Dr. Zeke Emanuel – Why he hopes to die at 75

I was listening to Zeke Emanuel on Squawk Box the other day concerning an article he wrote stating he would stop getting any sort of medical treatment at 75. For those of you that do not know, Dr. Emanuel wrote a book that is the model for the ACA and he is a definitive authority on it as well, or at least that’s the way I interpret his involvement because if you look at his book it’s clearly the ACA and his brother was one of President Obama’s advisors.

So I went and read his article,http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/09/why-i-hope-to-die-at-75/379329/, because if you really want to know what something says you can’t trust the media and need to research it for yourself.  Too many times have I taken the “mainstream news media” at their word only to find out the had some BS slant to their statements.

To be fair Dr. Emanuel did say several times in his article that this was his opinion as it pertained to himself and he was not recommending it be policy. However. He also stated several times in the article that a persons contribution to society diminishes starting in their 40’s and by age 75 it “forces each of us to ask whether our consumption is worth our contribution”, but he retains the right to change his mind as long as he is, “still being creative after 75”. I don’t want to say the government bureaucrats  are thinking this is good policy for government provided health care but I can’t help thinking it will, at some point, become a metric from which to gauge your consumption versus contribution especially if it comes from someone whose opinions formed the basis of the ACA.

And then I got to thinking.  How does this contribution verses consumption paradigm work with those that consume more than they ever contributed to the system or never contributed to?  I wrote previously about how I believe the Democrats are trying to create a class of economic slaves dependent on the Federal Government for their economic well being and will then vote for that party because their well being depends on it.  If you have a class of the population that never contributed then how does one measure their fitness for healthcare or will they become a protected class by the liberal elite, meaning those who contribute are left to their own devices while those that consume and never contribute are more important as long as they are voting for the “correct” party.

Cynical? Yes but.

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Splitting California Into Several States

Updated because I learned that the Constitution does allow the splitting of a state, but also the people who want to do this aren’t pretending anymore.  They feel that they are underrepresented in the Senate and in the vote for POTUS.  https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/17/politics/california-split-up-per-vote/index.html

I was reminded about this idea on my way back from vacation in 2014.  There have always been these “California is too large” drives but it got me to wondering what is the real value this.  Every once in awhile the idea crops up and on the surface it seems to be a good idea.

As far as I could see all of the “reasons” to split up California were just BS.  California is too large to govern effectively.  Too diverse and varied.  Really?!? Aside from the fact creating a new state out of an already existing state is against the US Constitution it’s not even the largest state in the Union.  Alaska and Texas are both larger and they are just as varied and complex  Maybe there is a different underlying reason for this.

If California, or any other state for that matter, were split up what would be the effect on the national government?  The number of representatives probably wouldn’t change.  Same population so the distribution of representatives wouldn’t change much but…..the number of Senators would.  Each new state would bring in two new senators.  So one state broken into five would mean two senators would grow to 10.  And if they are majority democratic then the Senate could safely stay democratic.

As far as I can tell the reasons to break up California are all just a smoke screen.  The real agenda is part of a much larger plan to maintain control of the Federal Government for one party now and into the foreseeable future.

Latino Influence in National Politics

I started to identify this issue after President Regan granted amnesty to the undocumented latino population.  The democratic party has slowly been working to make the national picture more democratic to win at least the Presidency and even better the Senate.  I saw something on BBC America news about the Colorado election that brought this influence to light.

The BBC was out interviewing voters in a tightly contested senate race asking voters what mattered most.  Most of the white people they interviewed spoke english and espoused differing opinions, and then they got to some latinos, none of whom spoke english, stated jobs was the number one issue but they did not say what party they were going to support.  The commentator did state the Republican party lost the majority of the latino voter in the last election and that the latino population “was growing”.  And that’s the point.

The democrats, and I believe this is a coordinated effort based on the current administration, is moving the illegals that have come across the boarder with the recent tide, to parts of the country to tip the scales in favor of the democrats.  These people may not be able to vote today but they someday will.  The distribution of the population is intended to tip the balance and it is being done on purpose.

If you can have the majority of a states population dependent on the government, state, local or federal, for their well being and income then you are going to vote for the party that continues to support those policies.  These policies started with states like New York and California.  They are now going national with this agenda and I believe are sending illegals to localities where, if enough of them stays put, can shift red states blue as soon as the illegals shipped there are granted amnesty and shift national elections to majority democratic for the foreseeable future.

Time will tell if I’m right or not.

My Political Leanings

This is a blog just to get out some ideas I’ve been having primarily concerning politics in America.  I am an independent voter.  I do not like either one of the “established” parties, democrat or republican, and find both of them morally corrupt and disingenuous.

I am going to write about what I see and think about the goings on in our government.  Some people are going to see me as liberal, others conservative but that is something that comes with being independent.  Other independents are going to be on the other side of your issue.  Independents are not party sheep.  They are independent thinkers and care enough about this country to cut through the BS spewed out by the national news organizations, liberal and conservative alike, to come to their own decisions.

And so I start.

CentOS kernel panic and chroot

For a project I’m working on I was recently provided with a CentOS 6.3 VM that kept giving me a kernel panic every time I tried to bring up the VM.  I have never worked with CentOS and have not used Fedora or RedHad in over seven years, but I do have a strong Unix and Ubuntu background so I took up the challenge to get this VM up and running.

I wasted a lot of time trying to bring up the VM first in VBox and VMware just to get the kernel panic notice every time but the I focused on the kernel grub boot parameters.  I took out the quiet and changed audit from 1 to 3 and was finally provided with the answer of what the problem was.  The boot param was set to /dev/vda2 and the notice came back that partition was not found.

The rescue information in the RedHat and CentOS documentation was informative in helping me to modify the grub boot parameters and identify the issues but because this was a VM, mounting to get access to it too a little bit of ingenuity.  I probably could have booted from a rescue CD on booting the VM but the chroot path I took did teach me some new methods to access a system.

I changed the grub boot param from /dev/vda2 to /dev/sda2 and the VM booted into maintenance mode.  Finally after a day of effort I was getting somewhere but I did not know the root password to do the maintenance.  That’s where chroot came in.

For those of you who are unfamiliar chroot changes the apparent disk root directory (and the current running process and its children) to another root directory.  So basically I can mount this VM’s OS using another OS.  The OS has to be the same architecture, i16, 64 bit, etc, as the one you want to chroot into.  I used CentOS 6.5 because that made sense since it was available and just a minor release ahead.  In theory you should be able to use Ubuntu or something else and maybe if I have a free night and some beer I’ll test that out.

I downloaded CentOS 6.4 64-bit and built a new VM with that.  Once that was accomplished I mounted the VM I needed to fix onto the new OS and started the new VM.  After it booted I noticed the 6.3 /boot device was being loaded and not the 6.5 /boot device.  I do not know why it does that so to fix that I edited the /etc/fstab and removed all devices associated with the OS I was trying to fix.  I needed them to be recognized by the OS in order to fix them but did not need them to mount at boot.

After rebooting I was now in the proper environment to be able to mount the OS and do a chroot.  I followed the following the instructions provided here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Change_Root

Following the guidance there I mounted the / and /boot devices onto new mountpoints, cd’d to the new root mount point, ran all of the mounts listed and entered the chroot /mount/root command and that was it.  The root was changed from the the CentOS 6.5 to CentOS 6.3 root.  I was in.

To be honest, from a security perspective I was a little surprised how easy it was for me to do this. If I was to do this with a secure system I would definitely use encryption.

First, I need to change the root password so that I could log into the system when booting as a separate VM.  Unfortunately I kept getting “passwd: cannot identify you”.  Either I needed to make another config or mount setting, possibly the root account I used to mount in was not configured the same as on this device, but rather then go and figure that out, I went into the /etc/passwd file and deleted the X bit from the root account so that root no longer required a password.  This way I could log in as root and set a new password.

Now that I had that taken care of I went into the /etc/fstab and set the devices to the proper devices.  Using blkid and df I could see what those were set accordingly for /, /boot and swap.

Next I edited the /boot/grub/menus.lst file and changed the device listed in there to the proper device. This is what was causing the kernel panic in the first place.

After all this was done I shutdown the VM and built a new VM using  the CentOS 6.3 VM I had just modified. The VM still had some errors while booting but I was finally at the login.

I was in. I could do my maintenance.  First thing I did was change the root password.

Next I fixed the swap because it was out of sync with the system.  Ran the following commands to fix that:

swapoff -a

mkswap /dev/sda3

swapon -va

Swap was now working.  Next I decided to replace the boot images. Since the architecture was different from the original I wanted to replace the img files in /boot.

to do that I ran:

mkinitrd /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r) –force

to create a new initrd for the current kernel

If you have a specific kernel version build you may need to rebuild that too.  To find out what modules are on the system look in /lib/modules.  I had an specific kernel version build as well so I ran the mkinitrd command for that as well.  To find out builds are on the system look in /lib/modules.

The “–force” is required to overwrite the files already in /boot.

Rebuilding the images fixed some of the boot errors, not all, but now I had a more stable system that would properly boot.  I could go in, finish the rest of the maintenance and use the VM for it’s intended purpose.