Lies and "Apologies"

Shamelessly cross-posted from tomorrow's edition of my blog.

First he lied with his bald, clearly spoken, oft-repeated "Period."

Then he lied with his denial that he said "Period," insisting that he really said "If."

Now he "apologizes." 

I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me.

Let's leave aside whether we can believe him this third time around.  Let's look at what he's masquerading as an apology.

For what is he apologizing, really?  That folks find themselves in "this situation" as a result of his behavior.  There's not the least syllable of an apology for his behavior.

A third lie.

Update: As I think about this a bit more, here's another thought: Obama is sorry that folks took him at his word--that whole "based on assurances they got from me" thing.

Hmm....

Eric Hines

Chris Christie, hard-edged conservative

OK, now that you've stopped laughing, you can treat yourself to more entertaining tidbits from the alarmed president of the Democratic Governors Association:

“What’s worked for [Christie] has been to make sure that nobody talks about the issues, that people just get consumed with his personality-driven late-show entertainment,” O’Comartun said.  “People will see past the bluster and the vaudeville routine that is the Chris Christie show.  They’ll focus in on the issues.”

Of course they will.  That's just how you've been training them, Mr. O'Carmatun!

On the issues, the best thing that probably can be said about Christie is that he'd be a sight better than Hillary Clinton.  The man has fallen for global warming, for pete's sake.   But on style, bluster, and vaudeville--oh, my!   Clinton will wish she had a sliver of what he's got.

I'm waiting for the bumper stickers:  "Putting government on a diet."

Glimmers and cold comforts

From Michael Barrone:

Northern Virginia was perhaps more impacted by the shutdown than any other part of the country.  Yet when the exit poll asked who was more to blame, 47 percent of voters said Republicans in Congress and 46 percent said Obama. Considering that individuals almost always poll better than groups of people—particularly Republicans (or, for that matter, Democrats) in Congress, this is a devastating result for Obama. 

It reminds me of the story of the Teamsters Union business agent who was in the hospital and received a bouquet of flowers.  The card read, “The executive board wishes you a speedy recovery by a vote of 9 to 6.”  However, in this case, the margin was narrower.

Unloading the gun

I'm liking Sarah Hoyt again this morning.   She argues that sooner or later every government becomes like a monkey with a pistol.

In monarchies this is fairly easy to see.  The brilliant father (or in Portugal’s case) the brilliant uncle, will raise a successor who -- either because of natural issues (those people really needed to get a clue about marrying their cousins) or because he was raised in luxury, catered to from birth, and never had to do anything to justify his existence, while, at the same time, everyone told him how brilliant he was – will be a moron in power. 

But in democracies this happens too.   Democracies are often victims of their own success.   The generation that strives and fights raises the generation that is much like the king’s heir.   The generation that builds an industrial empire raises the generation that says “Wouldn’t it be great if we had a war on poverty?  And isn’t the government just the instrument to use?” 

. . . Keep government small and starved. Then when it starts pointing the gun inappropriately, and shooting at shadows, or at people just for fun and with total amoral enjoyment, you can immobilize it and take the gun away. . . .  The only way to make this even remotely safe is to unload that gun, to take as many things as possible that people rely on the government for, and find other ways to do it.  Let government play with its shiny toys, but learn to ignore, circumvent, go under, go around.  Try to live your life as much as you can without either asking anything from government or letting it reach into your life to destroy anything you care about.

Before government can be trusted to do the tasks that we really must entrust to it, it should be restrained from wrecking anything even more important than those tasks.  You don't start a fire until you've thought through how to contain it.

This rings a bell

From this morning's Wall Street Journal:

Angered consumers are taking legal action over being dropped. On Monday, two California residents filed a lawsuit in a Los Angeles state court against Anthem Blue Cross, operated by WellPoint Inc., WLP +0.69% alleging that the insurer misled them into altering individual policies that led to them being canceled this year. In one case, a woman in her 60s upped her deductible, by $1,000, to $6,000 in return for lower monthly payments. In another, a health plan was upgraded to include more robust coverage. 

"This was an orchestrated effort by Anthem Blue Cross to get as many people off of these grandfathered plans as possible," said William Shernoff, a Claremont, Calif., lawyer representing both plaintiffs. A WellPoint spokeswoman declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.

We made trivial changes in coverage last year, too, and were vehemently reassured by Blue Cross that it would have no impact on our grandfathered status.

Game changers

I like to think about technological advantages, despite their frequent downsides, because they're often the wild card that allows people to sidestep the tyranny they're otherwise so likely to be subjected to by the control freaks who gravitate to power.  (Why, yes, I am preoccupied with issues of tyranny late.  Why do you ask?)  The Atlantic ran a survey of their favorite experts to see what consensus they could develop on the 50 most important advances in technology since the wheel.  The list is very light on ancient discoveries, with only seven discoveries dating from the B.C. period:  alphabetization, Archimedes's screw, cement, the sailboat, the abacus, the nail, and the lever, in descending order of popularity.  Wikipedia has a broader list here, arranged chronologically rather than by importance.

I notice that the stirrup, the rotary quern, the horse collar, and the crossbow didn't make the list.  Nor did crop rotation, though nitrogen-fixing did.  Wasn't there a well-known book about the critical importance of these five inventions?  I can't find it now in a net search.

Update:  I believe the book I remembered on the subject of the quern, the stirrup, crop rotation, and the horse collar was Lynn White's 1962 "Medieval Technology and Social Change," which I was conflating with William MacNeill's 1984 "The Pursuit of Power," highlighting the crossbow.

Don't like your party?

Change it.

Inertia

My most surprising discovery:  the overwhelming importance in business of an unseen force that we might call "the institutional imperative.  In business school, I was given no hint of the imperative's existence and I did not intuitively understand it when I entered the business world.  I thought then that decent, intelligent, and experienced managers would automatically make rational business decisions.  But I learned over time that isn't so.  Instead, rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play. 

For example:  (1) As if governed by Newton's First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction; (2) Just as work expands to fill available time, corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up available funds; (3) Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops; and (4) The behavior of peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated."

-- Warren Buffett, in the 1989 Berkshire Hathaway Chairman's Letter

Does this mean that corporations are hopeless?  I would say, instead, that it means we can't expect corporations, or any other group of people, to amend themselves from within purely as a result of rational thinking or pure motives.  It takes disruptive outside forces--the pain of failure--to make them change.  Private institutions can be stupid and harmful, but they don't hold a candle to stupid and harmful government institutions, because it's so much harder to apply the pain of failure to the latter.  Voter outrage is weak and delayed.  Private companies can lose their customers; monopolies can't.  Any government product that can outlaw its competition is almost guaranteed to become a monster.

Pesky talking points

Politico is not what you'd call a right-wing site.  At most, it's "centrist," whatever that means, and it's generally positive about Obamacare.  It's running a series of thumbnail PDFs to educate the pubic about this new law.  So what does the article "Beware of the Obamacare talking points" tell us?

• Obamacare is an entitlement, and you can never shut one of those down.  The Politico response is:  well, yeah, they're basically entitlements, though you can quibble about the details.  Obamacare is going to cost almost $2 trillion over ten years.  But Congress could still conceivably scale these entitlements back, unlike every other entitlement.


• Obamacare is already "helping to slow" the growth of healthcare spending.  Eh, not so much.


• Subsidies will fix the rate shock.  Eh, not so much, and to the rate shock you'll have to add the sharp increase in out-of-pocket costs.


• It'll be like shopping for a TV.  "It may get there, but it will take a while."  For people who've never tried to buy insurance before, it could conceivably be less confusing than it was before, but for everyone else it's a nightmare.


• You won't have as many doctors to choose from.  Yeah, but people who were uninsured didn't have any to choose from, so it's all good.


• Obamacare will reduce the deficit.  You're dreaming; see above.


• Obamacare will usher in death panels.  Oh, stop it, they won't be here for a little while yet.

Is Medicare "junk" coverage?

A commenter at Megan McArdle's place points out that, by White House standards, Medicare is junk coverage that should be outlawed like meat infested with e. coli.  Medicare is essentially catastrophic coverage strictly for expensive hospital stays.  Of course many seniors also want coverage for expensive, frequent office visits and prescriptions, and there is coverage for that.  Voluntary coverage.  Voluntary, private coverage for which they pay their own money to insurance carriers in the private market.

We can't just let people make up their own minds about whether to carry only catastrophic coverage, right?  That would be like letting them drive a Ford pinto.  And we can't expect them to pay for their own coverage beyond the catastrophic level, right?  And yet, as the commenter points out,  what Medicare makes optional for vulnerable seniors, Obamacare mandates for young invincibles.

In other news in bizarro-policy world, maternity care is now mandatory for the middle-aged but optional for women under 30 years of age, who are the only ones now legally permitted to buy bare-bones catastrophic coverage.

Weighing options again

It turns out the health insurance agent I talked to earlier this week probably was mistaken.  It seems that, as of January 1, 2015, no one will legally be able to sell me high-deductible affordable coverage, with or without medical underwriting, "on" or "off" the exchange.  It's all gone after this next year.

So to recap:   For over a decade we've had a high-deductible policy ($10K per person/$15K for the two) with Blue Cross.  It's very good PPO coverage, decent network, covers all the usual stuff, but a high deductible.  By law, it must be replaced with a deductible that's $3,750 lower per person ($2,500 for the two) but costs $4,800 more a year, and offers no new benefits of any conceivable use to us now or ever.  We have to decide whether to pay the extra $4,800 a year, or go without insurance for the first time in our lives.

We don't "insure" for medical costs that are reasonably likely in an ordinary year; we "budget" for those.  Insurance is for very unlikely harmful developments.  We rely on insurance in case (1) we have a medical problem that would make our lives unendurable or kill us, (2) that can be cured, and (3) that would cost enough to blow our live savings.  All three of conditions (1)-(3) have to happen before the insurance will make a difference to our life savings.  If the medical problem isn't that serious and we can't pay for it, we'll do without. If the medical problem is serious but can't be treated effectively, we'll do without.  If the medical problem is serious and can be treated and wouldn't obliterate our live savings, we'll pay for it ourselves.

The policies offered on the exchange on a subsidized basis (the only way to avoid the huge price hike) are all HMOs.  If my information is correct, they're the worst possible sort of "closed network" HMO; you're covered in the network, but outside the network, you don't just get a lower co-insurance rate, you get zero.  This is a sign of the deteriorating insurance climate, where squeezing down the network is the last option available for cost control.   In contrast, in our PPO, if we go out of network, we suffer only a partial loss of benefits, and there's still a cap on total out-of-pocket expense, though higher than the in-network cap.   If we stay in network, the doctors who have accepted Blue Cross are prohibited from charging us more than the Blue Cross rate, so the entire bill either counts against our deductible or is paid at the usual co-insurance rate.  If we go out of network, the doctor charges what he charges, not Blue Cross's fantasy of what he should charge; we're responsible for 100% of the "excess" price, and only the fictitious price counts against our deductible or is paid at our co-insurance rate.  But even then, we get a certain amount of help with catastrophic bills, and it is possible to put an upper limit on how much destruction can be visited on our life savings by a medical catastrophe.

A closed-network policy HMO would do us almost no good at all.  We want coverage only if there is a very serious problem, and that is the last time we'll be willing to settle for a Tier-4 doctor in the next county.  Our life savings would be nearly at as much risk with such a policy as if we were going bare.   So our decision, which we'll face in late 2014 when our current policy is destroyed by the ACA once and for all, is (1) go bare or (2) pay $4,800 a year more (minimum) for a PPO plan with a decent network of doctors and hospitals.  What makes the choice even more difficult is that Blue Cross reportedly is going to lose doctors and hospitals even from its PPO networks, though probably not as many as they'll lose from their HMO networks.

Going bare would mean saving about $11K every year.  That's enough to build up a pretty impressive warchest against the possibility of an expensive disease.  And we have to consider, now, that we're taking a gamble only on horrible medical bills for a maximum of one year, depending on what month the disaster lands in.   After that, we can just sign back up for insurance for the following year.  (And who knows?  Medicare may actually survive long enough to kick in in 7-9 years.)  The IRS penalty for going bare would be negligible and uncollectible anyway.  Crazy, but going bare seems like the rational choice.

This week on appeal

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the federal district court ruling requiring Catholic business-owners to offer health coverage that includes birth control.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the federal district court ruling that recently had overturned certain aspects of the recent Texas state law banning late-term abortions and requiring abortionists to maintain privileges at nearby hospitals in case of emergency.  The Texas law is now back in effect.  (Link fixed!)

Provider shock

Awesome.  Who would have guessed that the insurance jammed down our throats by the compassionate new law would keep its costs down by eliminating doctors and hospitals from our networks?  There are all kinds of tasty treats hidden in this shiny new law.

And if you thought that the big problem this week was limited to about 5% of the market -- and who cares about such a tiny voting bloc, right? -- it seems that closer to 90 million people are at risk of losing the coverage they wanted to keep.  But no problem:  they can all just shop around in the new market, right?

I thought my expectations about this program were about as bad as possible, but these people are surprising even me.

This is a good one, too:  We had to take your insurance off the market, because we made a central planning decision that people probably weren't going to be willing to buy it any more once they saw our fabulous new product.  That's capitalism.

(Pictures of) Guns are Scary

But sometimes the Bill of Rights wins anyway.  If you're a public school that wants to ban a t-shirt message, don't pick one that celebrates the NRA, because they've got lawyers who will come and help the students.  Pretty good lawyers, too:

In the face of public ridicule and legal action the school district came to its senses and issued an apology.  In a statement published by Michael L. Christensen, Superintendent of Schools, Orange Unified School District, the school district said the shirt was okay to wear to school, and promised to provide training to staff aimed at preventing future incidents.  The matter now seems to be resolved, and the NRA has given Haley a carton of the banned t-shirts to give to her friends, to wear to school if they want to.

Voting with their feet

And may many more do so.  While there is still some freedom to make business decisions rather than comply with central diktats, it's good to see people move their businesses to states that don't treat them like milk-cows.

The Pro-Transparency Plank

This is the most complicated of the planks in my proposed platform, but that's because it's going to take a lot to reform the government. The first goal here is to make individuals in government more responsive to the needs of the citizenry by putting them on the same ground as the citizen, eliminating special privileges and immunities that allow them to callously destroy lives, careers, businesses, etc. An equally important goal is to restore public faith in the institutions of government.

Part 1: Let's begin with Rand Paul's proposed constitutional amendment that no law can be made "applicable to a citizen of the United States that is not equally applicable to Congress ... the executive branch of Government ... the judges of the Supreme Court ... and judges of such inferior courts as Congress may from time to time ordain and establish." Then let's expand it to do away with judicially created immunities, as proposed by the Sage of Knoxville.

Part 2: Require laws to be written in common language and require a review period of 1 business day for each 10 pages in a bill. Once introduced, no vote can be taken on a bill until its review period has passed. Any changes to the bill require a new review period based on the total number of pages in the bill. The review period could be circumvented in the case of local or national emergencies, but only for bills that deal solely with the emergency (i.e., if someone tacked on an amendment for building an amusement park, the bill would have to go through the normal review period).

Part 3: Work together with private transparency organizations to create better transparency laws. Work with privacy organizations to create safeguards for privacy from government snooping. Put teeth into transparency and privacy laws by making non-compliance or overly-long response times by government officials or employees crimes, potentially leading to prison sentences.

Part 4: Another pair of Instapundit suggestions:
A. Cut pay to Congress and cut presidential travel when they haven't passed a budget.
B. If a government official or employee takes a lobbying or other private, government-related job within five years of leaving office, they must pay a 50% tax on that income.

Why, yes . . . .

I am feeling a little angry lately.  Why do you ask?

The Pro-Cannabis Freedom Plank

As the next part of my series exploring a winning political platform for the next two elections, here is my Pro-Cannibis Freedom plank:

Return control over cannabis possession, growing, sales, and use to the states. Keep importation illegal, and continue to use the DEA to stop cannabis from coming in, but let each state decide how to handle this drug. In addition, immediately convert federal prison sentences for cannabis-related crimes other than importation to parole.

There are several goals here: Move back toward the original interpretation of the Commerce Clause, reduce prison expenses, refocus anti-drug activities to more serious drugs, and try not to enrich drug lords.

When you lose CNN . . .

Anderson Cooper, well-known right-wing extremist at CNN, reports on White House tactics to intimidate health insurance industry representatives:

Legacy

He's chosen the blunder for which he'll be remembered.

One of the comments I'm seeing most often now is "I guess Ted Cruz was right."

Still lying

They can't quit lying even now.  This is from Kathleen Sibelius's testimony before Congress this morning:

“Mr. Chairman, there was no change,” Sebelius said.  “The regulation involving grandfathered plans, which applied to both the employer market and the individual market, indicated that if a plan was in effect in March of 2010, stayed in effect without unduly burdening the consumer with reducing benefits and adding on huge costs, that plan would stay in effect and never have to comply with any regulations of the Affordable Care Act.”*  

“That’s what the grandfather clause said.  The individual market which affects about 12 million Americans, about 5 percent of the market.  People move in and out.  They often have coverage for less than a year.  A third of them have coverage for about six months. And if a plan was in place in March of 2010 and again did not impose additional burdens on the consumer, they still have it.  It’s grandfathered in.”

In what universe?   My policy dates back over a decade.  Blue Cross didn't reduce my benefits or add any "huge costs" to my old policy.  They just canceled it and offered a new and improved consumer-friendly policy that costs $4,800 a year more in return for a $3,750 reduction in deductible.

Ms. Sebelius announced that she was now shouldering the blame:  "I'm accountable."  Resign, lady, and forfeit your public pension benefits, then we'll talk.

Anyone who thinks this treatment isn't scheduled to land next on people with employer-provided insurance is a fool.  They're just coming for us in manageable chunks, hoping we won't stick together.

The Pro-Immigration Plank

In an earlier post, I proposed a new platform for whichever party wants to adopt it. Here's the Pro-Immigration plank:

Allow all of the legal immigrants US businesses need. Tempered by background checks, annual income minimums, and health insurance requirements, give work visas to pretty much any foreign national who can get an America-based company to hire them before they come to the US (they need to have a job waiting when they cross the border). Don't set maximum limits; let the market decide.

Things I'd like to add to this, but which may be a bridge too far:

1. Implement something like the DREAM Act; don't punish the kids of illegals.

2. Since the overwhelming majority of illegal immigrants appear to be from Mexico, cut a deal with the Mexican government. We'll give illegals here legal status, but Mexico has to pass reciprocal laws that give US citizens in Mexico all the rights Mexican citizens in the US have, and make immigration to Mexico easier for Americans.

3. Make immigration violations permanently bar someone from getting a visa to enter the US.

Ray of hope?

I'm awfully confused about what the ACA does and not permit in the way of escape.  I've just been on the phone with a very helpful health insurance broker, recommended by our State Farm agent, who says that there will be off-exchange policies available as well as exchange policies.   The prices quoted to me by Blue Cross so far, and all the price quotations that I've been able to find on the internet, apparently are for exchange policies:  Bronze, Silver, and so on.  They can be bought without going on the non-functional website, but their prices (not counting subsidies) are the same either way.  Off-exchange policies have to comply with some aspects of the ACA but perhaps not all; it may be possible, for instance, to get more flexibility about deductibles.  If we stay with Blue Cross, we can avoid the pre-existing condition problem.  Even better, it may be that we can avoid it even if we switch to a new company like United Healthcare, which the broker believes has a better network and a better claims-paying record.  He also claims that many doctors and hospitals (like the Memorial-Hermann networks and Baylor University here in South/Southeast Texas) are dropping Blue Cross at the end of this year.  United Healthcare, in contrast, is preserving its network.

Because all the insurance companies are scrambling to make sense of the new regulatory environment, he can't get us options and prices yet, but he believes he will be able to do so in a few weeks.  Possibly there's still some way out of this mess--some way for us to continue to buy the cheaper, higher-deductible catastrophic stop-loss coverage we prefer.

I enjoyed talking to the guy.  He hates the new law as much as I do, and enjoyed hearing about Chris Matthews's hilarious new outrage about Benghazi.

"Why wasn't I told about this?"

I guess this is what happens when you let the veil of denial slip.  First, 60 Minutes has the gall to do a piece on Benghazi.  Softball, and sadly late, but better than the nothing-burger than preceded it.  Next, Chris Matthews actually watches it, because I guess it's inside his bubble, and wakes up in a whole new world with some questions scratching irritably at his brain:

JAY NEWTON-SMALL:  Well, Hillary in her testimony before Congress said she was there, she was, you know, on the ground, in the State Department listening to the response in real time on the phone as it was happening, and so, she knew what was happening.  But again, they also testified that there were waves of attacks, so they thought that, you know, after the first wave that things were quieting down.  That’s when they said, well, maybe we don’t need to send help, and help was really far away.  It wasn’t like it was next door. It was several hours away in Italy, so – 

MATTHEWS:  But the fight went on for seven hours. 

NEWTON-SMALL:  Yeah, but then if you’re doing it in waves, you think the attack is over and sending somebody is not going to help anymore, right?  Then all of a sudden, they attack again. 

MATTHEWS:  I’m going to ask you something.  If that what your brother or father in there, would you say that’s an acceptable response?  ‘Oh, it’s probably over by now, it’s no good to send anybody.’  Or would you say, ‘I don’t care if it’s over or not, I’m going to collect the bodies if nothing else.  I’m going to get there and show I cared.’  That’s what I’d do.

Wakey, wakey.

A Winning Platform for 2014 & 2016

Over the next week, I would like to introduce a set of ideas I have for building a winning political platform for 2014 & 2016.

My proposed platform for either major party would go something like this:

The X Party: Pro-Immigration, Pro-Transparency, Pro-Opportunity, Pro-Conscience, Pro-Health Freedom, Pro-Cannabis Freedom

Certainly, I am not an expert in government, politics, policy, etc., and it's likely one or more of my ideas will be dumb, unworkable, etc. But I thought I'd take a swing at it anyway.

I'll post details on my ideas for each plank over the next week. Meanwhile, I'm interested in hearing your ideas for a 2014 / 2016 platform in the comments.

When you lose NBC

About six hours ago, NBC posted an article pointing out that President Obama had known all along that millions of Americans would lose their insurance coverage.  As of this posting, there were almost 3,400 comments, mostly of the mad-as-hornets variety.  No one seems much interested in listening to administration mouthpieces explain how we all really should have known this was coming, so it wasn't exactly the same thing as a lie.  (I actually did expect part of it; I always believed they'd find a way to kill my individual policy, and have said so often.  But I confess I didn't expect that it would be almost twice as expensive to buy a replacement with a somewhat lower deductible, or that others would see increases of 300% or 400%.)

A man quoted in the article is coming to the same conclusion Raven and I are mulling over:  shouldn't we withdraw from this crooked game?  I want to see civil disobedience on a scale so massive it changes how all Americans look at the progressive agenda for decades.

It's almost unbelievable, but Valerie Jarrett and other administration hacks have taken to Twitter to push this talking point:

Nothing in the ACA forces people out of their plans. No change is required unless ins. companies change their existing plan.

Right, so it's not the law that's destroying your insurance policy, it's just the insurance company's compliance with the law that could cause a little problem.  That's how much respect they have for us.  Well, it's slightly comforting to know they're desperate to pretend the law isn't destroying the insurance coverage of millions of Americans; up to now, they were trotting out the explanation that, yes, the coverage was being taken away, but it was for our own good.  Also, it should be easy to get bi-partisan support for that bill to allow us to keep our existing coverage, right?  Because the law's not destroying it in the first place, so we're all good here.  I know I can count on Democrats in Congress to step up.

A handful of them are starting to make a fuss about demanding a refund from CGI for its work on the website.  It's the wrong part to focus on, and it shouldn't keep them from getting hung upside-down from lampposts, but it's a slight movement in the right direction:  a cheering sign that there is a healthy panic building in Congress.  I'd like it to reach the quivering, heart-palpitation stage, so I was pleased to read this purported quotation from someone described as high up in Democratic party circles:  "The Democratic Party is f**ked."  I couldn't agree more, sir.  It should be discarded entirely, and we should start with something new.

But something tells me that, after a few days of this, many of them will decide that it's really only about 15 million people affected, and they can afford to ignore them.  It will be up to the rest of the voters to decide if they'll be allowed to get away with that.

Improving old stories

Or at least, finding a new hook.  We recently watched the 2004 movie "King Arthur," whose conceit was that it would be a more historically plausible approach to the traditional tale.  In this version, Arthur is the son of a Roman father and a Celtic mother.  He leads a band of mounted warriors commandeered from a conquered Sarmatian tribe somewhere in the Caucasus, who are promised that if they serve for 15 years they will earn their freedom.  Lancelot is one of the Sarmatians, conscripted as a teenager.  Guinevere is a young Woad woman rescued from the dungeon of a Roman aristocrat whom Arthur is sent to rescue from Injun territory north of Hadrian's wall, on the eve of Rome's abrupt withdrawal from Britain in "453 A.D."  Merlin is the mysterious leader of Guinevere's blue-painted people.  There's kind of a plot, in which Woads and Sarmatians resent their subjugation by both Romans and newly arrived Saxon invaders.  Arthur carries a grudge against the Saxons for having killed his Celtic mother in a raid some years earlier and, in any case, is disgruntled by his superiors in the Roman army and thinks Guinevere isn't too hard to look at.  There are some battles at Hadrian's wall involving cavalry attacks, zillions of flaming arrows, something in the nature of napalm, and trebuchets with flaming missiles.  The Romans leave, the Saxons lose, and the Celtic Woads take Arthur as their king while looking forward to a couple of years of security before the Saxons return and overrun their territory completely.

The timing is a bit odd, since Rome withdrew from Britain in 407 A.D., not 453 A.D.  Setting aside the minor chronological slippage, I suppose it's not hard to buy the retreating Romans, about to take the last helicopter out of Saigon, as privileged types with a somewhat nominal approach to their Christianity and an effete Italian accent; the fact remains that all the Christians are two-faced cowards.  The Sarmatians are real enough; the Romans did conscript some of them, possibly for use in pacifying Britain, among other tasks.  It doesn't seem likely, however, that they should have had such elaborate armor, or even stirrups, let alone "Greek fire," in 5th century Britain.  Someone involved in the screenplay should probably have dreamed up a plot device whereby ancient Asian knowledge came over with the Sarmatians, like Conan with his "secret of the steel."

For all this historical revision, did we at least get a creative re-imagination of the classic elements of the Arthurian legend, such as the extraordinary honor of a band of men beating back brutal chaos, or the famous love triangle?  Eh, not really.  When the story begins, Arthur has been leading his band of proudly pagan Sarmatians for 15 years and enjoys their loyalty and respect.  His callous Roman superiors force him to lead his men on a suicide mission on the eve of an honorable retirement that would have allowed their promised return to Sarmatia.  While rescuing the unappealing Roman V.I.P., Arthur frees some mistreated Woads, including Guinevere, and begins to lecture them about natural rights.  He becomes disillusioned with the decadent and faithless Romans, choosing instead to make common cause with the Woads in a forlorn-hope stand against the invading Saxons.  Guinevere joins the battle as a prenaturally effective archer and broadswordsman, all 105 bright blue pounds of her.  Lancelot and Guinevere share about two misty glances before Lancelot is killed in battle, after which Arthur defeats the Saxons with the Woads' help and marries Guinevere to unite their people.  There's barely an Excalibur and only a few lines for Merlin.

All in all, I preferred the 1981 "Excalibur."  If the story's going to be anachronistic anyway, it would have been nice to preserve the aura of fantasy and mystery along with a plot and characters that made more sense.  Although the cast included some of my favorite actors, they were mostly wasted.

It's been a while since I've seen a really satisfying historical drama with a real plot come out of Hollywood.  On the other hand, we watched a surprisingly engaging if silly Godzilla-eats-New-York flick the other night: an indie production purporting to have been filmed with a hand-held video camera operated by a small band of hip young urban dwellers.  If you grant them the Godzilla, much of the rest of the story was believable and even moving.

Samhain

The festival of "summer's end" falls traditionally on the thirty-first of October, but the hour came early this year. We had our first freeze on Saturday, a light freeze of exactly thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit that nevertheless brought ruin to many of the herbs. In preparation we took in the last harvest from the garden that we expect; if we get one more out of this week of warmer weather, that will be nice but unexpected.

The last tomatillos and some of the jalapenos got turned into a salsa verde, while the last guajillo chiles and some more of the jalapenos became a fiery red pepper sauce. We drew up many sweet potatoes and ordinary ones as well.

What really made the day, though, was the final basil harvest. Because it was dark by the time I got to it, and I didn't want the leaves to lose any of their freshness before I made them into pesto, I substituted some ingredients. I was out of both Parmesan and Romano cheeses, but I had some very strong and crumbly three-year-old cheddar that I used instead. I was also out of pine nuts, so I substituted walnuts. The result was an exceptionally creamy pesto with a smoother flavor.

The Longest Three Inches

Presumably the longest three inches in the universe is the distance across the event horizon of a black hole. If one ship was just this side of it and the other just the other side they would be completely and irrevocably out of communication with each other, presuming the first ship could stay away from the horizon.

Aside from that, the 'longest three inches' is the distance between you and the bolt you need that just fell down inside your motorcycle. You know it's there. You know, as a matter of physics, that it can't be more than three inches away. But finding it -- ah! Two hours went by taking apart everything I could easily disassemble and reassemble in that time. I ran a magnet all over everything, rocked the bike back and forth, and rolled it forward and back. Nothing.

I finally just found another bolt of the same diameter and cut it with a Dremel to fit the length.

A Request for My Fellow Bloggers

Would you mind if I added labels to some of your posts? I am trying to go back and review discussions we've had on various topics, and labels would make it easier to find things in the archives.

I would only add labels for the topics I'm looking at, and I would be careful to only use the general topics for label names. E.g., education, health care, logic, Aristotle, chivalry, etc. I would avoid adjectives and category names that might be seen as imposing judgments (e.g., bad government, idiocy). You could always remove or change labels as well, though I understand that might be a bit of a hassle if you felt it was necessary to do that to preserve the integrity of the original.

My goal is to be able to find all the posts that relate to a particular topic of discussion so I can review them, learn from them, avoid repeating discussions, use them as a springboard for future posts, etc.

What do you think?

Health, political variety

I'm seeing an encouraging trend.  Even on comments sections at progressive bastions like The New York, New York Magazine, the L.A. Times, and the Washington Post, the sentiment is vehement and very nearly unanimous against the Obamacare rollout.  A lot of things about the program are confusing, but the idea that millions of Americans are losing their insurance invokes the crystal clear, infuriating memory of the repeated promise "If you like your plan, you can keep it.  Period."  The sticker-shock is dramatic. There are critical comments on many centrist or left-of-center sites (not just National Review or the Wall Street Journal) getting hundreds of up votes and zero down, which I've never seen before.  Something's changing.  To the occasional complaint that any opposition to the plan is a vote for heartless treatment of the uninsured, the routine answer is "Where is your compassion for the millions of people losing their insurance?"  It's not just the broken website that's a problem any more.

Is it possible that the Obama administration has finally overplayed its hand?  The arguments in support of Obamacare are increasingly desperate--it's really a Republican plan, it's too soon to panic over a few unimportant glitches, if people are losing their insurance we're really doing them a favor--and they're being met with derision.  Even better, they're being met with some clear thinking about why it's wrong for the proponents to make these decisions for other people, and to dragoon other people into their misguided redistributionist ambitions.  Suddenly everyone understands that there's no such thing as a free lunch.  Some of these ideas have been taking form for a long time, but it's as though they're suddenly ready to burst onto the stage.

A comment to cheer me up

From the comments section to a puff piece at the New Yorker:

The President prefers it when his stenographers say "quality, affordable health care."  So work on incorporating that next time. 

It is also important not to mention the flagrant deceptions he and most other Democrats have ladled out about the ACA for the last four years.  You get full marks on this. 

You could have blamed Republicans more for their complicity in this mess.  You typed "Republicans" three times as often as "Democrats" so I know your heart's in the right place, but more diversion/distraction is needed.  No R's voted for the ACA, making it all the more vital that they be invoked as much as possible. 

Overall this is B- propaganda.  We expect A-level work from The New Yorker.

Don't blame us, we wanted single-payer

I'm confused.  Democrats passed Obamacare without a single Republican vote in the House or Senate.  If they really wanted single-payer, couldn't they have passed it the same way?

Looks like what stopped them wasn't the threat of Republican "nay" votes; they got those anyway.  What stopped them was a whole bunch of Democrats who would have jumped ship.

Down from the ledge again

After days of unceasing worry about how to deal with health insurance that will suddenly start costing an additional $5,000 a year because Congress has taken the cheaper product I preferred off the market, I achieved some clarity last night.  First, at some price, it makes more sense for me to bank the premiums and save them each year against a medical catastrophe.  We must just have reached that price.  In the past, I always defined "medical catastrophe" as expensive medical treatments that would be needed for years and years, possibly for the rest of our lives, which might well be decades.  Now, a medical catastrophe is only what we may be faced with for a year of treatment, after which we can sign back up, assuming Obamacare is not repealed--and when are entitlements ever repealed?

If by some miracle it is repealed, and we couldn't get reinsured, well, we'd have to join the ever-growing ranks of people traveling to Mexico, Costa Rica, or Asia for some treatments.  Anyway, who says the expensive medical treatments are ever going to make sense just because they exist?  We'll always have the choice of dying in whatever comfort can be achieved with some morphine.  Morphine will always be available one way or the other, if only on the black market.  I'm amazed by what my friends at church routinely bring back from periodic trips over the border to the south.  We're not quite as trapped as I frantically imagined.  It's only in very recent years that people thought there was some alternative to facing illness and death with as much simple dignity and comfort as possible, especially once they'd reached middle age.  Maybe the alternative is simply more illusory than I always assumed.

I've also been giving a lot of thought to how to avoid, at all costs, dying in a hospital or nursing home.  I've seen how that works too many times now.  It came to me:  I don't have to.  Morphine again.  I've seen at least two people now review their medical situations dispassionately and say, no, thanks, not for me. It's not something to save up for or insure against the expense of.  It's something to be declined, like an invitation to be tortured to death over a period of months or years.  Thanks, but no!

In the light of these realizations, when Congress destroys my health insurance next year, maybe I'm not facing a $5,000 annual increase in living expenses.  Maybe I'm about to cut $5,000 out of my living expenses instead, by going bare.  (Sure, there will be a fine, but if I  had enough income to care, I probably could shrug off the doubled premiums.  What's more, I never overpay my taxes and therefore never ask for a refund.)  Maybe, for people not working full-time for an employer who provides (and can obtain) what HHS thinks is proper insurance, insurance is simply a thing of the past.  Maybe for us, it's a strictly cash-basis medical system from now on.

I haven't decided for sure to go bare.  It's possible I can eat the problem as long as the current estimate of our future premiums holds true.  But I don't believe it will; we're in a death spiral on enrollment and premiums.  Something will have to give.  The premiums will have to go up even further.  To the extent that the public is clamoring for a change, they're appalled that deductibles are so high, not that they can't buy higher ones.  If they get their way, I still won't be able to buy the high deductible I want, and premiums will go up to compensate for the lower deductibles.  There have to be an awful lot of people like me who are just now realizing that going bare is now a one-year risk calculation.  It's got to fly apart.

Many people have advised me to shoot for some of the wonderful new subsidies they'll be handing out if they ever get the website working.  Having assets rather than income to live on, I probably could qualify for subsidies until they get smarter about the needs-based restrictions.  I'm of two painfully divided minds.  On the one hand, it feels like giving in to a particularly filthy shakedown:  we double your costs and then get you dependent on a subsidy to make it humanly possible to pay the new bill.   On top of that, it feels not only humiliating but wrong, like taking money out of the collection plate at church.  On the other hand, if my church were taken over by smiling, caring thugs who robbed me as I came in the door, maybe I'd feel differently about robbing the collection plate on the way back out.

I feel the social contract has been broken.  I have to rethink how I will live with these people.  My final moment of clarity last night was this:  these idiots should not have the power to cause me to live one more moment in fury and anxiety.  I have a good life.  I'll keep living it until they come down the driveway, armed, to roust me.  If I get sick, I get sick.  If the system is going to crash and burn, I'm in as good a position as anyone to make the best of it.  After that, I got a good night's sleep.

Vote for Heinlein

I've never even heard of any of these other "famous" people from Missouri.  Of course I'm voting for the Master.

It can't fail

Obamacare can't "fail," because it was never designed to work in the first place.

The only problem is that they didn't expect it to fail this fast.  Such a brutally obvious face-plant playing out in the news within a year of the midterm elections, in ways obvious to some of the lowest-information voters with the murkiest political philosophies, can't have been in the game-plan.

Bugs

“If you don’t have time to do it right, will you have time to do it over?”   Good Robot Chicken link.

Warning

"I did not read the instructions, because I am a man."  This Amazon product review page is worth a read.  Many customers have been inspired to flights of composition by their remarkable experiences.  It's a little rude, so don't go there if you're easily offended.  My husband and I, being barbarians, have tears streaming down our faces, especially the part about the frozen brussels sprouts.

Talking me down from the ledge

Jonah Goldberg gives it a try:

Barack Obama, who holds a patent on a device that hurls aides and friends under a bus from great distances, also understands [the need to be the least acceptable available scapegoat].  That is why Kathleen Sebelius these days looks a lot like a Soviet general on his way to brief Stalin on the early "progress" in the battle of Stalingrad. 

. . . [A]s I've written many times, I don't think we have much reason to fear traditional jack-booted dictators in this country.  Ironically, the main reason we don't have to worry about them is that we worry about them so much. . . .  Deep in American DNA is a visceral aversion to despotism.  Sometimes, during a war or other crisis, it can be suspended for a while, but eventually we remember that we just don't like dictators. 

The bad news is that we don't feel that way -- anymore -- about softer, more diffuse and bureaucratic forms of tyranny.  Every American is taught from grade school up that they should fear living in the world of Orwell's 1984.  Few Americans can tell you why we shouldn't live in Huxley's Brave New World.  We've got the dogmatic muscle and rhetorical sinew to repel militarism, but we're intellectually flabby when it comes to rejecting statist maternalism.  We hate hearing "Because I said so!"  But we're increasingly powerless against, "It's for your own good!" 

. . . 

For instance, when the national-security types intrude on our privacy or civil liberties, even theoretically, all of the "responsible" voices in the media and academia wig out.  But when Obamacare poses a vastly more intrusive and real threat to our privacy, the same people yawn and roll their eyes at anyone who complains.  If the District of Columbia justified its omnipresent traffic cameras as an attempt to keep tabs on dissidents, they'd be torn down in a heartbeat by mobs of civil libertarians.  But when justified on the grounds of public safety (or revenue for social services or as a way to make driving cars more difficult), well, that's different. 

And it is different. Motives matter. But at the same time, I do wish we looked a bit more like the America Edmund Burke once described: 

In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; [In America] they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze. 

. . . 

The remarkable thing about this is that there's no real executive experience in his explication of his executive experience.  Yes, the candidate can fire people from the campaign.  But being the candidate and being the campaign manager are as different as being the lead singer for Spinal Tap and being the band's manager.  On the campaign trail, Obama's job was to "be Barack Obama," to sound smart and charismatic and rev up the crowds.  He's still playing that part rather than fulfilling the job description. 

And no one will tell him.  That's why, I suspect, when he went to check on the progress of the site's development he had no idea how to ask questions that would get at the reality of the situation.  Bureaucrats, apparatchiks, and contractors blow smoke.  That's what they do. Obama has no idea how to cut through the smoke.  He thinks being president involves constantly going out and giving speeches to crowds that love him about how hard he's working rather than actually, you know, working.  It's all very meta.  He's playing president Obama because he doesn't know how to be president Obama.  I think that when he went out on Monday and did his infomercial schtick in the Rose Garden -- Operators are standing by!  It's not just a website; it's a floorwax! etc. -- he honestly thought he was fixing the problem.  Well, I've done my part!

I can't link to this, because it comes from his email feed, but Goldberg usually has good stuff up at NRO.

Ways to be effective

Tools:

When Virginia's Fauquier County cited farmer Martha Boneta last year for hosting a birthday party for eight 10-year-old girls because she did not have a permit and site plan, little did county officials think they would set off a revolution for legal remedies against such abuses.

Push, keep pushing, and push some more.

Horse Soldiers: USMC Edition

Tom sends a link to a page devoted to the China Marines. It's a chapter of the Corps' history that few know about, but a very interesting one.

On New Forms of Government

Over at VC, Elise and I began a discussion late in the comments to a post that probably deserves to be considered independently.

Elise asked:

What does abandoning ship mean here? Secession for some States?

I replied:

I think that's the right solution, really. Peaceful and constitutional dissolution of the union, followed by erecting new unions of like-minded states. The Federal government is dragging everyone down.

We might also give some thought to how to avoid the problem in the future. In ancient Athens they believed that any electoral system was going to be impossibly corrupt: even before the innovation of using public funds to buy votes (or whole constituencies), the rich could use private funds to buy them. Their belief was that no system based on elections was sustainable because of the bedrock corruption native to such systems.

They still wanted to distribute power among the many, though, and not to have an elite or a tyrant. So they did something very similar to what William F. Buckley suggested with his 'first 300 people in the phone book' quip: they chose citizens to fill political offices by lot. You held the office for as long as you held it, and then you were replaced by a new lot.

You'd want to think about how to build the pool so that the lot was taken only among people who were qualified. Having established some basic qualifications for given offices, though, everyone who met those qualifications would go into the pool and the chosen would hold the office for a term.

It might make sense to have a bifurcated system, with elections for direct representatives responsible to their constituents for some functions, but lotteries for other offices. In general I would think you'd want representatives empowered specifically to limit government's power over citizens, and lot-chosen officers to exercise power (rather than restrain it).

Elise responded:

Having established some basic qualifications for given offices, though, everyone who met those qualifications would go into the pool and the chosen would hold the office for a term.

Sounds kind of like jury duty - an interesting idea.

In general I would think you'd want representatives empowered specifically to limit government's power over citizens, and lot-chosen officers to exercise power (rather than restrain it).

Interesting again. Perhaps a variation on the tricameral idea: one house to propose laws; one to pass the proposals (or not); only that exists solely to repeal laws?

To which I would respond:

That might also work, and really we should be talking about different ways of thinking about it. So, I'd like to propose a discussion of the subject. Consider it theoretical, if you like. There's no need to commit to doing it in actuality, but let's talk about how it might be done if we were to do it.

What I was thinking of was a Parliamentary form of government with a Civil Service, like the British have: but whereas the analog to the House of Commons and the heads of the departments of the Civil Service would be selected by lot (to avoid the corruption the Athenians saw, and to keep the Civil Service from overwhelming the elected branches as it has often done in Britain), the analog to the House of Lords would be elected.

This elected branch would be empowered both to repeal laws and Civil Service regulations it decided were out of line with the constitutional order, or the rights of citizens, but also to generally oversee in an adversarial way all the exercise of government. It would not be empowered to make laws, or to enact new regulations, or to exercise force of any kind against citizens not acting as a part of the government. It would serve a formally adversarial role to the government, with each member of this house responsible to their constituents and to a constitutional oath.

Against government actors, though, it would need the full array of powers: subpoena, arrest, and an independent power to punish according to whatever forms were usual (i.e., not 'cruel and unusual' punishments, but exactly the same order of punishments that would normally be applied against citizens).

What state are you?

Can't resist those quizzes.  Psychically, my husband belongs in Montana and I in Colorado, but neither of us can tolerate the cold.  I like to think that our atypical little Texas county is our own private Montana/Colorado.

Practical politics

Speaking of ways to achieve the necessary changes in Congress and the White House, such as ballot security, I enjoyed this comment on a forum:

Since Medicaid requires photo IDs, is it a health suppression law?

The possum

Things I did not know about opossums:

1. Natural immunity.  Opossums are mostly immune to rabies, and in fact, they are eight times less likely to carry rabies compared to wild dogs. 

2. Poison control.  Opossums have superpowers against snakes. They have partial or total immunity to the venom produced by rattlesnakes, cottonmouths and other pit vipers. 

3. Omnivores galore. . . .  They have an unusually high need for calcium, which incites them to eat the skeletons of rodents and road kill they consume. They're the sanitation workers of the wild. . . . 

7. Impressive tails. . . .  Opossums have been observed carrying bundles of grasses and other materials by looping their tail around them; this conscious control leads many to consider the tail as a fifth appendage, like a hand. 

And a bonus for the Scrabble players:  Male opossums are called jacks and females are called jills.  The young are referred to as joeys, just like their Australian cousins, and a group of opossums is called a passel.

Perils of the code

For you IT types. Go here for the whole thing, which is supposed to be set to a tune I'm not familiar with, "Leslie Fish":

Deep in engineering down where mortals seldom go,
A manager and customer come looking for a show.
They pass amused among us, and they sign in on the log.
They've come to see our pony and they've come to see our dog.

. . .

From briefcase then there comes a list of things we must revise,
And all but four within the room are taken by surprise,
And all but four are thinking of their last job with remorse;
The customer, the manager, the doggie, and the horse. 

. . .

Three things are most perilous,
Connectors that corrode,
Unproven algorithms,
And self modifying code. 

The manager and customer are quick to leave this bunch,
They take the dog and pony and they all go out to lunch.
Now how will we revenge ourselves on those who raise our ire?
Write code that self destructs the day the warranties expire.

We misunderstood him

When the president said, "If you like your coverage, you can keep it," what he really meant was, "If we like your coverage, you can keep it."

The U.S. individual health insurance market currently totals about 19 million people.  Because the Obama administration's regulations on grandfathering existing plans were so stringent about 85% of those, 16 million, are not grandfathered and must comply with Obamacare at their next renewal.  The rules are very complex.  For example, if you had an individual plan in March of 2010 when the law was passed and you only increased the deductible from $1,000 to $1,500 in the years since, your plan has lost its grandfather status and it will no longer be available to you when it would have renewed in 2014. 

These 16 million people are now receiving letters from their carriers saying they are losing their current coverage and must re-enroll in order to avoid a break in coverage and comply with the new health law's benefit mandates––the vast majority by January 1.  Most of these will be seeing some pretty big rate increases.

We are excited to be among those 16 million Americans!  Blue Cross tells me that my plan is not grandfathered, and that I get to pick a new one.  The new options are much, much nicer.  My betters in the Nanny State know that I never should have preferred low-cost high-deductible coverage of the sort that is now illegal for Blue Cross to offer me.  Instead, I get a brand-new policy with a deductible that is $3,750 lower.  And it only costs $4,800 a year more than my old policy!  Thank you, Mr. President!

I want this law dead, and I want some political careers ended.  We've got a lot of work to do in the coming election year.

Sigh no more

My linguistics reading of late is alerting me to survivals of archaic forms in popular culture.  The genius of Shakespeare and the King James Bible translation ensures that we never quite stop incorporating the English of 500 years ago into modern speech.  Last night I spent enjoyable hours watching Joss Whedon's recent production of Shakespeare's comedy "Much Ado About Nothing," staged in the present but using the original text.  Beatrice and Benedick are two young misfits everyone knows have to get together, though they think they hate each other.  They ultimately join forces to solve the problems of the secondary couple, Claudio and Hero, who have been tricked into an apparent tragedy that all comes right in the end.

Shakespeare often included bits of doggerel or folksong into his plays, with language that was archaic even in his time.  Modern adaptations tend to set them to tunes either in a style they take to be period-appropriate or in a style that's current for the production.  The song that caught my ear last night was "Sigh No More" (or, as we'd say today, with our Celtic restructuring of Germanic grammar:  "Baby Don't You Cry").  It uses the old-fashioned trochaic meter (DAH-duh), to which Shakespeare often switches from his usual iambic (dah-DUH) when giving voice to the old powers, like the witches in "Macbeth" ("Double, double, toil and trouble/Fire burn and cauldron bubble") or the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream ("Lord, what fools these mortals be!").

"Sigh no more" is a lament over the inconstancy of men, the counterpoint about male infidelity set into a play about the deadly consequences of even a false suspicion of female unchastity:

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more;
    Men were deceivers ever;
One foot in sea and one on shore,
    To one thing constant never;

        Then sigh not so,
        But let them go,
    And be you blithe and bonny;
Converting all your sounds of woe
    Into "Hey nonny, nonny!"

Sing no more ditties, sing no more,
    Of dumps so dull and heavy;
The fraud of men was ever so,
    Since summer first was leavy.

        Then sigh not so, 
        But let them go,
    And be you blithe and bonny;
Converting all your sounds of woe
    Into "Hey, nonny, nonny!"

Kenneth Branagh's "Much Ado" of a few years back set "Sigh, No More" to a pretty, old-fashioned tune and has the partygoers break into a fine barbershop-quartet performance.  Great stuff.



Joss Whedon adapts the same song to a nice jazzy lounge number, suitable for some relaxing entertainment at an elegant house party, with pretty acrobats out by the pool.  (The film was shot in twelve days at Whedon's home while he was taking a break from final editing on "The Avengers."  The actors are many of his regulars.)



Here's a snappy 1940's take:



Branagh directed a playful "Love's Labour's Lost" (a financial flop) set in the 1939 and using show tunes and modern dance, including the "Charleston."  He emphasized the play's iambic beat by setting the lines "Have at you now, affection's men at arms" to a tap-dance exercise, then breaks into Irving Berlin's "Cheek to Cheek":



I'm sorry that film didn't do well.  It's the kind of thing that makes my husband run out of the room, but I love dramas in which people spontaneously burst into song and dancing.

Aristotle on Causality

I'm moving into Aristotle's Physics and it depends heavily on his theories of causality, so I thought I'd start with Andrea Falcon's SEP article on that.

According to Falcon, Aristotle proposes that we have knowledge of a thing only when we understand its causes, and he proposes four possible causes: material, formal, efficient, and final.

The material cause: “that out of which”, e.g., the bronze of a statue. 

The formal cause: “the form”, “the account of what-it-is-to-be”, e.g., the shape of a statue. 

The efficient cause: “the primary source of the change or rest”, e.g., the artisan, the art of bronze-casting the statue, the man who gives advice, the father of the child. 

The final cause: “the end, that for the sake of which a thing is done”, e.g., health is the end of walking, losing weight, purging, drugs, and surgical tools.

The final cause for a statue is the statue itself.

With the final cause, Aristotle's theory is teleological; the purpose of a thing is a kind of cause of it. Because of this, he has been accused of anthropomorphizing nature, attributing to it psychological reasons for the way things are. However, while the theory can take desire, intention, etc., into account, the final causes of natural things don't require psychological causes. For example, Aristotle explains that the 'final cause' for why frontal teeth are sharp and back teeth are flat is because that is the best arrangement for the survival of the animal.

A couple of other key points are that, in studying nature, we should look for generalities. We aren't concerned about exceptions; we are trying to discover the rules. He also doesn't require that we use all four causes. In some cases,  like the bronze statue, the formal and final causes are the same. In some cases the efficient cause is enough. For example, Aristotle explains a lunar eclipse with an efficient cause: the earth comes between the moon and sun.

The idea of a final cause was controversial in Aristotle's day. (I think it became controversial again in the 18th or 19th century.) Many philosophers* proposed that material and efficient causes were good enough. Aristotle claimed that material and efficient causes alone failed to account for regularity. If we ask, why are front teeth sharp and back teeth flat, material and efficient causes alone leave us with coincidence; animals produce offspring like themselves, and that's it. There is no reference to this arrangement making survival easier. Final causes, on the other hand, allow us to say that teeth are arranged that way to make survival easier; they explain the regularity in ways that material and efficient causes do not.

Leaving Falcon behind for a moment, why did final causes become controversial in the 18th or 19th century? Because teleological explanations seem to imply Nature has a personality. Before this time, Christian philosophers who adopted Aristotle would often point to God to provide final causes: Why were front teeth sharp and back teeth flat? God designed the animal that way to improve its chances of surviving. But God had to be killed in the Enlightenment (Hegel proclaimed it long before Nietzsche) and all that sort of thing removed. Biology today still uses teleological terms, but they intend them in reverse: the animal survives better because the teeth are arranged that way, and survival means a better chance of reproducing, which produces offspring with teeth arranged that way.

Next up, a dive into the Physics.

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* Science as the organized / methodical study of nature was a branch of philosophy up through the Scientific Revolution, and some branches of science (such as physics) were still called 'natural philosophy' up into the 19th century.

Pix

Some great nature shots at this Atlantic website, but the last one is truly amazing.

Lost arts

From the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica entry on "Turkey" (the bird kind).   You can't find genteel trashtalk like this any more:

The bibliography of the turkey is so large that there is here no room to name the various works that might be cited.  Recent research has failed to add anything of importance to what has been said on this point by Buffon (Oiseaux, ii. 132-162), Pennant (Arctic Zoology, pp. 291-300)--an admirable summary--and Broderip (Zoological Recreations, pp. 120-137)--not that all their statements can be wholly accepted.  Barrington's essay (Miscellanies, pp. 127-151), to prove that the bird was known before the discovery of America and was transported thither, is an ingenious piece of special pleading which his friend Pennant did him the real kindness of ignoring.

It's Not A Double-Standard If You Never Thought Of It

A friend of mine sent me this picture, which I found rather surprising. I don't think it's a double standard, so much as their just not being interested in the quality of boys' toys to the same degree. I had honestly never thought of their point at all. Of course I remember He-Man, who was just a cleaned-up kids version of Conan, a physically similar character.

All three are really popular, which may say something about what is really going on here. When we talk about Conan books, the usual screed against them is that they represent a simple kind of male wish-fulfillment. I think that's unfair: at least the original R. E. Howard stories are really quite good. But it might be true for He-Man.

My New Favorite Syllogism

The moon is made of green cheese. Therefore, either it is raining in Ecuador now or it is not.

In our earlier discussions of logic, the failure of modern logic to take relevance into account seemed to me a great failure. Specifically, I maintain that the forms of natural language cannot be entirely separated from the content, no matter how many logicians deeply pine for such a situation.

Now, to the extent that modern logic is a branch of mathematics, I have no problem with it. It has found uses in computer programming and probably other fields, and it's an interesting intellectual exercise in itself. It is to the extent that modern logic attempts to use natural language to create or understand meaning that it fails.

Relevance / Relevant logicians have tried to develop formal expressions of relevance and have come closer to making premises and conclusions relevant to each other, but they haven't solved the problem entirely.

As for me, while I fully understand there are practical uses for modern logic, it seems that Aristotelean logic is superior for analyzing arguments in natural language. Else, it is either raining in Ecuador, or it is not, because the moon is made of green cheese.

Project Euler and Self-Directed Learning

Problem 2

Each new term in the Fibonacci sequence is generated by adding the previous two terms. By starting with 1 and 2, the first 10 terms will be:

1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, ...

By considering the terms in the Fibonacci sequence whose values do not exceed four million, find the sum of the even-valued terms.

Apropos of Tex's recent post on child-centered learning, I thought I'd add this.

Computer programming is a hobby of mine and something I am very interested in getting better at, but I was never good at math. Call me lazy, but the most difficult thing in math classes was keeping my eyes open; after missing the instruction, the problems were often impossible. (If it's impossible, it's not difficult, you see.) The textbooks were even more boring than the teachers, so they were no help, either.

In the last few years I've become increasingly interested in learning more math, but the problem is where to begin and how to approach it. I dread taking university math courses, an expensive cure for insomnia in my experience. Then I read James Somer's article, How I Failed, Failed and Finally Succeeded in Learning How to Code, where he introduces Colin Hughes, a British math teacher and the creator of Project Euler.

The core of Project Euler is a set of math problems designed to be solved by simple computer programs. Currently, there are more than 400 and Mr. Hughes adds a new one each weekend during the school year (he takes summers off). Interestingly, other than a simple explanation like the one above, he provides no instruction in math with the problem, but after you give the correct answer, it opens up a discussion thread for everyone who has solved the problem to share their solutions and comments with each other.

My route to solving these problems has generally been either to just start writing the program, if I immediately grasped the problem (like Problem 2 above), or if I didn't, to look up related math topics on Wikipedia, which has a surprisingly large number of helpful articles. I try to find a principle that will allow me to solve that type of problem (I avoid simply searching for  the problem itself; some unsporting types have posted their solutions publicly). After solving the problem, I go through a dozen or so solutions from others who have also solved it.

Hughes explains his method like this: "The problems range in difficulty and for many the experience is inductive chain learning. That is, by solving one problem it will expose you to a new concept that allows you to undertake a previously inaccessible problem. So the determined participant will slowly but surely work his/her way through every problem."

That seems to be how it's working for me. While the problems have gotten more difficult, I've become quicker to pick up on patterns in numbers and, when I don't understand a problem, I have a better idea of how to approach finding the answer. I've built up a better understanding of how numbers work together, a clearer understanding of some math concepts, an appreciation for different types of math (number theory, graph theory, combinatorics, etc.) and am solving the problems faster. I am, in fact, learning math.

My proudest achievement there so far has been solving problem 15. Wikipedia was entirely useless (I later found out that I was looking in the wrong articles), so I had to sit down with pen and paper and work through simpler versions of the problem until I found a pattern. Then I created my own formula to solve the problem, implemented it, and it worked. It took me nearly a week of spare time. Then I went into the discussion forum for that problem and found two vastly simpler ways to solve it, and of course I got a good laugh out of that. Then it was on to the next problem.