5300% More Likely...

If you're worried about getting killed by a gun, you should be about 5300% more worried about dying of heart disease:

Via

Music Sales

Via

When Bureaucrats Attack: Stabbed While Crocheting, Hurt at the Opera

Behold, the marvels of 21st century, bureaucrat-driven health care:

The U.S. health care system is ramping up to implement a massive new coding system called ICD-10. It’s a bland name for a system capable of coding thousands of colorful injuries. A full 68,000 to be exact, as opposed to the 13,000 under the current ICD-9. The codes are intended to help health care providers keep track of what happened to you, how much it should cost and what follow-up care you need. 

Take these, straight from ICD-10:

• Hurt at the opera: Y92253
• Stabbed while crocheting: Y93D1
• Walked into a lamppost: W2202XA
• Walked into a lamppost, subsequent encounter: W2202XD
• Submersion due to falling or jumping from crushed water skis: V9037XA

We are the ones we've been waiting for and this is the stuff of hope 'n' change.

Via Poor Richard

UPDATE: How To Prevent Injury While Crocheting

Dumbing Down Conservatism

You've heard Big Media use the term "conservative Democrat," but can you think of the last time you've heard them use the term "liberal Republican"?

No?

There's a reason for that.

Liberal Progressives* -- including liberal-progressive Republicans -- want to stretch the definition of "conservative" to the point that it's broken.  And they want to make "Republican" fully substitutable with "Conservative."  Controlling the terms of the debate in this way gives them an advantage in the war of rhetoric and makes it easy to stigmatize and bastardize conservatism.

The faux outrage over exclusion of liberal-progressive Republicans from conservative gatherings is a fine example of the liberal impulse to define conservatism for conservatives, as Ace aptly points out:

The gathering is called C-PAC, not R-PAC. Chris Christie's success as a registered Republican does not qualify him automatically as a "certified" conservative. I hate the Conservative Purity Purges as much as the next person.... but in this case? I think there is a valid point to be made. 

Chris Christie is not just soft on the Second Amendment. He is downright hostile...

Politicians who don't trust law-abiding citizens to own guns do NOT see them as equal members of a democratic republic. To put it bluntly, they see them as serfs...

Read the rest.

*I don't want anybody to feel left out.

Good Guys

New lib argument: Good guys can't be trusted with guns because "good guys" threaten their wives with guns:

It Keeps Getting Worse

Hat tip: Insty

Sloppy, Poorly-Researched Agitprop

We pay our doctors way too much?

The decade-old data from the OECD report don't account for workload or hours worked (i.e. productivity). The data are thus insufficient to support the notion that US physicians are immoderately compensated relative to physicians in Europe, Canada and Australia.

Sloppy analysis.

Individualism is dead. Long live the State!

Nauseating: Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism

Flashback: “Where are these angels who are going to organize society for us?”

Update: Sweet Sarcasm:

And indeed, our history proves Conly's claim, as objective government officials have acted with the reason and balance of experts who are not tempted by direct involvement in the questions being decided: the Sedition Act of 1798, which led to the imprisonment of newspaper editors who criticized government. Indian removal. The Fugitive Slave Act. The Dred Scott decision. The Wounded Knee massacre. Plessy v. Ferguson. Jim Crow laws. The firebombing of Tokyo. The mass internment of Japanese-Americans. The secret bombing of Cambodia. Drone attacks on Pakistani wedding parties. Indefinite military detention. The wisdom of government is virtually infinite, and has created a world of steady progress. When we act individually, we are irrational and reckless. When government officials act upon the human society from which they ascended, they do better to help us all reach our proper goals.

Do read the rest.

Put a fork in us

Via Insty:

“If we are going to wet our proverbial pants over 0.3% in annual spending cuts when we’re running up trillion dollar annual deficits, then we’re done ... Put a fork in us. We’re finished.”

RightKlik is Back

Image credit

After a long hiatus, RightKlik is back -- this time to document the slow disintegration of the USA. When I'm not blogging, paying taxes or taking humiliating orders from obtuse government bureaucrats, I'll be encouraging my kids to think about relocating to New Zealand or Canada so they can avoid paying for the financial and cultural costs of Hope 'n' Change. They're only 1½ and 3½, but they're bright kids so I think they'll understand.

Notes:

• I'm back to my old-school URL: rightklik.blogspot.com

• Allow me to recommend this book: Enjoy the Decline.  The author's writing skills aren't particularly exceptional (pot meet kettle), but I loved it anyway.  For me, it was the right book at the right time.  I might have written it myself if I had more self-motivation.

Update: Linked at The Other McCain. Thanks!