Resuming the War

Apparently Carlisle has succumbed to the general madness.

The U.S. Army War College, which molds future field generals, has begun discussing whether it should remove its portraits of Confederate generals — including those of Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson....

It is the kind of historical cleansing that could spark an Army-wide debate: Lee’s portrait adorns the walls of other military installations and government buildings. Two portraits of Lee are on display at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.: In the Cadet Mess Hall is a painting of Lee when he was superintendent as an Army captain. A portrait of Lee in full Confederate regalia hangs on the second floor of Jefferson Hall, the campus library.

There's a good reason you shouldn't, which the article happens upon by accident:

In 1975, Congress enacted a joint resolution reinstating Lee’s U.S. citizenship in what could be considered a final act to heal Civil War wounds. The resolution praised Lee’s character and his work to reunify the nation.

It's a bad idea to undo "last acts of healing." But you do what you want to do.

Singing of Hard Times

Johnny Cash sang this one to an international hit.



Henry Rollins wonders about doing the same thing now.



Yeah, OK. So what does it mean to ride against the order we know?

War, does it not?

Iowahawk on Propaganda

He is mocking the current propaganda, but his early example is striking.

This one is the one I always think of. It's weaker than his example, though: it stops at the horror, and misses the quality of the angelic that follows.

It's a silly place

Ace of Spades can't decide if the post he found about the tragedy of antifeminist computer coding is fake or not.  The obvious answer is that it's both fake and not-fake, and there's no necessary contradiction, unless you're stuck in an andronormative phallo-logical space.

Ace's commenters have fun with appropriate 404 error messages for feminist coding.

Seeing voices

Sign language fascinates me.  In my elementary school, we all learned to signed letters when we read about Helen Keller, and I can do it to this day.  It was with some dismay that I learned as an adult how much more complex true sign language is and how difficult its fluent and expressive practice.  Of course, it's easier just to fake it.  I know you've all seen the stories already about President Obama's fake interpreter at the Mandela funeral, but you may not have seen this video.

Mark Steyn reflects on the security implications:

[H]ow heartening, as one watches the viral video of Obama droning on while a mere foot and a half away Mr. Jantjie rubs his belly and tickles his ear, to think that the White House’s usual money-no-object security operation went to the trouble of flying in Air Force One, plus the “decoy” Air Force One, plus support aircraft, plus the 120-vehicle motorcade or whatever it’s up to by now, plus a bazillion Secret Service agents with reflector shades and telephone wire dangling from their ears, to shepherd POTUS into the secured venue and then stand him onstage next to an $85-a-day violent schizophrenic.  In the movie version—In the Sign of Fire—grizzled maverick Clint Eastwood will be the only guy to figure it out at the last minute and hurl himself at John Malkovich, as they roll into the orchestra pit with Malkovich furiously signing “Ow!” and “Eek!”  But in real life I expect they’ll just double the motorcade to 240 vehicles and order up even more expensive reflector shades.

No doubt Thamsanqa Jantjie was channeling Rowan Atkinson.  My favorite bit is the "$15 million" towards the middle.

Way harsh

A lot of the North Korean press release about the chief nutso's purged uncle didn't come through very well in translation, but this part is clear enough:

[D]espicable human scum Jang, who was worse than a dog, perpetrated thrice-cursed acts of treachery in betrayal of such profound trust and warmest paternal love shown by the party and the leader for him.

Few things fascinate me more than how one crazy guy can dominate a society:  the uneasy web of influence and privilege that keeps his henchmen in power over the populace, and the balancing act that keeps his henchmen from carving him up and serving him for dinner.  The old guard can't much enjoy seeing the kid start picking off members of their own ranks.  They probably have networks he can scarcely imagine, made up of people who must live in a perpetual state of crazed desperation.

Lessons from the food industry

I've never worked in a kitchen, but I've been a waitress in more than one establishment, so I can relate to some of this article about 23 important life lessons from the restaurant world. This one, about how to respond to a particular kind of ugliness, has a much broader application than the food industry: "You just have to get over it and remind yourself never to be like that in your own life." It's similar to advice I received many years ago about slander: "Live so that no one will believe it of you." There's also no disputing the high value of being close to a good chef who's always cooking new things he wants people to try out.

Hardball

Georgia has now joined South Carolina's first steps toward state nullification of Obamacare.  The four-step process, developed by the Tenth Amendment Center, includes awarding citizens state tax credits to offset any federal penalties, and revoking the state licenses of insurers that participate.

South of the Border

Won't it be amazing if the U.S.-Mexico border stops demarcating a division between an northern economy that functions and a southern one that does not?

On Thursday, Mexico's Congress passed what could be the most transformative economic legislation there in a century.  The members had a few fist fights and some screamed "treason," but the lower House still voted to expose the state oil company, Petroleos Mexicanos, to the free market.  And at 354-134, the vote wasn't close.

It brings to mind the scene in that silly global-warming-causes-catastrophic-freeze movie in which millions of Americans try to pour over the border into Mexico.

A different death spiral

This Forbes article is a helpful explanation of the complicated choices facing insurance companies as their customers embark on a completely different scheme of self-selection from the one that has driven actuarial planning up to now.  It seems that the ACA tried to guard against some kinds of self-selection and their resulting death-spiral dangers by requiring insurance companies to create one risk pool for all of their customers, regardless of whether they purchased their insurance on or off the exchange.  The law's architects did not take fully into account, however, how many insurers might decide to boycott the exchange altogether.  Boycotting insurers are free to price their products on the basis of their own pools.  If I understand the author's argument, this is likely for several reasons to result in a divergence of the risk profiles that will favor the competitive position of the non-exchange insurers even on their ACA-compliant products.

Pricing is only one aspect that may vary sharply between exchange and non-exchange products:  there is already considerable pressure on exchange products to shrink their provider networks and covered drug lists.  I've become interested in Assurant Health, an insurer that decided to boycott the exchanges.  Its prices for a Bronze plan are slightly higher than those of Blue Cross, but its network is the old-fashioned universal sort.  The article cites to a detailed brief on risk pools, including this explanation of why network shrinkage may be a more powerful cost-control issue than I realized:

Prohibiting [denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions] leaves insurers vulnerable to attracting a disproportionate share of patients with poor health risks. This vulnerability might cause them to leave the market or encourage them to use more covert or indirect means of risk avoidance, such as selective marketing or structuring their provider networks to exclude the doctors or hospitals preferred by higher risk patients.

It's not just that excellent hospitals like the Mayo Clinic or cancer centers charge high rates.  It's that they attract exactly the sort of patient that an insurer needs to avoid if it can't tie its prices to the health status of brand-new customers.

"I can't believe they let you do that"

Bill Whittle is terrific.  I can't seem to link directly to this video, so here's a basic PJTV link that, for now at least, takes you directly to his piece describing the pleasures of visiting Texas for Thanksgiving.

How many uninsured Americans are there, really?

Megan McArdle tries to get a handle on just how many people really were uninsured.  Is it more or less than the number of people who were insured before the PPACA hit them like a truck?

A third possibility is that we don’t have the uninsured problem we thought we had.  Most of the estimates we have for the uninsured population are really pretty crude.  For one thing, we tend to treat the U.S.'s roughly 48 million uninsured as if they were part of a discrete group, like Mormons or people who know how to play the tuba.  But in fact, people change insurance status all the time.  If you look at data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, you’ll see that a lot of people are uninsured for at least a month, but if you look at who is uninsured for as long as two years, that number falls by two-thirds.  If you extend the reference period out to four years, just 7.6 percent of the population counts as “uninsured.”  That is not a negligible number, but it is less than half of the 48 million we think of as uninsured.  And it’s heavily skewed toward immigrants and the young. . . .

. . . and to all a good flight

Medieval Warfare, Lego-Style

No female Legos were harmed in the making of this documentary. At least, I assume not, since I didn't see any that were pink.

The one-way compromise ratchet

John Hinderaker at PowerLine wonders why budget "compromise" always results in higher spending.  The best conservatives ever seem to be able to get is decreases in the rate of increased spending.

A number of observers are praising today’s deal as a “compromise.”   Patty Murray set the tone: “‘Compromise has been a dirty word” in Washington, D.C., Murray complained in an evening news conference, but “we have broken through the partisanship and the gridlock.”  But wait! The 2011 Budget Control Act was itself a compromise.  The $967 billion discretionary spending limit was a compromise, just two years ago.  So why should a higher spending number now be lauded as a “compromise”?  How about if we reduce spending by another $50 billion, to $917 billion?  That would be a compromise too, wouldn’t it?  But somehow that isn’t the sort of compromise that is ever entertained in Washington.

Hinderaker also points out the soft underbelly of this and every other budget "deal"--the gambit Republicans fall for every single time:

Republicans did get something in exchange for increasing spending: notably, federal employees will have to increase their pension contributions.  But we can say goodbye to the $2.1 trillion in spending cuts that the GOP trumpeted following the 2011 Budget Control Act.  That is the real moral of the story–long-term budget agreements are meaningless.  Typically, minuscule spending cuts up front are augmented by major cuts in the out-years.  But the reality is that the out-years never come.  No Congress can bind a future Congress, and political will to reduce spending is always in short supply.  Consequently, any spending deal is meaningless, except insofar as it applies to the current year or next year’s spending.  Beyond that, all claims to have cut government spending are fatuous.

Wouldn't it be amazing to see a bipartisan compromise that imposed immediate spending cuts (not merely decelerations) in exchange for unspecified entitlement increases to be implemented in 2024?

Meritocracy

Those of us who are well into our curmudgeon years probably have to stop and laugh now and then at our growing tendency to deplore the errors of this new crop of whippersnappers.  It is a pleasure, therefore, occasionally to find evidence that a characteristic error of the age is falling out of favor with the Young Turks:

More than 70 percent of [unionized] teachers on the job less than a decade are interested in changing the traditional salary scale, which rewards educators for longevity rather than performance.  Just 41 percent of more veteran teachers back such reforms, according to a national survey last year by the organization Teach Plus.  The poll documented similar gulfs in opinion about revamping teacher evaluations and pensions.

Unions are under intense pressure from falling membership, in the wake of movements to make their dues-paying membership voluntary.  They're finding that they have to consider what their members think.

My hometown

This five-minute clip from "Good Morning, America" is a brief introduction to the small town we live near.  The accents are interesting.  Several speakers are local, but the mayor obviously is a winter Texan who stayed on.  This time of year the parking lots are full of license plates from Wisconsin and Michigan.

An Outlaw Interlude

Some of you doubtless know the Dallas Moore Band, which has been billed as everything from an heir of Outlaw Country to the torch-bearer for Lynyrd Skynyrd-style Southern Rock.

Whether or not you know the band, though, here's an anthem that you may find useful at times in the next few years.

Steampunk insect act

I like these.

The Pig Bang

From Rocket Science, a report on a pig farm manure pit explosion that killed 1,500 pigs and seriously injured a human worker.  The unusual explosion may or may not have something to do with experimental pig feed or antibiotics.  Kind of makes you wonder what's going on in your gut.  Or maybe it just makes me wonder that, given my curious obsession with the topic.  I have to go give a short talk to some teenagers about organic gardening, so I'm focused more than usual on poop, the cycle of life, and the storage and release of chemical energy.