I came across a very interesting article urging me not to pay my medical bills today.

As health-care costs continue to soar, millions of confused consumers are paying medical bills they don’t actually owe. Typically this occurs when an insurance plan covers less than what a doctor, hospital, or lab service wants to be paid. The health-care provider demands the balance from the patient. Uncertain and fearing the calls of a debt collector, the patient pays up.

Most consumers don’t realize it, but this common practice, known as balance billing, often is illegal. When doctors or hospitals think an insurer has reimbursed too little, state and federal laws generally bar the medical providers from pressuring patients to pay the difference. Instead, doctors and hospitals should be wrangling directly with insurers. Economists and patient advocates estimate that consumers pay $1 billion or more a year for which they’re not responsible.

In this world where consumers and citizens are constantly urged not to take responsibility for their own lives, I find this to be an interesting conundrum.

If my insurance agency is acting as my agent, then why should I be paying the bills or spending little pieces of my life arguing about the amounts? That seems pretty logical. On the other hand, I have an obligation to pay for services rendered. Yet the provider did not spend any time explaining what the cost of the services being rendered would be.

I received a bill for eight dollars for dental services the other day showing that my insurance company did not pay and explaining that I owed the difference. I think I’ll just forward it to my insurance company - they spend all their time making me prove that I was actually treated for whatever I saw the doctor for - they’ve wasted hours of my time rejecting claims that were clearly valid. Now it’s their turn to respond to my demands.

In a world where customer service often seems to be the last thing on people’s minds, I’m going to demand more from those I do business with.

It’s true that Barack Obama loves guns. But only for the privileged politician and bureaucrat classes. You see, without guns, the bureaucrats would get a lot less cooperation fighting all the wars they are engaged in. Gun control is not about protecting us from each other. Gun control is about protecting bureaucrats from their subjects.

You don’t have to go back that far to find Obama taking an extreme stance against gun rights. In 2004, while running for the U.S. Senate, he promised to bar citizens nationwide from receiving concealed-carry permits. The Chicago Tribune reported then that Obama “backed federal legislation that would ban citizens from carrying weapons, except for law enforcement.” Obama explained his plan to pre-empt state concealed-carry laws with a federal bill: “National legislation,” Obama said at the time, “will prevent other states’ flawed concealed-weapons laws from threatening the safety of Illinois residents.”

For a man who doesn’t know me to arrogantly make assumptions about my level of competence and tell me I am not allowed to defend myself is morally wrong. Government has lots of guns. Why can’t I have guns?

The assumption is that government is more responsible with guns than regular people. Prove it. How many individuals have declared war on a country and killed millions of its citizens? Take away every gun regulation. The equation would remain exactly the same. People would still go crazy from time to time without thousands of gun regulations. Some of them would still get access to guns. If all the guns were gone, they would use a car, or poison your food and water, or devise some other method. The mentality a society teaches its citizens is much more important than the rules it writes down in books.

Maybe you could care less about guns. Maybe your pet issue is social injustice. Fine. Let’s talk about that.

The basic problem with government is that it doesn’t actually solve problems. It manages them.

Name one of the social injustices that government has declared war and won. War on Poverty? Nope. We’re nowhere near winning that one. War on Drugs? Nope. Drug use is up. Doesn’t matter if you look at illegal substances or prescription abuse. Not winning. That particular boondoggle isn’t going away anytime soon. War on Terror? The term itself is asinine. The program isn’t designed to stop terror. It’s designed to make us all very afraid. Of real and imagined boogeymen, some of whom wear government issued uniforms and lord it over you at the airport, border crossings and increasingly, on your city streets. We’re not winning the War on Terror and we never will because you cannot wage war on something as broad as “terror” - the whole idea is idiotic.

Finally, the most important war the government is fighting. I see the bureaucrats making a great deal of progress in that particular campaign. The War on Intelligence is moving right along. No, they aren’t winning per se. But the federal government has certainly managed to dumb us down since it took over educating us in 1979. No Child Left Behind has to be one of the most intelligence damning pieces of legislation ever written. The Idiocracy is coming. We’re 23rd in math and 16th in science. Under the management of FedGov, those numbers are sure to get bigger.

Let’s get back to our next President Mr. Obama and his worldview for a moment.

He has promised to pick guardians of the Constitution who do not respect gun rights and believe that a comprehensive ban on gun ownership is consistent with the second amendment.

Senator Obama has a history of projecting a misleading moderation in his politics — and he does it very smoothly. According to his biographer, David Mendell, one of Senator Barack Obama’s greatest political virtues is “his ingenious lack of specificity. . . . While talking or writing about a deeply controversial subject, he considers all points of view before cautiously giving his own often risk-averse assessment, an opinion that often appears so universal that people of various viewpoints would consider it their own.”

It is my belief that Barack Obama has no interest in solving my problems. That’s good because I don’t want him to solve my problems either. The tricky part is that I don’t even want him to manage my problems. They are my problems, and I’ll deal with them.

Mr. Obama when you become President all I want you to do is leave me alone to live my life. I have the audacity to hope you’ll end the four unwinnable wars your predecessors have been managing so poorly in direct violation of the Constitution they swore to uphold. Let the states handle social issues. Let me handle my business. You worry about protecting our borders and getting us out of all those ill advised foreign police duties we’ve assigned ourselves over the last 60 years or so. I’ll worry about running my own life, saving for retirement, choosing which medicine and medical treatment is best for me, picking what kind of gun I want to keep for personal defense, educating my kids and living as long and as healthy as I can. I don’t need help managing any of that stuff, please and thanks. The more rules you try to make me follow in my day to day routine the less likely it is I’ll cooperate with you. Hint: the same rule of thumb applies to people in other countries. Most people who didn’t ask to be managed don’t appreciate it when you decide they need managing.

I appreciate your taking a moment to consider this American’s viewpoint.

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Protect the children is getting to be a tired old mantra. People tend to get out of hand though. Voyeurs and exhibitionists are everywhere. As long as they aren’t forcing anyone to watch them, I have no problem with what they do.

Unfortunately, we live in a sensationalist society full of hypocrites and people who enjoy watching others get punished for things they’ve done that didn’t hurt anyone else.

BARTLETT, TN (WMC-TV) - Bartlett Grove Park sits in the middle of a subdivision.  It’s a favorite spot for children, and was recently the site of an adult website porno shoot.

The video clip we discovered begins innocently enough.

“I thought I’d come out for the day,” says the “model.”

She then exposes herself on the playground slide.

“She’s definitely a tramp — just nasty,” parent Barbara Taylor said in reaction to the video.

The part that upsets me is not that someone decided to get naked on a slide. As far as I can tell there were no children around at the time. Other then upsetting parent Barbara Taylor, Bartlett’s official tramp detector, I fail to understand what this woman did that hurt anyone.

Here’s the part that upsets me:

Bartlett Police Capt. Tina Schaber said the girl in the video is clearly breaking a law.

“Public indecency right off the bat,” she said.

Police got on the case after Action News 5 clued them in.

“I don’t think this would be appropriate for an adult to see in a park — much less a child,” Schaber said.

According to Schaber, the model and those video-taping her could be charged with a number of other crimes.

“These days, who knows?” she said.  “She could be over 18 — she could be under 18.”

What crime? Anytime someone brings up crime the first thing I want to know is who got hurt. In this case the answer is no one. Don’t we have enough societal problems without making a mountain out of a molehill?

The unfortunate thing about our legal system is that anyone who disagrees with anything you do can probably find a person in a uniform with a gun who is willing to punish you for something. I’d much prefer we lived in a system where you actually had to commit a crime before authorities would come running with tasers and citation pads at the ready.

Who got hurt? No one? Then mind your own business.

Government, by its very nature, engenders some pretty idiotic news stories. This is one of the dumbest I’ve read in years. Intent is no longer an issue in the giant plantation of subjects we called the United States of America. Nancy Pelosi, being one of the overseers, must be protected, even when no one is trying to harm her.

Secret Service spokesman Malcolm Wiley said 29-year-old Joseph Calanchini of Pinedale, Wyo., faces a charge of unlawful carrying of a weapon after police officers at the Grand Hyatt hotel noticed him carrying a rifle-type case while checking in. Calanchini did not have a concealed weapons permit, said Lance Clem, spokesman for the Colorado Department of Public Safety.

Wiley said authorities were not releasing information about whether the weapons were loaded because the case remained under investigation. Wiley said the charge is the same whether the weapons were loaded or unloaded.

Pelosi and other guests briefly evacuated the hotel but were never in danger, Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly said.

The charge of unlawful carrying of a weapon is ridiculous. Carrying a rifle in a rifle case is perfectly reasonable by anyone’s definition, unless you’re dealing with the government. Since government makes up the rules as they go they don’t have to be reasonable.

Authorities were investigating a report that Calanchini was in town on business and had had the weapons worked upon to prepare for the trip.

“The speaker was never in any danger and she appreciates the quick and professional response of the police,” said Daly.

So what we have is a situation where Speaker Pelosi appreciates “the professional response” of armed thugs. If these police were professional they wouldn’t be charging Joseph Calanchini with anything. They would have simply determined that he was a hunter passing through the area and let him go about his business. Unfortunately we are being treated as subjects instead of citizens by our government. That’s why Calanchini had to be charged with something. He needed to be reminded that he isn’t really free, and America isn’t really the home of the brave.

Someone named “Spengler” writes an interesting article entitled: Americans play Monopoly, Russians chess.

Again, the Russians misjudge American stupidity. Former president Ronald Reagan used to say that if there was a pile of manure, it must mean there was a pony around somewhere. His epigones have trouble distinguishing the pony from the manure pile. The ideological reflex for promoting democracy dominates the George W Bush administration to the point that some of its senior people hold their noses and pretend that Kosovo, Ukraine and Georgia are the genuine article.

What an interesting supposition. The author is saying that the Bush Administration is playing “fake it till you make it” - a dangerous game because a lot of those who play make believe never actually achieve the reality of their fantasy. Believing you are free and actually being free are two different things.

We all play political games in life. Nation-states play these games with rulebooks, guns and lives in ascending order.

Think of it this way: Russia is playing chess, while the Americans are playing Monopoly. What Americans understand by “war games” is exactly what occurs on the board of the Parker Brothers’ pastime. The board game Monopoly is won by placing as many hotels as possible on squares of the playing board. Substitute military bases, and you have the sum of American strategic thinking.

America’s idea of winning a strategic game is to accumulate the most chips on the board: bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, a pipeline in Georgia, a “moderate Muslim” government with a big North Atlantic Treaty Organization base in Kosovo, missile installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, and so forth. But this is not a strategy; it is only a game score.

Chess players think in terms of interaction of pieces: everything on the periphery combines to control the center of the board and prepare an eventual attack against the opponent’s king. The Russians simply cannot absorb the fact that America has no strategic intentions: it simply adds up the value of the individual pieces on the board. It is as stupid as that. But there is another difference: the Americans are playing chess for career and perceived advantage. Russia is playing for its life, like Ingmar Bergman’s crusader in The Seventh Seal.

So one side is fighting for “freedom” using Monopoly rules. The other side is fighting for “survival” using chess rules. As usual, the pawns are dying while the politicians move the pieces around on the boards. All we can count on is continued upheaval in former vassal states of the USSR. As usual, America will seed these conflicts by playing the world’s SuperNanny™ at our taxpayers’ expense.