FRENCH HEALTH CARE, SOME SILLY STUFF, AND IRAN: #25

FRENCH HEALTH CARE

Even though United Health Care sits at the top of the charts when it comes to denying coverage, and even though those denials have most likely caused many avoidable deaths, those denials are no excuse for murder. It's easy to believe that a denial of service led to the murder recently of United Health Care's CEO because for-profit healthcare in this day and age is an abomination, plain and simple. The data on both the ridiculous costs and the poor outcomes of the American for-profit system are clear and compelling.

Around the world, the United States ranks 48th in life expectancy. France is 13th. Of the world's 38 high income countries, the US has the highest infant mortality rate and the highest maternal mortality rate, averaging about three times higher. That's a disgrace. And yet the US spends nearly twice as much per capita for healthcare than France.

So Americans are dumping profit into a healthcare system that provides lousy outcomes while single-payer systems clearly supply the best bang for the buck. That's not to say that there aren't problems with single-payer systems, though. And the problems take two primary forms, funding and regional disparities in the availability of services.

Funding a single-payer system, if the single payer is the government, means taxes. And we are in a world in which rich folks are spending a lot of money, time, and effort to convince poor folks that they - the rich folks - are being taxed too much. So, incrementally, countries like France with vibrant single-payer systems are falling farther and farther into debt. We just have to look across the Channel to see a country whose single-payer healthcare system is almost completely broken, a country in which Thatcher joined Reagan years ago in making government itself villainous. That populist proposition, in France at least, is joined by a leftist philosophy that rejects any cuts in government services of any type while not having the balls to push for the taxes necessary to completely pay for those services. The result in France is a system that's still working quite well but that is in debt, limping along, waiting for the debt shoe to drop.

Two things have to be said. First of all, I'm an American expat with  limited understanding of the long term history of the various political movements in France and a limited familiarity of the thinking of the folks in Paris that shape policy. I'm just sticking my two cents in and my two cents is worth exactly that, two cents. This is simply the way that the situation looks to me today. And secondly, I report that the French system has never failed us. We see specialists when we must, we have scheduled medical procedures when needed in a timely fashion, and throughout we have been treated with comity and respect. We just have the weird habit of being concerned about the future.

About those taxes. The French pay just under 10% of their salary, capital gains, and most other forms of income to the government as what are called their social charges. Employers contribute as well. Public pensions, like Social Security Retirement, are not taxable. In return, the system pays about 70% of all medical and drug bills. And costs are strictly controlled. Our GP charges the mandated 30€ for each of our several annual wellness visits, less than our copay with insurance in the USofA. We get all but about 2€ back from the public system and from our supplemental insurance for each visit. The supplemental insurance is purchased from a for-profit insurance company, costs us under 2000€ annually, and covers most of the costs that the government program does not. The full cost without any insurance at all for a routine surgery, like for cataracts, runs under 2000€. With our public and private insurances, I paid less than 100€ out of pocket for each eye. Cathey had two dental implants, for which coverage is not very comprehensive, and paid just over 1000€ total.

Over ten years ago, before I left the USofA, I paid $6,000 off the top of my paycheck annually to cover Cathey and was paid $6,000 less that I could have been to cover my employer's cost for insuring me. Do the math. $12,000 not counting out-of-pocket expenses, not an insignificant amount if you have a health problem that your insurance doesn't cover fully. In other words, your not being taxed anew. It's that the money you are paying for your health care is being put in a different pocket, a pocket that isn't worried about how much profit can be realized from your illness.

We're fortunate that we live in a rural region that's close to two small cities, Narbonne and Beziers, featuring not one or two but several hospitals and clinics. We have a wealth of choices. The farther into the hinterlands that you live, the fewer services that are readily available and the farther that you have to travel to get more specialized care. Services do tend to congregate in the cities. It makes sense that retirees often do, too.

That's all for now. Happy to take questions.

SILLINESS - IT'S BEEN AWHILE

There are times that I just can't help myself.

It takes a sloth one month to digest one leaf.

Chicle is a tree sap that is used in chewing gum. You guessed it. Chiclets. Not only can't the body break chicle down, but more recently, they have begun replacing chicle with stuff like synthetic polymers that the digestive tract can't handle either. Your Momma was smart when she told you not to swallow your gum. It's almost certainly gonna come out the other end, whether you realize it or not.

Moving to a different vital bodily function, breathing, did you know that trees produce less than half of Earth's oxygen? Phytoplankton is your friend. Don't plant a tree. Save the oceans.

Enough!

IRAN

If you haven't figured out that the war in the Middle East is Israel versus Iran, you haven't figured out the war in the Middle East. Because of Iran, the government of Lebanon has lost control of its southern half. Because of Iran, the Houthis destabilizing Yemen fire missiles at Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and shipping in the Gulf. And Iran and Putin are apparently the last remaining friends of Assad, that beacon of democracy in Syria, and Iran has just decided to skedaddle. EDIT And as I was writing this, Assad skedaddled too.

Many blame Israel for growing instability in the Middle East. And of course, Western meddling is a convenient bogeyman around the world for folks with grievances to air. But if there is one simple way to bring peace to the Middle East, that is to topple the mullahs in Iran and end that country's sponsorship of terrorism in the region. There was a time when the United States would have tried to do that through covert action by the CIA. It was wrong then and would be wrong now. But that doesn't mean that we should not encourage at every opportunity any movement in Iran that encourages Iranian women to live freely as equals with Iranian men and encourage those Iranian men to dance with their women friends and partners in the streets.

BIOLUMINESCENT PETUNIAS, MET GALA, MESSI AND MORE: #22

 ODD STUFF

I read. It's silly of me. But I read.

In Rhode Island, it is illegal to wear transparent clothing. So no Met Gala in Rhode Island.

A repeat attempt by the city of Kyle, Texas, to break the world record for the largest gathering of people with one name fell short despite 706 Kyles turning up at a park in that suburb of Austin. The current Guinness record is held by a town in Bosnia that got 2,325 people named Ivan together in 2017. 

And finally, an 81 year-old man has been arrested for busting up windows and windshields in his neighborhood for the past ten years with ball bearings fired from a slingshot. Get off his lawn! 

EDIT: Shortly after his arrest, the gentleman in question died of a heart attack. We'll never know...

BIOLUMINESCENT PETUNIAS

Lede: Scientists from the US, the UK and Russia walk into a bar.

Punch Line: Bioluminescent Petunias.

And there you have it. For a mere 29USD, a garden variety petunia that glows in the dark will be delivered to your door. Spliced genetically with a bioluminescent mushroom, the petunias need no special handling and glow naturally, whether in a light or dark environment. They don't need 'charging'  and they'll glow all night long. That way, you will be constantly reminded that whatever a person can think of, a person can do. And another person will pay for it.

MESSI'S NAPKIN

Speaking of paying for something, a 25 year-old napkin covered with the scribbled terms of a proposed contract with a 13 year-old Lionel Messi sold for just under $1,000,000 recently. There's too much money in the world.

AND FURTHERMORE 

I'm a coward. A visiting friend called the war in Gaza genocide. I said that there were probably war crimes being committed, but not genocide. She said that it was genocide and that perhaps we shouldn't talk about. And in the interest of domestic tranquility, I said, "Okay." 

I'm a coward.

NEWS FLASH

Guilty! Random thoughts:

 

*He'll never go to jail. 

*The Supreme Court will not exonerate him directly. If a lower court vacates the verdict, they simply won't agree to take New York's appeal. If the matter comes before them with the guilty verdict intact, SCOTUS will find a way to return the matter to a sympathetic court that will vacate the verdict, then refuse to take New York's appeal. At some point during the process. Elena's keyboard will burst into flames.

* He will probably be elected President in 2024.

* He will probably not be elected President in 2024.

* The above is not a contradiction. The 2024 election will be such a hot mess that there's no telling who will have won and who lost. 

* Macron is my President.

LONGYOU CAVES, WASHINGTON AND CHERRIES, CATALINA ISLAND AND MORE: #21

LONGYOU CAVES

Amazing recent archeological find in China. Follow the link above to a Wiki that's startling in its brevity given the scope of the mystery. Check out the YouTube videos. It's as if the pyramids were built underground, the Egyptians left no record of their having been built, and there was no above ground evidence of their very existence. Huge amounts of stone had to have been excavated to create underground spaces covering over 300,000 sq ft, but there's no evidence of where the debris went. None of the local structures utilize matching stone. And, at only 2,000 years old (if current dating is correct), the idea that the meticulous Chinese bureaucracy failed to mention their construction truly boggles the mind.

WASHINGTON AND THE EVIDENCE

An archeologist poking around in the dirt basement of Mount Vernon found a couple of bottles of cherries. Still moisture inside. Smelled like cherry blossoms. Experts confirm that the bottles are probably 250 years old. The folks that run the museum that is George Washington's home on the Potomac will tell you that the story of a young George chopping down a cherry tree is pure myth. They lie. I think that the two bottles buried in the basement tell us that George's father was preserving the evidence should George ever change his story. It's the sort of thing that my dad would have done.

CATALINA ISLAND 

A century ago, 18 mule deer were imported to Catalina Island off the SoCal coast. They began doing what deer do. They mated and they grazed. Now there are a couple of thousand mule deer on the island. And now, plant and flower species unique to Catalina Island, found nowhere else in the world, are threatened with extinction by this non-native, invasive species of deer with no natural predators.

The folks responsible for managing Channel Islands National Park want to remove the deer from the environment that they are devastating. After study, they have decided to shoot the deer from helicopters. It may not the way that I would do it. I would favor a controlled hunt. But it has to be done and the Park Service made a choice. I can't wait to hear what the local community of environmentalists has to say. In a somewhat similar case in my home state of New Jersey, it was so hard to convince folks that thinning a herd in a state park was necessary that deer died of starvation before hunters were allowed to come in and thin the herd. Compassion can have unintended consequences.

SPEAKING OF COMPASSION

A doe-eyed child stares into the camera. The caption solicits money for food for starving Gaza children. By itself, this meme proves two things. Charities have learned to use research to maximize donations. And compassion is driven by the popularity of the cause. 

Studies show that when you put forward a picture of one child in distress and ask people how much they would donate, they come up with a number based on their own resources and the depth of their empathy. Add a second child, and the number diminishes. Show a camp full of children and the empathic impulse can be overwhelmed, leading to a feeling of helplessness. So to maximize donations, one good picture of one hungry child. 

80,000 children have died of starvation during the Syrian civil war in the last decade. 80,000. Children. Have. Starved. To. Death. Thousands more have succumbed to diseases like diphtheria. Thousands more from violence. Who marches for them, for the 600,000 dead Syrians in total, for the 4,000,000 Syrian refugees? Who marches for the 300,000 civilian dead in the Yemeni civil war? I am not pretending that the plight of civilians in Gaza is not dire. But I have to wonder why, over the past decade, Arab on Arab violence towards children is given a pass while the effects of the October 7 declaration of war by Hamas has caused international condemnation of Israel's response.

I suppose that the answer, if it's not outright antisemitism, is that Israel is viewed as a European construct, so the violence is white-on-color violence. But 60% of Israelis trace their heritage not to Europe but to Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. And the non-Jewish Arab population since 1948, when 150,000 Arabs remained in Israel, has grown to over 2,000,000 Arabs who live, work, and vote there today. Hardly apartheid.

In my opinion, the reason for the misguided demonstrations is the rise of solipsistic thinking, the belief that truth is personal rather than revealed through discourse. The demonstrators do not want to hear that, while Israelis build shelters to protect civilians from rockets and mortars, Hamas builds tunnels under civilian homes, hospitals and schools to protect themselves with human shields. Evil.

We can only hope that we are witnessing the death throes of Iran as its internal and external critics take action against its barbarity and the barbarity of those groups that Iran sponsors - Hamas and Hezbollah and ISIS and Al Qaeda and the Houthis. Just imagine living with those folks as your neighbors. Imagine the constant shellings and the suicide bombers. Now imagine what the real justice would be in holding the real evil accountable while Israel struggles alone against a Caliphate that will, if it manages erase Israel, come swords bared for Europe and the Americas next.

IT'S TIME TO GET REAL - ISRAEL AND JK AND LIFE AND MORE

DEEP THOUGHTS

I have not been writing blog posts for several months. I have been too timid to put pen to paper - fingers to keyboard - because Israel and Trump and gender issues are so strongly held. Those of you that I call friends may know how each of us feels about these issues, but when we disagree, we don't talk about them much. We are not the kind of voters who insist that we are undecided two weeks before an election. We've thought about things and we've decided. I hesitated to post because I knew that I have friends and family who have come to different conclusions than I have. But it's late and I'm getting old and bullshit is getting harder to tolerate. And so...

ISRAEL

Full disclosure, I'm Jewish. One of a group of us who are secure in calling ourselves Jews but who haven't been to synagogue for awhile...a long while.

Israel is where the Abraham of the Abrahamic Religions came from. Judaism started with Abraham. In Israel. Christianity started with a Jew called Jesus who lived as a Jew and died as a Jew. In Israel. According to the Quran, God gave Israel to the Jews. No, I'm not claiming that Jews owning the deed to Israel relies on certain holy books. I am claiming that until 1948, everybody knew that Israel was where Judaism began and where Jews lived. Sometimes, they were chased out, but whether they were thick on the ground or scattered to the winds. for centuries the world at large agreed that when Jews first were forced to scatter, they scattered from Israel.

Israel doesn't have a right to exist. Israel exists. Whether you like it or not. Period. More in a follow-on post.

TRUMP

Beyond understanding. I'll try. Later.

JK ROWLING

Words do not make reality. Words shape perception. You can argue that Earth is flat because you perceive it to be flat. But in reality, it ain't flat. JK says that there is reality in chromosomes. Others say that words alone can alter the reality that chromosomes represent. JK doesn't believe that. I don't believe that. I don't think JK is transphobic and I don't think that I am transphobic. 

And by the way, phobias are fears. So being transphobic means fear of trans people. Which means that a whole bunch of people called transphobic are not transphobic at all. They demonstrate that by not being afraid to say what they think about trans issues. 

Words matter, but they don't matter to the point that they can alter observed fact.

GETTING OLDER

If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.

That quote is most often attributed to Churchill. He may have said it, but he probably didn't originate it. Whatever the case, it does describe the political evolution of some people. For the record, I'm not one of them. Yes, I considered myself a liberal in my younger years, probably not a socialist. But even then, I noticed in conversations with friends that political lines were easily, and often unwittingly, crossed. 

For example, I had a very progressive friend back in the days when being a feminist was not simply progressive. It was radical. And she was a radical feminist. I'll call her Annie. We shared a common female acquaintance. That friend decided to do something that Annie thought that she shouldn't do. "Stop her," Annie said to me. "Tell her not to do it." In that one exchange, I learned that principles can easily give way to personal preferences. I understood why our friend had made her choice, I knew that she had considered the choice carefully, and I respected her. So I wasn't about stop her from pursuing her choice.

And that's where I'm going with this. I don't think that our choices are the result of embracing one end of the political spectrum over the other. I think that we choose what we choose either emotionally or logically based on preferences that are ingrained and can defy understanding. Shit happens. And we react as we do, if we are thoughtful people, reasonably and consistently.

So as I got older, I didn't get more conservative. I have gotten more confident in my beliefs. Israel exists. Deal with it. Trump was an existential threat to American democracy in 2016 and in 2020 and he is an existential threat to American democracy today. Deal with it. Sex isn't assigned at birth, it is observed at birth. Deal with it. 

THE UNIVERSE IS FINE TUNED FOR LIFE

Is it? I watch YouTube videos of serious people having long, detailed discussions to convince themselves and others that the universe seems to be fine tuned for human life. Change one little bit of our universe and its properties and it all goes away. The strength of gravity. The Cosmological Constant. Any one of dozens of numbers like those are right where they need to be.

I have never understood why no one ever argues the opposite - that human life is fine tuned to the universe. It seems obvious to me. There's one universe that we know of. The numbers are what they are. Panelists talk about what would happen if the numbers changed, but who's to say that the numbers can be changed? We evolved in the comfortable niches that those numbers provide, billions of years after our version of the universe was born, hundreds of millions of years after our Earth was formed. 

It took a hell of a long time for us to get to where we are. If there had been a designer, why did She wait billions of years to create chocolate-peanut butter ice cream. I would have whipped that up first.                   

 

NETANYAHU, CONGRESS, AND A PALESTINIAN-ARAB STATE

I believe in Israel's right to exist in peace with its neighbors.

Is peace possible when the charters of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas call for Israel's destruction, when regional despots like Ayatollah Ali Khamenei call for death to Israeli Jews? There are those who would tell you to ignore the charters and the speeches, that they are just words. But Jews have come to understand, after centuries of being taught by example, that when a political movement or a government official says that they will kill Jews, they are to be believed. The original Zionists made that assumption and the Israeli government continues to operate on that premise.

Ask yourself a simple question: Which hypothetical circumstance would be most likely to lead to peace in the region, disarming the Palestinians Arabs or disarming the Israelis? As Golda Meir is reputed to have said, though she certainly wasn't the first: Disarming the Palestinians Arabs would lead to peace. Disarming the Israelis would lead to the destruction of Israel.

Step back for a moment and look at history. There are those who will tell you that history doesn't matter, that we should focus on the present. Those people don't understand either the Jewish or the Arab mentality. Events that took place centuries ago are to both peoples as fresh today as a cool morning breeze. We can dispute whether or not the Palestinian Arabs were in the main chased from Israel by Zionists in 1948 or if the bulk of them left their homes at the urging of Arab armies promising a swift return once the Jews were pushed into the sea. Either way, certain subsequent events cannot be disputed:

1. The Palestinian Arab refugee camps were built by their Arab brothers who, with the exception of Jordan, refused to allow the refugees basic civil rights and a path to a normal life within the host country. As a result, while in other countries Palestinian Arabs have been radicalized and promised a right of return that has not been and in all probabilities will not be granted, the bulk of Palestinian Arabs in Jordan are fully integrated and say that they wouldn't return even if given the opportunity.

2. From 1948 to 1967, the West Bank and Gaza were in Arab hands. A Palestinian Arab state could have been declared without Israel's involvement. Israel would no doubt have had security questions. In the central part of the country, before 1967 you could have taken a flying leap from Israel's eastern border and landed hip deep in the Med. But if the neighboring Arab states had prepared for peace instead of war, those questions could have been answered.

3. After 1967 and after Egypt recognized Israel's right to exist, Israel traded land, valuable land, to Egypt in turn for peace. That peace has held for close to 50 years. I repeat. Peace with Egypt - as well as Jordan - has held for 50 years. The prerequisite? Simply recognizing Israel's right to exist and establishing diplomatic relations.

I believe in a two-state solution. I believe that Israel's settlement policy is misguided, primarily in place as a sop to the Israeli political Right. But I support Israel against such uninformed charges as genocide against the Palestinian Arabs. Israel could level Gaza and bounce the ashes. It restrains itself from doing so even if its recent actions in Gaza do not lend themselves to the term 'restraint'. Ask yourself the outcome if such military asymmetry were reversed.

And now we come to Netanyahu. Why shouldn't Netanyahu address the US Congress?

Let me count the ways...

1. The Constitution clearly gives the Executive responsibility for the bulk of the conduct of foreign affairs including the negotiation of treaties. Yes, Congress must approve. But the Founders understood that there should only be one voice at the table during negotiations with foreign powers. That voice belongs to the Executive. Negotiation by committee, and therefore this foray into the negotiations with Iran by Congress, is just stupid.

2. We know what Netanyahu will say. He will say that Iran is an existential threat. That Iran cannot be trusted. That Israel cannot allow Iran to possess a nuclear weapon. There. I've given Netanyahu's speech for him. He can save the time and the jet fuel it will take to get here and back to Israel to continue campaigning for reelection.

3. Speaking of campaigning, the US has a longstanding policy of not interfering in democratic elections conducted by its friends. Well, except for the CIA. But since the Mossad is better at covert ops than the CIA, the Israelis don't have to worry on that score. They should worry, however, that Netanyahu thinks that it's a good idea to drag the US Congress into Israeli politics. Our Congress has an approval rating only slightly higher than Boko Haram's. And there is reason to believe that the fear tactics Netanyahu is using may backfire, that his political opposition is coalescing. Is Netanyahu desperate or just clueless?

4. And speaking of politics, Americans have a saying that politics ends at the border. Not any more, apparently. If speaking before Congress makes Netanyahu look silly, John Boehner conducting foreign affairs behind the President's back makes John Boehner look silly - or sillier, depending on what you think of his tanning spray.

There's more, but that's enough. The proposed speech is bad for the negotiations with Iran, bad for Netanyahu, and bad for Congress. What's the point?

EBOLA, CLIMATE CHANGE (GLOBAL WARMING), ISRAEL, PROGRESSIVES, PAUL RYAN & STUFF

Every once in a  while I get worked up over politics and just have to write about the silliness that surrounds us. For instance, Paul Ryan was quoted recently as having excoriated the Affordable Care Act's over $700 billion in cuts from Medicare. How terrible! Yet he certainly can't have forgotten that his own budget proposals contained approximately the same amount of cuts to Medicare. I suppose what bugs Ryan is that while he proposed to cut benefits to consumers, the Affordable Care Act cut payments to providers. Thus, in one little tidbit, behold the definition of politics, Count on the average voter to have the memory retention capabilities of a fruit fly (with apologies to fruit flies) and be shameful in exploiting that fact.

Of course, this tactic is not confined to Republicans. (I almost typed conservative Republicans but that would be a double negative.) For instance, Elizabeth Warren was a registered Republican for about as much of her adult life as she has been a Democrat, a fact that does not appear in her bio on such sites as Huffington Post. One site, however, does quote her as saying that she began (emphasis mine) voting Democratic in 1995. Does that mean that she managed to reconcile herself to voting for Reagan twice? One interviewer claims to have asked her that question and claims further that she declined to answer. Protecting her right to privacy, was she? Or protecting her newly-minted Progressive image? I would love to hear how anyone who claims the Progressive mantle managed to find sufficient reason to vote for Reagan over Carter at a time when Reagan was as far to the right of center as Ted Cruz is today.

So, the expediency of the moment abounds on both sides of the political fence.

Allow me one more shot at Progressives before I take aim at Republicans. During the recent Israeli incursion into Gaza, many of my Progressive friends were appalled. I get it. It was a hot, ugly mess. But in expressing their outrage, they not only questioned Israel's tactics of the moment, but Israel's very right to exist.

Where to begin? While Columbus was accidentally discovering the New World, Europeans back home were hunting down and killing Jews with great vigor as part of the Inquisition - not really a Spanish invention at all but sanctioned a couple of centuries previously in Rome. Russian progroms refined the art of Jewish genocide generations ahead of Hitler. And well into the 20th Century in the US, one of the Ks that the KKK wanted to eliminate in America, in addition to Koons and Katholics, was Kikes.

So even if you don't view Israel as being as legitimate as so many of the other European-sponsored constructs in the Middle East, even if you don't accept the argument that the Palestinians who left in 1948 weren't so much chased as invited to leave by Arab armies who promised a triumphant return after the Jews were driven into the Med, even if you blame the horrid conditions in the camps on the Jews rather than the indifference and/or nefarious self-interest of their Arab hosts, it seems that there's as much of a Progressive case to be made for reparations to Jews as there is on behalf of African-Americans, as is the current Progressive fashion.

On to Republicans, who are not scientists. What's with that? Are only farmers allowed to vote on farm bills? Was John Glenn given carte blanche to determine NASA's budget as the only astronaut on Capitol Hill? This is simply ludicrous. The 80s were warmer than the 70s, The 90s were warmer than the 80s. And so on and so on. You don't have to be a scientist. You just have to have blood flow to your brain. And whether or not you believe that human activity is a contributing factor, how can you legislate against the Pentagon planning for the appearance of new sea routes through Arctic or the effect of sea-level rise on existing facilities? Yet that sort of silliness managed to get written into the House's version of the Defense budget this year. One expects that sort of thing from a state like North Carolina, which has banned basing coastal development policies on scientific predictions of how much the sea level will rise. But the US House? C'mon man...

And then there's ebola. I personally like the viral internet meme: More Americans have been married to Kim Kardashian than have died from ebola. But if it bleeds, it leads. Fortunately, polls are showing that 'bleeds/leads' is turning off Gen Y to mainstream media. That's a hopeful trend. Unfortunately, Gen Y is not well represented in Congress. Brain dead people are fully represented, however. Take, for example, the Congressman who suggested that the Surgeon General should head Washington's response to ebola rather than Obama's appointed ebola czar. When it was pointed out to Congressman Chaffetz that Senate Republicans have held up the confirmation of Obama's choice for Surgeon General, leaving the post vacant, Chaffetz tried to backpedal. But read the transcript. You can't fix stupid. (I have to stop using these pop culture callouts...)

I leave you with a quote from the movie An American President:

We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you (Insert Politician's Name Here) is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things, and two things only: making you afraid of it, and telling you who's to blame for it.