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May 23, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:47
May 23, 2014, Friday, Hour #3
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Live from the left coast at our satellite studios in Los Angeles.
It's open line Friday.
Yes, sir Revive.
Here we are, folks, our final Sterling.
Uh, wait.
Stellar.
Busy broadcast hour from the left coast.
Rush Lindbaugh and the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Open Line Friday, 800-282-288-2 is the number if you want to be on the program.
The email address, Lrushbow at EIB net.com.
We do read the emails.
I do check them.
You'll never see it happen, but I do do it.
In commercial breaks.
I don't know what made me think of this, but I want to pass off just a just a somewhat funny but instructive little cochlear implant story.
Because that's why I'm here.
I'm gonna come out for another tune-up of the new implant I got on the right side, and I went out uh had the appointment yesterday after the program.
Yesterday, I had come across on a on a website a five-minute video that purported to help people understand how those of us with cochlear implants hear things.
And I sent it up to Coco, and I had him post it so that you could all see it.
Now, the only caveat I had to offer says I I I can't verify it because I'm hearing it through a cochlear implant.
Now, I do hear, if you if you watch the video, what it did, they first they they just hit some tones, various frequency tones, as they normally sound, and then they simulated how it sounds to somebody with a cochlear implant.
I could hear the difference in the two, but remember I'm hearing everything through an implant itself, so I don't I can't testify to the accuracy of it.
That's the thing.
But a lot of people talked to me about it and and uh watched it.
Hey, you know, I think I could uh I think I know what's happening here.
It's clipping this and it's clipping that bit over there, and uh that bit's not firing on you let me, I think I could fix it.
Uh I've got it covered, thanks.
But I took it, I took the video to my appointment.
And I played it for my audiologist.
Now, I this is not to get anybody in trouble or anything of the sort.
It's just to make a point.
I have been working with the audiologist team at the place I go for 13 years, and I have been describing for them how the various live from the left coast at our satellite studios in Los Angeles.
It's open line Friday.
Yes, sir, revive.
Here we are, folks, our final Sterling uh wait.
Stellar.
Busy broadcast hour from the left coast, Rush Lindbaugh and the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Open line Friday, 800-282-2882 is the number if you want to be on the program.
The email address, Lrushbow at EIB net.com.
We do read the emails, I do check them.
You'll never see it happen, but I do do it.
In commercial breaks.
I don't know what made me think of this, but I want to pass off just a just a somewhat funny but instructive little cochlear implant story.
Because that's why I'm here.
I'm gonna come out for another tune-up of the new implant I got on the right side, and I went out uh had the appointment yesterday after the program.
Yesterday, I had come across on a on a website a five-minute video that purported to help people understand how those of us with cochlear implants hear things.
And I sent it up to Coco, and I had him post it so that you could all see it.
Now, the only caveat I had to offer says I I I can't verify it because I'm hearing it through a cochlear implant.
Now, I do hear, if you if you watch the video, what it did, they first they they just hit some tones, various frequency tones, as they normally sound, and then they simulated how it sounds to somebody with a cochlear implant.
I could hear the difference in the two, but remember I'm hearing everything through an implant itself, so I don't I can't testify to the accuracy of it.
That's the thing.
But a lot of people talked to me about it and and um watched it.
Hey, you know, I think I could uh I think I know what's happening here.
It's clipping this and it's clipping that bit over there, and uh no, that bit's not firing on you let me, I think I can fix it.
I've got it covered, thanks.
But I took it, I took the video to my appointment, and I played it for my audiologist.
Now, I this is not to get anybody in trouble or anything of the sort.
It's just to make a point.
I have been working with the audiologist team at the place I go for 13 years, and I have been describing for them how the various tune-ups and programs that we create sound.
And based on my feedback, they tweak them to try to improve the way I sound.
But at the end of the day, it is impossible.
It's always amazed me about the inventor and management side of cochlear implants.
The people involved have no idea what it sounds like to the people using them.
Yet they work.
It would be like somebody blind inventing a TV set.
I don't know how they've done it.
I know they've you use meters and graphs and charts and all that, but when you get down to the real world application of it, it still stuns me that people have no way of knowing how their device well, they they know how it works, but they they they they can't possibly experience the device they've invented as the end user does.
So anyway, I said, you gotta see this.
You gotta see.
Well, we've got a guy here that's put one of these together.
I say, I know, I know, but this is a different one.
She knew who this guy that had made the video was.
He's he's famous in the uh in the audiologist community.
So I watched her watch it, and she looked at me.
Now remember now I've been doing it for 13 years, and I've been telling her how things sound to me.
And she looked at me, do things really sound that fuzzy to you.
I said, Yeah.
I mean, in in fact, I told her what I hear, the sound on that video that I posted on the website that comes with a cochlear implant sounds much better than what I hear.
Really?
It sounds that fuzzy?
It doesn't I saw what does chipmunk mean?
I mean, I did that didn't sound chipmunky, but that I only mention this not as criticism.
It it's it's uh it it's a real testament.
These people, that those of us who have implants, and there's like 324,000 of us in the world.
That's it.
That's all.
324 stop and think, if you're gonna be in the cochlear implant business, how are you gonna with 324, you got a finite number of customers, you gotta hope for deafness.
You don't really.
But it's the the business side of this is also fascinating to me.
In the whole world, 324,000 people with cochlear implants.
I looked it up in the whole world.
Now there are many more people that need them, just can't afford them.
Obamacare doesn't cover it in Nigeria and other places.
But even somebody had been working with it for 13 years and with other people, does it really sound that fuzzy?
Which just told me it's not possible to tell people what sound sounds like.
It's just not possible.
If a highly trained specialist, if I can't convey how things sound, I mean, I've been telling her for 13 years how things sound.
She heard that reproduction, really that fuzzy.
Then there's no way I can make anybody understand how things sound to me.
That's that's the the point that was was driven home.
And I wish there were.
I wish, because it would help.
It would help in in communicating with people if they knew.
I mean, you if we You know, for example, somebody blind can't see.
You know what that is.
You can imagine that.
But bionic sound is something it's just and see the problem here is, if I may get deep.
Being able to communicate with people is required if you're going to have intimate, meaningful relationships with people.
And what happens is the people who can't hear you get mad at you.
One of the most frustrating things, and I'm sure you've experienced this too, when when uh somebody says to you, what I didn't hear you, can you say it again?
Okay, and you yell it.
And if they don't hear it that time, then you really get mad.
Who wants to repeat what they say?
And well, the hard of hearing or deaf person doesn't want to cause that kind of angst in people.
So two things happen.
The hard of hearing person will either lie and pretend he or she understood what's being said, instead of saying, I'm sorry I didn't hear you, could you repeat that?
Because nobody wants to make other people mad.
Nobody wants to be responsible for tension being created in just a simple conversation.
So you pretend that you heard what you didn't hear and hope that that covers it.
Uh, or you just withdraw and you don't go to places where it's going to be hard to hear so that you don't cause that kind of tension.
So people the heart of hearing either withdraw or they fake.
In either case, you are not building meaningful relationships to people.
That is the main problem.
That's why I wish I could come up with a way to explain people, explain to people how I hear things, because it would help them deal with uh it would help them make whatever effort they have to make for me to understand them and hear them.
Um, getting mad at people is a two-way street, like it didn't happen last night, but let me use last night as an example.
Well, cloud crowded loud restaurant.
Everybody there knew I had a second implant, uh obviously, and and they've heard me say that it's an improvement.
And so people uh it didn't happen, but it does.
People will speak to me in a crowded, loud environment, and they will not raise their voice, they'll not get closer, they'll make no effort for me to understand them.
And it's not, it's just an instinctive thing.
It's it's it's with them.
And so in that case, I have to nod my head and act like I know what they're saying when I don't have the slightest idea what they're saying.
Then you try to use association.
The way that works for me anyway, having a conversation with somebody about subject A, then the conversation pauses for a few seconds, then they say something else that you don't hear.
The next thing they say you don't hear, I don't hear it.
I assume if I heard it but don't understand it, I'm trying to lightning fast comprehend what I just heard, then what I'll do is maybe it has to do with what they just said.
So I'll try to put together what I think I just heard based on something I heard moments ago, but it's still a uh a wild guess.
And if I then say something that is not related at all to what they just said, that makes them mad.
And or frustrated or what have you.
So what it really results in uh is people participating less in conversation.
Because it just causes too much tension.
It causes people to get mad.
Uh it it and nobody wants to be the cause of that.
So you withdraw or you don't go places or you don't talk to people.
I mean, uh, you have to fight.
I don't, you know, I th uh in some cases I I will not go.
I'll not accept an invitation if it's going to be a certain place where I know it's going to be impossible to hear people.
I just I'm not going to put myself in the situation because it's not fun, it's not enjoyable, and uh all it does is cause tension.
Especially if somebody thinks in a situation like that, they've really said something really important, and I have no clue what it is, and never knew what it was.
They think I know it.
The next time they bring it up, I'm totally in the dark, have no idea what they're talking about.
That causes tension.
So I've always thought that if I could just come up with a way of telling people how I hear, it would help them in speaking to me.
And so when the audiologist said to me yesterday, is it really sound that fuzzy?
It just told me it's not possible to actually let people know how things sound.
So it requires just a further effort.
In fact, I I'll tell you something.
I am a little guarded here, even in talking about improvement or wow, this right side, oh, the magic cap, what's so much better.
Well, it is from my baseline.
But it still isn't anywhere near normal and never will be.
So you have to be very, very careful, even how you explain to people when it's getting better.
Because the assumption is it the expectation, everybody hopes that the implants can restore your hearing to normal.
And that will never be the case because it's not possible.
But that's everybody else's baseline.
My baseline much, much below normal.
Uh and so improvement to me is far different than the way people hear me talk about it being improved.
So if you know somebody who's hard of hearing or maybe even has an implant, just trust the fact that they're lying to you half the time when they tell you they heard you.
And they're doing that because they don't want you to get mad at them.
They don't want you to, they don't want to be the cause of tension.
They don't want you to think they're not trying, they don't want you to think they're not paying attention.
It's just they're not able to.
And so they're if if uh if they're not accepting invitations, if they're not uh being open with it just because they can't hear you and they they're tired of of trying to explain it.
Because it's not this told me yesterday it's impossible to convey to people.
But it doesn't mean I'm gonna quit trying.
I is it's one of the um challenges I have is to find there's gotta be some magic way that I'm gonna be able to convey or show people how things sound to me.
Uh one thing that I have going, and everybody, I'll be hard-of-hearing person, any crowded environment, it's tough for even a normal person to hear in a very loud place.
So there is that.
There is an ability to uh relate on that on that score.
Anyway, we got to take a break.
We got phone calls coming up, and do you remember Paul Ehrlich?
Population bomb.
You know what his latest is?
His book, The Population Bomb totally discredited.
Not one thing was right.
Not one thing.
He's still a guru and a hero.
To the insane environmentalist wackos and others on that side.
He says it's getting so bad now that our population's so out of control, the Earth's ability to feed today's population and tomorrow's is so strained that the only hope we have is to eat our dead.
Right here it is, and he's still teaching at Stanford, where what do you pay 40 grand a year to send your kids to hear this kind of stuff?
Okay, so here come the snarky emails.
Hey, Rush, my wife never hears a thing I say.
What's her excuse?
Folks, I get the jokes.
I know you're sitting around, you're watching TV, you're reading, and somebody comes in room and says something to you.
You're not paying attention, so you have to ask them to repeat it.
I'm talking about when you're doing nothing but talking to somebody, and you only hear half of what they say.
Most often you're gonna fake hearing the whole thing rather than ask them to repeat it because it's gonna frustrate them.
I mean when you're just doing nothing but having a conversation and you only get half of it.
Stop using you.
When I'm in a conversation with people and I only get half of it, the odds are I'll fake it.
I'll act like I heard the whole thing.
Just to avoid say, I'm sorry, could you say that again?
Because they just get mad.
Unavoidable.
You know what I've you know what one of the funniest manifestations of this is when I'm out on those rare occasions when I do a public appearance, it's no way.
If if there's uh a line of people, say for photo or uh handshake or what have you, and there's a lot of noise.
I just I don't hear half or more what people say.
So I'm just again association.
I assume they're there because they're listeners, they enjoy it.
So I just say thank you.
And when that doesn't well, you ought to see their faces when they've complained about something or said and I'm thank you.
Well, thank you very much.
And I get the weirdest look on their faces.
Because that's that's one of my fallbacks, is just to be polite, say thank you when I don't understand what people have said.
And sometimes it's funny.
And at that point, they'll say, wait a minute, did you hear what I said?
And if they ask and say, No, I actually didn't, then they're happy to repeat it.
If they figured out that um it didn't get communicated.
Anyway, here's Mike in Melbourne, Florida.
Mike, you're next on Open Line Friday.
Hello.
Uh good afternoon, Russ.
Thank you for taking my call.
You bet so.
Um I we need to talk about a new government scheme involving flood insurance that's going to victimize more and more people across the country.
Uh, as you know, um the government is the sole provider of flood insurance policies.
Well, it turns out that FEMA is in the process of redrawing all of their boundaries to determine who is in a flood hazard zone and who isn't.
Well, a few days ago I received uh from my mortgage company a letter saying that FEMA had informed them that my property is now in a flood hazard zone, and that a federal law required them to force me to purchase flood insurance.
And I've looked online, and there is in fact such a law.
It's called the National Flood Insurance Reform Act of 1994.
The reform act makes you a new customer.
Uh yes.
What it does is it requires anyone with a government-backed mortgage to secure flood insurance if at any time during the loan their property becomes located in a flood hazard zone.
So you can immediately see what this is.
This is a government drawing up.
Well, now wait a minute.
Isn't pretty much every mortgage government backed to Fanny and Freddie ultimately?
Well, it's probably headed that way, yes.
Yeah, and so you can see how many people this is going to be right, right.
And then they can just arbitrarily draw a flood zone and put you in it.
That's exactly right.
And you probably know that the flood insurance program is running about a one trillion dollar deficit because they've been subsidizing people for years and years, building on a floodplain at low rates, and this is the way they're going to recover it.
It's nothing more than a backhanded tax increase.
And it's potentially going to cost you thousands and thousands of dollars because once you're in a flood zone, now you've got to pay the jacked up rates for a special hazard zone as opposed to a preferred risk policy.
Right.
And there are absolutely no rules I can see anywhere that determine, you know, exactly how they draw these zones.
So what are you gonna do about this?
What do you think can be done?
I have tried I'm beginning to look for lawyers that will help me in a class action lawsuit against the government.
I tried contacting Mark Levin's legal foundation.
Uh they told me they couldn't help me.
I would need to go through a Florida lawyer.
Um this is just beginning.
I've also contacted Senator Rubio's office, so we'll see where this leads.
But um this I mean, I can't believe this can happen in the United States.
Oh, I can.
I can.
This this sounds like I mean, this sounds made to order.
This is the exact kind of thing that government does to recoup spending that they've blown.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have Rushlin bought executing assigned host duties flawlessly.
Folks, do not disregard our previous caller.
This is this is hidden taxation.
It's another way for the regime to redistribute wealth.
And it's all done in a stealth way, and it doesn't require the bad PR of a tax increase.
Nobody knows about it except the people to whom it happens.
And basically, he was right on the money.
FEMA is simply redrawing floodplains.
And they're simply declaring that if you happen to live in an area they deem to be a floodplain, and then if your mortgage is backed by the government, then you have to buy flood insurance.
You may have never purchased flood insurance before because there's never been a flood where you live.
But FEMA, in concert with the EPA can simply declare, well, you know what?
Our computer models that say it's going to raise two degrees in a hundred years, say there might be a big 100-year flood in the next 80 years where you live.
And as such, you need to have insurance.
It's simply a way of the government's going to go get money wherever they can, and they're going to get it from people they think have it.
be it pension plans or savings accounts or what have you.
There's a story out of Dallas from their ABC affiliate WFAA.
Same thing happened in Midlothian.
At first glance, it's a nice neighborhood, Midlothian, Texas.
Didn't look so good recently from inside the mailbox of resident Janet Allen, who received a notice from her mortgage company that she was in a zone, a special flood hazard area.
She said, Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, what am I going to do?
What am I going to do?
I don't have the money to pay for this insurance.
It's devastating to me.
She was told that FEMA had re-evaluated her property, and it was now designated as being in floodplain, but there wasn't any explanation why.
She said it makes me mad, makes me very angry.
A Midlothian Texas city official explained that there's been a veritable flood of properties newly listed as flood prone in maps that were just put out by the feds.
There are hundreds of new additions from several Midlothian subdivisions, each of them.
Going through what Janet Allen is experiencing.
It's real depressing.
So Janet Allen and some of her neighbors are now in the process of spending hundreds of dollars each to get a new elevation survey done on their property so that they can try to appeal the flood zone characterization.
Now, the reason for the increase in properties in the in the floodplain in Ellis County, this Midlothian, Texas area, is that the area was recently remapped by FEMA, and the agency says that better mapping technology and changes in runoff because of new development is driving many of the increase.
It's just arbitrary.
And it's happening all over, and it's a stealth way of raising taxes.
I mean, it's the federal government selling the insurance.
No uh, it's the federal government demanding that you buy it.
So keep a sharp eye.
You could live in a place where there hasn't ever been a flood, and all of a sudden get one of these notices that you now live in a potential floodplain, and as such, you have to have flood insurance.
From the federal government, here's what it costs.
It's these kind of things not happening with acts of Congress.
And how much of this, here's another thing.
How much of this is being done to support this insidious hoax of climate change.
I mean, how how many people are getting these notices because climate change models are forecasting sea level rises of four feet in the next century, and it could result in a flood in your neighbor.
Don't doubt for a minute that that's what's driving some of this.
And driving it in in the sense of warranting it.
Oh, yeah, global warming.
You believe, oh yeah, I'm really worried about it.
Well, it's it's gonna make you could live in a flood zone now because of global warming.
What are you gonna do?
Because you've always bought into it.
So don't think for a minute that it is climate change undergirding and not undergirding this.
It is.
Flood insurance has gone up because of rising sea levels.
It's gonna be very easy for them to say this.
Even though it's all a hoax.
Controversial Stanford professor has claimed overpopulation could lead to humanity having to eat the bodies of the dead.
Paul Ehrlich, best known for his prediction of human oblivion 46 years ago, says that current population trends are on a course that could leave cannibalism as one of our only options.
Ehrlich claimed that scarcity of resources will get so bad that humans will need to drastically change their eating habits and agriculture.
He said we will soon be asking, is it perfectly okay to eat the bodies of your dead because we are all so hungry?
This is in an interview to Huffing and Puffington Post.
That this guy still has any credibility.
He has been proven wrong on everything.
Proven wrong.
Julian Simon, the late scientist, made Ehrlich a bet.
In fact, a book has been written about this bet, called the Bet.
Julian Simon bet Ehrlich that the price and availability of an assortment of minerals and natural resources would increase in a certain number of years in the future.
And he was right.
Prices went down, all these minerals became more discoverable because of free markets.
Ehrlich has been totally discredited.
And yet he still serves a purpose on the left.
What does that tell you?
Ben Shapiro has a piece today at Truth Revolt.
As the fallout from the VA cooking of the books and the related deaths of over three dozen veterans continues, President Obama took to the podium on Wednesday to explain that problems at the VA are nothing new.
Wrong button.
Herein lies the problem for the left, though.
The failures at the VA, including its bureaucratic incompetence, its waiting lists, and its deaths, all debunk the notion that a government-run health care system will work.
It's a fresh slap in the face to all those commentators who, in pushing Obamacare, endorsed the VA as a model.
And there's some pretty big names on that list.
Paul Krugman in 2011 wrote of the VA's huge success story.
Now, folks, listen to me on this.
Was what what has been compiled here?
All of these leftist commentators praising the VA recently, last eight to ten years.
So much praise that they held out the VA.
They held it up as an example of how Obamacare will be wonderful for this country.
Paul Krugman, 2011, just three years ago.
Multiple surveys have found the VA providing better care than most Americans receive, even as the agency has held cost increases well below those facing Medicare and private insurers.
The VA is an integrated system, provides health care as well as paying for it.
So it's free from the perverse incentives created when doctors and hospitals profit from the expensive tests.
So here's a guy, he's creaming, he's ripping the shreds the free market, doctors and hospitals praising the VA.
It's so well run, it's so efficient, it's so economical, the treatment's so good, nobody's left wanting anything.
It's a great example of how Obamacare will work.
And then he added, yes, this is socialized medicine, but it works and suggests what it'll take to solve the troubles of the U.S. health care system more broadly.
Nicholas Christoph, New York Times, 2009.
Take the hospital system run by the Department of Veterans Affairs, The largest integrated health system in the country.
It's fully government run.
It's much more socialized medicine than the Canadian system is with its private doctors and hospitals.
And the system for veterans is by all accounts one of the best performing, most cost-effective elements in the American medical establishment.
These guys could not be more wrong.
They were just acting as PR agents for Obamacare.
And somebody told them, hey, why don't you use the VA?
And they lied to him about how well the VA's doing, and it all got started.
The VA was great.
All the while this is going on, Obama and everybody running around with the need for reform of the VA, these waiting lists were happening, people were not being treated, patients were dying, all while this stuff was being written just last year.
Uve Reinhard of Princeton wrote in the pages of the New York Times.
Notice where all this stuff runs.
The New York Times.
Remarkably, Americans of all political stripes have long reserved for our veterans the purest form of socialized medicine, the vast health system operated by the Department of Veterans Affairs, generally known as the VA.
If socialized medicine is as bad as so many on this side of the Atlantic claim, why have both political parties ruling this country deemed socialized medicine the best health system for military veterans?
Or do they just not care about them?
You think these people are embarrassed today?
Hell no.
They don't think anybody's going to hear about this or remember any of this.
They just said what needed to be said at the moment to advance whatever part of the Democrat agenda was in trouble.
And they'll say tomorrow whatever has to be said, whether it's true or not, to advance the Democrat agenda.
It's the purpose of the media today.
The Rand Corporation, if other health care providers followed the VA's lead, it'd be a major step toward improving the quality of care across the U.S. health care system.
This is embarrassing.
I mean, it it's nothing could be further from the truth.
And then the wonder kind of the Washington Post, Ezra Klein, who wrote in 2009, expanding the veterans' health administration to non-veterans is one of my favorite ideas.
So I, you know, all of this, I think all of this is proof of the theory that Obama didn't want the truth about the VA to come out.
Well, they're trying to sell us an Obamacare.
In fact, they're out there using, they got their willing accomplices here in the drive-by media spreading these lies about how great the VA's doing.
So they can't focus on any problems there because that would undercut the effort of Obamacare, which they were using the VA as a model for.
You could New York Times, Washington Post, you know, little Northeastern liberals gobbling this stuff up and considering it to be gospel, being lied to practically in every paragraph.
Gotta take a break, but we're coming back.
Don't go away.
Chris in Kansas City.
We head back to the phones here on Openline Friday.
Hi.
Hi, good afternoon, Mr. Limbaugh.
Thank you for taking my call.
I'll try to be brief.
Thank you.
In light of the uh scandalous cover-ups involving the VA, the IRS, and Benghazi, I'd like to note that since the GM recall scandal hit the air, there has not been one peep from anyone even remotely associated with the Obama administration about how he saved General Motors.
Now, why do you think that is?
Um personally, I believe, just like all the other ones, he has to distance himself from having been involved with it at all.
To protect himself politically.
Well, obviously, but and that's of course the larger overriding thing, but there's also another thing at work here, and it's very, very, very important for people to understand.
What's going on at General Motors, government runs at the United Auto Workers owns it?
It doesn't matter.
It's what you think of it that matters.
And the last thing Obama said about GM was GM's alive and bin Laden's dead.
Democrat National Convention.
That's the only thing you need to say.
If you don't have car being recalled, you don't know.
You're not paying attention to the low information news.
And so Obama's, of course, not going to come out and address this because it would go against the created quote-unquote reality.
That GM is trucking along just fine.
Obama can run it, save it from these evil corporate tears, while at the same time destroying Al-Qaeda.
And bin Laden.
But you're right, Zach.
And I gotta go.
A quick break.
Have a great Memorial Day weekend, folks.
Uh, we had a best of show on Monday or something.
Yeah, best of, thank you.
Yeah, I'll be back here Tuesday.
We'll see you then.
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