Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The BBC piece is not always good history -- there are a few real howlers in the commentary -- but I suppose that's part of the charm of television.
Þis kyng lay at Camylot vpon KrystmasseWith Old and especially Middle English, you can often work out the meaning approximately by sounding out the word, remembering that "Þ" or "þ" is a "Th-" sound. The poem will sound archaic, but only a few words have passed completely out of the language. One of these is "tulkes," which is translated as "fighting man" or "soldier." Tolkien gives "tulkes" as "knights," but then translated "kniȝtes" as "lords," probably simply so as not to repeat himself. Tolkien appears to me to have adapted "tulkes" for the name of his Valar of might and prowess, Tulkas the Valiant, who laughed in war so that Melkor fled before him.
With mony luflych lorde, ledez of þe best,
Rekenly of þe Rounde Table alle þo rich breþer,
With rych reuel oryȝt and rechles merþes.
Þer tournayed tulkes by tymez ful mony,
Justed ful jolilé þise gentyle kniȝtes,
Syþen kayred to þe court caroles to make.
Read more about "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" as a Christmas poem, if you like.
Running Late
Last Sunday was Gaudete Sunday. This is the last hour in which I can thus post this before it's overtaken by events. :)
Getting close now.
UPDATE:
"Our bread it is white, and our ale it is brown."
Getting close now.
UPDATE:
"Our bread it is white, and our ale it is brown."
On Cursing
A new book treats the question of obscene words, noting that just what qualifies as an obscenity has changed a lot over the years. The Medievals weren't shocked by references to bodily functions, including sex, because of the relative lack of privacy at the time; they were shocked by blasphemy, which is why those who wanted to speak an obscenity made some reference to something holy. The Victorians, who had privacy, made a big deal about words that related to sex or scatology.
We're no different, she proves:
The real swear words of our time, she notes, are race- and gender-based epithets, which polite society has banned—words that, indeed, almost define polite society by their absence.‘MOTHER, WILFRED WROTE A BAD WORD!’
THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NEW YORK
And sure enough, the reviewers (especially the British ones) have gleefully put into print all the once-prohibited words they know for fornication and excrement. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, gerunds, even adverbs—all-purpose bits of grammar that seem intended mostly to prove, among the writing classes, that their users want us to admire them for having broken free from the stultifying strictures of the linguistic past. Then, when they reach Mohr’s discussion of racial and sex-preference terms, they suddenly turn into prissy Victorian matrons, clicking their tongues in disapproval. A little euphemism, a lot of typographical gesturing, some elaborate circumlocution—it takes work to review a book about these modern unspeakables and not actually quote them.UPDATE:
Mark Steyn:
Here are two jokes one can no longer tell on American television. But you can still find them in the archives, out on the edge of town, in Sub-Basement Level 12 of the ever-expanding Smithsonian Mausoleum of the Unsayable. First, Bob Hope, touring the world in the year or so after the passage of the 1975 Consenting Adult Sex Bill:
“I’ve just flown in from California, where they’ve made homosexuality legal. I thought I’d get out before they make it compulsory.”
Once Again, With Feeling
You are all (excepting one of you, our friend the orchestral musician) doubtless bored with my repeated commentary on the unity of beautiful music. I won't expound on it this time. I'll just give you a few videos to watch. You'll be glad you did.
Having Lots of Female Friends
Via this article on GWB, I learned that something called "Thought Cloud" exists.
Via Thought Cloud, I learned that it's problematic for a man to have too many female friends.
Is this right? When I was a boy, my elementary school did something that was at the time actually illegal: it took our standardized test scores on reading and used them to sort us into levels. We had an "advanced" class, a "medium" class, and a slow class (which wasn't given a name). Now girls mature faster than boys, especially in terms of academic work, so as a consequence I spent my formative years in a class with 26 girls and 4 boys, of whom I was one. Since we were sorted alphabetically, I was perforce surrounded by girls all the time except at recess.
From my perspective this has always meant that I learned early how to like and talk to girls, which has been a tremendous benefit. It turns out (boys, I am talking to you here) that girls are interesting, and have markedly different perspectives on life. If you're curious about big-T Truth, it's good to hear what other people with different perspectives have to say. If you're not interested in big-T Truth, you should rethink your life. As Aristotle rightly suggests, the contemplative life is one of the best ones available for our limited time here on Earth.
I think the author is worried about sexuality, which is a fair point. But learning to live with temptation is practicing the virtue of temperance, which is (as Aquinas will tell you) finally at the heart of every virtue. It's a matter of practice ("A virtue is a permanent habit," Aquinas says in his commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics; and habits are formed by practice).
So of course you should have friends who are girls (or, later, women), if you are a boy or a man; and vice-versa. It is wisdom to do so.
Via Thought Cloud, I learned that it's problematic for a man to have too many female friends.
Is this right? When I was a boy, my elementary school did something that was at the time actually illegal: it took our standardized test scores on reading and used them to sort us into levels. We had an "advanced" class, a "medium" class, and a slow class (which wasn't given a name). Now girls mature faster than boys, especially in terms of academic work, so as a consequence I spent my formative years in a class with 26 girls and 4 boys, of whom I was one. Since we were sorted alphabetically, I was perforce surrounded by girls all the time except at recess.
From my perspective this has always meant that I learned early how to like and talk to girls, which has been a tremendous benefit. It turns out (boys, I am talking to you here) that girls are interesting, and have markedly different perspectives on life. If you're curious about big-T Truth, it's good to hear what other people with different perspectives have to say. If you're not interested in big-T Truth, you should rethink your life. As Aristotle rightly suggests, the contemplative life is one of the best ones available for our limited time here on Earth.
I think the author is worried about sexuality, which is a fair point. But learning to live with temptation is practicing the virtue of temperance, which is (as Aquinas will tell you) finally at the heart of every virtue. It's a matter of practice ("A virtue is a permanent habit," Aquinas says in his commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics; and habits are formed by practice).
So of course you should have friends who are girls (or, later, women), if you are a boy or a man; and vice-versa. It is wisdom to do so.
OK, Now I've Heard Of Him
I remember Tex posted once about "Phil" Robertson, and without reading very closely I assumed she must be talking about "Pat" Robertson. It appears the two gentlemen share some views.
This is a very ordinary, traditional Christian view with pretty strong Biblical support. It's also a view that has a lot of philosophical support, and not just from Christian or religious philosophers: Kant takes exactly the same view in the Metaphysics of Morals, 6:277-8, all the way down to asserting that the issue is one of a violation of logic (or basic rationality).
You're not obligated to be a Kantian, and I'm not one; you're not obligated to be a Christian either. But it's extraordinary to treat this as if it were a mere expression of hate. Kant, for example, has an argument for what it means to 'respect the humanity in one's own person' that applies here as elsewhere.
Kant is too important to the Left for him to be disappeared. I won't be surprised, though, if it becomes increasingly hard to find copies of his book that don't redact those paragraphs.
This is a very ordinary, traditional Christian view with pretty strong Biblical support. It's also a view that has a lot of philosophical support, and not just from Christian or religious philosophers: Kant takes exactly the same view in the Metaphysics of Morals, 6:277-8, all the way down to asserting that the issue is one of a violation of logic (or basic rationality).
Sexual union (commercium sexuale) is the reciprocal use that one human being makes of the sexual organs and capacities of another.... This is either a natural use (by which procreation of the same kind is possible) or an unnatural use, and unnatural use takes place with a person of the same sex or with an animal of a nonhuman species. Since such transgression of laws, called unnatural (crimina carnis contra naturam) or also unmentionable vices, do wrong to humanity in our own person, there are no limitations or exceptions whatsoever that can save them from being repudiated completely.In the next paragraph, Kant goes on to define marriage as "the union of two persons of different sexes."
You're not obligated to be a Kantian, and I'm not one; you're not obligated to be a Christian either. But it's extraordinary to treat this as if it were a mere expression of hate. Kant, for example, has an argument for what it means to 'respect the humanity in one's own person' that applies here as elsewhere.
Kant is too important to the Left for him to be disappeared. I won't be surprised, though, if it becomes increasingly hard to find copies of his book that don't redact those paragraphs.
Resuming the War
Apparently Carlisle has succumbed to the general madness.
The U.S. Army War College, which molds future field generals, has begun discussing whether it should remove its portraits of Confederate generals — including those of Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson....There's a good reason you shouldn't, which the article happens upon by accident:
It is the kind of historical cleansing that could spark an Army-wide debate: Lee’s portrait adorns the walls of other military installations and government buildings. Two portraits of Lee are on display at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.: In the Cadet Mess Hall is a painting of Lee when he was superintendent as an Army captain. A portrait of Lee in full Confederate regalia hangs on the second floor of Jefferson Hall, the campus library.
In 1975, Congress enacted a joint resolution reinstating Lee’s U.S. citizenship in what could be considered a final act to heal Civil War wounds. The resolution praised Lee’s character and his work to reunify the nation.It's a bad idea to undo "last acts of healing." But you do what you want to do.
Singing of Hard Times
Johnny Cash sang this one to an international hit.
Henry Rollins wonders about doing the same thing now.
Yeah, OK. So what does it mean to ride against the order we know?
War, does it not?
Henry Rollins wonders about doing the same thing now.
Yeah, OK. So what does it mean to ride against the order we know?
War, does it not?
Iowahawk on Propaganda
He is mocking the current propaganda, but his early example is striking.
This one is the one I always think of. It's weaker than his example, though: it stops at the horror, and misses the quality of the angelic that follows.
This one is the one I always think of. It's weaker than his example, though: it stops at the horror, and misses the quality of the angelic that follows.
It's a silly place
Ace of Spades can't decide if the post he found about the tragedy of antifeminist computer coding is fake or not. The obvious answer is that it's both fake and not-fake, and there's no necessary contradiction, unless you're stuck in an andronormative phallo-logical space.
Ace's commenters have fun with appropriate 404 error messages for feminist coding.
Ace's commenters have fun with appropriate 404 error messages for feminist coding.
Seeing voices
Sign language fascinates me. In my elementary school, we all learned to signed letters when we read about Helen Keller, and I can do it to this day. It was with some dismay that I learned as an adult how much more complex true sign language is and how difficult its fluent and expressive practice. Of course, it's easier just to fake it. I know you've all seen the stories already about President Obama's fake interpreter at the Mandela funeral, but you may not have seen this video.
Mark Steyn reflects on the security implications:
Mark Steyn reflects on the security implications:
[H]ow heartening, as one watches the viral video of Obama droning on while a mere foot and a half away Mr. Jantjie rubs his belly and tickles his ear, to think that the White House’s usual money-no-object security operation went to the trouble of flying in Air Force One, plus the “decoy” Air Force One, plus support aircraft, plus the 120-vehicle motorcade or whatever it’s up to by now, plus a bazillion Secret Service agents with reflector shades and telephone wire dangling from their ears, to shepherd POTUS into the secured venue and then stand him onstage next to an $85-a-day violent schizophrenic. In the movie version—In the Sign of Fire—grizzled maverick Clint Eastwood will be the only guy to figure it out at the last minute and hurl himself at John Malkovich, as they roll into the orchestra pit with Malkovich furiously signing “Ow!” and “Eek!” But in real life I expect they’ll just double the motorcade to 240 vehicles and order up even more expensive reflector shades.No doubt Thamsanqa Jantjie was channeling Rowan Atkinson. My favorite bit is the "$15 million" towards the middle.
Way harsh
A lot of the North Korean press release about the chief nutso's purged uncle didn't come through very well in translation, but this part is clear enough:
[D]espicable human scum Jang, who was worse than a dog, perpetrated thrice-cursed acts of treachery in betrayal of such profound trust and warmest paternal love shown by the party and the leader for him.Few things fascinate me more than how one crazy guy can dominate a society: the uneasy web of influence and privilege that keeps his henchmen in power over the populace, and the balancing act that keeps his henchmen from carving him up and serving him for dinner. The old guard can't much enjoy seeing the kid start picking off members of their own ranks. They probably have networks he can scarcely imagine, made up of people who must live in a perpetual state of crazed desperation.
Lessons from the food industry
I've never worked in a kitchen, but I've been a waitress in more than one establishment, so I can relate to some of this article about 23 important life lessons from the restaurant world. This one, about how to respond to a particular kind of ugliness, has a much broader application than the food industry: "You just have to get over it and remind yourself never to be like that in your own life." It's similar to advice I received many years ago about slander: "Live so that no one will believe it of you."
There's also no disputing the high value of being close to a good chef who's always cooking new things he wants people to try out.
Hardball
Georgia has now joined South Carolina's first steps toward state nullification of Obamacare. The four-step process, developed by the Tenth Amendment Center, includes awarding citizens state tax credits to offset any federal penalties, and revoking the state licenses of insurers that participate.
South of the Border
Won't it be amazing if the U.S.-Mexico border stops demarcating a division between an northern economy that functions and a southern one that does not?
On Thursday, Mexico's Congress passed what could be the most transformative economic legislation there in a century. The members had a few fist fights and some screamed "treason," but the lower House still voted to expose the state oil company, Petroleos Mexicanos, to the free market. And at 354-134, the vote wasn't close.It brings to mind the scene in that silly global-warming-causes-catastrophic-freeze movie in which millions of Americans try to pour over the border into Mexico.
A different death spiral
This Forbes article is a helpful explanation of the complicated choices facing insurance companies as their customers embark on a completely different scheme of self-selection from the one that has driven actuarial planning up to now. It seems that the ACA tried to guard against some kinds of self-selection and their resulting death-spiral dangers by requiring insurance companies to create one risk pool for all of their customers, regardless of whether they purchased their insurance on or off the exchange. The law's architects did not take fully into account, however, how many insurers might decide to boycott the exchange altogether. Boycotting insurers are free to price their products on the basis of their own pools. If I understand the author's argument, this is likely for several reasons to result in a divergence of the risk profiles that will favor the competitive position of the non-exchange insurers even on their ACA-compliant products.
Pricing is only one aspect that may vary sharply between exchange and non-exchange products: there is already considerable pressure on exchange products to shrink their provider networks and covered drug lists. I've become interested in Assurant Health, an insurer that decided to boycott the exchanges. Its prices for a Bronze plan are slightly higher than those of Blue Cross, but its network is the old-fashioned universal sort. The article cites to a detailed brief on risk pools, including this explanation of why network shrinkage may be a more powerful cost-control issue than I realized:
Pricing is only one aspect that may vary sharply between exchange and non-exchange products: there is already considerable pressure on exchange products to shrink their provider networks and covered drug lists. I've become interested in Assurant Health, an insurer that decided to boycott the exchanges. Its prices for a Bronze plan are slightly higher than those of Blue Cross, but its network is the old-fashioned universal sort. The article cites to a detailed brief on risk pools, including this explanation of why network shrinkage may be a more powerful cost-control issue than I realized:
Prohibiting [denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions] leaves insurers vulnerable to attracting a disproportionate share of patients with poor health risks. This vulnerability might cause them to leave the market or encourage them to use more covert or indirect means of risk avoidance, such as selective marketing or structuring their provider networks to exclude the doctors or hospitals preferred by higher risk patients.It's not just that excellent hospitals like the Mayo Clinic or cancer centers charge high rates. It's that they attract exactly the sort of patient that an insurer needs to avoid if it can't tie its prices to the health status of brand-new customers.
"I can't believe they let you do that"
Bill Whittle is terrific. I can't seem to link directly to this video, so here's a basic PJTV link that, for now at least, takes you directly to his piece describing the pleasures of visiting Texas for Thanksgiving.
How many uninsured Americans are there, really?
Megan McArdle tries to get a handle on just how many people really were uninsured. Is it more or less than the number of people who were insured before the PPACA hit them like a truck?
A third possibility is that we don’t have the uninsured problem we thought we had. Most of the estimates we have for the uninsured population are really pretty crude. For one thing, we tend to treat the U.S.'s roughly 48 million uninsured as if they were part of a discrete group, like Mormons or people who know how to play the tuba. But in fact, people change insurance status all the time. If you look at data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, you’ll see that a lot of people are uninsured for at least a month, but if you look at who is uninsured for as long as two years, that number falls by two-thirds. If you extend the reference period out to four years, just 7.6 percent of the population counts as “uninsured.” That is not a negligible number, but it is less than half of the 48 million we think of as uninsured. And it’s heavily skewed toward immigrants and the young. . . .
Medieval Warfare, Lego-Style
No female Legos were harmed in the making of this documentary. At least, I assume not, since I didn't see any that were pink.
The one-way compromise ratchet
John Hinderaker at PowerLine wonders why budget "compromise" always results in higher spending. The best conservatives ever seem to be able to get is decreases in the rate of increased spending.
A number of observers are praising today’s deal as a “compromise.” Patty Murray set the tone: “‘Compromise has been a dirty word” in Washington, D.C., Murray complained in an evening news conference, but “we have broken through the partisanship and the gridlock.” But wait! The 2011 Budget Control Act was itself a compromise. The $967 billion discretionary spending limit was a compromise, just two years ago. So why should a higher spending number now be lauded as a “compromise”? How about if we reduce spending by another $50 billion, to $917 billion? That would be a compromise too, wouldn’t it? But somehow that isn’t the sort of compromise that is ever entertained in Washington.Hinderaker also points out the soft underbelly of this and every other budget "deal"--the gambit Republicans fall for every single time:
Republicans did get something in exchange for increasing spending: notably, federal employees will have to increase their pension contributions. But we can say goodbye to the $2.1 trillion in spending cuts that the GOP trumpeted following the 2011 Budget Control Act. That is the real moral of the story–long-term budget agreements are meaningless. Typically, minuscule spending cuts up front are augmented by major cuts in the out-years. But the reality is that the out-years never come. No Congress can bind a future Congress, and political will to reduce spending is always in short supply. Consequently, any spending deal is meaningless, except insofar as it applies to the current year or next year’s spending. Beyond that, all claims to have cut government spending are fatuous.Wouldn't it be amazing to see a bipartisan compromise that imposed immediate spending cuts (not merely decelerations) in exchange for unspecified entitlement increases to be implemented in 2024?
Meritocracy
Those of us who are well into our curmudgeon years probably have to stop and laugh now and then at our growing tendency to deplore the errors of this new crop of whippersnappers. It is a pleasure, therefore, occasionally to find evidence that a characteristic error of the age is falling out of favor with the Young Turks:
More than 70 percent of [unionized] teachers on the job less than a decade are interested in changing the traditional salary scale, which rewards educators for longevity rather than performance. Just 41 percent of more veteran teachers back such reforms, according to a national survey last year by the organization Teach Plus. The poll documented similar gulfs in opinion about revamping teacher evaluations and pensions.Unions are under intense pressure from falling membership, in the wake of movements to make their dues-paying membership voluntary. They're finding that they have to consider what their members think.
My hometown
This five-minute clip from "Good Morning, America" is a brief introduction to the small town we live near. The accents are interesting. Several speakers are local, but the mayor obviously is a winter Texan who stayed on. This time of year the parking lots are full of license plates from Wisconsin and Michigan.
An Outlaw Interlude
Some of you doubtless know the Dallas Moore Band, which has been billed as everything from an heir of Outlaw Country to the torch-bearer for Lynyrd Skynyrd-style Southern Rock.
Whether or not you know the band, though, here's an anthem that you may find useful at times in the next few years.
Whether or not you know the band, though, here's an anthem that you may find useful at times in the next few years.
The Pig Bang
From Rocket Science, a report on a pig farm manure pit explosion that killed 1,500 pigs and seriously injured a human worker. The unusual explosion may or may not have something to do with experimental pig feed or antibiotics. Kind of makes you wonder what's going on in your gut. Or maybe it just makes me wonder that, given my curious obsession with the topic. I have to go give a short talk to some teenagers about organic gardening, so I'm focused more than usual on poop, the cycle of life, and the storage and release of chemical energy.
Most transparent presidential psyche ever
Ace has up a good essay about the press's Hitchcockian treatment of Barack Obama. Hitchcock's thrillers employed a device he called the MacGuffin: "The thing that the hero has to get, but the audience doesn't care what it is." He was a skilled enough storyteller not to waste any superfluous exposition on where the MacGuffin came from, how it worked, or what it might do it if got loose. The audience just wanted to watch the hero be disappointed, hurt, and ultimately successful. In Nick Lowe's formulation, the MacGuffin is one of the plot coupons the hero has to save up so he can send off to the Author for an ending.
The other day I was participating in an argument that went off in a familiar direction: my interlocutor demanded to know with what I would offer to replace the splendor that is the PPACA if it were repealed. My response, as usual, was that there are a number of practical proposals anyone can look up if (as seems unlikely) he's genuinely interested, such as high deductibles combined with HSA's and tax breaks or outright subsidies. But the immediate point is that the law is proving so obviously and concretely harmful that simple repeal would constitute an improvement without any regard to a replacement. His entire response was, "Oh, I see. So it's 'Screw you, Obama.'" Yes, I don't care about health insurance. I'm just the Villain who places obstacles between the Hero and his MacGuffin.
For too many of Obama's followers, the story is about him, not about his policy or his countrymen. They think they're in a "Raiders of the Lost MacGuffin" caper, but it's really a science fiction disaster movie in the "You're Meddling with Forces You Don't Understand" line.
Ace carries his theme further with a report on the breathless interest in Obama's reading list and what it reveals about the state of his internal journey.
The other day I was participating in an argument that went off in a familiar direction: my interlocutor demanded to know with what I would offer to replace the splendor that is the PPACA if it were repealed. My response, as usual, was that there are a number of practical proposals anyone can look up if (as seems unlikely) he's genuinely interested, such as high deductibles combined with HSA's and tax breaks or outright subsidies. But the immediate point is that the law is proving so obviously and concretely harmful that simple repeal would constitute an improvement without any regard to a replacement. His entire response was, "Oh, I see. So it's 'Screw you, Obama.'" Yes, I don't care about health insurance. I'm just the Villain who places obstacles between the Hero and his MacGuffin.
For too many of Obama's followers, the story is about him, not about his policy or his countrymen. They think they're in a "Raiders of the Lost MacGuffin" caper, but it's really a science fiction disaster movie in the "You're Meddling with Forces You Don't Understand" line.
Ace carries his theme further with a report on the breathless interest in Obama's reading list and what it reveals about the state of his internal journey.
Tullamore Dew
There are many blessings that come with dismissing television from your life; there are few sorrows. But I expect all of you have seen this before me.
It's a fine piece, especially if you have wasted so much of your life in pubs that you can't help but join in the final verse.
It's a fine piece, especially if you have wasted so much of your life in pubs that you can't help but join in the final verse.
Just-in-time insurance
I've been assuming for months now that the problem with waiting until you get sick to buy the new guaranteed-issue health insurance was that you can sign up only once a year, which leaves you exposed to up to a year's worth of medical expenses before your new coverage kicks in.
I'm hearing now that that's true only if you plan to go through the exchange to buy your coverage, which is necessary only if you want to try to qualify for a premium subsidy. To my utter amazement, it appears that you really will be able to go to an insurance company at any time and buy coverage, regardless of pre-existing conditions. The only counterargument I'm finding on any official websites is "We'd really rather you didn't do that." There's the penalty, of course, but anyone should be able to avoid a penalty simply by not overpaying taxes and putting himself in the position of needing to apply for a tax refund.
Who wrote this thing? Were they high? I know it's possible to rack up a big ICU bill in a few weeks, but come on. What's easier, saving up against that one-time danger, or paying $10K a year in premiums year in and year out?
This is like guaranteed-issue fire insurance you can buy after you dial 911 and while you're waiting for the fire trucks to arrive. If this is right the law has got to collapse under its own weight.
I'm hearing now that that's true only if you plan to go through the exchange to buy your coverage, which is necessary only if you want to try to qualify for a premium subsidy. To my utter amazement, it appears that you really will be able to go to an insurance company at any time and buy coverage, regardless of pre-existing conditions. The only counterargument I'm finding on any official websites is "We'd really rather you didn't do that." There's the penalty, of course, but anyone should be able to avoid a penalty simply by not overpaying taxes and putting himself in the position of needing to apply for a tax refund.
Who wrote this thing? Were they high? I know it's possible to rack up a big ICU bill in a few weeks, but come on. What's easier, saving up against that one-time danger, or paying $10K a year in premiums year in and year out?
This is like guaranteed-issue fire insurance you can buy after you dial 911 and while you're waiting for the fire trucks to arrive. If this is right the law has got to collapse under its own weight.
On Vaccines
I assume that most of you are not both (a) of an age to have young children, and (b) struggling with whether or not to vaccinate them. For any of you who are, however, my cousin in medicine writes to recommend this article. She is a young mother herself.
How To Fit In As A Marine Infantrywoman
The satirical Duffleblog is in rare form today.
After finishing check-in late Friday to Alpha Co, 1st Battalion 6th Marines wearing her dress blue uniform, Private First Class Rhonda “Thunderbeast” Williams went down to Honest Pierre’s Used Car Emporium and bought a hot pink Ford Mustang at 46 percent interest....Heh.
The final acceptance by the company came on Saturday night, when the entire unit went out in town. After consuming several dozen alcoholic beverages and getting a tattoo of ‘Death Before Dishonor’ on her entire back, Williams led her platoon into the Pink Flamingo, a local gentlemen’s club near the base. At the end of the evening she was seen leaving with a male waiter who she had been loudly hitting on all night.
On Monday, Williams had informed her chain of command she was getting married.
The self-pay patient
This is an incredibly useful article about strategies for dealing with Obamacare without exposing your household to financial ruin. I look forward to reading the guy's book when it comes out. There is information about price transparency, cash discounts, exempt healthcare cost-sharing ministries (including for non-evangelicals), exceptions to tax penalties, affordable telemedicine for simple illnesses, and exempt short-term or limited-scope insurance policies. This is exactly the sort of information I've been looking for from licensed health insurance brokers, two of whom have proved to know very little about the subject.
"Special Government Benefits"
Evil Hobby Lobby! Don't they realize how much they owe the government?
What the government wants to do here is to bar religious organizations from corporate status, so that religious people must either abandon their moral principles when they enter the market, or accept an uneven risk of personal financial destruction v. those without moral principles.
As for compelling employees to abide by its corporate religious principles, of course, Hobby Lobby makes no such claim. It doesn't claim any right, nor express any wish, to prevent employees from purchasing birth control. Its owners merely state that they are unwilling to buy and distribute birth control themselves, especially the kind that facilitates abortion.
Should they have to do so? Or exit the market? Or, at least, accept a disproportionate risk of personal financial destruction if they wish to run a business?
This corporation, which already takes advantage of special government benefits by incorporating as a private business in the first place (entitling Hobby Lobby to tax benefits and liability shelters to which individuals alone are not entitled), wants to use its government-created corporate status with the help of government-run courts not just to express its religion on a poster or what have you but to force its employees to comply with the supposed religion of the corporation’s founders. This is, plain and simple, a corporation trying to contort government to impose the religious views of some onto many. This is precisely what our nation was founded against.I think the writer and I agree on the issue at stake, but disagree about the Constitutional principle entirely. The issue at stake is whether religious people can form corporations, or whether your ability to practice your religion must serve as a kind of severe economic penalty. If you can't form corporations to pursue economic activities, you are subject not to limited liability but to losing everything you own in the event that your business fails. What the author is calling "special government benefits" are, rather, an international feature of the corporate mode of organization that has made it so powerful in driving economic growth.
What the government wants to do here is to bar religious organizations from corporate status, so that religious people must either abandon their moral principles when they enter the market, or accept an uneven risk of personal financial destruction v. those without moral principles.
As for compelling employees to abide by its corporate religious principles, of course, Hobby Lobby makes no such claim. It doesn't claim any right, nor express any wish, to prevent employees from purchasing birth control. Its owners merely state that they are unwilling to buy and distribute birth control themselves, especially the kind that facilitates abortion.
Should they have to do so? Or exit the market? Or, at least, accept a disproportionate risk of personal financial destruction if they wish to run a business?
A Thoughtful Analysis of the Pope's Recent Writings
Via D29, "In the Spirit of John Chrysostom." The writer is a fan; but see what you think.
A different definition of success
Not so much the Amazon variety, but the sort we can expect for the government:
The administration has given up on success, as it might once have defined it. The object is no longer 7 million people signed up through the exchanges, with 2.7 million of them young and healthy, and the health-care cost curve bending back toward the earth. It is to keep the program alive until 2015. The administration's priorities are, first, to keep Democrats from undoing the individual mandate or otherwise crippling the law; second, to keep insurers from raising premiums or exiting the marketplace; third, to tamp down loose talk about the failures on the exchanges; and, only fourth, to get to the place where it used to think it would be this year, with lots of people signed up for affordable insurance. It is now measuring the program’s success not by whether it meets its goals, but by whether it survives at all. And all of its choices are oriented toward this new priority.
Isaac Newton and the apple
The apple didn't hit Newton on the head and inspire him with the sudden insight that there's such a thing as gravity. People had been noodling over the obvious tendency of things to fall just about forever. For a long time, their views on the subject took the form of theories about how objects might be animated, such as by an innate desire to be reunited with the Earth. During the Enlightenment, as creatures now known as "scientists" began to emerge, the focus left the supposed interior experience of the objects and trained itself on finding universal, predictable patterns in the movement.
So what was really going through Newton's mind when the apple fell from the tree? Before Newton was well launched on his extraordinary career, natural philosophers already had adopted the "inertia" model of movement; that is to say, objects tend to keep moving in a straight line unless slowed or diverted by an outside force. But this was puzzling in view of the evident circular/elliptical movement of heavenly bodies. There was a strong tendency to find circles "perfect" and "beautiful," resulting in a popular view that lowly straight-line movements characterized earthly bodies while heavenly bodies moved in stately and superior circles. Were there separate laws of motion on Earth and in Heaven?
Newton's brilliance lay in a unifying theme that would explain why an apple appears to fall straight down while the Moon describes a circular orbit around the Earth.
We have now finally arrived at that idyllic summer afternoon in Grantham in 1666, as the young Isaac Newton, home from university to avoid the plague, whilst lying in his mother’s garden contemplating the universe, as one does, chanced to see an apple falling from a tree. Newton didn’t ask why it fell, but set off on a much more interesting, complicated and fruitful line of speculation. Newton’s line of thought went something like this. If Descartes is right with his theory of inertia, . . . then there must be some force pulling the moon down towards the earth and preventing it shooting off in a straight line at a tangent to its orbit. What if, he thought, the force that holds the moon in its orbit and the force that cause the apple to fall to the ground were one and the same? This frighteningly simple thought is the germ out of which Newton’s theory of universal gravity and his masterpiece the Principia grew.Newton guessed that, if the Moon were motionless, it would fall straight down to Earth the same as the apple. But the Moon has a momentum that's at right angles to the gravity vector, which always points to the center of the Earth, meaning that the Moon's path is gradually changing in direction as the it "falls" sideways around the Earth. The same gravitational force could account for the curved motion of the Moon and the straight motion of the apple.
The Principia was published in 1687, after Newton put considerable additional work into his first intuition about gravity, including the critical insight that elliptical planetary orbits result from a force pointing from each planet straight down into the Sun, which is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the two. Not that Newton dreamed up either the planets' elliptical orbits or the inverse-square law on his own. Galileo had noticed in the late 16th and early 17th centuries that gravity acts as a constant acceleration on falling bodies, no matter what their weights. Kepler published his three laws of planetary motion in the first couple of decades of the 17th century, showing that planets move in ellipses of which the Sun is one focus. Between Newton's 1666 "apple moment" and the 1687 publication of the Principia, Hooke and others were inching their way toward the inverse-square law, first realizing that gravity always operated in one direction (earlier theories included the idea that gravity pushed at one point in the orbit and pulled at another), then establishing that its attractive power varied with distance, and finally nailing down the understanding that gravity alters with the square of the distance between the attractive bodies. Newton's genius was to understand that the inverse-square law, plus the tendency of objects to move in a straight line unless acting on by a force, simultaneously explained the elliptical paths of planets in Heaven and the straight downward fall of an apple from a tree on Earth.
As Richard Feynman used to say, in the old world people believed that angels flew behind planets and pushed them in their circular paths. Now, in the advanced modern world, we say that the angels are invisible and they push at right angles to what we thought back then. We still have no idea what gravity is, but we're considerably more adept as describing what kinds of motions it produces, on Earth as it is in Heaven.
Eye contact
Making it personal is a good way to harness people's will to work. With strangers, we trade. With fellow human beings, we give. A handful of Rice engineering students took on a freshman-year project to make a robotic arm for a wheelchair bound teenager with brittle-bone disease. They found some of the engineering problems unexpectedly tough to crack:
H/t: for this and other posts to come this morning, "Not Exactly Rocket Science."
And there was an even bigger problem. The arm wasn't nearly finished, but the engineering course was ending. But the team members say the idea of not finishing the project never entered their minds.
"We had someone who came and sat down in front of us, and asked for our help," says Najoomi.It took them till the end of their sophomore year, but they finally presented a working gadget to their client.
H/t: for this and other posts to come this morning, "Not Exactly Rocket Science."
The real "Amazon experience"
I don't think the President and his henchmen really want the true Amazon experience as much as they think they do.
Mr. Stone describes a meeting during the 2000 holiday season when Mr. Bezos tested a claim by Bill Price, his vice president for customer services, who said hold times on Amazon's phone lines were less than a minute.
"'Really?' Bezos said. 'Let's see.' On the speakerphone in the middle of the conference table, he called Amazon's 800 number. . . . Bezos took his watch off and made a deliberate show of tracking the time. A brutal minute passed, then two. . . . Around four and a half minutes passed, but according to multiple people at the meeting who related the story, the wait seemed interminable." Less than a year later, Mr. Price was gone from Amazon.Whatever we may think about Amazon's goals, there's no denying that Bezos is fanatically devoted to testing the truth of claims about the progress toward those goals. It's not an "Emperor's New Clothes" atmosphere over there.
Technophilia
Jeff Bezos is everything I love about modernism and free enterprise. I don't think the delivery drones are going to make it out to my house in 30 minutes, though. We can't even get pizza delivered here.
In honor of the brave new world we're going to pull down our house and construct this in its place:
In honor of the brave new world we're going to pull down our house and construct this in its place:
"Based on my poor understanding of history, science, and ethics..."
My favorite part about this anti-politician petition on WhiteHouse.gov is that it is apparently being driven by the Left. I heard about it from one of my Left-leaning friends, and the support I can find for it is all built around left-leaning organizations. The by-name exemption of Ph.D.s is suspicious as well -- education is a beautiful thing, but a doctorate is not a substitute for understanding. Hopefully they go together, but manifestly not necessarily.
That's Certainly Been My Observation
Even as President Obama reluctantly granted Americans thrown off their health plans quasi-permission to possibly keep them, he called them "the folks who, over time, I think, are going to find that the marketplaces are better." He means the ObamaCare exchanges that are replacing the private insurance market, adding that "it's important that we don't pretend that somehow that's a place worth going back to."Dealing with my wife's hospital bills lately, I've been struck by how lucky I am to be handling this under the grandfathered plan than under one of the proposed plans that are available from the exchanges (at least, in theory they are available: I haven't met anyone from Georgia who has mentioned successfully signing up for one). For one thing, the hospital we just happened to be nearest was in-network -- common for the old plan, which has the kind of broad networks Blue Cross normally features, but unlikely to prove true under the new plans. Since it was emergency care, that is a significant benefit.
Easy for him to say. The reason this furor will continue even if the website is fixed is that the public is learning that ObamaCare's insurance costs more in return for worse coverage.
Mr. Obama and his liberal allies call the old plans "substandard," but he doesn't mean from the perspective of the consumers who bought them. He means people were free to choose insurance that wasn't designed to serve his social equity and income redistribution goals.
Second, our deductible -- though I always considered it 'catastrophic' coverage -- is less than the $12,700 that I would have to come up with under the Obamacare plans. There's an individual out of pocket limit, too.
Third, the monthly premiums are about half what the cheapest plans on the exchange purport to cost.
So if I had a plan like his, I'd have had less money in the bank (because I'd have to cover higher monthly premiums), in order to pay for a higher total bill (because of a higher deductible). Plus, my wife might have had to have been carted by ambulance goodness-knows-where to find a hospital that would accept her.
No thanks, pal. Your plans for us are not only not better, they are not acceptable.
"Death in Battle," by C. S. Lewis
A poem, mentioned in passing here, Lewis wrote about his experiences in the first world war for an audience of veterans. This is what he said to them, knowing they might understand.
"Death in Battle"
Open the gates for me,
Open the gates of the peaceful castle, rosy in the West,
In the sweet dim Isle of Apples over the wide sea’s breast,
Open the gates for me!
Sorely pressed have I been
And driven and hurt beyond bearing this summer day,
But the heat and the pain together suddenly fall away,
All’s cool and green.
But a moment agone,
Among men cursing in fight and toiling, blinded I fought,
But the labour passed on a sudden even as a passing thought,
And now—alone!
Ah, to be ever alone,
In flowery valleys among the mountains and silent wastes untrod,
In the dewy upland places, in the garden of God,
This would atone!
I shall not see
The brutal, crowded faces around me, that in their toil have grown
Into the faces of devils—yea, even as my own—
When I find thee,
O Country of Dreams!
Beyond the tide of the ocean, hidden and sunk away,
Out of the sound of battles, near to the end of day,
Full of dim woods and streams.
"Death in Battle"
Open the gates for me,
Open the gates of the peaceful castle, rosy in the West,
In the sweet dim Isle of Apples over the wide sea’s breast,
Open the gates for me!
Sorely pressed have I been
And driven and hurt beyond bearing this summer day,
But the heat and the pain together suddenly fall away,
All’s cool and green.
But a moment agone,
Among men cursing in fight and toiling, blinded I fought,
But the labour passed on a sudden even as a passing thought,
And now—alone!
Ah, to be ever alone,
In flowery valleys among the mountains and silent wastes untrod,
In the dewy upland places, in the garden of God,
This would atone!
I shall not see
The brutal, crowded faces around me, that in their toil have grown
Into the faces of devils—yea, even as my own—
When I find thee,
O Country of Dreams!
Beyond the tide of the ocean, hidden and sunk away,
Out of the sound of battles, near to the end of day,
Full of dim woods and streams.
Pools
More unintended consequences: some bright soul at a hospital figured out it would save the hospital money to buy qualified ACA coverage for their patients and have the hospital pay the premiums itself. After all, these are very needy sick people, just the ones Obamacare is supposed to help. And they're in dire straits and probably can't afford the premiums. And it would be very wrong to deny coverage to these desperate patients merely because they're already sick, right? Why shouldn't the hospital give them money to buy health insurance, if it's cheaper than eating the uncollectible bills?
The Obama administration and insurers are up in arms about the proposal, because it will upset the balance of the risk pools, dumping all those expensive sick people in.
The Obama administration and insurers are up in arms about the proposal, because it will upset the balance of the risk pools, dumping all those expensive sick people in.
A little burst of honesty
Here's something you don't see every day. The National Park Service is embarrassed about having cited an OpEd instead of scientific evidence for its statement opposing fracking. It has requested that its comments be removed from the record. There isn't even any weasel-talk.
News you can use
How to talk to your progressive relatives at Thanksgiving dinner: tell them regulators are going to take away their organic kale.
Coming Soon: Ragnarok
The JORVIK Viking Center is a serious operation, so when they put out a press release calling for the end of the world, it's worth taking note.
Fortunately, they are ready with good advice on how to prepare.
(Earlier version of this post accidentally deleted, clearly another sign of the end times.)
Fortunately, they are ready with good advice on how to prepare.
‘Following a study published in 2010 that bearded men are more trustworthy than those without, we’re also looking for fantastic displays of facial hair, so that we can identify those with the potential to take us into the brave new world that is foretold to follow Ragnarok,’ said Danielle Daglan director of the JORVIK Viking Festival.Ladies and gentlemen of the Hall, you are in luck.
(Earlier version of this post accidentally deleted, clearly another sign of the end times.)
Coincidences in the News
The Supreme Court is to consider claims that the First Amendment can't require religiously-founded companies to violate religious principles. If the First is not applicable to corporations, then religiously-founded companies will be limited to single-proprietorships or partnerships: that is to say, they will be able to be conducted only when exposed to full personal liability for losses, which is a significant economic disability. Both in terms of obtaining investors and in terms of surviving or recovering from difficult economic cycles, the effect could easily be to destroy the ability of the religious to operate in the market at any significant level without agreeing to set aside their religious principles.
The Pope has come out with a significant work that refers to the effect of financial markets on politics as "a new tyranny." It doesn't read like he is thinking of Hobby Lobby, though his remarks are on point there as well.
The Obama Administration has decided to close the embassy at the Vatican. Allegedly this is a lesson learned from Benghazi. The similarities are blindingly obvious: they are, after all, operating in a religious environment chiefly protected by mercenaries and militias. If this is how the administration connects dots, Benghazi makes a whole lot more sense.
The Pope has come out with a significant work that refers to the effect of financial markets on politics as "a new tyranny." It doesn't read like he is thinking of Hobby Lobby, though his remarks are on point there as well.
The Obama Administration has decided to close the embassy at the Vatican. Allegedly this is a lesson learned from Benghazi. The similarities are blindingly obvious: they are, after all, operating in a religious environment chiefly protected by mercenaries and militias. If this is how the administration connects dots, Benghazi makes a whole lot more sense.
Medicaid in the spotlight
Stories are mounting about people who are unhappy to learn that they're required to buy expensive insurance that they may not be able to afford without subsidies, and that at a low enough income they can't even ask for subsidies: they're relegated to Medicaid whether they like it or not. It's an uncomfortable position for people who've never intended to take a government handout. It's especially jarring for someone with considerable life savings who simply doesn't have a great deal of current income. As best I can understand, the recent Medicaid expansion doesn't require the new recipients to spend down their savings before qualifying.
Most of us probably are unaware that there is a complicated system, varying from state to state, for recovering some of the expenses of the Medicaid program from the estate of someone who received benefits after the age of 55. I suspect this program is going to get more attention now that millions of people with savings but low income may be more or less forced into Medicaid.
Most of us probably are unaware that there is a complicated system, varying from state to state, for recovering some of the expenses of the Medicaid program from the estate of someone who received benefits after the age of 55. I suspect this program is going to get more attention now that millions of people with savings but low income may be more or less forced into Medicaid.
Forging an Axe
Smithing is one of those things I wish I had taken up when I was younger. There may someday yet be time, and money, for such things.
Shut up, you silencer
Desperation rules the debate over the health reform policy that will lower the oceans, or whatever it was supposed to do:
Part of this week's Friday news dump is the decision to delay the posting of price increases for 2015 policies from October 15 to November 15, 2014. Nothing to do with the election, of course; there's just a reasonable desire to give insurance companies more time to complete their calculations. Suspicions to the contrary are gendered.
“Don’t deploy the very principles of white privilege to silence a black man on the panel because you don’t want to talk about race. So be quiet,” the hustler screamed at Lewis.An even more puzzling complaint: the observation that young, healthy people aren't flocking to the exchanges as hoped is "very gendered." I was hoping for some explanation, but alas.
Part of this week's Friday news dump is the decision to delay the posting of price increases for 2015 policies from October 15 to November 15, 2014. Nothing to do with the election, of course; there's just a reasonable desire to give insurance companies more time to complete their calculations. Suspicions to the contrary are gendered.
Quests
Everyone probably has heard by now that C.S. Lewis died 50 years ago today. Here is Michael Gerson on C.S. Lewis and myth:
Having found truth in myths, Lewis decided to produce his own -- not as pleasing distractions but as reminders that we actually inhabit a world of fantastical, eternal creatures, with noble quests to perform and stories that do not end. And when we discover our true citizenship, he says, it comes with a "happiness ... so great that it even weakens me like a wound."
Here's Something You Don't See Everyday
In fact, you've likely never seen or heard it before: an instrument designed by Leonardo Da Vinci, constructed and played for the first time. It somehow combines the effects of a piano and a cello.
Power To The... Central Government
A writer named Richard Kim explains that it would have all been much smoother if the Federal government were in a better position to force the states to heel at command.
That seems unlikely to me, for the reason Tex was citing Warren Buffett explaining not long ago -- which, as discussed in the comments, Schumpeter himself had laid out before. The problem has to do with organizations that rise to a certain level of complexity and scale. They really can't do any better than this. It's ossification: making them bigger and stronger just makes the failures worse and more destructive.
That seems unlikely to me, for the reason Tex was citing Warren Buffett explaining not long ago -- which, as discussed in the comments, Schumpeter himself had laid out before. The problem has to do with organizations that rise to a certain level of complexity and scale. They really can't do any better than this. It's ossification: making them bigger and stronger just makes the failures worse and more destructive.
What's With The Scare Quotes?
National Journal deploys them in a strange way.
Obama didn't say that in July 2009—or any time while the program was being debated in Congress. He couldn't. He couldn't stand up before the American public and say that the only way to achieve the program's goals was to reallocate money within the health insurance market. That there would need to be a transfer of wealth—from the young to the old, from men to women, from the healthy to the sick. That to raise the floor, you had to lower the ceiling. To do so would have handed his enemies the kind of weaponry they craved, validation that Obama was indeed some sort of "socialist" who believed in "redistribution."Fine, but isn't the point of the article that "redistribution" is exactly what the law does? Why are we wagging our fingers over a word agreed to be a completely accurate description?
Now That's Interesting...
Not news: Scientists discover a new genus of bacteria.
News: ...so far found exclusively in NASA and European Space Agency clean-rooms thousands of miles apart.
News: ...so far found exclusively in NASA and European Space Agency clean-rooms thousands of miles apart.
A Temporary Victory
At least for a while, a Federal court has blocked the ACA from forcing Catholic groups to violate a basic tenet of their faith.
It's interesting that Cardinal Dolan testified, under oath and in public court, that the services in question are "evil." That's the position of the Church, to be sure, but how strange to see it said.
It's interesting that Cardinal Dolan testified, under oath and in public court, that the services in question are "evil." That's the position of the Church, to be sure, but how strange to see it said.
A Moment of Congratulations
I would like to call the attention of the Hall to four young women who have done something remarkable: they have succeeded in surviving the United States Marine Corps' enlisted School of Infantry.
We here have differing opinions about the wisdom of incorporating women into the combat arms, and certainly on another occasion we ought to talk about what the success of these four women -- part of a group of fifteen, the other eleven of whom did not make it -- might mean in the context of that debate. Not today, though.
Today, I just want to take a moment to celebrate the heart and self-discipline it took to volunteer and to succeed against such odds. Well done!
UPDATE: Apparently that number has been reduced to three, because of a leg injury sustained in the final stages of testing by one of the women. Reportedly the fourth will be allowed to graduate with a later company.
We here have differing opinions about the wisdom of incorporating women into the combat arms, and certainly on another occasion we ought to talk about what the success of these four women -- part of a group of fifteen, the other eleven of whom did not make it -- might mean in the context of that debate. Not today, though.
Today, I just want to take a moment to celebrate the heart and self-discipline it took to volunteer and to succeed against such odds. Well done!
UPDATE: Apparently that number has been reduced to three, because of a leg injury sustained in the final stages of testing by one of the women. Reportedly the fourth will be allowed to graduate with a later company.
Cryptocurrency and rebellion
A old science fiction story posited a country in which the country's chief executive had a free hand in almost every way, with one curb: three anonymous citizens controlled a radio link to a bomb in his head. If they unanimously agreed he was screwing up: a sudden, dramatic impeachment. Now a self-described cryptoanarchist is setting up something similar with a crowd-sourced bitcoin-financed website that he calls the Kickstarter of political assassinations.
The long view
George W. Bush on Leno:
“You have to believe in what you’re doing, first and foremost,” Bush said. “I relied upon my faith, my family helped a lot, and I had a good team around me, and did the best I could do. I’m also very comfortable with the fact that it’s going to take a while for history to judge whether the decisions I made are consequential or not and therefore, I’m not too worried about it, which I read some biographies of Washington, my attitude is if they are still writing about biographies of the first guy, the 43rd guy doesn’t need to worry about it.”
Envy
“Systemic processes tend to reward people for making decisions that turn out to be right—creating great resentment among the anointed, who feel themselves entitled to rewards for being articulate, politically active, and morally fervent.”Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed.
Logic in Another Language
This post is especially for Piercello, who is working on a project around human reason. It will also interested Cassidy, though, because it's a long-time subject of interest of hers.
A study of intelligence analysis suggests that we are more rational when evaluating things in our second language, not our native tongue.
A study of intelligence analysis suggests that we are more rational when evaluating things in our second language, not our native tongue.
The three groups of participants had English as a first language and Japanese as a second, Korean as a first language and English as a second or English as a first language and French as a second, indicating that this effect is replicable within and across language family boundaries.Emphasis added.
So why, then, do we make more rational, less biased decisions in our second language than in our first? It largely has to do with the lack of “emotional resonance” that we derive from foreign language text. Literature on second language acquisition unanimously agrees that people perceive messages delivered in their second language as less emotional (and consequently less impactful) than messages delivered in their first language; this concept applies to everything from political opinion to curse words.
Race in REH and Tolkien: A Brief Comparison
Lars Walker has a review of several works by Robert E. Howard related to his character Solomon Kane. It's a review generally pleased with the subject, but he offers a cautionary note about the handling of race:
And so you get (as you do in Tolkien, for reasons he manages to slide out of a race-based concept) a notion of High Men, Middle Men, and Low Men. But whereas Tolkien assumes a kind of basic human nature to which the High Men are always falling, but to which the Low Men might aspire, REH thinks the categories are permanent. Conan is a barbarian but a High Man because his blood is of ancient Atlantis. Tolkien's High Men (also of an island kingdom, Numenor) are High because of their friendship with the elves: only a very few of them have any admixture of actual elvish blood. Their fall -- expressed in terms of a loss of physical height, and length of years, but also in terms of a collapse of knowledge -- is cultural, resulting from a turning away from the elves (who, in turn, are High or Low depending on their friendship with the next highest rank in the Chain of Being, the Ainur, better known as Maiar or, in the case of the higher ones, Valar).
Another way of expressing this would be to say that, in Tolkien, you can rise or fall through friendship: and not just any friendship, but a kind of hierarchical friendship with those who stand in a closer relationship to the divine. When that friendship fails -- and it is friendship, a kind of love, even though one side is meant to guide and the other to be guided in how to actualize the divine order -- the fall occurs. And they have fallen farthest who have fallen under the dominion of Melkor, or later Sauron, powers that utterly reject and defy the divine order. These are sometimes (but far from always, and in fact not usually) black men "from Far Harad." There aren't any counterexamples of "good" black men in Tolkien, but one suspects there might have been: his literary structure is such that they should have improved or fallen on the same terms as others.
That contrasts sharply with REH's vision, but it is worth noticing that REH's vision isn't "evolution," either. There isn't any substantial evolution going on in the races he envisions. The ones that Conan encounters in his analog to sub-Saharan Africa are exactly the same as REH's worst ideas about the blacks down the road in his modern South (who appear in a collection of American stories, in which they are similarly more bestial, and more easily swayed by the darker powers and aspects of human nature than those descended from what REH calls, in his poem about King Kull, "high Atlantis").
Yet friendship is possible, though it brings no benefits to either party. Conan is a great friend to one of the black kings, so much so that they rule for a while together as brother kings of a tribe. In the end, though, the pull of the darker powers of the universe sways the people out from under both of them, so that his brother-king is murdered by his own people and Conan nearly so.
So I don't take REH's view to be that blacks are "a lower evolutionary form of human being," but rather a lower form per se. He believes that race is real, and as immutable by evolution as by any other process.
He still believes that it is possible to be unjust to them, or to befriend them (though it remains perilous to be close to them). It's a permanent condition, a feature of the world that a million years will never change. That's a pessimistic view, neither scientific nor religious, but one he levered for its literary force.
Something should probably be said about Howard's handling of race. Solomon Kane is not hostile to the black people he encounters. In fact he often acts as their protector, flying into volcanic rage over injustices and violence visited upon them. But he is patronizing in the extreme. The author's view seems to be that Africans are a lower evolutionary form of human being, soon destined for extinction, and that it's the duty of superior whites to look after them.It might be interesting to compare his handling of the race issue here with the way it is handled in his Conan books, and to contrast how it is handled in Tolkien. Clearly REH was excited by the idea of race as an explanation for cultural differences -- so, it should be said, was almost everyone of a scientific mindset in the early 20th century. The world of Conan reads almost like an attempt to catalog the legitimate races in REH's opinion, and show how their racial characteristics persist over tens of thousands of years.
And so you get (as you do in Tolkien, for reasons he manages to slide out of a race-based concept) a notion of High Men, Middle Men, and Low Men. But whereas Tolkien assumes a kind of basic human nature to which the High Men are always falling, but to which the Low Men might aspire, REH thinks the categories are permanent. Conan is a barbarian but a High Man because his blood is of ancient Atlantis. Tolkien's High Men (also of an island kingdom, Numenor) are High because of their friendship with the elves: only a very few of them have any admixture of actual elvish blood. Their fall -- expressed in terms of a loss of physical height, and length of years, but also in terms of a collapse of knowledge -- is cultural, resulting from a turning away from the elves (who, in turn, are High or Low depending on their friendship with the next highest rank in the Chain of Being, the Ainur, better known as Maiar or, in the case of the higher ones, Valar).
Another way of expressing this would be to say that, in Tolkien, you can rise or fall through friendship: and not just any friendship, but a kind of hierarchical friendship with those who stand in a closer relationship to the divine. When that friendship fails -- and it is friendship, a kind of love, even though one side is meant to guide and the other to be guided in how to actualize the divine order -- the fall occurs. And they have fallen farthest who have fallen under the dominion of Melkor, or later Sauron, powers that utterly reject and defy the divine order. These are sometimes (but far from always, and in fact not usually) black men "from Far Harad." There aren't any counterexamples of "good" black men in Tolkien, but one suspects there might have been: his literary structure is such that they should have improved or fallen on the same terms as others.
That contrasts sharply with REH's vision, but it is worth noticing that REH's vision isn't "evolution," either. There isn't any substantial evolution going on in the races he envisions. The ones that Conan encounters in his analog to sub-Saharan Africa are exactly the same as REH's worst ideas about the blacks down the road in his modern South (who appear in a collection of American stories, in which they are similarly more bestial, and more easily swayed by the darker powers and aspects of human nature than those descended from what REH calls, in his poem about King Kull, "high Atlantis").
Yet friendship is possible, though it brings no benefits to either party. Conan is a great friend to one of the black kings, so much so that they rule for a while together as brother kings of a tribe. In the end, though, the pull of the darker powers of the universe sways the people out from under both of them, so that his brother-king is murdered by his own people and Conan nearly so.
So I don't take REH's view to be that blacks are "a lower evolutionary form of human being," but rather a lower form per se. He believes that race is real, and as immutable by evolution as by any other process.
He still believes that it is possible to be unjust to them, or to befriend them (though it remains perilous to be close to them). It's a permanent condition, a feature of the world that a million years will never change. That's a pessimistic view, neither scientific nor religious, but one he levered for its literary force.
"This Is Aspirational."
Once upon a time, the Atlanta Police Department explained that their motto "Answer the Call!" didn't actually mean that they intended to answer your calls.
Of course, aspirational usually means 'having to do with audible breath that accompanies or comprises a speech sound.'
[Director Kelly of the APD's foundation] said it didn't help matters when a person was told by a 911 operator to quit calling to report shooting because the caller rang in too much.So when we said 'this is going to be just like Amazon or Travelocity,' well... this is aspirational, don't you see?
"This is aspirational," Kelly said. "The Police Department doesn't want this problem to be there forever. They want to solve that problem."
Of course, aspirational usually means 'having to do with audible breath that accompanies or comprises a speech sound.'
Who could have foreseen it?
Imagine for a moment we had a press that was reporting on controversial issues. Here's an exchange in 2009 between an Obamacare shill and a skeptical member of Congress:
REP. PRICE: You also mentioned, as other folks have, that the president's goal -- and it's reiterated over and over and over -- that if you like your current plan or if you like your current doctor, you can keep them. Do you know where that is in the bill?
MS. ROMER: Absolutely. And things like the employer mandate is part of making sure that large employers that today -- the vast majority of them do provide health insurance. One of the things that's --
REP. PRICE: I'm asking about if an individual likes their current plan and maybe they don't get it through their employer and maybe in fact their plan doesn't comply with every parameter of the current draft bill, how are they going to be able to keep that?
MS. ROMER: So the president is fundamentally talking about maintaining what's good about the system that we have. And --
REP. PRICE: That's not my question.
MS. ROMER: One of the things that he has been saying is, for example, you may like your plan and one of the things we may do is slow the growth rate of the cost of your plan, right? So that's something that is not only --
REP. PRICE: The question is whether or not patients are going to be able to keep their plan if they like it. What if, for example, there's an employer out there -- and you've said that if the employers that already provide health insurance, health coverage for their employees, that they'll be just fine, right? What if the policy that those employees and that employer like and provide for their employees doesn't comply with the specifics of the bill? Will they be able to keep that one?
MS. ROMER: So certainly my understanding -- and I won't pretend to be an expert in the bill -- but certainly I think what's being planned is, for example, for plans in the exchange to have a minimum level of benefits.
REP. PRICE: So if I were to tell you that in the bill it says that if a plan doesn't comply with the specifics that are outlined in the bill that that employer's going to have to move to the -- to a different plan within five years -- would you -- would that be unusual, or would that seem outrageous to you?
MS. ROMER: I think the crucial thing is, what kind of changes are we talking about? The president was saying he wanted the American people to know that fundamentally if you like what you have it will still be there.
REP. PRICE: What if you like what you have, Dr. Romer, though, and it doesn't fit with the definition in the bill? My reading of the bill is that you can't keep that.
MS. ROMER: I think the crucial thing -- the bill is talking about setting a minimum standard of what can count --
REP. PRICE: So it's possible that you may like what you have, but you may not be able to keep it? Right?
MS. ROMER: We'd have -- I'd have to look at the specifics.
This promise he'll keep
"If you like your nukes, you can keep your nukes." That's the way you solve conflict when you're a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Iran won't exactly freeze its enrichment program, but it will potentially stop accelerating the rate of its production, if it feels like it, after we lift sanctions. Such a deal!
As Ace noted recently, the President really is earning that Prize: this lunacy has induced Israel and Saudi Arabia to work together. He's even stirred up France, which has vivid memories of the last time it tried to get Israel to swallow a mortal threat while making ineffectual, scrabbling motions in the direction of controlling anti-semitic madness in the Middle East. In 1967, when it was Israel's chief military supplier, France threatened to cut off the pipeline if Israel launched a pre-emptive strike. Israel thought about it, then decided not to commit suicide, many of its people having vivid memories of the last time they failed to fight back before it was too late. These days, France knows that wagging its finger at Israel isn't going to cut any ice as long as that country is under existential threat. Israel is not in the habit of making idle threats about its self-preservation.
As Ace noted recently, the President really is earning that Prize: this lunacy has induced Israel and Saudi Arabia to work together. He's even stirred up France, which has vivid memories of the last time it tried to get Israel to swallow a mortal threat while making ineffectual, scrabbling motions in the direction of controlling anti-semitic madness in the Middle East. In 1967, when it was Israel's chief military supplier, France threatened to cut off the pipeline if Israel launched a pre-emptive strike. Israel thought about it, then decided not to commit suicide, many of its people having vivid memories of the last time they failed to fight back before it was too late. These days, France knows that wagging its finger at Israel isn't going to cut any ice as long as that country is under existential threat. Israel is not in the habit of making idle threats about its self-preservation.
Credibility trickle-down
You can't get low-information voters to pay attention to much detail, but you can create a mood of powerful skepticism if you screw the pooch often enough. A small-town Pennsylvania mayor found that out when he lost his seat to a candidate who didn't think much of his support for Mayor Bloomberg nationwide anti-gun crusade:
“Look, people outside of Washington look at all of the spying with the NSA and problems with the IRS they see coming out of D.C., and they just don't trust the government,” he said. “I understand that, they just don't want any more interference.”
261-157
The House approved the Upton (R) version of "Keep Your Plan" by a solid but not veto-proof majority, 261 to 157. Thirty-nine Democrats defied their party leadership's complaint that enforcing the President's 99%-true promise was tantamount to repealing Obamacare.
For those keeping tracks of proposals:
Upton (R-House): Everyone is eligible to sign up for a grandfathered plan for a year, regardless of whether they previously had such a plan, if insurers agree.
Landrieu (D-Senate): Everyone enrolled in a grandfathered plan by October 1, 2013, can keep it until the last customer drops out of the plan, regardless of whether insurers agree.
Obama (by executive fiat): Everyone currently enrolled in a grandfathered plan can keep it for a year unless he says otherwise at any point by executive fiat, if insurers agree. Obama also has announced he would veto the Upton bill. Not that it matters, since it's hard to imagine that Harry Reid will let either the Upton bill or the Landrieu bill come to the floor of the Senate under any circumstances.
For those keeping tracks of proposals:
Upton (R-House): Everyone is eligible to sign up for a grandfathered plan for a year, regardless of whether they previously had such a plan, if insurers agree.
Landrieu (D-Senate): Everyone enrolled in a grandfathered plan by October 1, 2013, can keep it until the last customer drops out of the plan, regardless of whether insurers agree.
Obama (by executive fiat): Everyone currently enrolled in a grandfathered plan can keep it for a year unless he says otherwise at any point by executive fiat, if insurers agree. Obama also has announced he would veto the Upton bill. Not that it matters, since it's hard to imagine that Harry Reid will let either the Upton bill or the Landrieu bill come to the floor of the Senate under any circumstances.
Happiness in the Book
On reading as a form of happiness. And of course it should be, because we know from Aristotle that happiness is an activity. If the readings lift your heart and mind into active engagement with heroic qualities, of course it ought to make you happy.
The Fall of Númenor
Unlike the legendary kingdoms of Númenor or Atlantis, this was a slow and quiet fall:
Doggerland, a huge area of dry land that stretched from Scotland to Denmark was slowly submerged by water between 18,000 BC and 5,500 BC. Divers from oil companies have found remains of a 'drowned world' with a population of tens of thousands - which might once have been the 'real heartland' of Europe.
Letting Joe Say No, Or, Shouldn't All Soldiers Be More Like 'Chelsea' Manning?
An author at the Boston Review suggests that members of the all-volunteer force should be allowed to opt-out of wars on an individual basis.
The proposal is completely impractical, for reasons I assume I don't have to explain to this audience. What's more interesting are the responses, of which there are quite a few, including this one by West Point's senior military philosopher.
The proposal is completely impractical, for reasons I assume I don't have to explain to this audience. What's more interesting are the responses, of which there are quite a few, including this one by West Point's senior military philosopher.
First do no harm
From Thomas Sowell, that lovely thinker:
No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: “But what would you replace it with?” When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?
Keeping Your Plan -- Update
While it's true that it's pretty late to expect insurance companies to reverse course on policy cancellations that have been in the works for months if not years, it's also true that in a crisis, motivated people can find a way through the red tape:
It’s worth noting the California insurance commissioner is forcing two insurers to reverse cancellations for hundreds of thousands of individual market plan enrollees, and the insurers are reluctantly complying to keep people in their plans beyond January 1. In that case, operational issues were not impossible to overcome.
Insurers respond by noting that it generally takes months to have insurance regulators approve their rates before offering plans in the marketplace. While true, that does not mean that the regulators would not act much more quickly in a crisis. Indeed, there should be no doubt that, if the Upton legislation were to become law, there would be great pressure on the state regulators and the insurance industry to do whatever it takes to keep these plans open. The same political firestorm that is propelling the Upton legislation through Congress would force the states and insurers to be responsive also to the plight of the enrollees in the cancelled plans.It's amazing what can get done if the insurance regulators want it to happen.
Must be doing something right
Jonah Goldberg indulges in a big dollop of schadenfreude today, observing that the Obamacare website couldn't be more like the "third-world experience" Henry Chao was desperate to avoid if it required customers to pay in chickens. The exchange, as he says, rolled out "like a piano into a peat bog."
But that's just the chattering classes who live on the Internet. What is the man on the street hearing about all this? It was interesting to listen to a neighbor at dinner the other night describe the reaction of the workers at his small construction company, whose excellent healthcare policy is being taken off the market. They weren't sure exactly what was going on, but every single one of them had gotten the news that the President lied to them about keeping their plans.
Turning now to the fever-swamp perspective, a cri de coeur from a Firedog Lake commenter who's evidently been accustomed to serve as an opinion leader on the jobsite:
But that's just the chattering classes who live on the Internet. What is the man on the street hearing about all this? It was interesting to listen to a neighbor at dinner the other night describe the reaction of the workers at his small construction company, whose excellent healthcare policy is being taken off the market. They weren't sure exactly what was going on, but every single one of them had gotten the news that the President lied to them about keeping their plans.
Turning now to the fever-swamp perspective, a cri de coeur from a Firedog Lake commenter who's evidently been accustomed to serve as an opinion leader on the jobsite:
This polling makes me sick! Yesterday in the lunchroom, I was subjected to a bunch of moronic gibberish about how “I just wish the teabaggers would shut the damn government down permanently and let us govern ourselves at the State level”.
I tried to talk some sense into these ‘people’, but all I got was a dozen or so neanderthals looking at me as if I, rather than they, were a lunatic.
The Federal Family has been trying so hard to establish a truly fair and equitable society and yet the filthy and maniacal millionaires and billionaires who control the ‘media’ on behalf of the corporations continue to spew forth all these absurd lies cooked up by the “vast rightwing conspiracy” which so pervade our society.
I’m sick of it! Apparently the same damn thing is happening all over the world! The ultra extreme far right just messes up EVERYTHING!
I’ve got to go now, I can feel another onslaught of agonizing cognitive dissonance coming on. I certainly hope that once Obamacare becomes effective, I can see a doctor, any doctor who will prescribe a medication that will stop this D*MN cognitive dissonance … IT’S MAKING ME SICK!
Causality & The Lord of the Rings
Who killed the Witch-King of Angmar?
I couldn't stand the first movie, so I never saw the others. Jackson's infatuation with the modern is a wedge between him and Tolkien. I am therefore not surprised to see his error in this clip, which misstates entirely the events at the death of the Witch-King.
Éowyn is here represented as killing the Witch-King, with the hobbit as a kind of supporting actor -- distracting him with a little back-stab. You get the effect with the strange 'pulse' that flies from the Nazgûl when he is struck by Éowyn. Just the opposite is what Tolkien intended.
"[Meriadoc the hobbit] brushed away the tears, and stooped to pick up the green shield that Éowyn had given him, and he slung it at his back. Then he looked for his sword that he had let fall; for even as he struck his blow his arm was numbed, and now he could only use his left hand. And behold! there lay his weapon, but the blade was smoking like a dry branch that has been thrust in a fire; and as he watched it, it writhed and withered and was consumed.
"So passed the sword of the Barrow-downs, work of Westernesse. But glad would he have been to know its fate who wrought it slowly long ago in the North-kingdom when the Dúnedain were young, and chief among their foes was the dread realm of Angmar and its sorcerer king. No other blade, not though mightier hands had wielded it, would have dealt that foe a wound so bitter, cleaving the undead flesh, breaking the spell that knit his unseen sinews to his will."
So the blow that should have sent the 'pulse,' if pulse there should have been, was Meriadoc's. It was the hobbit, the small man who bore the sword he was never expected to bear, who struck the fatal and unexpected blow. He cut the web of spells, fashioned long before him by mighty ones who did not bother to take his kind into their reckoning.
Here as elsewhere, this is a theme of Tolkien's. The Hobbits are small people, unexpected, whom the great and the powerful fail to take into their accounts. Yet again and again, they are the tools of a greater artisan.
I couldn't stand the first movie, so I never saw the others. Jackson's infatuation with the modern is a wedge between him and Tolkien. I am therefore not surprised to see his error in this clip, which misstates entirely the events at the death of the Witch-King.
Éowyn is here represented as killing the Witch-King, with the hobbit as a kind of supporting actor -- distracting him with a little back-stab. You get the effect with the strange 'pulse' that flies from the Nazgûl when he is struck by Éowyn. Just the opposite is what Tolkien intended.
"[Meriadoc the hobbit] brushed away the tears, and stooped to pick up the green shield that Éowyn had given him, and he slung it at his back. Then he looked for his sword that he had let fall; for even as he struck his blow his arm was numbed, and now he could only use his left hand. And behold! there lay his weapon, but the blade was smoking like a dry branch that has been thrust in a fire; and as he watched it, it writhed and withered and was consumed.
"So passed the sword of the Barrow-downs, work of Westernesse. But glad would he have been to know its fate who wrought it slowly long ago in the North-kingdom when the Dúnedain were young, and chief among their foes was the dread realm of Angmar and its sorcerer king. No other blade, not though mightier hands had wielded it, would have dealt that foe a wound so bitter, cleaving the undead flesh, breaking the spell that knit his unseen sinews to his will."
So the blow that should have sent the 'pulse,' if pulse there should have been, was Meriadoc's. It was the hobbit, the small man who bore the sword he was never expected to bear, who struck the fatal and unexpected blow. He cut the web of spells, fashioned long before him by mighty ones who did not bother to take his kind into their reckoning.
Here as elsewhere, this is a theme of Tolkien's. The Hobbits are small people, unexpected, whom the great and the powerful fail to take into their accounts. Yet again and again, they are the tools of a greater artisan.
The magic of self-pay
I tried something new at a doctor's office today. I'm trying out a new GP in a nearby community, someone with great patient ratings. I went to see him today, not because I needed anything, but to put myself in his office system so that if I do need something, there's some chance of my getting an appointment before I die of whatever it is. My more local doctor never seems to be available any more in an emergency. Though I can generally get in to see a P.A. on a same-day basis, and his P.A.'s are very nice, they haven't had much of a track record in the last couple of years diagnosing anything usefully. So I'll see how things go with the new guy.
The really new thing is that I told the office staff to treat me as self-pay. I told them I have insurance, but I'm not going to burden you with the knowledge of who it is, so you won't have to worry about whether you're complying with your contract. Just tell me what the prices of things are going to pay, and I'll pay you cash. If I get remotely close to my deductible, I'll gather up my bills and send them in and see whether my insurance company will acknowledge them, but you don't ever have to fool with that part of it.
Like magic, for the first time I can remember, I got a prompt and unequivocal answer to my question "How much is this visit costing?" It was a very reasonable fee, which I paid on the spot by check. The doctor recommended a standard blood panel, which would cost about $400 if I went through Blue Cross, but will cost only $84 if I self-pay. In the past, I've had similar blood panels done through a doctor's office to whom I had incautiously confessed my affiliation with Blue Cross. Suddenly it became "illegal" for them to treat me as self-pay, even though I'm going to pay in cash, because (as always) I'm nowhere near my deductible. Apparently the only way out of this trap is never to tell them you're insured in the first place. Some offices won't take you as a new patient on that basis. They aren't likely to get my business. What do you guys want from me? A cash retainer to prove I won't stiff you on my bills?
I'm faintly hopeful that, as more people are shoved into the new style of mandatory health plan with very high deductibles, they will begin to approach things my way, so we'll see more of a transparent, cash-basis market at least for ordinary stuff like exams and blood tests.
The doctor seemed sensible, had practical advice to offer about various minor ailments, and didn't pester me with any questions about spousal abuse or guns in the home. It was such a rational and worthwhile experience that I got through the whole thing without exploding with rage about Obamacare!
On that subject, though, here is the latest thinking from the President's apologists: When he told us we could keep our plans, that was 99% true, and it was shockingly unfair to make a fuss about the tiny, unimportant sense in which that was a lie. The people who aren't getting to keep their plans are an insignificant sliver of the marketplace, most of whom aren't even going to see their premiums go up, so don't believe what you read. Besides, the old plans are terrible; nobody in his right mind would keep them if he were offered something better. But when we ask the President to support bills in Congress to ensure that we'll keep our plans, it turns out that letting us do that would be a dagger at the very heart of Obamacare. If even a minuscule fraction of the market doesn't sign up for the new plans, the entire creaky edifice will crash and burn. And it won't be a few customers, it will be a stampede, because almost everyone will want to keep his old bad plan instead of taking the priceless gift of the wonderful new plans. Also, although the financial harm suffered by this inconsequential backwater of the market, just a few Americans, 15 million tops, is hardly worth mentioning, the fact remains that denying this stupendous influx of revenue to the grand nationwide Obamacare experiment will starve it of its lifeblood and leave the brilliant social experiment in smoking ruins.
The really new thing is that I told the office staff to treat me as self-pay. I told them I have insurance, but I'm not going to burden you with the knowledge of who it is, so you won't have to worry about whether you're complying with your contract. Just tell me what the prices of things are going to pay, and I'll pay you cash. If I get remotely close to my deductible, I'll gather up my bills and send them in and see whether my insurance company will acknowledge them, but you don't ever have to fool with that part of it.
Like magic, for the first time I can remember, I got a prompt and unequivocal answer to my question "How much is this visit costing?" It was a very reasonable fee, which I paid on the spot by check. The doctor recommended a standard blood panel, which would cost about $400 if I went through Blue Cross, but will cost only $84 if I self-pay. In the past, I've had similar blood panels done through a doctor's office to whom I had incautiously confessed my affiliation with Blue Cross. Suddenly it became "illegal" for them to treat me as self-pay, even though I'm going to pay in cash, because (as always) I'm nowhere near my deductible. Apparently the only way out of this trap is never to tell them you're insured in the first place. Some offices won't take you as a new patient on that basis. They aren't likely to get my business. What do you guys want from me? A cash retainer to prove I won't stiff you on my bills?
I'm faintly hopeful that, as more people are shoved into the new style of mandatory health plan with very high deductibles, they will begin to approach things my way, so we'll see more of a transparent, cash-basis market at least for ordinary stuff like exams and blood tests.
The doctor seemed sensible, had practical advice to offer about various minor ailments, and didn't pester me with any questions about spousal abuse or guns in the home. It was such a rational and worthwhile experience that I got through the whole thing without exploding with rage about Obamacare!
On that subject, though, here is the latest thinking from the President's apologists: When he told us we could keep our plans, that was 99% true, and it was shockingly unfair to make a fuss about the tiny, unimportant sense in which that was a lie. The people who aren't getting to keep their plans are an insignificant sliver of the marketplace, most of whom aren't even going to see their premiums go up, so don't believe what you read. Besides, the old plans are terrible; nobody in his right mind would keep them if he were offered something better. But when we ask the President to support bills in Congress to ensure that we'll keep our plans, it turns out that letting us do that would be a dagger at the very heart of Obamacare. If even a minuscule fraction of the market doesn't sign up for the new plans, the entire creaky edifice will crash and burn. And it won't be a few customers, it will be a stampede, because almost everyone will want to keep his old bad plan instead of taking the priceless gift of the wonderful new plans. Also, although the financial harm suffered by this inconsequential backwater of the market, just a few Americans, 15 million tops, is hardly worth mentioning, the fact remains that denying this stupendous influx of revenue to the grand nationwide Obamacare experiment will starve it of its lifeblood and leave the brilliant social experiment in smoking ruins.
Looking Glass World
Where the authorities have all the time in the world for trivia and none for anything that matters.
Update: link fixed!
Update: link fixed!
"Do You Got"?
I realize it's the smallest thing wrong with this, but somehow it seems to tie it all together.
The Center
From Jim Geraghty's Morning Jolt, some statistics from a recent Esquire survey of the political "center," which is looking pretty conservative. Affirmative action: 57% oppose it in hiring decisions and college admissions; 19% support it. Amnesty: 54% oppose a path to citizenship for those who have come to the country illegally; 32% support it. Voter fraud: 75% support requiring photo ID to cast a vote; 15% oppose. Abortion on demand: 38% support it, but only in the first trimester; 29% would limit it to cases of rape, incest, and the life of the mother; 12% support abortion on demand through all 40 weeks. Personal accountability: 78% said the bigger problem for the United States is people aren't accountable for their decisions and actions; 22% said that the bigger problem was "people aren't compassionate toward one another." Federal budget: 77% support a Constitutional amendment requiring the federal government to balance its budget every year; 11% oppose.
I can't link directly to this emailed newsletter, but you can go here to sign up for free delivery of future Morning Jolts.
I can't link directly to this emailed newsletter, but you can go here to sign up for free delivery of future Morning Jolts.
A Little Music for Veterans Day
I like letting vets tell their own stories. Luke Stricklin served as an infantryman in Iraq, where he and a couple of buddies wrote this song.
Happy Birthday, Marines
Just in time, a story about the Corps that is after my own heart.
The MWTC near Bridgeport, Calif., has begun teaching an advanced horsemanship training course in order to teach Special Operations Forces (SOF) personnel the necessary skills to enable them to ride horses, load pack animals, and maintain animals for military applications in remote and dangerous environments.The need for men like this never really goes away, though our pride in technology sometimes makes us think we need it -- we will need them -- no more.
Hollywood: Fantasyland
Tom Cruise: 'My job is as hard as fighting in Afghanistan.' Picked a great week to stick your foot in that one, son.
Certain Marines crafted this appropriately off-color response. [May have to be logged in to FB to see it.]
Certain Marines crafted this appropriately off-color response. [May have to be logged in to FB to see it.]
"Cause of death undetermined"
A remarkably restrained account of the demise of a Louisiana man who had been holding his kidnapped ex-wife hostage since last Wednesday in a shack in a canefield. The police couldn't find her but, unluckily for the guy, her family could. They applied a very direct approach to the situation. The authors of the story leave a lot to the imagination.
Veterans Day & Birthday Weekend
Normally I'd wait until the actual days to post, but all the active duty folks I know are so involved in the 4-day weekend I figure I'd better post in case they only get by once. Happy birthday, tomorrow. Those of you who are veterans or hope someday to become veterans, enjoy the eleventh. All the best, warriors.
He could fix this if he liked
A comment I admired:
The GOP needs to heavily advertise the fact that the only, yes only, reason that people are losing their current policies is because President Obama's administration (which he presumably leads) wrote regulations that overrode the grandfathering clause in all those policies.
This is important. They didn't have to do that! It's still reversible!
The GOP leadership needs to call him out on this daily, until even his sycophantic mainstream press contingent is forced to ask him why he doesn't simply tell his HHS director to reverse the harmful regulations that overrode the grandfather clause.
Then, he either reverses it and restores normality, while destroying the source of the subsidies required to make Obamacare work, or he continues to lie, and the Democrat brand continues to plummet.I'm making this point--that HHS could reverse the harmful regulations tomorrow without violating the ACA--in every forum I can reach. It won't prop the ACA up; the income from we few "Wild Westers" isn't enough even if every one of us knuckles under to paying double the premiums from now on. But it will get some of us out of an acute, immediate bind, and it will show either that the President screwed the pooch big time, or that he could help this "unimportant 5%" but simply can't be bothered to do it.
Junk teachers
Maybe there is some way to tell a good teacher from an ineffective one:
Education Secretary Arne Duncan hailed this year's National Assessment of Educational Progress (i.e., the nation's report card) results on Thursday as "encouraging." . . .
Between 2010 and 2012, about 4% of D.C. teachers—and nearly all of those rated "ineffective"—were dismissed. About 30% of teachers rated "minimally effective" left on their own, likely because they didn't receive a pay bump and were warned that they could be removed within a year if they failed to shape up.
Clearing out the deadwood appears to have lifted scores. D.C. led the nation in student progress. Average reading scores jumped five points in the fourth grade and six in the eighth. The percentage of students scoring at or above "basic" in math rose by six points in both grade levels.Just admitting that there could be such a thing as "deadwood" has got to help.
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