Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Obama Fire Insurance

Obama's next big deal:

The Obama fire insurance law requires fire insurers to sell coverage to burning orphanages starting this year, and that protection is extended to all houses on fire in 2014.

The law requires insurers to cover children regardless of health problems starting this year, and that protection is extended to people of all ages in 2014.

Ruin your health by smoking, pigging out, or BASE jumping, and an insurer and its shareholders and customers will be forced to pick up the tab for your stupidity by providing coverage for a nominal fee.

And if ruin or risk your health by smoking, being obese, or engaging in suicidal "sports," any premium you could possibly pay is purely nominal. To the insurer, you're basically a house on fire.

Of course, once all insurers have been successfully bankrupted, the taxpayer will be forced to pick up the tab. Of course, to protect the taxpayer, tobacco, hamburgers, and parachutes will be outlawed and their possession persecuted, just like the possession of weed.

There ought to be mass lynchings of smokers, fatties, and skydivers, too. Why should governments have all the fun?

Obama Insurance. Transforming capitalist insurance into socialist welfare schemes since 2009.

Welfare is our business. Totalitarianism to protect you from yourself is the lagniappe.

A word from our sponsor:

A hundred percent of Alex agrees — buildings are supposed to be from steel, stone, and concrete.

So you built a light-frame McMansion instead? Because with a wood-framed house you get more space for the same money? So you can impress your equally IQ-challenged friends?

Fear not, we've got you covered! Here comes Obama Disaster Insurance!

Build a house in a brush-choked canyon, on tornado alley, on the beach, or below sea level, and once it naturally gets destroyed, taxpayers will buy you a new one, in the same indefensible place!

(Hey, wait, we already had that in New Orleans…)

(And in case you live in a wooden house in a brush-choked canyon, you're not only a burden on the taxpayer, you're a burden on the gene pool.)

Obama Insurance. Protecting fools from the consequences of their irresponsibility at the expense of their betters since 2009.

Fine Print:

If you succeed in burning down your house on you own, you are on your own. We only pay if the disaster is big enough to get on national TV.

(We don't get any political mileage out of charity nobody ever hears about. Our charity is paid for by other people's money, so we have to make sure we get the biggest bang for the buck.)

Monday, September 20, 2010

Presidential Clothes Quiz

Which President wore the most unfun clothes?

Washington: He never LOLd a tie.

Thursday, September 16, 2010

A Tale of Two Cities

(Make that one City and one cow frog town.)

For what would happen to New York if the NIMBYs and Tony Munchkins had their way, look at Paris. It died from what the frogs call museification.

Sure, it's full of American tourists who want to see what they have been told to find romantic. So they do this original Disneyland with its Cinderella architecture.

But Paris is dead. Sure, there are plenty of people and nightlife and whatever.

But it can't grow, it can't improve, it can't change. It's forever stuck in a period from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century.

When Montparnasse Tower, the first and only skyscraper in Paris proper, was built, Parisians, or at least the majority of them, decided that they hated such buildings and banned them. Ever since, businesses have been leaving for the suburbs, like La Defense, where skyscrapers are allowed. What's left to the city is the tourist trade.

Now look at London. Just like Paris, the City of London outlawed modern skyscrapers with large floor plates to protect the views of its ugly, kitschy cathedral. The result was that the world's biggest banks moved their European headquarters from the City to Canary Wharf, where they can build beautiful, boxy, modern skyscrapers with trading floors as big as they want to.

Suddenly, it became possible to build modern skyscrapers in the City. As I am writing this, the tallest buildings in London are going up in or just across the Thames from the City.

Now, Britain is no purely capitalist country. It's in fact a strange blend of capitalism, democracy, and monarchy. But it sure is way more capitalist than France, and observe the results.

Capitalism = The market wants skyscrapers. The City gets skyscrapers.

Democracy = The majority doesn't want skyscrapers. The frog town gets stuck in the past, a quaint little Disneyland for the majority that is afraid of change and likes to stagnate and the deluded tourists who believe vacation means watching stagnation happen.

(That doesn't mean that slumming in Paris isn't fun. It just isn't exactly noble.)