular readers will remember that Rufus says I am a “c-h-e-a-p   b-a-h-s-t-i-d” so I also think long about what most things cost before buying.

I’m not the first in the fambly to have that trait. My great grandfather was a Quaker farmer who never threw anything away which largely explains the size of the moving van we needed when we moved to North Puffin. I really believe in reduce, reuse, and eventually, recycle.

My mom coined the term “used food” when the grocery store would mark down the day old meats in the refrigerated meat case. We’ve expanded its meaning.

Dented CanI see an upside down cake in my future.

SWMBO and I keep our own grocery bills as low as we can by shopping the used food store for dented cans. That emporium is a liquidation center that clears out “zoins” — the pallets of rejected non-perishables from grocery stores. My mom always worried that the dent could damage the can coating and at the very least change the taste of the contents. We’ve never had a problem.

There are some rules to follow with used food.

Bulging or bloated can?
What? Are you nuts? Cans bulge and bloat when bacteria outgasses.

Push on the top and bottom of the can
If the lid moves or pops, throw it out.

Rusted cans
Rust weakens the floor of Vermont cars and lets bad stuff in. Does the same for cans, doncha know.

The can sprays when you open it
A can ought not spray or explode when you open the lid with a can opener or screwdriver or Swiss Army knife. Safe dented cans will open the same as non dented cans.

Foods that have abnormal odors should not be eaten.

Lots of new laws went into effect in Vermont this summer.

I hadn’t realized just how just stupid Vermont lawmakers are. All food scraps must be recycled back into consumption by 2020. The best of my food scraps, after sitting on my summer porch, will help feed people, lawmakers say. Oh it’s good to be poor in Vermont.

Oh yeah, bags of trash cost an extra 25 cents to toss now, and bulk trash an extra $10 per ton. Canceling the fees for recycling is just the first step in an effort to keep everything that can be recycled or composted out of Vermont landfills by 2020, the goal of the state’s Universal Recycling law, Act 148. Mandated recyclables. (Sounds really good, except the trash haulers still pay for recyclables by weight.) Otter stuff. And this.

It is the policy of the state that food residuals collected under the requirements of this chapter shall be managed according to the following order of priority uses:
(1) Reduction of the amount generated at the source;
(2) Diversion for food consumption by humans;
(3) Diversion for agricultural use, including consumption by animals;
(4) Composting, land application, and digestion; and
(5) Energy recovery.

Back to the food on my porch. Our trash hauler retired (he didn’t want to buy a new truck to split recyclables) so we make a “dump run” every couple of weeks. In that time we fill two or three barrels with mixed recyclables and one large bag with household garbage. Uncooked chicken trimmins. The bones and skin of that small mouth bass. And the mouse I caught last Monday. Mmmm. Smells soooooo fine. Oh, my.

I good with #1. We do need to cut down on the amount of food we throw away. This is Vermont, for heaven’s sake. Thrifty farmers. Make do folk. And #3, #4, and #5 are great.

I may have to rethink this whole “used food” idea, though.

 

Do You Want Fries with That?

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Yes or No.

Pierre Krahenbuhl, the commissioner general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, appeared on CBS Face the Nation yesterday for a quick question-and-answer.

OK, maybe not so quick.

Mr. Krahenbuhl used 450 words — about the length of a typical newspaper editorial — to avoid answering two simple, yes or no, questions: Are your facilities protecting Hamas members? and Is Hamas using children as human shields?

Norah O’Donnell sat in for long time CBS host Bob Schieffer.

NORAH O’DONNELL: Are your facilities protecting members of Hamas?

Pretty simple yes or no question, wouldn’t you think?

PIERRE KRAHENBUHL: Look, I think what you have to get a sense of is we have two hundred fifty thousand people now sheltered in our schools as a result of the intensity of the conflict that is going on in Gaza. Some of these people have received instructions from the Israeli Defense Forces to leave areas that they were living in. Others fled the fighting. And because we have numerous school buildings throughout the Gaza Strip, we have been able to accommodate them in about ninety school buildings. And so this is very clear under international law that these are premises that are protected. The sanctity of which have to be respected by all parties and so, of course, when they are shelled it is something that is unacceptable in any sense. Now, we have also had incidents — and there were three — in the course of inspections we carried out we have identified weapons caches that were in the premises, something that we made known to the world in a very proactive and transparent way because those ways of endangering our premises by placing weapons in them are unacceptable and we condemn them unreservedly.

192 words.

It was a “yes” or “no” question.

“Can I rinse your plate?” SWMBO asked as we finished breakfast right after hearing that.

“Well in the grand scheme of the surface chemistry, as we study the chemical reactions at the interfaces, we’re really looking at heterogeneous catalysis. The adhesion of the food molecules to the plate is known as adsorption. This can be due to either chemisorption or by physisorption. … ” I began, just getting wound up.

“It was a yes or no question.”

NORAH O’DONNELL: Mm-Hm.

“There are 1,500 dead Palestinians, you know,” my friend Nola Guay said. “That far outnumbers the 64 Israelis killed. How is it fair that so few Israelis are getting killed?”

What, are you nuts? I’m thinking when you poke a bear with more than 2,500 rockets, you gotta prepare to pay the price.

Ms. O’Donnell asked the most important questions.

NORAH O’DONNELL: Israel says that Hamas is using civilians, children as human shield. Is that what you found?

Ms. O’Donnell asks yes or no questions, doesn’t she?

PIERRE KRAHENBUHL: What we’ve found and what we know is that when armed forces be it in this case, the Israeli Defense Force or non-state arm groups as the groups present inside Gaza, all of them are bound by rules of international law and humanitarian law which regulate the way in which military operations and combat is taking place in any conflict around the world. And in the case of Gaza, because of its very densely populated environment, all of these military operations have a great risk of endangering the civilians. And that is the case for all of the actors involved. Yes, there are certainly behaviors that expose the population on the ground by militant groups that operate close to civilian premises. But, certainly, if you look at the extent of the damage, the extent of the physical destruction but also the extent of the loss of human life and I witnessed that myself visiting this week the pediatric ward in the main hospital in Gaza seeing the broken bodies of the children there, there is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that insufficient measures of precaution and control and protection are being taken, including by the Israeli Defense Force when engaging in Gaza. And the message I’ve heard repeatedly this week by civilians in Gaza is that they don’t feel safe anywhere. And what they’ve been saying to me is if we are not safe in an UNRWA school building, where are we going to be safe.

Mm-Hm.

247 words this time and not a single “yes” or “no” to be found.

Ms. O’Donnell asked the two most important questions. And she didn’t get an answer.

Worth noting is this commentary that Mr. Schieffer offered on Face the Nation last week:
In the Middle East, the Palestinian people find themselves in the grip of a terrorist group that has embarked on a strategy to get its own children killed in order to build sympathy for its cause, a strategy that might actually be working, at least in some quarters. Last week, I found a quote of many years ago by Golda Meir, one of Israel’s early leaders, which might have been said yesterday. “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children, she said, “but we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”

That was just 96 words.

Mr. Krahenbuhl and the agency charged to maintain international peace and security could take a lesson. So could the Hamas apologists who conveniently forget those inconvenient 2,500 rockets.