Let's Hear Some Mormon Jokes

Allahpundit writes on the new Obama campaign ad:

They won’t attack [Romney] for being Mormon (I hope), so calling him a murderer will have to do.... You know what’s really interesting about this spot? It’s not even a health-care ad. It’d be sleazy under any circumstances, but there’d at least be a concrete policy angle if Burton was selling it as an argument for, say, single-payer, to decouple insurance from employment. He’s not. There appears to be no actual policy argument here at all, unless The One now opposes layoffs on principle, for fear that someone somewhere might be left without insurance.

The policy argument doesn't need to be explicit, I think: decoupling employment from insurance is clearly going to happen under Obamacare. As Dad29 was pointing out the other day, it's clear from the way the incentives and penalties are structured that the real desire is that employers should drop coverage, putting people on the public (i.e., government run) exchanges. Otherwise, how do you make sense of the fact that dropping coverage for all employees nets you a $2,000 annual penalty, but it's a $35,600 fine per employee per year if you fail to provide free birth-control, including sterilization and abortifacients?

The complexity of the regulations and the scale of the penalties will make compliance expensive even for those without moral objections -- especially as HHS appears to believe it has been given a free hand to revise the mandated requirements at any time. You can hire lawyers and accountants to keep you in compliance, risking massive fines if you should miss something; or you can pay $2,000 total and opt out for the year.

Just a cost of doing business, that.

As for attacking Mormonism, coincidentally Adam Gopnik just finished a piece for the New Yorker on the history of Mormonism. The upshot of the piece is that Mormonism is clearly a fraud perpetrated by an unstable madman, has weird doctrines, and was imposed in Utah through extreme brutality including the massacre of a large number of innocents who had accepted safe passage from Brigham Young's riders. We learn that it was so dangerous that the US Army was called out to quell it, avoiding war only because the Mormons surrendered key doctrines of their faith.

However, the piece concludes, all is well now because the Mormons sold out. Having left off pursuit of the stranger aspects of their faith for pursuit of vast, vast wealth, they are no longer the danger to society that once they were.

'But hey!' the piece concludes: religions selling out for money is a good thing. The Mormons are role models for the rest of you, who ought to sell out your values like they did. That brings us back around to the business about the huge fines and the contraception mandate, after all.

I'd assume that the timing was coincidental, except Mr. Gopnik explains that it isn't:

It’s only later in the cycle of integration that the group comes banging on the door—as Jews and Catholics did, in the nineteen-fifties—for more general admission, not as cardboard stage-ethnic types good at one or two things but as people available to do everything, just like the ruling Wasps. That’s when everyone starts asking what it is these people really believe.

As he goes on to point out, his piece is not alone: in addition to "four scholarly books" on the history, there are a ton of "Mormon jokes" and "a Mormon-themed Broadway show" engaging the attention of New York City right now.

Now, I haven't heard any Mormon jokes. Religious jokes can be funny, if they're in the right spirit. Are they?

Money in Politics

The AJC describes the state of the race for the Georgia 9th Congressional District in an article entitled "Money frames a mountain vs. tea party race in the 9th."

The thing is, neither the mountains nor the Tea Party have much money. The recent T-SPLOST victory in Atlanta was fought by the Tea Party with a budget of around fifteen grand. Their opponents spent millions lobbying for it. When the spirit of the times is on your side, though, sometimes you don't need a lot.

The figures here are on the same scale. I don't think the money will matter, really: I'm not sure how much money really does matter in politics. Remembering the Wisconsin runoffs, it was never possible to determine just how much each side had really spent, and how much of an advantage either side had -- but the final vote totals were almost precisely the same as the vote totals from the previous election (i.e., the recall didn't change any minds; people voted the same way the second time). Likewise, we've seen unprecedented expenditures from the Obama campaign designed to demonize their opponent, but the needle on Romney hasn't moved very much. The people who were going to vote for him are still going to vote for him, and I am not sure all that many people exist who are both genuinely undecided, and interested enough to turn up on Election Day.

It may be that we have vastly overestimated the capacity of political advertising to change peoples' minds. I tend to think they vote their interests and personal values; and that's why I'll be voting for Dan Collins in the runoff. He's mountain-born, carries the endorsement of the last politician in America I truly respect, he's a former military chaplain and he spent time in Iraq. I think he'll serve with honor.

I think Zoller's a good candidate too, though; she's a firebrand and a Tea Party activist. We need all of those we can get. Even so, my sense of what I want is pretty set. I don't think they can move the needle on me with a slick ad, not even when the needle would only have to be moved a little bit. This causes me to believe that, more than we admit, people usually do what they want to do no matter how persuasive you are.

Civil War Buff Disarms Knife-Wielding Robber

So says the headline... but note that they mean the English Civil War.

Mr Thompson, a member of the Sealed Knot, grabbed the robber’s hand and dragged him over the shop counter. The grandfather wrenched the knife from the man’s hand and then pinned him to the counter while the shopkeeper dialled 999.

During the brawl, the masked robber drew a second knife – but Mr Thompson disarmed him again before pinning him to the floor and waiting for police.

Well done, Cavalier.

Against Hedonism, or, Why Happiness Does Not Equal Pleasure

Here is a good popular reading of why hedonistic ethics and politics must fail -- including modern utilitarian ethics and political thought.  You can maximize pleasure, maybe; maybe you can even structure a plan that maximizes pleasure for a group of people, given a level of resources.

What you can't do is plan to maximize happiness, because it's not that kind of a thing.  As Aristotle says, and rightly, happiness is an activity -- it is the particular activity of fully engaging your virtues in the pursuit of excellence.  As such the question 'are you happy?' does not especially relate to the question 'how many resources do you have?', beyond a lower boundary that gives you adequate nutrition, etc., to ensure that you have the physical capacity to pursue excellence.

All virtues require developing good habits and good training, but there is also a certain amount of capacity that either is or is not inborn.  By the way, the Greek word he mentions -- eudaimonia -- doesn't quite mean 'having a good guiding angel.'  A daimon is not exactly an angel:  it is a kind of spirit, one that the Greeks metaphorically said rode on  your shoulder:  that is, you couldn't see it, looking forward.  Other people could see your daimon, and could tell whether it was a good one or a bad one, but not you.

There is some wisdom in this.  We fail to be able to discern whether distant people are happy -- rich and famous people should be, shouldn't they? -- but we are often able to help people we know well to see that they are happier than they realized.  In fact, it is in relating to others that we do discover how happy we are:  what really matters is not our internal sensation of pleasure or cheerfulness, but the relationships we build with others whom we love, respect, or honor.  That is the field in which we best express our virtues, and thus the field in which we are most likely to discover how happy we can really be.

Customer Service

Two weeks ago I ordered some motorcycle parts. They were shipped on the first of August, with a note that they would arrive in one to three days. In fact they arrived today, in the following package:

I can't imagine why the Postal Service is having so much trouble with its competition.

UPDATE: ...and unsurprisingly, one of the parts -- a headlight replacement bulb -- was broken.  Beautiful.

A Workman Is Worthy of his Hire

Apparently doctors consider themselves workmen, too. Having paid for their own educations and insurance, they resent being dragooned into working below their rate.

Decker finds a positive correlation between Medicaid reimbursement rates and how many providers accept Medicare. In Wyoming and Alaska – largely rural states that pay Medicaid providers about 50 percent more than Medicare reimburses – the vast majority of providers accept Medicaid. In New Jersey – where reimbursement is the lowest – only about 30 percent say they’ll take new patients.

Why is this important? Part of the new health care law is expanding Medicaid. In states with lower reimbursement rates, however, more private doctors simply refuse to play along.

Which states would those be?

As Avik Roy pointed out a few weeks ago, states with Democratic governors actually tend to have lower reimbursement rates.

What? Why?

Faced with crunched budgets, some have chosen to cut provider payment rather than reduce services.

So, faced with crunched budgets, the states have chosen to cut the doctors' pay per Medicaid client. They are shocked to find that doctors are unwilling to accept such clients when they could work for people who pay the full rate.

This is what the death spiral looks like. Expand social welfare, and costs rise. Costs rising leads to budget cuts. Budget cuts lead to fewer doctors being willing to participate in the social welfare system. This results in political pressure on the politicians to force the doctors to participate...

...and that's surely the next step here. Expect it when you see it.

By the way, what does it mean for the health care law if the Republican states refuse to fund the exchanges, and the Democratic states can't afford to pay doctors for the Medicaid expansion?

Bearing True Faith

Temple President Satwant Singh Kaleka, killed trying to tackle and restrain yesterday's gunman. Here was one who understood the kirpan.

Curiosity

A great name for a space probe, Curiosity landed on Mars either yesterday or this morning depending on where you live.

NASA seems pleased. It looks like they got the old Babylon 5 folks to do their graphics.

The Fiscal Cliff

"The Fiscal Cliff" is what the New York Times calls what we usually call the union of Taxmageddon and Sequestration. However, it happens that the NYT is in favor of both higher taxes and massive cuts to defense programs (although it largely wants to see that spending redirected into "investments," i.e., other kinds of government spending). So where are we on this, in their reading?

Until recently, the loudest warnings about the economy have come from policy makers and economists, along with military industry executives who rely heavily on the Pentagon’s largess and who would be hurt by the government reductions.

But more diversified companies like Hubbell Inc. in Shelton, Conn., have begun to hunker down as well.

Hubbell, a maker of electrical products, has canceled several million dollars’ worth of equipment orders and delayed long-planned factory upgrades in the last few months, said Timothy H. Powers, the company’s chief executive. It has also held off hiring workers for about 100 positions that would otherwise have been filled, he said.

“The fiscal cliff is the primary driver of uncertainty, and a person in my position is going to make a decision to postpone hiring and investments,” Mr. Powers said. “We can see it in our order patterns, and customers are delaying. We don’t have to get to the edge of the cliff before the damage is done.”

So if we don't solve the problem, we get a renewed recession; if we do 'solve the problem,' it means increased deficits because we can only 'solve' it by agreeing to smaller tax cuts and redirected spending.

Seems like I've heard this story before.

On the Occasion of a Sikh Massacre

There are few religions in the world that I admire more than the Sikh faith. These are my brothers, at least in one of their most sacred concepts.

[A]ll baptised Sikhs (Khalsa) must wear a kirpan [sword or dagger] at all times....

The kirpan is both a defensive weapon and a symbol. Physically it is an instrument of "ahimsa" or non-violence. The principle of ahimsa is to actively prevent violence, not to simply stand by idly whilst violence is being done. To that end, the kirpan is a tool to be used to prevent violence from being done to a defenseless person when all other means to do so have failed.

It is a shame that none of them were able to bring the kirpan to its proper use today. Perhaps we shall learn that some of the fallen were trying. In any case, they are a fine and noble people, and I am terribly sorry for their loss.

News That Was Obvious Twenty Years Ago

Social Security? Not such a great deal after all, and it's only going to get worse.

Of Course It Would Have to be John

All US Presidents but one are cousins of King John of England. You remember King John?



The song isn't very good history, really: John not only was the first King John of England, he was the last one. The "mom" he allegedly calls for was Eleanor of Aquitaine, which is the consolation prize: if all our Presidents are related to John, they're also related to her, and to his brother, Richard the Lionheart.

Still, good history or not, the song does bear a certain similarity to current events...

Stand up

Grim's post about the Incas reminded me that I hadn't been over to "The Bleat" in a long time.  I find his little daughter has grown up considerably.  Today they're discussing a recent film expert poll that places "Vertigo" over "Citizen Kane," but the consensus of many of his readers is that "Casablanca" is better.

It's not an art film, nor subtle.  Just a perfect thing of its kind.  It's the prodigal son: "for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; was lost, and is found." This is the first scene in which the surviving spark of humanity in Rick begins to flare up again. At the same time, you see in Ilsa's face why the story can't finish up with her leaving her husband. How many passionate love stories end with the lovers deciding to part rather than do wrong, and yet without painting them as tragic figures beaten down by their restrictive culture?



Notice how the tune of "Die Wacht am Rhein" meshes harmonically with "The Marseillaise," so that the conflict doesn't just sound like Charles Ives noise. Music, courage, and love. The Nazis banging away on the piano like robots are Jewish actors who had recently escaped Europe.

What Were You Expecting?

The London Olympics, 2012.

Stonehenge, Midsummer Day, since time immemorial.

Louis Armstrong and the Power of Art

Bthun sends a tale by Charles L. Black, Jr., on the magic of Louis Armstrong.

[O]ne never entirely knows the ways of the power of art. I know a little of the framework, a little of the rational components. But when these are exhausted, art remains inexhaustible, unknowable....

He was the first genius I had ever seen. That may be a structurable part of the process that led me to the Brown case. The moment of first being, and knowing oneself to be, in the presence of genius, is a solemn moment; it is perhaps the moment of final and indelible perception of man’s utter transcendence of all else created. It is impossible to overstate the significance of a sixteen-year-old Southern boy’s seeing genius, for the first time, in a black.... [G]enius—fine control over total power, all height and depth, forever and ever? It had simply never entered my mind, for confirming or denying in conjecture, that I would see this for the first time in a black man. You don’t get over that.

I remarked to Bthun that I thought Dr. Black was remarkable to be able to make the adjustment. Think of how many people who have first encountered genius in a Jew, and remained as anti-Semitic as ever they were. Worse, perhaps, since they now had cause to fear as well as to despise the object of their hatred.

Dr. Black sounds like he never really despised anyone, and the recognition thus could work its magic. The power of art is something we often discuss here, but art is also like a mustard seed. It seeks the fertile ground.

Here is the recording Dr. Black mentions. You can judge for yourself how well he judged it.



By the way, Bthun noted that today is Louis Armstrong's birthday. It is, in fact, his eleventy-first -- to borrow a phrase from another artist who has done a world of good.

Appointed rounds

In 2003, the Bush Administration's blue-ribbon commission to study the United States Postal Service issued a list of recommendations for addressing that organization's chronic problems.  According to the National Association of Letter Carriers (the Postal Service union), the commission pushed several "anti-labor" initiatives, including limitations on collective bargaining rights, erosion of pension and health benefits, and a three-day wait for "continuation of pay" benefits for injured workers.

In 2007, the NALC triumphantly announced that both the House and the Senate had passed a bill by voice vote, signed promptly into law by President Bush in late 2006, that vindicated the NALC's position on every important issue except one:  a compromise had to be reached on the three-day day in injured-worker benefits.  The NALC crowed that it had beaten back the forces of privatization in favor of a vision for modernizing the Postal Service.  The new law, its president said, “preserves our collective bargaining rights, maintains universal, six-day delivery and significantly improves the Service’s long-term financial stability.”

The reference to long-term financial stability apparently concerned squabbles over the Postal Service's funding of pension and retiree health benefits obligations.  In 2003, a pension funding reform initiative had required the establishment of an escrow account.  What's more, the Postal Service objected to Bush administration demands that it cover $27 billion in military pension benefits that had been earned by veterans before they joined the Postal Service.  The 2006 bill gave the Postal Service some flexibility to use part of the retiree-health-benefit escrow account to cover operating expenses, while removing the obligation to fund the military benefits.  Instead, the union "prevailed over the White House" in establishing

a 10-year schedule for using the escrow and military pension savings to dramatically reduce the Postal Service’s massive unfunded liability for retiree health insurance, while also providing some flexibility for other uses. 

In so doing, we secured more than $100 billion for the Postal Service in the decades to come and protected the interests of our current and future retirees, whose health benefits will be fully funded.

Today, the Postal Service is facing a financial crisis and once again beating back the inexorable forces of privatization.  Anti-privatizers suddenly are filling the Net with articles explaining that the Postal Service would be doing fine financially if not for a ridiculous obligation imposed by the dreaded Bush administration in 2006, unfairly requiring it to pre-pay 75 years' worth of retiree health benefits over only 10 years, a burden of about $6 billion of year.  Absent this requirement, they claim, the Postal Service could easily meet its operating expenses.  In addition, although the Postal Service may be in arrears on its obligations to fund future retiree health benefits, it claims to have overfunded its ordinary pension fund, and would like to raid that overage to cover its current shortfalls, a tactic they clearly learned from Bain Capital.

While the wires are burning up with arguments over whether the Postal Service should be privatized, there are the usual quarrels over whether the Constitution requires a postal service (it certainly authorizes one, but I have to laugh at this uncharacteristic originalist fervor), as well as over whether the Postal Service should continue to enjoy a monopoly on non-urgent ordinary letters (competition is allowed only for express service and packages), and over whether the Postal Service still provides a useful service at a reasonable price.  Some supporters go beyond these arguments to the now-familiar complaint that operational reforms would threaten the jobs of deserving middle-class workers, especially minorities.  Some even argue that closing down a number of stand-alone post offices (perhaps replacing many of them with kiosks within big-box stores) would threaten a vital community-gathering spot, as if communities could not figure out how to gather without federal intervention.

European countries are experimenting more freely with postal service modernization.  The Swiss, for instance, scan mail and offer the recipient a choice of e-transmission or physical delivery of a hard copy.  So much volume has been lost in the U.S. to electronic media that the Postal Service now finds itself relying increasingly on high-volume junk mail to make ends meet.   Even there, pro-labor forces find fault:  large companies like FedEx bring in significant revenue by pre-sorting bulk mail and winning a discount from the Postal Service in the amount it would have cost to sort the mail in-house at union rates; FedEx then does it more cheaply with minimum-wage workers.  The Postal Service finds itself increasingly entangled with FedEx, which has taken over the Postal Service's overnight mail operations for a fee, but in return has contracted with the Postal Service for the final leg of deliveries of many consumer packages.

Recent efforts in Congress to break up this mess have been stalled by opposition either to the closing of rural offices, or to the lay-offs of workers, or even (allegedly) by Congressman who would prefer to induce gridlock so that privatization will be the only answer.  The various interest groups certainly seem to be at cross-purposes.  I'm not sure whether the Postal Service should be abolished, but I sure can't see any reason why its monopoly on ordinary mail should be preserved.  Until that happens, how can we reach any sensible conclusions about whether its product is worth its price?

The Economics of DC-Island Politics

Applying the same approach we applied yesterday to Southern politics, let's look at this analyst note on President Obama's 83% approval rating in the District of Columbia:

Some readers might attribute Obama’s rating there solely to his enduring popularity among black voters, but Washington is no longer a majority-black city. (The black population dipped below 50 percent last year.) Obama is popular with nearly everyone in the capital. Among those who work for the government and for government-related businesses — the permanent bureaucracy centered in Washington DC, northern Virginia and southern Maryland — approval of the president remains very high.

Yesterday's article noted, "Virginia might remain a swing state because of the massive number of Federal workers, and those whose interests lie with a rich and powerful Federal government." Today's analyst seems to agree.

How not to apologize

If you're filming an apology to post on YouTube concerning your earlier and universally reviled post on YouTube, and your first instinct is to call it "an apology and . . .," you're probably already on the wrong track.  A real apology takes the form of an expression of genuine regret and perhaps a very brief description of how and when you came to understand that you were wrong.  Full stop.  Do not, repeat not, go on to say "I just felt compelled to act the way I did because of my strong feelings on an important cause, which I now invite you to admire, because you know, you're still very much in the wrong regarding that cause."  Even more urgently, do not take the opportunity to complain about the hate-filled responses you have received objecting to your boorish behavior, or blame others for your initial slowness in issuing your apology, or express dismay at how many people still disagree with your position, or discuss your ambitions to remain an important spokesman for the cause you have just helped to discredit.  In short, get over yourself.

No Time for Protestants

An interesting observation, on the assumption that Romney might win: the power structure of the United States would not include any Protestants in the top elected leadership. The point that the author thinks is very interesting is that nobody seems to have noticed, and in spite of this being a majority-Protestant nation, nobody seems to care.

But notice, too, that unless Romney should choose a veteran for his Vice President, neither presidential candidate nor their vice presidents should have ever served in the military. Mr. Wolf of BLACKFIVE and I were talking about this on the phone the other day. Biden avoided service through five deferments during Vietnam; Obama, of course, was too young for Vietnam and did not elect to serve. Romney had five deferments as well, and then drew a high draft number. If his VP pick is also a non-veteran, it will be the first time I can remember when we didn't at least have the option of a military veteran on the ticket. Bush and Kerry both served; Bob Dole served; George H. W. Bush served; Reagan served; Carter served; Ford served; Nixon served; Kennedy served; I'm not sure how far you'd have to go back to find an election with no servicemen at the top of the ticket, let alone present at all.

Nobody's made a big deal about this either, even though whoever should win this election will have troops deployed in Afghanistan and rising tensions with Iran. I wonder why.

Meanwhile, in Tennessee...

...it looks like Senator Bob Corker's job is pretty safe.

Via the Tennessean, the Tennessee Democratic party has condemned [Tennessee Democratic Party nominee for the US Senate Mark] Clayton, saying in a statement that he is "associated with a known hate group" (a reference to Public Advocate of the United States), and blaming his victory on the fact that his name appeared first on the ballot.

You have to have a certain sense of pity for the man. It's so hard to unseat an incumbent, even when your own party doesn't officially disown you!

By the way, "hate group" in this context means a group that was apparently founded to pursue evangelical Christian values, and oppose the gay rights movement. Its platform is here; compare and contrast with, say, the KKK.

Would the Democratic Party care to apply the same standard to these guys? They appear to be guilty of the very same offense.