Bringing back racial segregation …

Did I miss something?

I seem to remember the 1960s battles over civil rights.  Civil rights leaders – I believe – demanded an end to racial segregation back then. 

Segregation was evil. We could never expect different races, especially blacks and whites, to learn to get along and move forward as equals until we removed barriers keeping the races apart.

So no more racially divided public schools and universities. No more racially divided drinking fountains and lunch counters.  Or seats on public transportation. No more racially divided housing. No more laws prohibiting marriage between races.

There was no such thing as “separate but equal”; “separate” always meant unequal. 

The overriding message was that racial equality and racial harmony could only happen when segregation by race finally ended in America. Discrimination would wither and equality would reign once blacks and whites learned together, lived together, worked together, and realized they had much more in common than what had previously set them apart. 

It might take a generation or so, but that was the promise of desegregation. 

Did I dream all that? Am I “misremembering” what one of the major goals of the 1960s civil rights movement was about?

I don’t think so.

That’s why I am surprised that there’s new pressure to bring back racial segregation. By blacks. By young blacks, in fact.  By young blacks on integrated college campuses. 

There’s a movement on campuses by young blacks to create separate housing for black students. They claim this is needed because black students, especially black male students, need a safe space surrounded by only their racial peers to survive the pressures of college life on campuses they must share with students of other races.  Black-only housing would enable black students to nurture one another in a setting that allowed them to fully express their black culture.

Please note that the latest push for this – on the UCLA campus – is not focused exclusively on African Americans, but also would provide the same “black segregation” for Caribbean blacks, blacks from Africa studying here, and anyone else activists deem “black.”

So the only qualification is skin color.

Now, on most large college campuses in this country there are self-segregation elements already in place, again mostly at the request of black students. There’s usually a black student union, a black cultural center, an organization of black students, and black sororities and fraternities. 

It seems that self-segregation like this is perfectly fine in this day and age.  However, that right to so publicly self-segregate is selective. I doubt many university administrators would be as accepting of a white student union, a white cultural center, an organization of white students, and white sororities and fraternities, much less white-only housing.  

I personally believe people have the right to associate with whomever they wish without the heavy hand of government involved.  I also believe people have the right to form private groups or clubs, or other private organizations, that place limits on who can be a member. 

Yet I also believe very strongly that those rights go out the window when public money is used. As a hard and fast rule, no publicly-funded institution should indulge or permit any form of racial discrimination. Period. That’s a big part of what the civil rights movement was about.

Make no mistake: segregation by race is just another form of discrimination.   

What people do with their own money is their business. If black students want to raise money to build their own dorms off campus – dorms that only allow blacks as residents – I have no problem with that at all.  But if they want taxpayers to foot the bill for that by forcing a university to dedicate on-campus housing exclusively for one race or another, the answer always should be no.

People were beaten and lives were lost fighting for desegregation. National Guard troops were brought in at times to force the desegregation of public universities.

And here we are, more than 50 years later, and some people from the same groups that once fought and died to end segregation are now demanding it return. 

Talk about irony.     

Saying goodbye to my Blackberry …

It’s time to say goodbye to my Blackberry Z10.

It’s never let me down. It still works fine. But I have to move on. 

It’s the end of an era for me, nonetheless. 

My first smartphone was a Blackberry. The one after that was a Blackberry. And the one after that, too. Not a single one of those failed me. Ever.  They were all rock solid devices that did everything you asked flawlessly.  Until now I’ve always been faithful to the brand. 

However, Blackberry as a company failed to adapt to change quickly enough. And in the technology marketplace that can be deadly.  

Blackberry fell behind because it stubbornly protected what it considered its crown jewel – its proprietary Blackberry operating system (OS).  It’s a great OS by the way, robust and bullet-proof in almost every way, but that’s not enough to survive and grow – you need third-party apps people want.  App developers follow the crowd; if you don’t have the numbers, they won’t support you.  Because proprietary Blackberry devices couldn’t compete on price with high-volume mass-market smartphone makers, Blackberry couldn’t get the numbers. 

So as its market share got smaller and smaller, fewer and fewer developers were willing to devote the resources to make versions of their apps for Blackberry.  Once that downward trend starts, it’s virtually impossible to reverse. Blackberry most likely will never recover. 

The ultimate winners among technology companies don’t always make the best devices or most elegant operating systems. They just make stuff that sells enough to achieve critical mass – a certain ubiquity, as it were. With enough devices running their operating system more third-party software developers jump on board. With enough software available, more devices are sold.  With more devices sold, more software for those devices is created. And so on. 

It’s possible to accelerate this process.  Make a decent operating system available to just about any device manufacturer, keep the price to OEM manufacturers low and put enough marketing dollars behind it, then let the device manufacturers drive down their product prices – and their profit margins, not yours – as they compete against each other.    

It’s how Microsoft gained dominance for Windows in the desktop and laptop marketplace. It’s also why, to this day Apple – which won’t allow anyone else to make an Apple-compatible desktop or laptop – only has about 7% market share. (That’s also why hackers and virus writers attack Windows users almost exclusively; there simply aren’t that many Apple users.)

That’s not to say Apple doesn’t make a lot of money – it does – but most of its income and profits now come from purely consumer products and services, not desktops and laptops. Apple’s effectively abandoned the business market, except for graphic design, and most business-software developers focus on Windows-platform products first.  

Apple makes its money catering to those with fierce loyalty to the Apple brand. Apple can't compete on price, nor does it even bother. Apple can command a premium for their products because to some people Apple is not just a good brand, with nicely designed products, but a status brand. Apple fans wait breathlessly in line for hours to be among the first to buy the latest Apple offering whatever it is. And they are willing to pay a lot more for the Apple name.  

The same way, believe it or not, people once paid a premium for a Blackberry.    

A lot of people still think the real battle of corporate giants for operating system dominance is between Microsoft and Apple. It’s not.  In the general business user market, Microsoft rules; Apple’s not even close. In the consumer market – and especially for smartphones and tablets – it’s between Microsoft Windows and Google’s Android OS.  And Android is winning big.   

 

By offering a decent operating system free – which is what Google did with Android – to any and all possible smartphone and tablet makers, the result is predictable: price wars among manufacturers and a flood of ever cheaper devices as they fight for market share. That’s why there are a lot more Android-based smartphones and tablets on the market than Windows-based versions of these despite Microsoft’s best efforts. And, frankly, far more Android-based smartphones and tablets sold than iOS-based versions (like the iPhone and iPad) from Apple. 

But back to Blackberry.      

The reality for Blackberry is that the rest of the world has moved on to Android or iOS-based smartphones and tablets. Virtually every app written these days is for one or both of these operating systems. Blackberry users have essentially been left behind; practically nobody writing apps will spend the time creating apps for an ever-shrinking pool of potential users. Why bother?   

You can’t blame developers for walking away. The Android platform now has 82% of the market. As I said earlier, developers follow crowds. So do device manufacturers.   

Blackberry did at last come out with an Android-based phone but it’s woefully expensive and way too late. Why would anyone invest hundreds of dollars in an Android-based Blackberry when they can get a Samsung, LG or other Android smartphone – which will do everything the Blackberry does and more – for a fraction of that? Sometimes even free with a two-year wireless contract? 

In a way, it’s sad. But it was also predictable. 

I shed no tears putting my last Blackberry aside. I like my new Samsung smartphone. It does everything my Blackberry did: e-mail, contacts, calendar, etc. For a lot less.  

It also syncs automatically with my Google account so my contacts and calendar on Google are instantly updated on every Android device I own whenever I make a change.  I couldn’t do that with my Blackberry without connecting it to my PC or laptop and running another program.

But the biggest advantage the new device has is that it’s not a closed system like Blackberry. This means there are thousands of apps for it, and more always being developed because the Android platform has the numbers to make it worthwhile for developers.  It’s got critical mass.

Something Blackberry couldn’t achieve.  

Over the years Blackberry got more than a thousand dollars from me for all the successive Blackberry devices I bought. But I suspect they won’t get any more.

I have to follow the crowd, too. It's nothing personal.  

People will die …

We’ve all heard this.

It’s the Democrat talking point on the Republicans’ replacement for ObamaCare. It’s the headline grabber from folks like Elizabeth Warren and Nancy Pelosi.

It does get your attention.

Like much of the stuff from the Democrats and the left, it’s simply not true.  Sure, people will die as they do all the time. Some of them will be poor.  But the lie that repealing ObamaCare will cause more poor people to die is the myth that keeps on giving. 

Get ready for commercials featuring families of poor people who died because they didn’t have insurance.  Expect interviews with people who fear they won’t get dialysis, kidney transplants, heart surgery or other life-saving procedures if Republicans get their way.

We’ll also see stories about the over 20 million uninsured that can’t get critical medical treatment, even for things like a stroke or heart attack, because they can’t afford it. 

Don’t get sucked in. 

No one – including non-citizens – can be denied emergency medical care in the United States. Anyone from anywhere can show up in practically any U.S. emergency room and if they have a medical emergency they will be treated.

Whether or not they have insurance.  Whether or not they can afford to pay.  Whether or not they speak English, Swahili, Pig Latin, or an obscure language from anywhere on this planet. Once they hit an emergency room of any hospital that accepts Medicare – which is pretty much every hospital in the country – they get treated. 

That’s the law of the land: The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) passed in 1986. ObamaCare didn’t create that. Republicans can’t overturn it.

In short, no one in this country will suddenly die from a heart attack, or an adverse reaction to medication, or even a gunshot wound, for example, because they don’t have enough insurance. The same applies to a woman about to give birth – she can’t be denied emergency room care because she lacks insurance or the ability to pay. 

Or because Republicans repeal ObamaCare. 

I got pulled into an exchange on Facebook the other day about this. Someone made a claim that a close friend had serious stomach pain but couldn’t afford to see a doctor so she died.

People piled on how this was the problem with healthcare in America. I brought up the EMTALA and how the friend didn’t need money or insurance to be treated – she just needed to get to a hospital. I got flamed 10 ways to Sunday, including by a women who wrote, and I quote: “Bullf***ing shit!” I provided a link to a government website as proof.

Then someone wrote, yeah, sure, you’ll get treated without insurance or the means to pay but when you leave the emergency room they are going to hand you a bill. 

Oh my God.  The nerve of the hospital. The bastards. How dare they …

So apparently that’s what this is all about: everything should be free. 

For the truly poor it actually is – you can’t get money from people who don’t have any, especially if they are illegals without Medicaid; hospitals know that.  They treat all of them anyway. But you can’t fault a hospital that maybe just saved your life or the life of a family member, delivered your baby, or treated a gunshot wound, or drug overdose, from trying to get paid for their services.  It’s not like the doctors and staff work for free. 

In any case, hospitals lose billions every year treating the poor and uninsured. 

Part of the reason health insurance is so expensive is that the insured help pay for this already through higher premiums. In one state it was estimated that the average insured family paid as much as $2,000 more annually to help cover the uninsured – and that was before ObamaCare.   

Still, I suppose it’s insulting to some that recipients of emergency services are asked to pay something. That’s the impression I got from my brief exchange on Facebook.   

I forget to mention someone else who claimed hospital emergency rooms discriminate against the poor and uninsured by pushing those people to the back of the line for treatment.

I don’t believe that’s true at all.  But you’ll never convince class warriors. I probably have a different perspective from seeing a lot of emergency rooms in action.  

I’ve taken a lot of people to emergency rooms, including my mother who was a hypochondriac of the first order. She was always sure she had something she read about in Reader’s Digest.  She managed to get her hands on a Physicians Desk Reference, too, so she could find and claim the proper contraindications for just about every drug she was ever prescribed.  Shortness of breath, palpitations, tingling in the extremities, nausea, whatever.

From the time she was in her 30s she always told us what she wanted on her tombstone was: “See, I told you I was sick.” She died at 90, appropriately enough on Groundhog Day. 

I got very familiar with going to emergency rooms whenever she had an “incident.”

My experience was that most emergency rooms were filled with other hypochondriacs, and people too lazy to wait to see a regular doctor for the flu, a nosebleed, a sprain or other less-than-life-threatening condition.  The docs in the emergency room focused first on people they needed to save – like those brought in from a serious car accident – not just serve. 

Which made sense. It’s called triage. Emergency rooms aren’t run like the deli counter where you get a number and everybody gets served in order.  Arterial spurting trumps a runny nose, as it should.  That’s why it’s an “emergency” room. 

But for far too many people the emergency room is their local family doctor. These people get in the way of those who truly need emergency medical care.  They use ambulances like taxi cabs and expect to be treated like royalty when they arrive.

They huff and they puff and can’t imagine anyone might have a greater need for immediate treatment.  These assholes go nuts when emergency room staff doesn’t push everyone else aside because they have the sniffles or their precious little snowflake has a sprained finger. Tell me you haven’t had the same experience in an emergency room – EMTs bring in somebody bloodied from head to toe who needs to be rushed into surgery, and one of these jerkoffs in the waiting room starts up about how long THEY’VE been waiting already.    

Hey, if you default to the emergency room instead of a regular doctor’s office for every little thing like a bad cold or an ingrown toenail, people who are really demonstrably hurt will take precedent over you every single time. It’s not about insurance or whether you have more or less money.

It’s about actual need for emergency services.  Emergency room docs and staff aren’t on commission; nor are the admitting nurses.  They are paid a salary to save lives, and fix things, in that order.  Emergency rooms, on average, routinely treat a lot of people who don’t need to be in their emergency room but are there because they don’t want to bother with a regular doctor or think they are too important to wait.  

Some of them have no insurance or money to pay emergency room services, too, but they always get treated anyway.  Go to any major city or suburban emergency room and you’ll see what I mean. In some cases, the emergency room saves their life or the life of a loved one.      

The hospitals don’t have any choice. They have to treat anyone who comes into their emergency room – citizens, illegals, foreigners here on vacation – whatever.  It’s the law.   

And they can’t turn anyone down for inability to pay, or lack of insurance. 

So the next time you hear some blowhard on TV or online how people die because they don’t have insurance, or that more people will die if ObamaCare is repealed, remember this:

That’s all bullshit.

Republicans still don’t get it, either …

Once again, for the slow learners in the back of the room …

Donald Trump won the last election. 

He defeated his Democrat opponent, Hillary Clinton.

However, to first win the Republican nomination, he defeated all his Republican challengers.  That included those favored – and heavily backed – by the Republican establishment and deep-pocket Republican donors. 

Every moderate they put up went down in flames in the primaries. Despite spending millions more than Trump. Despite traditional party poohbahs like McCain, Romney, the Bushes, Boehner, Karl Rove, and others doing their absolute damndest – including funding and supporting stop-Trump movements, and trashing Trump in media interviews – to keep him from the nomination.

Yet Trump still emerged victorious from the primaries.  And won the nomination.   

Questions?  Anyone?  Anyone? 

Okay.  Why did this happen?   

Republican primary voters didn’t want to run another establishment Republican.  Been there; done that. Seen the results.  Republican primary voters wanted real change, not more wonky “reaching across the aisle,” “better relations with our neighbors” and “compassionate conservatism” crap.  They wanted an aggressive, take-charge leader for a change – someone who wouldn’t let Democrats walk all over them.  They wanted someone who cared less about what the media, pundits, career politicians and bureaucrats thought of them, and more about getting stuff fixed.   

In short, someone not a part of the Washington establishment. 

They – and in the general election, a lot of independents, too – wanted someone who would shake things up, change the way Washington worked and get results, public opinion polls be damned. So they voted for Trump. 

Trump wanted to repeal and replace ObamaCare. He wanted to improve border security on our southern border with a “big, beautiful wall.” He wanted to prioritize deporting criminals here illegally. He wanted to end “sanctuary cities.” He wanted to revisit our international trade deals.  And he wanted to cut taxes, and bring more jobs back to our country. 

He wanted to make American great again. 

That’s what he ran on and that’s how he won.   

Honestly, I don’t think any establishment politician – Republican or Democrat – could have defeated him in this election. That’s how angry the general public was with government as usual. Voters may not have agreed with him on every issue, but they didn’t want more of the same.

He ran nominally as a Republican but he was actually an independent. In reality, he ran against the Republican establishment as much as he did against the Democrats.

And he beat both.

As expected, Democrats have decided to resist him at every turn.  It’s the only card they can play, having lost control of the White House, the House and the Senate. It got worse for Democrats on the state level, too, as there are now even more Republican governors and Republicans control more state legislatures. All Democrats can do is delay and disparage.   

Also, as expected, the media generally is doing everything in their power to make Trump and his administration look bad and incompetent. Of course, Trump often shoots himself in the foot with ill-advised tweets and off-the-cuff remarks.  

Still, Trump’s biggest problem is Republicans. 

None of us should be surprised.  To establishment Republicans Trump’s an unwanted guest who is annoying their friends.  He crashed their party but if they ignore him long enough he’ll get the message and leave. Then their party can continue as it was meant to be.

Conservative Republicans – such as the Freedom Caucus – will vote against any spending bill, regardless of what it’s for or how justified. They always want deep cuts in spending – unless, of course, that might hurt their constituents in any way. The media hate them. 

“Moderate” Republicans – in effect, timorous Democrats-lite – will watch polls and media reports to divine which way to vote.  Or stay undecided to see what they can squeeze out of a deal. The media love these people because they add drama to what’s usually a foregone conclusion.

Blue-state Republicans are nothing more than the last moderate Democrats in existence, and live in fear of being outed as actual Republicans. So they support the same social and fiscal causes as their more traditional Democrat brethren.  Why they’re still Republicans baffles me. 

Red-state Republicans feel immune from pressure by the White House and won’t support anything that doesn’t directly aid their state, and will reject anything that won’t. When you see a Republican running at the mouth about how they don’t give a damn what the President wants, and how Congress has the real power, it’s almost always a red-state Republican.

The Republicans in Congress, by and large, are all a pack of whores.  All they care about is getting re-elected. They expect that what worked for them in the past – the public posturing followed by the behind the scenes caving to whatever the Democrats want – will continue to work for them going forward. Nothing’s changed. 

In that regard, they are as tone-deaf as the Democrats right now, who keep saying the election was rigged by the Russians and Trump’s not really the President. 

Wake up folks. Trump is the President, sworn in and everything. 

The typical Republicans in Congress, and the policies they’ve traditionally represented, were defeated by Trump in the last election.  People actually voted against his opponents who espoused the traditional platform planks of the Republican establishment. People voted against what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wanted, and for tighter immigration enforcement. People voted against corporate welfare and especially tax breaks for companies that send U.S. jobs overseas. People voted against keeping ObamaCare and for replacing it with something that brought premium costs down for average working citizens.    

Yet Republicans still don’t get it; they don’t comprehend that voters sent a clear message that business as usual won’t cut it anymore.  Trump voters don’t care if Republicans and Democrats work in a bipartisan fashion to get things done; they only care that things get done.

Trump voters also don’t believe that it should take as long as it always has to get things accomplished. That Republicans are leaving to go home again, shortly after they came back from a two-week recess is incredible. Especially when Republicans, with control of the White House and Congress, could easily pass and get legislation signed to finally do something tangible.    

It’s also emblematic of the widespread attitude among both Republicans and Democrats in Congress that they are a privileged class in an exclusive club with its own set of rules.  Because of their lofty positions, they are entitled to act in a way that would never be tolerated in any private enterprise. That’s what they believe.

What they don’t understand is that they can be fired by the voting public as early as the next election cycle for their seats.  I fully expect many of the more contentious and obstructive Republicans to face serious primary challenges when those come around. And more than a few of those primary challengers will have the backing of Donald Trump.

Unlike the Democrats who move in lockstep regardless of their differences, Republicans remain oblivious to the power they could have if they simply coalesced.

Republicans have always said they can’t get things done in Washington because they lack control over Congress and the White House. Now they have it and they still can’t get anything done. 

That's all too clear to everyone, especially Trump voters.  

I think Republicans are gravely misreading Trump and what his supporters want, and ignoring the loyalty of his base – still at 95%. That’s a lot of people who will probably vote again to support those who delivered on Trump’s agenda, and punish those who didn’t.   

Time is running out. Republicans need to start accepting reality.