Jay Nordlinger asks, "Who can wave the Bible?" I'd like to discuss that, and will do so above. However, first we must deal with another important matter.
Later in the piece, he makes the shocking admission that -- though part Scot -- he doesn't know what the flag of Scotland looks like. I hope that none of you are in that same category, but if so, let us fix it! The flag is the St. Andrew's Cross, the white cross saltire on a blue field. It appears in the upper left of this achievement:
Probably all of you have seen the Royal Arms of the United Kingdom, which quarter the arms of England (Richard I's three lions), Scotland, and Ireland. Did you notice, however, that -- when displayed as they are in Scotland -- the Scottish arms are given precedence? The Scottish lion rampant is doubled, instead of the English lions of Richard I. The Scottish national motto is also used, and the supporters are reversed. The crown of England steps aside when it comes to Scottish soil.
Here is how you have probably seen the arms, as they are displayed in England and elsewhere:
The Scottish flag partially inspired two additional famous flags. The Union Jack includes the Scottish flag (as well as the St. George's cross of England, and the St. Patrick's cross of Ireland). Also, the old Confederate battle flag was a nod to Scotland in its choice of the St. Andrew's cross, as many of its soldiers were of Scottish heritage. The battle flag's colors, and the use of stars-for-states, were inspired by the American tradition. The Confederates, after all, believed they were defending American traditions of independence and rebellion against overweening authority.
With all of that handled, we can deal with the other matter.
Scottish Heraldry
Puff
This is one of those puff-pieces that could only have been written by a career diplomat, unless it was by a "visiting scholar" who depends on both the State Department and the White House for access. If you dig down past about seven paragraphs of flattery and excuse-making, however, you do learn something about the direction of US foreign policy under the new administration.
The United States has abandoned the idea of working with its traditional allies. The author mentions the failure of the G8 as a vehicle for our policy: those nations, excepting Russia, are Cold War allies. NATO is barely mentioned in the article, but its continuing difficulty fielding real fighting forces in Afghanistan has shown how weak it has become in its original role -- that of a military alliance. The new vehicle? The author states that this is not clear: "the administration has an effort underway to determine whether the successor to the G-8 will be the G-20, or perhaps some other grouping."
The questions that Sec. Clinton is described as asking have been of interest to the military for some time. A model for addressing the question of building networks of sub-regional partners was considered here, in a piece from the US Army's War College. That model is not entirely theoretical: the US Pacific Command leveraged our relationship with Singapore to assert US interests on a Singapore-Malaysia-Indonesia alliance to patrol the Malacca Straits.
The Malaysians and the Indonesians both have reasons to wish to avoid a formal alliance with the United States. Malaysia, in particular, has a longstanding foreign policy that balances several local third-world governments against any great powers operating in the region. Direct partnership isn't an option for that reason: Malaysia won't have it, not with us. Yet they will partner with the Sings, and our strong alliance with Singapore allows us to exert indirect influence.
Indonesia, meanwhile, is a partner of extraordinary importance as both the largest Muslim nation on earth and a modernizing force within Islam -- but it is also a noted human rights abuser, and a competitor in some respects to a genuine ally, Australia. We would like to work more closely with Indonesia, but political pressures prevent it.
In spite of that, by building strong sub-regional partnerships, we are able to influence the entire area. We have the alliance with Australia, which allows for the good-cop/bad-cop influence on Indonesia; we have the partnership with Singapore, which allows us to influence and keep apprised of the patrolling of the Straits; we have the alliance with the Republic of the Philippines, to whom we provide direct military support in the form of the Joint Special Operations Task Force there, and diplomatic support also to their peace process; and we have another strong ally in Thailand.
One reason the relationship between Sec. Clinton and the military is as good as it is, is that many of the solutions she has been looking for were pioneered by the DOD. The piece makes a sketch of a bow to that fact, noting that a lot of 'statecraft' resources are currently at the Pentagon. Why would that be? Because the Pentagon was the one having the success in creating the desired effects.
This is true even for her signature focus on getting State to attend to 'nonstate' actors, especially those focused on 'women's issues': one of the key places for State officials to learn that is with an ePRT or PRT in Iraq, where the military has been setting up women's committees for several years. These committees are often initially resourced by American money -- formerly CERP, but these days State may be involved from the beginning -- and may meet at US-secured facilities (though that is also increasingly unnecessary).
I'm not sure I agree with the author that the Obama administration has had any notable foreign policy successes. The Clinton State Department, however, may be poised to have some internal successes. If so, the lady does deserve the credit for having both the sense to recognize practical solutions, and the personal power to move the bureaucracy to adopt them.
However, the piece seems to overstate the effects achieved so far. For example:
Even just a few months in, it's clear that these appointments are far from window dressing. Lew, Slaughter and the acting head of the U.S. Agency for International Development are leading an effort to rethink foreign aid with the new Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, an initiative modeled on the Pentagon's strategic assessments and designed to review State's priorities.Confer that assertion with this piece by Matt Armstrong, at Small Wars Journal, on the serious problems with USAID at State. USAID is one of the most effective arms of the State Department. Also relevant is Mr. Armstrong's commentary on State's failures at re-establishing a role in Public Diplomacy. You might say that he agrees that the Clinton State Department is an improvement, but with less effusive praise:
I'm not sure where Pincus has been, but until the recent year (ie. this year), the leadership at the State Department was out to lunch....Dr. Rice was indeed a disappointment, both as Secretary of State and as National Security Adviser. Sec. Clinton does seem to be an improvement over her, but there is a very long way to go. If State wants to begin reasserting its traditional perogatives, it can do worse than to start by trying to "buy back" some of those DOD strategic communication assets, and re-building USAID.
It is worthwhile to recall that it was the Secretaries of Defense (both Donald Rumsfeld and Gates) and not the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that frequently and seemingly continuously fielded questions about the need of resurrecting the United States Information Agency. It was Rice who raided the public diplomacy budget to help fund the Embassy in Baghdad.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. Senate Democrat asked the top 15 health insurers to explain what portion of premiums go to profits versus patient care, putting further pressure on the companies to explain their business practices as Congress considers sweeping health reform legislation.
It's going to get real interesting, real quick, I think.
Rating Stars
I really have no idea why Haloscan is popping up this annoying "rating stars" code. I'll try to shut it off. In the meanwhile, if you have an opinion on what I have to say, please continue to express it in writing. :)
Ouch
Yesterday we noted the President's odd use of religious rhetoric. Professor Althouse slapped down one piece of that rhetoric.
Did you ever see a football player tackled so hard that it made your teeth hurt, just to watch it?BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: These are all fabrications that have been put out there in order to discourage people from meeting what I consider to be a core ethical and moral obligation. That is that we look out for one other, that I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper. And in the wealthiest nation on earth right now, we are neglecting to live up to that call.Now, we know that Barack Obama doesn't "keep" his actual brother — we remember George Hussein Onyango Obama, the brother who lives a hut....
A true and fair stroke, though.
Smack
Our friend Lars Walker does not generally believe in signs and portents.
I won’t go so far as to say that signs never come in our day, but I’m leery of them. Whenever I’ve thought I’ve seen a sign in my own life, it’s turned out to be an embarrassment. My church body believes that, in our time, those who have the Scriptures don’t need any further input on divine matters.Sometimes, like today.
And yet, sometimes…
Oddities in Rhetoric
Religious rhetoric from the Left: "We are God's partners in matters of life and death."
From the Right: 'Keep your laws off my body!'
Both are fairly reasonable sentiments, which is why they see use in rhetoric. The latter is a very powerful rhetorical trick in its normal usage, since it elides right past the fact that the laws aren't really interested in your body, but rather the one belonging to the child. The former admits that we normally hope to be aligned with God when we make decisions about life or death: we invoke God's blessing over births and executions.
The Honorable Mrs. Bachmann actually proposes a conservative concept for health care reform during her call. It's a sketch -- you don't get detailed ideas in this kind of format.
In the early 1960s, curators at the Philadelphia Museum of Art noticed something funny about one of their modern-art sculptures: It smelled like vinegar. Worse, the once-clear plastic sculpture had begun browning like an apple, and cracks had appeared on its surface. By 1967, Naum Gabo's translucent, airy Construction in Space: Two Cones looked like Tupperware that had gone through the dishwasher too often.
I think I've talked about this before.
Trust
I can see only good in this:
The left likes to say that conservatives hate government. The truth, and it holds for many people beyond conservatism, is closer to what Alfred Hitchcock said when he was accused of hating the police. "I'm not against the police," Hitchcock said, "I'm just afraid of them."Ezra Klein writes:
Congress's approval rating sits at 30%. This is a remarkable vote of no confidence in the representative branch of a national government.
In California and New York, the two most economically important and famous of the 50 states, the legislatures have been revealed as incompetent to manage the public's money. The budget crises in California and New York aren't just a normal turn in the fiscal cycle. Those governments have finally hit the wall.
Oblivious to manifest failure, the liberal-progressive idea keeps itself afloat on intellectual water wings—insisting that most people still believe that if government commits itself to accomplishing a public good, it will more or less succeed despite the difficulties and inefficiencies of these great projects. Needed good gets done.
That civics-book faith in the good intentions of government has been on the bubble with a broad swath of the American people who don't know left from right but only public performance. The Obama health-care proposal arrived at a particularly bad moment to be asking voters to "trust us."
Americans Hate Everyone, Believe EverythingYes, exactly. The American people trust government with nothing.
Wednesday's Wall Street Journal/NBC poll is disappointing stuff. It's not so much that the American people have turned against Obama's health-care reform effort as they've turned against the legislative process in general.
That distrust is well earned, and past due. We must solve our problems ourselves, not only without the government, but in defiance of its wish to intermesh itself with our concerns. It's 'the man in the arena,' as Theodore Roosevelt put it, that matters. He is the one fully engaged, heart as well as mind. A bureaucracy can, at best, devote only its mind. These critical, difficult questions are best solved at the lowest possible level, where the heart can be tapped as well.
Volte
It's time for some more early music:
If you have eighty-nine cents to spend, try track nine here. If you've double that, and you want to hear a medieval drinking song worth the price, try track thirteen. "Istud vinum, bonum vinum, vinum generosum!"
Ex-soldiers burden
So says the sub-title of this report, looking at "living wills" from the perspective of the VA.
If President Obama wants to better understand why America's discomfort with end-of-life discussions threatens to derail his health-care reform, he might begin with his own Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). He will quickly discover how government bureaucrats are greasing the slippery slope that can start with cost containment but quickly become a systematic denial of care.Let's all factor that in to our concept of what the Obama adminstration was thinking about with its push to universalize 'end of life' planning.
Last year, bureaucrats at the VA's National Center for Ethics in Health Care advocated a 52-page end-of-life planning document, "Your Life, Your Choices." It was first published in 1997 and later promoted as the VA's preferred living will throughout its vast network of hospitals and nursing homes. After the Bush White House took a look at how this document was treating complex health and moral issues, the VA suspended its use. Unfortunately, under President Obama, the VA has now resuscitated "Your Life, Your Choices."
Who is the primary author of this workbook? Dr. Robert Pearlman, chief of ethics evaluation for the center, a man who in 1996 advocated for physician-assisted suicide in Vacco v. Quill before the U.S. Supreme Court and is known for his support of health-care rationing.
"Your Life, Your Choices" presents end-of-life choices in a way aimed at steering users toward predetermined conclusions, much like a political "push poll." For example, a worksheet on page 21 lists various scenarios and asks users to then decide whether their own life would be "not worth living."
The circumstances listed include ones common among the elderly and disabled: living in a nursing home, being in a wheelchair and not being able to "shake the blues." There is a section which provocatively asks, "Have you ever heard anyone say, 'If I'm a vegetable, pull the plug'?" There also are guilt-inducing scenarios such as "I can no longer contribute to my family's well being," "I am a severe financial burden on my family" and that the vet's situation "causes severe emotional burden for my family."
Co-ops
The AP has an odd Q&A piece on the "co-op" idea that ObamaCare advocates are floating, now that they've lost the fight to have the single-payer system they wanted, or the "public option" that was their second-best wish. The piece states that such co-ops have a "checkered" history, and that it is "unclear" if they would drive private insurers out of business. None of that is very helpful.
The oddest thing to me, though, is the question about how a co-op might be better. The answer is that the co-op advocates presume it could eliminate some costs, "including profits."
Profits are costs? That's a remarkably awful understanding of a basic economic concept.
Profits are revenue minus costs -- they're what is left over after you've paid for everything. Taking out the profits doesn't reduce the costs, which are the same either way. You can reduce profits by increasing costs, or by reducing revenue.
"But," one might object, "if you eliminate profits, you can make do with lower revenue. So, the price to the consumer is lower, because they don't have to provide profits for the co-op. It's enough that revenues meet costs, rather than surpassing the costs."
That revised concept still fails to grasp what profits are for. Profits are not costs, and the wise man doesn't seek to eliminate or reduce them.
Rather, profits are incentives. They encourage you to do something good for society, by providing you with something good in return. We want health care, right? Therefore, when someone offers to provide us with health care, we want to make it worth their while.
If we do that, more people will want to provide health care. They will be smarter people, too, the sort of people who could choose to do something else instead. That's good for everyone.
Profits are also responsive. Mark Steyn's point in his piece below was that, in a for-profit system, if your hospital isn't clean you can move to the one down the road. In the mandated, socialist system, that's not an option. Even if it were, though, why would the one down the road be any cleaner? There's no money in it. In America, being the cleanest hospital could quickly become a point of competition if attention were focused on it -- a competition leading to rapid improvements.
Lacking profits, the only way to motivate people is through negative consequences. If there's no positive incentive, you're left with regulations, punishments, and drafting unwilling people into service. You have a stick, but no carrot.
Profits are not costs. They're incentives. They're good. We should want more of them.
Hopsitals Kill
The Atlantic has an article that blames a father's death on the American health system.
Almost two years ago, my father was killed by a hospital-borne infection in the intensive-care unit of a well-regarded nonprofit hospital in New York City. Dad had just turned 83, and he had a variety of the ailments common to men of his age. But he was still working on the day he walked into the hospital with pneumonia. Within 36 hours, he had developed sepsis. Over the next five weeks in the ICU, a wave of secondary infections, also acquired in the hospital, overwhelmed his defenses. My dad became a statistic—merely one of the roughly 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals. One hundred thousand deaths: more than double the number of people killed in car crashes, five times the number killed in homicides, 20 times the total number of our armed forces killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another victim in a building American tragedy.Oddly enough, that was precisely Mark Steyn's complaint with the Canadian health care system.
My father is currently ill, and the health "system" is doing its best to ensure it's fatal. When an ambulance has to be called, they take him to a different hospital according to the determinations of the bed-availability bureaucrats and which facility hasn't had to be quarantined for an infection outbreak. At the first hospital, he picked up C Difficile. At the second, MRSA. At the third, like the lady above, he got septicaemia. He's lying there now, enjoying the socialized health care jackpot — C Diff, MRSA, septicaemia. None of these ailments are what he went in to be treated for. They were given to him by the medical system.Now, the first fellow says that those 100,000 deaths are "caused or influenced" by secondary infection. That "influenced" muddies the waters quite a bit. We don't know how many of those deaths are from the infection, versus from the original disease (with the infection just 'influencing' the course of that disease).
This study shows that the Canadian system infects 250,000 people a year with diseases. It lists only 8,000 deaths caused by those infections -- but it doesn't say how many are "influenced" by the infections. It's quite possibly rather more than 100,000.
The solutions being proposed in both cases are remarkably similar: clean your hands. Go through a basic checklist to make sure instruments are clean. A fair number of doctors aren't doing it in either country.
The problem isn't the payment system, then. The problem is the fact that hospitals collect people whose immune systems are already taxed by one disease or injury, and expose them to many other people with different diseases, many infectuous. The problem is that a number of sanitary techniques are not fully implemented. The Atlantic asserts that a government-run system would do it better, but the evidence suggests that there is no reason to believe that is the case.
170th Infantry
Perhaps the Army's newest unit heraldry -- technically, it isn't even active yet, since it's approval date is not until 16 October, 2009 -- was designed by a friend of mine. The 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armor Division, reflagged as the 170th Infantry following their recent mission in Iraq. A new 2/1 AD will stand up here at home. The soldiers of the old 2/1 AD ("Iron Brigade") remain forward-deployed in Germany. Designing the new distinctive unit insignia was one of very many tasks handled by a certain lieutenant I could name (who was a captain by the time he left).
As tasks go, I thought that was a pretty cool one.
A new PETA billboard campaign that was just launched in Jacksonville reminds people who are struggling to lose weight -- and who want to have enough energy to chase a beach ball -- that going vegetarian can be an effective way to shed those extra pounds that keep them from looking good in a bikini. "Trying to hide your thunder thighs and balloon belly is no day at the beach," says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman.
Yup, I think that's going to convince people. Really.
(via American Digest)
Dennis, over at Dennis the Peasant, has been laid up of late, and is using his convalesence to blog up a storm, principally on the failure that the Obama administration is becoming.
Just keep scrolling.
For the Left, war without Bush is not war at all
Remember the anti-war movement? Not too long ago, the Democratic party's most loyal voters passionately opposed the war in Iraq. Democratic presidential candidates argued over who would withdraw American troops the quickest. Netroots activists regularly denounced President George W. Bush, and sometimes the U.S. military ("General Betray Us"). Cindy Sheehan, the woman whose soldier son was killed in Iraq, became a heroine when she led protests at Bush's Texas ranch.
That was then. Now, even though the United States still has roughly 130,000 troops in Iraq, and is quickly escalating the war in Afghanistan -- 68,000 troops there by the end of this year, and possibly more in 2010 -- anti-war voices on the Left have fallen silent.
I remember the same sort of thing happening after the abolishment of Apartheid in South Africa, too.
Skara Brae
Not the cold, as you'd expect, but the sea threatens the oldest city in the North.
The city was abandoned five thousand years ago: a thousand years before this extraordinary find of an early British hero.
The carved capstone had sealed the grave so well that organic materials including wood, bark and leather survived intact as well as various metal objects. The man, who is believed to have been an important figure, had been laid out on a bed of quartz pebbles in sand, in a birch coffin, inside a larger stone chamber. He was buried with a valuable bronze dagger with a gold band — still in its leather sheath. There was also evidence of the remains of wooden possessions and floral tributes.Whenever you find soft, organic material in one of these sites, it's exciting. To find it from four thousand years ago is amazing.
Conservatives
I'm working on a piece on Federalism v. Progressivism; self-described "progressives" seem to be the chief enemy of the idea of pushing government down to lower levels. As that solution allows people with fundamentally different ideas about right and wrong to live in peace, it's a difficulty for a divided nation.
That said, and as I've often noticed, conservatives are the ones with the most to gain by concentrating Federal power. At the moment, though, it makes sense -- liberals have few friends anywhere except the Federal bureaucracy:
Self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals in all 50 states of the union, according to the Gallup Poll.The 2008 exit poll, showing a disaster for Republicans, had a conservative advantage by 34/22.
At the same time, more Americans nationwide are saying this year that they are conservative than have made that claim in any of the last four years.
In 2009, 40% percent of respondents in Gallup surveys that have interviewed more than 160,000 Americans have said that they are either “conservative” (31%) or “very conservative” (9%). That is the highest percentage in any year since 2004.
Only 21% have told Gallup they are liberal, including 16% who say they are “liberal” and 5% who say they are “very liberal.”
Now, if only there were a conservative party.
Speaking in defense of my status as a lifelong Democrat, by the way, I'd like to point out that the effective opposition to the health care bill is largely coming from conservative Democrats. I've seen a few Republicans trying to claim credit, but the only one who seems to have done anything demonstable is Mrs. Palin -- now retired to private citizenship. The guys who are actually forcing the change in the policy are wearing D's.