I'm with Joseph Heller (author of Catch-22) who famously said that he couldn't wait for government to get out of the war business and leave the field to private enterprise.

Intel's founders were process engineers (organic chemists and the like), not electrical engineers: their chip designs have always been considered second rate (which is why both Apple and Sun went with Motorola for their first computers). IBM had little faith in the potential for the PC market but felt it had to have a presence and Intel had the manufacturing skill to deliver the processors (Motorola being sufficiently committed). When DEC's Alpha team joined AMD, Intel was outmanoeuvered and bested. Later Intel sought revenge on Microsoft for breaking up the duopoly (by certifying AMD chips for Windows) and lured Apple into its camp to show Microsoft it wasn't the only game in town! Intel has been running on fumes since the 1980s; time for a conventional wisdom reset!

If healthcare was truly the product of free-market competition, the outcome would be more like that of the computing sector: over time, products become better, cheaper, and more available to the general public. But the healthcare establishment has cleverly followed the defense industry model: rising prices and falling quality. It's win-win for them and lose-lose for the consumer.

Like defense contractors, health insurance is a cost-plus business with nothing to gain and lots to lose by holding down costs in the healthcare sector. Insurers take a percentage of the money flowing through their hands which is why the higher their costs the more money they make. Every time they raise their premiums they throw up their hands and point at the medical profession and its conspirators who consistently raise prices based on questionable claims of technological progress and say "Who can put a price on human life?" Well, they can and it's always going up!

Apparently unaware that their analysis of the state exactly matches Lenin's (a group of people got together and put themselves in charge of everyone else by making themselves or their agents the sole authorized users of coercion and violence), libertarians stop short of drawing the obvious conclusion (that their overlords will not go quitely into that good night) because they're afraid they'll be kicked out of the country club or disinvited from the afternoon tea.

The kind of money Wall Street is seeking is chump change compared to the trillions of (adjusted) dollars that Detroit has pulled in over the past 60 years. Detroit killed off mass transit systems across the United States and reaped the benefits of the interstate highway system not to mention the suburban car-centered dystopias that followed. Forget Detroit and go with Wall Street for the postindustrial future that lies ahead.

Since the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan, the right has only one successful game plan against the left: the antiamerican, cultural elitist attack which basically deconstructs to the assertion that the left is against the natural order of the world (God's or whomever's) as exemplified in issues such as same-sex marriage or more equitable distribution of resources and income. This attack is essentially a repudiation of the Enlightenment and its fundamental imperative to question authority and apply rational analysis to the world and human beings interaction with it.

For most of Western history, marriage was a matter between individuals and families. Only with the 1545 Council of Trent did the Catholic Church take official note of the matter and only then in reaction to the Reformation's general disintermediation in the religious sphere. In the modern world, marriage is strictly a civil-law event with consequences exclusively in the secular sphere. If society looks at same-sex relationships and determines that they are entitled to the same social considerations as different-sex relationships, where's the harm? Well, of course, there isn't any, except to the right's traditional appeal to the natural order of the world for its continued support of all forms of discrimination and inequality: The natural hierarchy of the world must be preserved!

This unfortunate child is a victim not of homophobia but of old-style aggressive masculinity which is in its final days as postindustrial society gradually wipes out what's left of the old industrial world where muscle ruled the roost. Industrial society required workers with muscle to perform the physical-labor-intensive tasks of production but postindustrial society is knowledge- and analysis-based and relies on brains not muscles. This new set of circumstances favors people like this boy who are thoughtful and contemplative (and hence "feminine" in the eyes of old-style masculinity which is assertive, domineering, and action-based). Boys like this were in the past variously called "girls" or later "nerds" because they did not buy into the old industrial assertive model of masculinity which is threat- and force-driven. This child will have the last laugh in the long run, and as for the old masculine model, good riddance to bad rubbish!