Samhain

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

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

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

The Longest Three Inches

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

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

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

A Request for My Fellow Bloggers

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

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

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

What do you think?

Health, political variety

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

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

A comment to cheer me up

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

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

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

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

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

Don't blame us, we wanted single-payer

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

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

Down from the ledge again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vote for Heinlein

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

It can't fail

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

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

Bugs

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

Warning

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

Talking me down from the ledge

Jonah Goldberg gives it a try:

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

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

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

. . . 

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

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

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

. . . 

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

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

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

Ways to be effective

Tools:

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

Push, keep pushing, and push some more.

Horse Soldiers: USMC Edition

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

On New Forms of Government

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

Elise asked:

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

I replied:

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

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

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

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

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

Elise responded:

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

Sounds kind of like jury duty - an interesting idea.

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

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

To which I would respond:

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

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

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

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

What state are you?

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

Practical politics

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

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

The possum

Things I did not know about opossums:

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

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

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

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

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

Perils of the code

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

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

. . .

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

. . .

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

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

We misunderstood him

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

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

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

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

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