An empty suit speaks to an empty room: Joe Biden at NAACP the other day.
Consider the DMV (and Some People Think It’s a Good Idea to Have Government Manage Health Care?)
Sarah Hoyt posted yesterday about her experiences with “gummint bureaucrappy” (my neologism applied to her descriptive narrative on bureaucracy), and that prodded one of my two active brain cells to simulate something like life.
Her youngest son had to trek (with Mom, for reasons Hoyt skewers) to the DMV for his license.
“…which will then be mailed to him, in a week or two…”
Good Sharkey, Colonel God! That’s worse than I’ve experienced from any DMV in 40+ years’ experience driving! Most recently, it took me 15 minutes and I walked out with my new license. BUT, it did chap my gizzard that for the VERY FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE, thistime, although I have a 40+ years’ easily-trackable record with four states’ DMVs (20 years in this state alone), THIS time I had to have my birth certificate to “prove” I am me. (WTF? How does my birth certificate prove that I am me, unless the whorls on my baby footprints were to be matched up with my adult footprints?) The funny thing? (No, not “funny ha-ha” but “funny gag-gag”.) My birth certificate was temporarily unavailable (long story), so I sent off for a duplicate (yes, a photostatic duplicate that was as exact a duplicate as can be produced, as comparison with my original later demonstrated). To obtain it I had to include a scanned copy of… my current driver’s license.
So, my (then) current driver’s license was all I needed to obtain a duplicate birth certificate… which was needed to renew that driver’s license.
Complete, absolute and total paper-shuffling B.S.
I draw from this sort of thing–and from Hoyt’s post, to which you can surely add your own examples–an extended lesson:
Governments cannot run without some form of bureaucracy, but since bureaucracies are subject to both Parkinson’s Law and Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy, perhaps that’s an argument for anarchy. *heh* The bureacrappic anarcho-tyranny that is now strangling our economy, castrating our liberty and aiding in stultifying society is certainly the most potent argument against surrendering health care to the “tender mercies” of yet more “gummint bureaucraps”.
Just sayin’
I am So Behind the Times
Thank God!
Flipboard is apparently THE “killer app” in some demographics for iPad, iPhone and Android phones. Here’s what the app has to say for itself (OK, via developers’ plug):
Flipboard brings together world news and social news in a beautiful magazine.
Flipboard’s award-winning experience lets people see everything in one place. By bringing together the world’s stories and life’s great moments, you can stay up to date with the things that matter most. Flip through the news from your Twitter timeline as well as from outlets like the BBC, USA Today and The Verge. See everything from posts and photos shared by friends on Facebook and Instagram to videos from Stephen Colbert and pop culture nuggets from Rolling Stone. Find inspiration for your travel, style and life from places like National Geographic, Oprah and Cool Hunting.
It’s the one thing to simplify your daily life. Bring Flipboard on the train during your morning commute, catch up over coffee or on vacation, use it as a tool at work or simply to wind down your night.
Talk about damning itself in the eyes of anyone with more than two active brain cells. Absolutely nothing listed above is worth aggregating into an electronic magazine experience, unless one’s goal in life is to make oneself stupid(er). If auto-lobotomy is one’s goal, then the “benefits” of Flipboard are manifold. If one instead wants to preserve a few brain cells for actual thought, then it would seem that avoiding the things touted above would be a Very Good Thing. (OK, with highly filtered and limited use, Facebook and National Geographic could be less brain damaging than the other things listed, but FB is filled with crap and NG has been degraded to barely better than just another Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind propaganda organ. *sigh*)
Thanks, Flipboard, but I’ll pass. Aging brains need to be stimulated with information that’s not toxic cotton candy in order to preserve mental capacities as much as possible.