"Special Government Benefits"

Evil Hobby Lobby! Don't they realize how much they owe the government?

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:

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:

"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.

Good Answer

I don't understand a man who doesn't want a dog, but at least he's got a good comeback.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

The Collie Walk

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:

“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.