To me basic SEAL training was a life time of challenges crammed into six months.
So, here are the ten lessons I learned from basic SEAL training that hopefully will be of value to you as you move forward in life.
And this brings us to Snowden’s ultimate arrogance, the thing that makes his calm certainty finally more infuriating than anything else: He believes he is above the law. He believes he should get to decide what stays secret and what does not. He believes that he should get to decide what laws he can and cannot be tried under. He believes he gets to decide what rules should govern spying. And he not only believes he should get credit for civil disobedience without being willing to face the legal consequences of his actions, he believes he should get credit for courage as though he had done so as well.
As I say, I am unmoved.
We have something else for which to be thankful this weekend - Team Obama claims to have won their recent battle against HealthCare.fail:
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said on Sunday that it had met its goal for improving HealthCare.gov so that the website now “will work smoothly for the vast majority of users.”Left unanswered - whom do they imagine they are kidding? Reality will overtake their BS quite quickly, and the legacy media seems to have put down the pom-poms and embraced the notion that there is a real problem here.
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Central to the goal of Obamacare's architects, universal health insurance, was preventing the possibility of exit. Its individual mandate meant everyone had to sign up for insurance.
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If Obamacare's architects were keen on preventing exit, they blithely ignored voice. The legislation was unpopular when it was proposed, while it was passed and in the months and years afterwards.
Barack Obama seldom mentioned it in the 2012 campaign except for the provision allowing “children” under 26 to stay on mommy and daddy's policies.
The architects of Obamacare also had to deal with loyalty.
Polls have consistently shown that about 80 percent of Americans are satisfied with their health insurance and doctors. They have chosen each at one point or another and were not eager to change absent some serious aggravation.
One reason medical policies are so expensive is that their purpose is twofold. They provide not just indemnification against risk--that is, true insurance--but also payment for routine expenses. You can't buy medical "insurance" without buying an expensive service contract. That was true to some extent before ObamaCare. But that law makes the package more expensive for everybody by mandating both more services and "free" ones, and more expensive for the young in particular by jacking up their rates so as to subsidize higher-risk policyholders.
At the same time as ObamaCare raises the cost of having insurance, it reduces the risk of going without insurance--the reason why doing so "sucks!" As blogger Michael Eades points out, lacking insurance no longer makes you uninsurable. If you pass up insurance in 2014 and are diagnosed with a serious condition, you may face burdensome out-of-pocket expenses--just as you would have before. But ObamaCare promises that you'll be able to buy insurance in 2015, and at the same price as if you were still healthy.
Often in error but never in doubt, Barack Obama could walk into the Rose Garden and step on a half-dozen rakes like Foghorn Leghorn in an old Looney Tunes cartoon, and the official line would be, “He meant to do that.”
And the amazing thing is that so many people believe it. “Mr. Obama is like a championship chess player, always several moves ahead of friend and foe alike. He’s smart, deft, elegant and subtle,” proclaimed then–New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in 2009. It’s an image of the president that his biggest fans, in and out of the press, have been terribly reluctant to relinquish — because it confirms the faith they invested in him. Nobody ever likes to admit they were suckered.
But the fiction of Obama as a man three steps ahead has taken a terrible beating if you have eyes to see it.
A recent sad experience with a friend undergoing rehab has left me with another analogue. I now think liberalism is an addiction and displays all the behaviors commonly associated with addictive behavior.
Well, not “liberalism” per se. That policy-agenda is really an elaborate metaphorical delusion built to camouflage the true drug these poor souls crave so desperately: moral superiority.
It’s as powerful as heroin or cocaine. It supplies a terrific high: all sense of personal failure, betrayal, guilt, ineffectiveness, irrelevance, of being nothing and nobody, disappears in a flash. Instead our hero feels extraordinarily good about himself. He is helping. He is compassionate. He is without sin. He is sensitive, caring, part of the solution and not the problem. He feels handsome, daring and heroic. He thinks it will get him laid. How could he not love this?
He cannot see the harm he is doing, either at the micro level or at the cataclysmic macro level; he cannot see how his “generosity” with other people’s money, for example, has devastated the black community, turned it bitter, hopeless, impulsive, violent and addicted itself to free stuff from the gub’mint as well as the crutch of “racis” to justify everything.
Healthcare.gov, like ObamaCare, was going to work because it was "good". Its goodness was by some measure other than result. It was morally good. It was progressive. And so the deity of liberal causes, perhaps Karl Marx or Progressia, the Goddess of Soup and Economic Dysfunction, would see to it that it would work. Karma would kick in and everything would work out because it had to.
This brand of magical thinking was once commonplace. It still is. And it's why things so rarely work out in some of the more messed up parts of the world. But the sort of attitude that would once have made anthropologists shake their heads is now commonplace here. Savages in suits, barbarians with iPads are certain that things will work because they have appeased the gods of modernity with their fonts, they have made a website that looks like a functioning website. And like the cargo culters who built fake control towers expecting planes to land, they thought that their website would work.
Competence is built on the unhappy understanding that things won't work because you want them to, they won't work if you go through the motions, they will only work if you understand how a thing works and then make it work by building it, by testing it and by expecting failure every step of the way and wrestling with the problem until you get it right.
He is, in fact, our first postmodern President, and he is always looking in the mirror. He believes that thinking makes things so. He believes that the most important part of the universe within which we live is the imagination. And when things go amiss, he is apt to tell his aides not that he or they have blundered in their deeds, but that they have "lost the narrative." Everything is always about the man his aides call "Obam-me." He is the Prophet of "Change We Can Believe In." Belief is the operative word.
The Obamacare rollout is leading to the cancellation of hundreds of thousands of health insurance plans nationwide, contradicting President Barack Obama’s repeated pledge that people who like their coverage can keep it.
President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it. But millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years.
The regulation of commerce is a necessary and vital governmental function. Consumers and honest businesses need protection from unscrupulous market participants. That is nearly impossible when an industry is owned, or effectively controlled, by the government. To socialize an industry is to put it in a position to regulate itself. It legalizes fraud by recasting it as mere "political lies."
Senate Democrats voted unanimously three years ago to support the Obamacare rule that is largely responsible for some of the health insurance cancellation letters that are going out.
In September 2010, Senate Republicans brought a resolution to the floor to block implementation of the grandfather rule, warning that it would result in canceled policies and violate President Barack Obama’s promise that people could keep their insurance if they liked it.
The basic idea underlying the rules is that if the pre-existing plans remained unchanged, they could continue. If, however, there was any significant change in coverages, co-pays, and so on, then the plan would become subject to all of the requirements of Obamacare (even grandfathered plans are subject to a number of Obamacare requirements). The problem is that the health insurance market is constantly changing, and it is typical for plans to change, to some degree, from year to year. So the administration looked at historical data to estimate how many employer-sponsored and individual plans would likely lose their grandfather status once Obamacare was implemented. The administration’s methodology can certainly be questioned, but the results were as has been reported.
But the entire premise of Obamacare was that, in order to cover (some of) the uninsured and (in many cases) uninsurable, other Americans were going to have to pay significantly more. Obamacare was always intended to be the Great Disruptor: Avik Roy reports that, by 2010, administration officials knew that 93 million Americans would lose their current plans under Obamacare. Small businesses are cutting back on full-time workers; medium businesses are dumping employees’ spouses and children from their plans; and the largest businesses are eating nine-figure bottom-line increases.
It started with the letter from his health-insurance company informing him it was canceling his plan and offering him a new one that’s nearly twice as expensive. Then the 60-year-old retiree from Mount Vernon heard about more people like himself with canceled plans and soaring premiums. Finally, he spent hours on the phone and computer trying — and failing — to find a new option that he likes.
“This whole experience has converted a lifelong Democrat into a foot soldier for the Republican Party,” Fullner said.
Dean Griffin liked the health insurance he purchased for himself and his wife three years ago and thought he'd be able to keep the plan even after the federal Affordable Care Act took effect.
But the 64-year-old recently received a letter notifying him the plan was being canceled because it didn't cover certain benefits required under the law.
The Griffins, who live near Philadelphia on the Delaware border, pay $770 monthly for their soon-to-be-terminated health care plan with a $2,500 deductible. The cheapest plan they found on their state insurance exchange was a so-called bronze plan charging a $1,275 monthly premium with deductibles totaling $12,700.
No president can lead from such a deep, discredited hole. And his ratings are likely to keep sinking because, once the Web site is fixed, millions more “shoppers” will get sticker shocks from the new policies ObamaCare requires. And next year comes the employer mandate, which will shake up the policies and prices of millions of others.
So Clinton’s advice that Obama “let them keep what they got,” is, in a vacuum, a perfectly logical escape route.
But even if it were possible, the reversal would be a dagger in the heart of ObamaCare. The whole Rube Goldberg scheme depends on using insurance policies to distribute wealth from healthy young Americans to older, sicker ones. Letting people keep the policies they have effectively repeals the president’s signature achievement.
