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<\/a><\/p>\nAll\u2019s well at Chaos Manor, and with luck I\u2019ll have today\u2019s View done tonight. For the moment I am working on The User\u2019s Column AKA Computing at Chaos Manor, and while that\u2019s flowing I want to work on it.<\/p>\n
The Washington DC area storms were of interest because two of my sons and all my grandchildren live in that area. One lives in DC and the other in Fairfax County. Both were inconvenienced but aside from lengthy power outages resulting in communications failures nothing of great importance happened, and all is well there. In Los Angeles we are having summer weather; the June Gloom, what the late columnist Jack Smith called \u201cWummer\u201d or Winter in Summer, is over. Alas it ended just as my old friend former BYTE editor Paul Schindler came down to LA for a hike up the hill. We went up at 10 AM and it was blooming hot, not a cloud in the sky, and a very light sea breeze. Still it was a good hike, and we all enjoyed it including Sable with her fur coat. There\u2019s a house at the bottom of the hill with a yard faucet hidden in some palmettos but Sable knows precisely where it is and always heads there when we come down.<\/p>\n
Sable and former BYTE editor Paul Schindler on the hill above Chaos Manor. This is part of a 50 square mile park area that California maintains for me across the street from my house. I see that I should have brought the camera for its flash; the iPhone takes great pictures but sunlight and shadow remain, and you can\u2019t really see what picture you are taking when you\u2019re in bright sunlight. An iPhone 4S is all the camera you need for many purposes, but it is not at its best in bright of day.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And it\u2019s a nice day for working, so long as the electric fans are in good shape, no need for air conditioning. The humming birds are fighting to get to the feeders I just refilled while the orioles look on in amusement, waiting their turn until they run out of patience. My old friend Richard is back from his stint in Chicago where he gets paid to watch pretty girls play volleyball, and no I am not making that up. And all\u2019s well at Chaos Manor.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We have had several Chaos Manor adventures with computers, and it\u2019s time I started telling those stories again, so I\u2019ll be working on those this afternoon and some of tomorrow. I\u2019m back.<\/p>\n Broke for dinner and Roberta and I watched a bit of television, in particular the prequel to the Inspector Morse series. This begins with Morse\u2019s first case, as he comes back to Oxford as a brand mew Detective Constable. It was worth watching but it\u2019s not the old Morse. Of course Oxford is the murder capital of England as Cabot\u2019s Cove is the murder capital of the world\u2026<\/p>\n Anyway it\u2019s late, and I haven\u2019t time to do a disquisition on the Obamacare decision. Actually I haven\u2019t much to say that I didn\u2019t say in my last essay. I believe Mr. Roberts doesn\u2019t want to go down in history as a new Taney, substituting his judgment for that of the political departments when it isn\u2019t at all clear what we ought to do. The people of the United States do not want to tell sick people to go off and die. It\u2019s also clear that we can\u2019t afford to do what Obamacare says we will do. There has to be some way of allocation of resources. There has to be some advantage to working hard and making money, or, yes, of inheriting from someone who did work hard and make money \u2013 but at the same time we don\u2019t want to be rolling people out of hospital and into the gutter. (Although if the hospital is the old Los Angeles Martin Luther King Hospital, being rolled out to the gutter where someone might take you somewhere else might be preferable. I know a police officer who actually threatened with his weapon an ambulance driver who was taking his wounded partner to the nearest emergency room which was King. His partner was delivered to USC hospital. And the affair was kept quiet for many obvious reasons.<\/p>\n We don\u2019t know what we will do, and we can\u2019t afford what we are doing. This is a job for the political departments, and trying to make the courts decide what is essentially a legislative matter is not fair to the courts. It is a burden they cannot bear.<\/p>\n The fact of the matter is that under no conservative view of the Constitution is there any federal obligation or power to interfere with the operation of health care and its insurance, yet there is also no chance that the political departments will simply get out of the way and force the states to deal with it. That would in my judgment be best. Perhaps something like Obama care will work in some states. Perhaps something else. But we can\u2019t afford what we are doing, and it doesn\u2019t satisfy enough of the politically active in the US. That is a constitutional crisis, and Mr. Roberts doesn\u2019t want to be the man who decides it. I don\u2019t blame him. Given the size and costs of health care and its complexity, nationalization of the health care industry will inevitably and probably irrevocably march this nation down the road to a national socialist state. Where that goes we do not know. And yes, I am aware of who else has used the phrase national socialism as a party name in what had been a Federal Republic. I also know that Mussolini died proclaiming himself an Italian nationalist and a socialist.<\/p>\n That\u2019s more to say than I intended to say. It\u2019s late and I have some other things to clean up.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n View 631 Sunday, July 01, 2012 All\u2019s well at Chaos Manor, and with luck I\u2019ll have today\u2019s View done tonight. For the moment I am working on The User\u2019s Column AKA Computing at Chaos Manor, and while that\u2019s flowing I want to work on it. The Washington DC area storms \u2026 Continue reading <\/a><\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"