Beyond the Cusp

May 21, 2013

For a Healthy, Well Regulated Society Where Every Action is Regulated, Illegal or Mandatory

We live in the era of rule by bureaucracy. The path to this impossibility was a quick slide down a slippery slope of lazy politicians. At some point in time, the early 1960s is my best guess, our elected officials found an easier way to make laws while not needing to understand or research the particulars for the application and implementation of said laws. Their new operational model was they simply passed new legislation that gave a somewhat malleable and vague definition of the target ideas and ideals the legislation was targeted to produce and then assigned to different cabinet departments, cabinet Secretaries, select committees, or even in extreme cases some NGO to make the necessary regulations in order to fulfill the requirements stated and set in the legislation. Never in the wildest imagination of any conspiracy theory was there a more powerful way to slide down the slippery slope to a society where any and every act is either illegal or required or, in the best of cases, both. The epitome and perfection of this procedure will be taking effect throughout the rest of the year and is scheduled to be complete and workable by January 2014; but trust when we tell you that there will be more regulations spawned by this legislation in every year going forward for as far as one can envision. This strangling legislation is the Affordable Care Act which is better known as Obama Care. Most of us probably thought that everything would have been fully fleshed out and completely defined and everything that could possibly be required described in full and complete detail somewhere in the many hundreds of pages of the bill. After all, were we not told by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi that we had to pass the bill in order to see what was in the bill? Well, that probably meant something quite different than was understood by most of us.

 

The reality is that within the legislation were hundreds of pages enacting or setting in place the requirement for many items which had absolutely nothing to do with healthcare while also not defining definitively much of anything and simply left amorphous definitions of intent of coverage and systems and left much of the filling in of details and regulations up to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. What is even more worrisome is that when these laws are passed such as Obama Care there is no date which prevents new regulations from being added past that point. This was a peculiarity which President Obama decided provided an unintended plethora of new regulations. In order to mine this gold mine that never stops giving technically, President Obama made a position named Regulations Czar Cass Sunstein with the given job description of reviewing government regulations in order to delete those regulations which are no longer deemed to be fulfilling any necessary purpose. The actual work being performed by Mr. Sunstein is to review all legislation passed into law over the entire history of the United States mining them for potential application of new regulations which serve the intents and ends of the Administration’s legislative and policy aims. Since any new regulations, or any regulations, which are written in order to fulfill the required implementation of passed legislation does not require debate or even the knowledge of Congress and can be completely enacted and implemented by the Administrative branch of the government. Simply put, if the President can produce justification for any regulation within any piece of existing law, then the regulation can be written, implemented, and enforced without the knowledge or action from any other branch of government. If this worries you, welcome to the scariest of secrets with which the Federal government is being grown beyond the wildest dreams of the most ardent fascist or other big government advocate.

 

Now for the really worrisome part of this story, Obama Care. Just imagine what a policy wonk given unlimited power to write regulations with the intent of controlling all actions over such areas as diet, exercise, habits, risky behavior, participation in dangerous sports, accident avoidance, and virtually anything one can imagine a person either participating or avoiding in their lives as long as these regulations can be tied in any manner to healthcare costs. We have seen a small example of such in New York City with Mayor Bloomberg and his smoking ban, trans fat ban, salt limiting, and attempted soda size limitation. When addressing all things which can be considered as potential health risks, where risk is defined as requiring healthcare expenditures, and you quickly realize that everything in life is now legally defined as something that government may choose to regulate. With government health care where the government decides what care you as a patient are entitled to receive, just imagine what requirements can be placed on one so that they can qualify for the best possible care allowed. Your diet can be controlled by requiring a scientifically specified diet with excessively restrictive meal plan. You might also be required to perform specified physical exercise routine. Should your weight deviate from the governmental norms for BMI you could be placed on an even more restricted diet to address your potential health risk. You like trail biking, sky diving, scuba diving, or any other potentially dangerous or injury prone activity? Not if you want healthcare to cover sprains, broken bones or other injuries which could result even if one does not participate in any injury risk behavior. Or perhaps in order to enjoy such activities one would be required to be licensed after taking required instruction which is required for your own good and would presumably teach you the safest manner to participate in your selected activity. Of course the fee for the licenses would be directly proportional to the risks involved in the particular activity. In all honesty, nothing in life is beyond being controlled in order to assure you remain in tip-top healthy shape in order to minimize the likelihood for you to require other than normative healthcare treatments. There is already a system which will likely be the eventuality of Obama Care which is known as the Complete Lives System. This system sets up formulae which are to be used to determine whether or not it would prove to be cost effective for government to provide healthcare services depending on the cost of the care required, the prognosis for success, the age of the patient, and numerous other cold, hard facts which then make the determination whether or not you will be treated. This system almost guarantees that there will be nothing beyond the most basic care provided to the elderly and high cost procedures would also not be approved for youth, especially if the problem will require continued care. This is as impersonal a system and arbiter for the dispensing healthcare as one could ever imagine, but then government has never been accused of being emotional or particularly caring. The future under universal government healthcare, which is inevitable under Obama Care, will result in a tangled web of regulatory requirements and restrictions which will ensnare every life and strangle from them any deviance from whatever is determined to be governmental norm. The other unavoidable result will be the absolute and complete end to personal privacy as in order to assure your life meets all health requirements, your life will necessarily have to be totally monitored. The amount of privacy that remains today, as restrictive as it may seem, will seem like unbelievable freedom in a decade or two when the government has reached the point where it must regulate all activities, diets, exercise, and all else in order to assure the healthiest of populations under its care. After all, it will be for your own good, honest.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

May 17, 2013

Secure Roads From Rock Terror Before Worry Over Price Tag

Justice Minister Tzipi Livni is once again putting the cart before the horse. She is making a grand display of where her heart lies and it is not with the victims of real terrorism but with a phantom crime which has yet to produce all that many solid arrests, let alone actually taken lives. The vast majority of so-called “Price Tag” crimes have never been solved while those that have produced a perpetrator were found to have been committed in a set-up by Arabs trying to place blame on neighboring Jews for a self-inflicted crime. Yet this same justice and law enforcement system which expends inordinate amounts of manpower and investigative hours chasing phantoms and detaining innocent Jewish youth from the communities in Judea and Samaria only to have to release them due to lack of evidence while not arresting those hurling deadly, life-threatening projectiles including large rocks and fire-bottle-bombs at private vehicles and government vehicles with literal abandon free of any consequences. But you are doing that which government is best at doing, turning the real priorities upside down. You choose, Minister Livni, to chase after the least criminal act in both severity and numbers while turning a blind eye in order to ignore the threat to countless lives of the innocent and challenge to the authority of the State of Israel. Let us simply compare your priorities of placing “Price Tag” crimes above rock and firebomb terror attacks for concerted legal efforts.

 

“Price Tag” crimes are an illegal act against property. Much of the “Price Tag” crimes are a committing of vandalism which in and of itself often would only even be qualified as a misdemeanor and not rise to the level of felony except that the vandalism which qualifies as a “Price Tag” crime automatically becomes classified as a crime against the State. Such an inflation of the perceived importance of “Price Tag” crimes is purely political and minimally a legal classification. Yet a “Price Tag” crime which amounts to under a thousand shekels in damages has become a critical focus for the Justice Ministry. Meanwhile, the potentially fatal barrages on our streets and in our communities targeting our children and our adults, our police and our troops, the youth and the elderly, a universal and lethal threat which is not being taken even as a criminal act yet you want to invest more enforcement assets and resources chasing after phantom criminals and false-flag crimes.

 

Meanwhile, the standing orders which for the police, the IDF, the Border Police, and any other enforcement personnel is to run away should they come under assault by rocks, bricks, or fire-bombs if retreat is at all possible. Israeli citizens have been assaulted, some, like Asher Palmer and his infant son literally days before his first birthday, have died as a result of these so-called nuisance attacks and an innocent little three years-old girl named Adelle Biton continues to lie comatose while fighting for her little life as the result of the large rock that crushed her tender skull weeks ago and still nobody has been arrested for this crime. The Palestinians behind these attacks are having a propaganda field day posting videos on You-Tube of Israel’s cowardly IDF troops running from their brave stone-throwing Palestinians. Free the arms of law enforcement to complete their assign tasks of enforcing the laws using passive, non-lethal measures and arrest the leadership and as many as continue breaking the peace after the first week’s enforcement. A show of fortitude and resolution is all that is required, that and taking the first step and it is all up to you. It could not be any simpler.

 

This is an even worse example of misplaced priorities than your interference with Minister Bennett’s efforts to find accommodations which would satisfy both the religious and the Women of the Wall ending a terrible strife in the religious fabric of the State. What could be your reason to interfere in the procedures being taken by the Minister of Religious Services attempts to reconcile a rift between two factions of Judaism except for your endless efforts to place your name in the headlines. Often your actions seem to have no other explanation beyond that you missed yesterday’s headlines and you refuse to miss them two days in a row. Make a positive headline stating that the rock and fire-bomb terrorism will no longer be tolerated and relative quiet will return to the streets and towns within two weeks; refuse to change the stand-down order against terrorism and you would start the countdown to the Third Intifada.

 

The people have petitioned the Justice Ministry for protection, troops and police on the front lines obey restrictive do-not-shoot orders against such attacks, and the government including the Prime Minister and his Cabinet kowtow to world opinion by allowing these crimes to continue unopposed. You, Justice Minister Livni, if you wish could take steps to enforce the law and provide safety for all Israelis from such attacks. Both Arab and Jew have been targeted at one time or another by these viscous attacks. Knowing that there is little you would love more than to once again be considered for the position of Prime Minister and before you is the golden ticket to that office. What is even more amusing is all you need do is enforce the law and allow whatever measures are necessary and end the attacks on motorists and other civilians. Step up and show that the rock and fore-bombing attacks will no longer be tolerated and they will soon stop because they continue solely because there is no enforcement. End the capitulation to world pressure and protect all Israeli citizens as your position requires and reap the rewards of standing up for justice. A golden opportunity stands before you Ms. Livni and all that is required is for you to grasp a situation and do the right thing by all the people of Israel.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

May 1, 2013

Can America Survive in a World Without G0d?

There has been a slowly rising crescendo for half a century from a growing group of conservatives who are religious and hold their faith in the L0rd as dearly as they hold to the rights as delineated in the founding documents, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and increasingly the Declaration of Independence. It is in the Declaration of Independence that these religious conservatives find their strongest arguments that they are uniquely positioned to more fully understand the ideas and ideals behind the founders and what they viewed as the origins of the nation they wished to found. They also take to heart many of the arguments made between the different founders which many were fortunately preserved in the letters of correspondence. The likely most famous coming from John Adams who wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” But even this quote falls short of the delineation of the manners for power distribution which was the backbone of the Declaration of Independence. Despite the watering down of the reference in order to pacify a select group of founders who feared placing too strong a reference to things religious as they feared relating too close an interdependence between the Almighty and the governance of the country they were to found. Still, the distribution of power is given a direct flow from the Creator to the individual people and from them to government. The government was relinquished to accepting only those powers permitted by the people and the people retained all other powers and rights not relegated to government. And taking things one step further, the power which was relinquished to the purview of government was to be most powerful at the most local level and from their powers would be relented upwards until the Federal Government would receive the least power and only those powers which were furthest from the citizens as those powers were to be retained at the governance closest to the people and most readily monitored and corralled by the citizens. The Constitution went even further in limiting the powers of the Federal Government in that it spent more words forbidding powers to the Federal Government than granting it powers.

 

It would be an impossible argument to try and claim that as time has passed that the Americans as a peoples have strayed from their strict religious beliefs and are now at best evenly divided between religiously observant and largely secular. If one were to query a plurality of Americans as to where their rights originate, they would likely say they were granted by the government and likely the Federal Government. This is exactly the opposite of the ideas that were the underpinning of the intentions and inspirations of the Founding Fathers. This belief has become so widespread that the Federal Government does not even pretend to follow the restriction on their powers as delineated in the Constitution. This has been a growing problem which found its origins in the humanist movement which really gained steam at the turn of the twentieth century. The prominence of the humanist, secular humanist in particular, was given a huge impetus with the writings of two men of science, the first being Charles Darwin and the second Sigmund Freud. Between these two gentlemen much of what had been wonder and the purview of the Creator were now reassigned to the purviews of science and given Earthly explanations. This drove the movement that culminated in <a href=http://www.usconstitution.net/xconst_Am17.html?ModPagespeed=noscript>Amendment 17</a> to the Constitution which stripped the States of their representation at the Federal Level thus removing the power to limit the powers stolen from the States by the Federal Government which over time allowed the Federal Government to gather far superior power over that of the States and other local governances. This inverted the power curve from G0d – People – Local Governments – State Governments – Federal Government to the new divisions of power which now appears to closely resemble Federal Government – State Governments – Local Governments – People. When the followers of secular humanism rearranged the structures of power in the governance of the United States they not only inverted the entire power curve, they removed the Creator from the picture completely and placed the Federal Government as the originator of all powers, rights, and grantor of all privilege. The same year that Amendment 17 was ratified there was another, namely Amendment 16. This permitted the Federal Government to collect an income tax from the people which further placed the peoples under the thumb of the Federal Government as the governance now had a direct access to one’s wealth.

 

Once the Federal Government inverted the entire power structure which had been implemented under the system designed by the Founding Fathers it began to take over those areas which had been relegated to religion and seen as the place where religion and thus G0d was responsible. Such areas included assisting those who were in need, those unable to care for themselves, feeding the hungry, assisting those who were unemployed, the homeless, providing for the education of the people, providing health care, childcare of orphans, and all distribution of charity. One by one the government took control of these areas with the concept that the government would provide such care without subjecting those who were in need with sermons and other pressures which religious institutions were presumably guilty of forcing upon those they helped. The fact that a church run soup kitchen might impinge upon those receiving their food that they say a prayer and listen to hymns while they ate was cast as being an unnecessary victimization on those who were needy. Why should anybody have to put up with such an imposition of their sensibilities just to receive a meal. Government was going to save these needy people from such an imposition. Government took over the care for children in orphanages with the reasoning that the government would be more suitable and particular when choosing adoptive parents and this would free those seeking to adopt from the possibility for meeting unnecessary religious requirements. The result was that the main determination for adopting a child became more aligned with wealth or who one knows than more humanistic qualities. Unemployment, charity, you name it and the government crept in and usurped responsibility replacing religion in every sector of our society. By the end of this year the government will be well on their way to replacing religion in its last bastion, hospital and health care. The death knell for religious provided health care is known as Obama Care which will slowly morph health care in ways that will wrest it from the hands of religious institutions eventually making government the sole provider for health care just as they have taken over every other area in society which once was provided by religious institutions. This was not done by accident as government was seeking to replace religion and replace G0d as the originator and guarantor of rights and freedoms. Let us pray that when we find that we the people can no longer suffer the overreach and domination of government over the individual that we can find the strength of character and the power of faith and trusting in our Creator take back from government those rights and privileges it has stolen from us the people and return the balance of power such that the people are under the protection of G0d and not the vassals under government.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

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