Medicaid For All

Medicaid For All is the MOST fiscally responsible health care policy in the USA political world right now. When I recently demanded my congressman Derek Kilmer explain why he was not more enthusiastically supporting a single-payer system, he responded with a thoughtful explanation of his policy, which included this comment in regards to "Medicare For All":

 "...health providers have raised the concern that putting everyone on Medicare without improving Medicare reimbursement rates would be problematic. Currently, most hospitals lose money on Medicare patients..."

That's EXACTLY why MediCARE For All is better than Obamacare or any privately-held health-insurance, is because it is the only system that actively pushes back against the exponential out of control increases in medical costs. But that's not what I am advocating for here... what I am advocating for here is MediCAID for all.

Why Medicaid instead of Medicare? Because:

1. Medicaid pays even lower rates to health providers than Medicare, pushing back against costs even more!
2. States have more control over their Medicaid policy than their Medicare policy, so that this is far easier to implement on a state by state level.
3. A senior friend of mine was recently forced to transition from Medicaid to Medicare. At least in his case Medicaid was a much better customer experience, with far less paperwork, more comprehensive coverage, and less over all stress in general. 

Some of my thoughtful Libertarian friends have pointed out the real problem here is that private health insurance uses our employers to shield them from our consumer wrath as our health care fees are raised. They point out that making employer-provided health insurance - a victory of organized labor - illegal (probably resulting in a Libertarian-celebrated collapse of private health insurance generally in favor of a pay-in-cash system,) could almost by itself solve the problem of skyrocketing health care costs.

Unfortunately, like so many other Libertarian truisms, this amounts to quaint platitude. Until serious Libertarian politicians make serious health care proposals, this is pure fantasy. Medicaid on the other hand is real:

Medicaid For All is very actionable:

1. Nevada is doing it.
2. California has started a political process that will (for the above mentioned reasons) likely result in it.
3. Vice President Mike Pence (one of my least favorite people) pioneered a conservative version of this in Indiana, where everyone pays an income-adjusted amount to support their medicaid coverage, when other health insurance options won't work for them ("Healthy Indiana Plan 2.0".)

As to just how possible and likely Medicaid For All is, consider this quote from my "Trump Card" post that demonstrates how much leaders of industry are looking to shed the burden of their employee's health care costs:

First, let's take what Trump himself has said on health care in a 1998 NBC interview: 

"...I am a liberal on health care, we have to take care of people that are sick... I like Universal health care, we have to take care, there is nothing else. What is the country all about if we are not going to take care of our sick?" 

Second, let's take the ultimate "evil corporation" by liberal standards, WalMart. In  2007 WalMart actually sided with the notoriously progressive SEIU in calling not for Obamacare, but full blown universal "socialist" health care, just like what Trump was praising in 1998.

Third, even GM Motors CEO Richard Wagoner testified on December 5th, 2008 before the House Financial Services Committee said something along the lines of "universal health care coverage would help us against foreign competition where health care is provided by their governments instead of by our competitors."

And if you are a small business entrepreneur or owner, worrying about the impacts of health care on you, your partners, and or employees doesn't help your bottom line by any stretch of the imagination. Under the Californian proposal mentioned above, studies show small businesses would end up saving more than 10% even with any required tax increases taken into consideration. 

Watch this carefully. Take notes. Watch it a second time to make sure you understand all of its political implications in 2018 and 2020 (because you do NOT want to be a Democrat in 2020 who has failed to make progress on Medicaid For All):

Stealthing

I am disappointed in first world humanity. The most insipid thing of all time, a new form of sexual violation called "stealthing" where supposedly a man slips off his condom while having sexual intercourse with a woman, has taken prominence in the media lately. I seriously question how relevant stealthing is in comparison to other forms of sexual violence in our society, and I think those propagating its importance are naive or opportunistic.

I agree with feminism insofar as it relies on facts, science or data, and eschews postmodern deconstructionism. Obviously discrimination based on sex or sexual orientation is a foul sin our society should have laws against. Non-consensual sex is horrid violence, no question about it, and should be punished as such. If full blown prison gang rape is the sexual equivalent of murder, than stealthing would be the sexual equivalent of slapping someone in the face hard enough to leave a bruise.

Keep in mind that in this case condoms slipping off are already a known form of condom failure, the risk of which she has already consented to. Is it sexual violence? Certainly. Does it deserve the same attention by society at large as the other forms of sexual violence in our society? I seriously doubt it. Should stealthing be punished if someone is convicted of such a crime? Yes, to the full extent of the law, whatever that may be. Should there be a law? Sure. How severe should it be? Something like slapping someone in the face and leaving a bruise. Is it provable? How can you prove someone did something on purpose that frequently happens on accident?

Besides questioning the severity and provability of stealthing compared to other forms of sexual violence, I openly challenge the assertion that it is a "rising trend." Show me numbers. I don't doubt that it happens... with 7 billion people in the world, 3 billion of them competing for sexual partners, no doubt heinous unpredictable behavior happens every day. But the source document everyone is referring to here doesn't even assert numbers that suggest stealthing is a "growing trend". Sure it must happen, sure it should be illegal.

Let me say something here about post-modernism and feminism. When these two are combined, and words start to mean different things for different authors, when we start hearing things like "patriarchy for me may mean something different than patriarchy means for her", when we eschew the very concept of having set definitions for words, this excludes some types of rational people (who depend on established vocabulary to communicate) from your conversation. Especially males, who's shoulders and backs industry has built its tremendous weight on, who under that pressure as a community have had to become extraordinarily rational in order to survive in the face of dangerous chemicals and machinery.

In a world of profound sexual violence and competition, who benefits from a party where the men are all invited to leave? I appreciate the contributions lesbians make to our world every day, was educated and personally mentored by more than a few myself, and fully realize the vast majority of them distance themselves from these kinds of male-hating irrational arguments. But just as there are aberrant males leaving sexual damage in their wake, certainly it is at least possible that there are opportunistic lesbians that have something against their most common sexual competition, men.

Isn't it ironic how convenient stealthing is for man haters? If a condom comes off by accident, how does a man prove his innocence in their eyes? Keep in mind that compared to other birth control failures, a condom accidentally slipping off was fairly likely to happen sooner or later - BUT in 2016 it was no crime - and now it will be. It is better for a woman to have sex with a lesbian because she can't get you pregnant. Condom? He will probably just stealth you.

Tom Leykis asserted that men needed to flush their condoms down the toilet, so that opportunistic females could not pull your condoms out of the trash and impregnate themselves with men's sperm non-consensually, as to be able to take advantage of men financially. I had a really hard time taking that whole line of thought seriously. Tom is the epitome of modern misogyny, yet stealthing is the exact opposite of anything he or any of his followers would ever do...

Naivete. Can you not see the chip on her shoulder as she stares at your female curves? More importantly, do you know what an internet troll is? Supposedly men are bragging about stealthing online. Do you have any idea the lengths to which a troll will go to offend you online? Do you have any idea what lengths I, B.F.Galbraith, have gone to offend people on line, primarily for my own entertainment? Have you not partaken of this forbidden fruit even once yourself, and taken a person or community for a ride to Alice's Wonderland?

Stealthing is an appropriated term from gaming. In gaming, stealthing is sneaking up on and punking your enemies when they least expect it. Think about that: a gamer term - ironically referring to strategic deception - used to inject a new phrase into the language of sexual violence? Seriously, you don't suspect anything amiss here?

The internet knows how weak feminism is when tainted with postmodernism. They also know how ubiquitous postmodern feminism is. When you abandon facts, numbers and data, then you have no reliable standards for evidence. It is then an extreme temptation for your critics to inject myths into your network of knowledge, and see how gullible you actually will become before you abandon your silly postmodernism. So far the depths of your naivete have not been discovered.

If feminism survives, it will be without postmodernism.  It will recognize objective reality and feminism's place in it. The future of feminism will have more facts, data, and science.

One Boy at a Time

In our era of gender-fluidity and pomosexuality, maleness has been demonized. Whenever any of us experiences a strong sexual impulse, we sag our heads in shame of our maleness. By "emasculation" I refer to any time we are made to feel less because of our maleness.

Women have maleness. They carry genes which are intended to benefit male offspring should they reproduce. This maleness can be expressed in their own biology and personality. Whenever a woman is asked to refrain from "unladylike behavior" she is experiencing emasculation.

Sexual objectification of women is the most obvious form of female emasculation. When men only see her as a sex object, men cannot appreciate the male characteristics a woman is contributing to the group. Her male qualities are ignored, and thus her maleness emasculated.

In the martial arts, I have worked out with numerous females who were very physically attractive. Often we would be working on ground fighting, on a mat in very close quarters, bodies weighing on each other as we battled for positions to dominate each other. However these circumstances were far from erotic, as their male aggression forced me into numerous painful submissions as I was choked, pinned, or had my arm twisted until I surrendered.

These females, as sexy as they were, were brothers in arms to me, and that is exactly how I saw them. Without others to spar with, I could not get better at martial arts, and another potential sparring partner was much more rare and valuable to me than yet another potential sexual partner. Now as I encounter new attractive female students, my words for them are brother to brother, as I help them awaken and harness the male within: "Hit me as hard as you can. OK, now swing your body into it. Hit me harder! That's better, now keep your hands up!"

But most often emasculation is used to openly assault straight male sexual identity. Straight males are criticized for being more attracted to fit females over unfit ones - as if they were the only ones who can control who they are attracted to. They are criticized for being too forward with females they are attracted to, and criticized for not being forward enough. Never minding the fact that most females will develop self-esteem problems if they see themselves as wholly unattractive to men, male heterosexual attraction towards females is often seen as the definition of pure evil.

"One Boy at a Time" is what I refer to a specific canned response I often see on social media. It goes something like this: "males are all inherently misogynist. We have to overcome rape culture by teaching them to see females as people instead of sexual objects, one boy at a time." This sounds like a green skinned witch with a long warty nose, a dark hooded robe, and a straight razor wandering a city park and castrating any little boy she can get her hands on. This assumes most males can not see for themselves the painfully obvious fact that females are also people, as if most males constantly groped most attractive females they see. The message to boys is clear: "the way your were born is NOT OK."

One Boy at a Time is incredibly and naively optimistic about protecting females from male aggression. First it is assumed that a little education can change a person's behavior significantly. Second, it assumes that a "one at a time" approach can keep up with the birthrate of new males.

First, the kind of opportunist that takes advantage of vulnerable females at each convenient opportunity is not most males, or we would live in a much different world. Just as all women carry male characteristics, males also carry female characteristics and have an empathetic, nurturing side that is horrified at the thought of another human being being sexually victimized. This means that when a women is being sexually victimized by a male, it is a male that is abnormal in some way. With two equally large populations, if only 5% of population A is aggressive towards population B, that is plenty of aggressors to, as the days go by, repeatedly and regularly harass 100% of population B, even if 95% of Population A is horrified at the prospect of such harassment happening to population B. This kind of opportunist, the 5% as I have referred to here, aren't going to change by way of educational effort.

Second "One Boy at a Time" is not frequent enough to catch up with the birth rate of males. If every male is born with this sort of original sin of built-in-misogyny than no one-on-one tutoring program on how to think about females is going to reach them all. One Boy at a Time is practically inadequate.

Once upon a time I did an internship for college credit with an extremely progressive activist organization. One of the leaders in this organization invited me over to her place to work on some strategic planning documents. She acted as if she was unsure about where the most comfortable place to get work done would be, going from kitchen to living room to - before I realized what was going on - her bedroom, as she gestured to her bed "we could get some work done there." Not only did I need this project for college credit, I was married, and even more to the point, she was NOT my type. I pretended like I was just too stupid to understand and explained I needed a table to write on, and managed to get some work on the documents done with her before leaving without further incident.

This was not the only time women have tried to coerce me into sexual encounters with them when I found myself alone with them. I use this specific example so that it is crystal clear that from my experience, hard-line anti-cis-male ultra-progressive feminist females are far from above this kind of harassment. Ideals do not guarantee behavior, and women possess a wealth of toxic masculinity themselves.

In my personal life, I categorically don't hang out with women who are having more than one drink, ever. I reserve the right to be a red blooded male. I retain my maleness - I have sexual might that is all too easily unleashed - and I reserve the right to constrain it by avoiding even the appearance of evil.
If it LOOKS bad, why go there?  Male. Heterosexual. 100%. That is my sexual identity, ready and willing to inflict bedroom mayhem on vixens everywhere, if unrestrained. Restraint is part of taking my sexual identity seriously. THIS prevents "rape culture." THESE kind of "avoiding the appearance of evil" standards are the ONLY effective protection for females from highly opportunistic males. 

Orthodox Stance With Weapons

Orthodox stance, by my definition (and most others), refers to a fighting stance where:

1. The weak foot is forward, and the strong foot is back.
2. The weak hand is forward, and the strong hand is back.
3. Both hands are held defensively in front of the the body or head.
4. The stance is square enough so that the opponent can still be easily reached with the strong hand.

In fencing they have the opposite of an orthodox stance. They are standing so far sideways that it is hard to reach the opponent with the rear hand, and they are leading with the strong side. This stance is often popular in light contact point-sparring competitions that imitate fencing.

The best weapon fighters right now seem to be using a stance that is strong side forward, but which is otherwise what I would think of as an orthodox stance.

I am very interested in using an orthodox stance (instead of a strong side forward stance) in weapon fighting, a tactic that after a lot of experimentation and development, I tried out at the 2017 Pacific North West Tipon Tipon:

Besides Boxing and Kick Boxing, typically Sword & Sheild fighters will fight with an orthodox stance:

And most people who train with spears quickly realize you want to use an orthodox stance with long weapons as well:

Even in the notoriously strong-side-forward world of Japanese weapon martial arts, with long weapons a more orthodox stance is preferred:

What the orthodox stance brings to smaller weapons such as knives, is it keeps the empty hand in the fight. Normally beginners and many others will want to knife fight with only one side of their body, keeping distance from the opponent and not endangering their weak hand (which is full of vulnerable and valuable veins, nerves and bones). But when using an orthodox stance in knife fighting, it forces you to keep the weak side of your body in the fight, so that you are more likely to employ two hands instead of just one:

The other big advantage of the orthodox stance is that kick boxers and boxers should be able to integrate their unarmed strikes into their weapon duels more easily, if they are starting from a stance they are already trained to use.

Right now the orthodox stance is not the dominant stance in full contact weapon sparring, but for me the verdict is still out on this.

Kudos for Kudo

By the early 80's martial arts master Takashi Azuma had earned advanced black belts in Judo and Kyokushin. He then created a synthesis of the two arts, now called Kudo. At first glance Kudo looks like MMA with uniforms and helmets (raising the question as to why we still need Judo or TKD in the Olympics when we could have Kudo instead):

But the use of the Gi in Kudo is even more practical and street-fighting related than what we find in in other Gi-grappling arts:

While those helmets make for some good-looking athletes with relatively few boxer's noses and cauliflower ears compared to MMA, those helmets also help allow headbutts which are now often illegal even in MMA. When I studied Judo off and on over the course of a decade (never making it close to yellow belt,) I was always puzzled at how easy it was to accidentally smack your head into your opponent's head in many Judo throws. Allowing headbutts as intentional attacks makes for more head position awareness:

Kudo has a rich tradition and philosophy as well, complete with (above mentioned) legendary martial arts master founder doing a super human martial arts stunt:

Though it is interesting that Kudo has been around far longer than MMA, Kudo has managed to incorporate plenty of boxing, Muay Thai and BJJ over the years, so that it is basically the perfect martial art for the self defense consumer:

Health Care Reality

I have stated repeatedly that the number one reason why Hillary lost the electoral college vote was because she continued to defend Obamacare (ACA) even as it continued to fail the fly-over states. Many of you seem to think Health Care Coverage is not the number one political issue of our time, yet it is.

First understand how bad Obamacare actually got for many people. In at least 5 states there were only one carrier in the ACA health exchanges, while healthcare insurance prices soared in those states as you would expect with such a monopoly. Alabama's health insurance prices became more expensive than California's. Some of that was state-level self-inflicted wounds by conservative states rejecting the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, but just as the public option would have been required to make the ACA/Obamacare work, so allowing for this obstructionism in Obamacare's design was also a fatal flaw.

Various polls have shown that when the policy is explained to the person being asked, we in the USA strongly prefer a "single payer" system for health care to any alternative. The problem is now the name "single payer" because of the specific disaster mentioned above with health insurance monopolies created in Obamacare exchanges. The plain American English for what we mean by "single payer" (which is not private health insurance monopolies) is "Medicare for All," as espoused by Bearnie Sander's platform. There was a very significant anti-establishment overlap between Trump voters and Sanders voters, but once Hillary got her party's nomination, she guaranteed "Medicare for All" would not be on the agenda, and voters desperate for change on this one most important issue had little choice but to vote for Trump.

Before  Obamacare, we Americans were easily frightened by tales from Western Europe and Canada about the failures of single-payer health care coverage. However now that we have seen just how rapidly things can decline, a "European-style health care system" is sounding very good to us. There is one other English speaking country in the Americas, and they are right next door to us. We know the Canadians have a superior health care system to ours, and there isn't any hiding it. 10 years ago you could have pointed to their taxes and convinced us it was too luxurious for the USA, but now that we have seen our health care prices skyrocket in spite of the Obamacare overhaul, "Canadian taxes" are the least of our health insurance expense concerns.

As Americans, we believe in freedom, so that employer based health insurance is a very poor cultural match for us:

1. From an employer's perspective, an entrepreneur or manager shouldn't have to sweat how to cover employee health insurance. This is not a natural part of the wages vs. hours formula, and when health care insurance prices go up for exactly the same or worse coverage, your employees do not appreciate what you are paying for them because they aren't paying for it, except for in lower and less frequent raises. Employer-based health insurance impedes our ability as Americans to complete fairly in business.
2. From an employee's perspective, the threat of losing employment means loosing access to your doctor. For anyone with a significant health condition OR at risk for a serious health care condition (basically all of us,) this is very like threatening our lives. In other words, employer-based health care for the employee is strikingly similar to guns-pointed-at-our-heads slavery.

I also often say "do not tell me about political parties. Instead give me Libertarians and Socialists, so we can have a grown up conversation about meaningful policies." In an era were most jobs are rapidly being replaced my automation, the most important question voters should be asking themselves (besides perhaps issues around maintaining their rights to vote in the first place,) is "what should be paid for by taxes, and what shouldn't be paid for by taxes." We get so caught up in political bike shed issues, that this critical question is rarely debated:

• Roads should be paid for by taxes, because they are too expensive for any of us individually to build and maintain, but we all need those roads. See also military, court system, government, etc.
• Chocolate should not be paid for by taxes, because it is inexpensive enough for anyone who wants it to get it, and even in the case of extraordinarily expensive chocolate, we do not depend on chocolate to survive. See also piano lessons, watermelons, entertainment, etc.

In the days of the traveling door-to-door doctor (think 1800's,) health care coverage was far more affordable and far less effective at extending our survival. Now in 2017 health care is like roads, incredibly expensive and critical to survival in our society. Health care should be paid for by taxes and have have nothing to do with our decisions regarding business plans or how we spend our days.

Mint

At the Game Arts Guild we get the most powerful hardware we can afford by buying last-years laptops that haven't sold and go on sale to make room for the latest inventory. We then put Linux on them instead of Windows to get maximum performance (and so they aren't at all outdated.) I have two secrets that make this simple to do.

First and foremost, if your Linux machine has a problem where the screen freezes up for no apparent reason (a chronic problem for us in the past), do this:

(This is from: http://askubuntu.com/questions/760731/lenovo-thinkpad-11e-randomly-freezes-on-ubuntu-16-04 Note: to edit grub, you have to run the text editor from the command line with “sudo”. In Mint, you would open a terminal and type “sudo xed”.) 

Edit /etc/default/grub. Change the line

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

to

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="intel_idle.max_cstate=1 quiet splash" 

then in the terminal enter:

sudo update-grub

and restart the computer.

Second, use Mint Linux:

1. Your first clue is because it has been the most popular version of Linux on DistroWatch.com for a very long time. 
2. Your second clue is that though it is based on Ubuntu (the other most popular type of Linux) it has three major versions, two Ubuntu versions (MATE based on the older, faster, more established Gnome 2, vs. Cinnamon based on the slower, fancier Gnome 3,) and a Debian version, so that the Mint Linux community has a very clear definition of what their operating system experience should be like in spite of whatever desktop (MATE vs. Cinnamon) or back end (Ubuntu vs. Debian) they are using. Obviously you should be going with Mint MATE in most cases.
3. Anything lighter weight than Mint MATE (like say Xubuntu) comes at a great sacrifice (as with Xubuntu's Thunar file manager which in my experience cannot reliably either move large files around or see USB drives. Lubuntu? Worse.) The good news is that Android is turning into a real OS called "Andromeda," and most low end machines will not need a new OS for most users.
4. That Mint "definition of operating system experience" is ideal. The default set up is simple, familiar, easy to use, and conscious of screen real estate. It installs easily. It starts with the software that makes the most sense such as VLC for a media player and GIMP for an image editor. This Mint definition has also very stable, not changing with fads like Windows 8. Installing other software on it (such as the Chrome Browser) is easy.