Bee Swarm

Crowder's Beard Launches Solo Act

God Agrees to Spare Virginia if Just 10 Democrats Who Never Wore Blackface Can Be Found

Pelosi Reveals Favorite Bible Verse: "War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength."

Google Celebrates Noahic Covenant

Elizabeth Warren Admits to Wearing Paleface at College Costume Party

Update: Just because

Two Views on Sex/Gender

The first one is from Minding the Campus.
[A]bout 75% of all PhDs in psychology now go to women (a trend that began in the late 1980s).

Since 2009, women have outnumbered men overall in doctoral degrees earned, and the gender imbalance in psychology is particularly marked. Moreover, in fields such as developmental and child psychology, women Ph.D. recipients outnumber men by more than five to one. According to the APA’s own documents, this has for years caused concern about the “feminization” of the field of psychology.

In a 2011 report, the APA affirmed that gender diversity is important, as is a diversity of viewpoints. But if the APA just redefines what desirable human characteristics are, perhaps they won’t have to bother with this problem or the fact that women are the vast majority of therapists in practice.
The second one is from Esquire. I won't excerpt it. It is wrong to try to extrapolate very far from a single example, which is the premise of the piece. But the piece is nevertheless interesting on many levels.

Are Animals Self-Conscious, or are Scientists not Self-Conscious Enough?

So Grim's recent post "Bird Thoughts" which looked at the questions of consciousness, how it may have developed, and where it may originate reminded me of some related news: a recently done experiment attempted the famous "mark test" that has been used on dolphins, higher apes, and Eurasian magpies to show the possession of self-awareness (by recognizing that seeing themselves in a mirror is not another animal, but is a reflection of themselves) on a *fish*- and lo and behold, they responded as though they did recognize themselves.  So it would seem then, that they are on a level of intelligence and self-awareness on the plane of dolphins, if the test is to be believed.  Now, the common sense test suggests then that perhaps the test itself isn't as good as some thought it might be (no offense to the blue streak cleaner wrasses out there).

The Blue Streak Cleaner Wrasse

I find this in line with my own inclinations- almost every time I hear about a test showing how smart some animal species is, with the obligatory implication from the scientists conducting the experiments that there is more to the animals than we know (and I infer from either the scientist directly, or the journalist reporting on it that maybe they're more like us than we'd like to admit, and we're not so special), I become highly skeptical, and find at least a thing or a few that seem to me to be interpretive suppositions and perhaps reflecting biases that call into question the reliability of the test used.  Of course, I have to also be wary of my own biases in that I think humans are different from the animals, so I try to keep an open mind.

In the end, I think this test result will do much good in forcing some self reflection of the researchers and perhaps the development of more rigorous tests less prone to interpretive bias.

As one of the interview scientists said- "If we want to understand the complexity of life, and our place within that complexity, we must ask questions in a way that avoids the inherent bias we as narcissistic humans have." 

Indeed.

Isn't That How Congress Does Work?

As readers know, I don't endorse or put up with antisemitism. However, I'm a little bemused by today's controversy over the remarks of Somali-born Representative Omar of Minnesota. She said that her fellow Congressmen are motivated principally by lobbyist money where Israel is concerned, and cited AIPAC as the source of this money. She's been forced to apologize by the Democratic leadership.

OK, I'll grant that she has a bad record, and antisemitism is likely. However, if you said on any other topic that Congressmen are motivated principally by seeking illicit personal profit, including through lobbyist dollars, would anyone bat an eye? That's why people form lobbyist groups, right? That's why most of Congress are millionaires, though not all of them were when they got there, right?

Look at the net worth of some of these Congressfolk of long service, and calculate how much of that came from their salary. This isn't a very controversial thing to say about, say, why Republicans tend to favor amnesty in spite of the fact that their constituents hotly oppose it. It's the money, right? The Chamber of Commerce and many rich industries really want to depress the price of labor, both unskilled and skilled. That's why there's always such a push for amnesty, for more H1 visas, and why eVerify never manages to get through the Republican-led houses of Congress.

Pick your topic. Does anyone doubt that Congress is being bribed in various ways, as well as being allowed to profit off prior knowledge of how they are going to legislate?

So why would it be antisemitic to assert that a Jewish lobby is behaving like every other lobby? That's treating Jews -- these particular ones -- just the same way as everyone else. It's the opposite of bias, it's genuine equality.

I have a similar concern when people cry "Antisemitism!" about complaints about George Soros' deploying his vast wealth to try to create effects in American politics. Yes, Soros is a Jew. Yes, there's an ancient trope about Foreign Jews doing things like that which has been used by actual antisemites in the past. However, Soros really is spending a lot of money on organizations designed to create effects in American politics, and he's not an American. It's not his business how we govern ourselves, and it's reasonable to object to a foreign billionaire trying to buy influence in our government. [UPDATE: Apparently at some point he became a naturalized citizen, which I did not know. Obviously an American citizen has a right to engage in our politics. See the comments.] The fact that he's Jewish is immaterial to the complaint. The existence of the trope does not alter the fact that the charge, in this case, is perfectly true and legitimately objectionable.

Now, I don't think what Omar said is actually true. My sense is that AIPAC isn't actually powerful enough to do what Omar claims they do; if they were, there would have been no Obama-era Iran deal. It's wrong to raise false charges. But it's not antisemitic, necessarily, to believe that what is true of Congress in most cases involving lobbyists is still true of Congress where there are Jewish lobbyists. It's only treating them on even terms with everyone else, which is surely fair game.

Redistribution Never Ends

This is one of the better parodies I've seen lately.
This past weekend, thousands of protesters from the ‘Nice Guy Socialist Coalition’ marched on the Capitol to demand Congress pass a bill “guaranteeing men’s basic human right to access to women.”

“It really isn’t fair,” says Gunther Doogan, leader of the coalition. “Women want guys who are strong, ambitious, reliable, well-groomed…they only seem to care about profiting off of the virtues of good men...."

Criticisms by counter-protesters railed against the clear infringement on women’s rights by the legislation. Coalition members fired back, stating that women inherited their good looks and virtues from their parents. “Why should they have a right to their bodies?” asked Jacob Werner, a gaming streamer from Boston. “They didn’t earn them! I’d be a stud if I had parents who provided me with good genetics, basic understanding of social cues, and grooming habits!”

“I can’t believe in 2019 there are people who still don’t believe in a man’s right to be loved,” said Doogan. “While they selfishly preen over their precious ‘individual rights’, men across the country are literally starving for affection. No man should be denied access to women simply because he has no redeeming qualities.”

Prejudice and Votes for Women

So it's become the standard history of the 19th Amendment that the real reason for it was to dilute the votes of majority-male mass immigrants in the era. 1919 saw some of the worst racial violence in American history, and anti-immigrant sentiment was at an all time high. More men than women immigrated, so white men voted to give women the vote because it would buoy up traditional Americans versus those crazy Irishmen, Italians, and Germans. Though framed in moral terms, the actual motive was low.

I had thought, however, that better motives were in play out West, where women gained the vote in Wyoming territory early. I thought it was that there were many important jobs to do, the few women around had to join in doing them, and did them so well that it just seemed natural to extend the vote. After all, if a woman can be the mayor, why couldn't she vote for the mayor?

Unfortunately, my faith in human nature has betrayed me again. It turns out the real motive was to dilute the votes of freed blacks.

Recently I was listening to a rabbi who pointed out that, as a Jew, he was more interested in the action than the intention. This is distinct from the Christian view, promulgated in the Middle Ages by Peter Abelard, that intention is what really determines if an action is sinful or not.

You can see the advantage of the Jewish view here. If it was a just action, it doesn't matter why you did it. You are a just person if you do just things.

Abelard's view has advantages too, especially for those who sometimes do wrong things with good intentions. Still, it seems to make a sin out of what is ordinarily viewed by many as an act of supreme justice.

Bird Thoughts

This piece in the Atlantic is rambling and undisciplined, but the subject is one of great interest.
It is alternatively described as the last frontier of science, and as a kind of immaterial magic beyond science’s reckoning. David Chalmers, one of the world’s most respected philosophers on the subject, once told me that consciousness could be a fundamental feature of the universe, like space-time or energy. He said it might be tied to the diaphanous, indeterminate workings of the quantum world, or something nonphysical.

These metaphysical accounts are in play because scientists have yet to furnish a satisfactory explanation of consciousness. We know the body’s sensory systems beam information about the external world into our brain, where it’s processed, sequentially, by increasingly sophisticated neural layers. But we don’t know how those signals are integrated into a smooth, continuous world picture, a flow of moments experienced by a roving locus of attention—a “witness,” as Hindu philosophers call it....

It was likely more than half a billion years ago that some sea-floor arms race between predator and prey roused Earth’s first conscious animal. That moment, when the first mind winked into being, was a cosmic event, opening up possibilities not previously contained in nature.
If Chalmers is right, the evolutionary picture the author takes as "likely" is wrong. There is no 'first mind,' because consciousness is a feature of reality itself. The thing to explore is how consciousness is experienced by different forms of organization of this basic reality.

The author is also wrong (typically) in his description of the thoughts of the ancients and Medievals on the subject. This view Chalmers is advocating is quite ancient; it was Plato's opinion, and Plotinus' model. The name for it is panpsychism, and it happens to be my opinion as well.

Aristotle thought that discursive reason was a feature of the human soul, but not the animal soul. He did not thereby assume animals were 'unconscious automatons.' For Aristotle, three kind of souls 'stack,' as it were: plants have a limited capacity to sense the sun and turn towards it, and to distinguish nutrition and absorb it; animals have an additional capacity for locomotion in search of food, which grants a higher degree of consciousness. This is because you have to be able to recognize that the thing over there is different from you, and that you need to go over to it and eat it. The capacity to reason abstractly and discursively, however, Aristotle thought was an additional layer of capacity that only humans had.

Really, the opinion the author attributes to the ancients and Medievals is most properly an Enlightenment opinion. Kant seems to have thought something like that about animals. For him, access to the order of reason is the basis for the "integrat[ion] into a smooth, continuous world picture," which was a process Kant called "transcendental apperception." Thus, if animals lacked access to discursive reason, they couldn't be conscious because reason is what does the work on Kant's model.

As is often the case -- nearly always, I think -- we find that the ancients were closer to correct than the Enlightenment thinkers, the Moderns, and so forth. This whole period from Hobbes to Kant, from Newton to Hume, from around 1500 to today, someday our descendants will regard it as a useful detour from the path of wisdom. By exploring a whole new set of false ideas, we made some rapid advances toward what might really be true. In the end, though, we will return to the path the ancients laid out, but with a better set of models for how that path is actually realized.

Plotinus will ultimately prove to have been right about everything, I'll wager.

Trial by Ordeal in Egypt

Tom posted a bit about trials by ordeal a little while ago, suggesting that they were effective through a combination of incentives and magic tricks. With that in mind, watch this video of a woman in Egypt licking what purports to be red-hot iron (after reciting a verse of the Koran to ensure divine protection).

As you can see, it plainly doesn't bother her. Iron turns bright red above 1400 degrees Fahrenheit, which would destroy the sensitive flesh of the tongue on contact. She calmly licks it twice, and does no screaming afterwards.

I don't know how exactly this test is carried out by the imams, but I agree with the author of Tom's piece: "For example, in the early 13th century, 208 defendants in VĂ¡rad in Hungary underwent hot-iron ordeals. Amazingly, nearly two-thirds of defendants were unscathed by the ‘red-hot’ irons they carried and hence exonerated. If the priests who administered these ordeals understood how to heat iron, as they surely did, that leaves only two explanations for the ‘miraculous’ results: either God really did intervene to reveal the defendants’ innocence, or the priests made sure that the iron they carried wasn’t hot."

So either God intervenes in ordinary civil cases in Egypt, or it's a kind of magic trick whose secret remains known only to the few who work it.

There's Something New

Polar bears raiding cities in packs.

Self-Excommunication

It is my understanding that any priest who does this is excommunicated by his own action.
One 1998 report focused on Africa observed that “sexual harassment and even rape of sisters by priests and bishops is allegedly common.”

“When a sister becomes pregnant, the priest insists that she have an abortion,” the report added. ‘‘The sister is usually dismissed from her congregation while the priest is often only moved to another parish — or sent for studies.”
That leaves me with a set of questions for those who understand all of this better than I do myself. If a priest like this remains a frocked member of the priesthood, what is the status of his capacity to perform the rites? What becomes of the faithful who trust that his rites are efficacious?

Slow Learners

A woman completing her college education writes.
When you ask a question at a lecture, is it secretly just your opinion ending with the phrase “do you agree?” If so, your name is something like Jake, or Chad, or Alex, and you were taught that your voice is the most important in every room. Somewhere along your academic journey, you decided your search for intellectual validation was more important than the actual exchange of information. Now how do you expect to actually learn anything?

American society tells men, but especially white men, that their opinions have merit and that their voice is valuable, but after four years of listening to white boys in college, I am not so convinced.
Four years? Students at these elite colleges must be a little slow. I didn't even need two paragraphs to come to doubt the merit of her voice.

Somebody apparently told her otherwise, even to the point of soliciting and publishing this article. That was deeply unfair to her.

New fashion trends

Just think of everything as valuable fishing structure.


A local volunteer group pulled cubic yards of debris off of rookery islands, but this was the most interesting.  Second look at footwear ornamentation?

The American Dream is Freedom, Not Wealth

Not that there's any reason to be opposed to wealth, which can to some degree sometimes increase practical freedom. Still, most Americans seem to grasp that the essential thing was always liberty.
What our survey found about the American dream came as a surprise to me. When Americans were asked what makes the American dream a reality, they did not select as essential factors becoming wealthy, owning a home or having a successful career. Instead, 85 percent indicated that “to have freedom of choice in how to live” was essential to achieving the American dream. In addition, 83 percent indicated that “a good family life” was essential.

The “traditional” factors (at least as I had understood them) were seen as less important. Only 16 percent said that to achieve the American dream, they believed it was essential to “become wealthy,” only 45 percent said it was essential “to have a better quality of life than your parents,” and just 49 percent said that “having a successful career” was key.

This pattern — seeing the American dream as more about community and individuality than material success and social mobility — appeared across demographic and political categories. In the case of political party affiliation, for example, 84 percent of Republicans and independents said having freedom was essential to the American dream, as did 88 percent of Dem­ocrats; less than 20 percent of those in either party held that becoming wealthy was essential.
Contra the NYT's summation, they didn't say "community," they said "family." There's a crucial, biological difference there. The nation grows out of its families, and whether or not it sustains and supports healthy families is an important measure of its success. Blood ties remain important. People care less about whether they are 'living a better life than their parents' than about whether their children and grandchildren will still have prospects for a good life, even if they happen to define that life in terms of less-marketable choices.

Ultimately this is all very wise, and I'm glad to see it.

"A Plan to Reduce Emissions"

The more I think about yesterday's fiasco, the more I realize how little these people understand what they are talking about. I have to conclude that they don't actually care about the stated goal -- reducing emissions -- at all.

For example, this discourse on how to 'pay for' the Green New Deal misses a major step.


This is equivalent to saying that of course we can afford a starship line to Alpha Centauri, because we can afford anything that is for sale in our own currency. Even if it's true -- as is quite debatable -- that you can really inflate the currency without damage to the economy, there is no such product for sale in our currency.

The same is true for this deal. Take just the provision that we're going to refit or rebuild all the buildings in America in ten years. I read a claim yesterday that this roughly means refitting 39,000 buildings a day. It might be twenty thousand or fifty thousand a day, but let's go with 39,000 as a round figure. To make it easy to accomplish, we'd start with America's 100 largest cities, so we'd need 390 teams in each of these 100 cities, each team capable of refitting a building per day. So we've got 39,000 such teams nationwide.

Maybe it's possible to hire 39,000 teams, 390 teams per city. Maybe it's possible to buy all the stuff that all 39,000 teams would need to refit a house today. But what about day two? We're going to have scoured every hardware store and warehouse in America by day two, or certainly by day three or four. But we've got to keep going, every single day for ten years. Where's all the stuff we'd need? It doesn't exist. It's not for sale.

That's just one bullet point. To make the goods available for sale in our currency over a ten year period, you'd first have to build thousands of new factories. You're also going to want to build massive new amounts of wind farms and solar panels, so you'll need to make lots of electricity-expensive aluminium. You want to build a railway system that is so big and active that it eliminates air travel -- so you'll need lots of new trains, and new steel tracks, and to cut down lots of trees to make the cross-ties, and you'll need to boil lots of tar to make the creosote to soak the cross-ties as a preservative.

This plan is going to reduce emissions?

While we're building all this stuff, we don't have it yet, so even while we're building up all this renewable electrical power we'll have to ship it from the factories to wherever it's going to be set up and put to use. Since we don't yet have electric trains, we'll need to do that shipping with diesel fuel. We'll thus need more diesel fuel -- so we need new oil refineries, to make a lot more diesel, which we're going to burn moving all this stuff.

Reducing emissions is the point of all this?

Why don't we just buy the starships instead, and export people to the Offworld Colonies? If practicality like money is no object, why not shoot for the stars?

Development is good because it's developed and stuff

My little community wants to establish something called an "Economic Development Corporation," a 501(c)(3) entity that under some circumstances (but not ours) can glom onto a half-cent local sales tax.  It has to operate under open-meeting and open-records laws like a governmental entity, but as far as I can tell it doesn't have any authority.  There are said to be 700 of them in Texas already.  They look to me like a sort of souped-up chamber of commerce, though I'm told that our local Chamber of Commerce doesn't do the same sorts of things at all.

Actually it's very hard to talk to the supporters about why an EDC would be a good idea.  Luckily, ours apparently would be pretty low-risk, since it will have to subsist on modest handouts from local governments plus private donations, and will have no power that I can discover to make anyone do anything in particular.  Most EDCs seem to operate pretty good websites with information of the sort that prospective employers would want, like demographics, available real estate, zoning philosophy, educational opportunities, tax abatements or other financial incentives, and links to local elected officials.  I thought that was Chamber territory, but apparently not.  Or, if it's Chamber territory, the Chamber doesn't have enough money and people to do it effectively.  It's surprisingly difficult to get supporters to answer a question like, "Are you going to do what the Chamber does, but more of it and better because you'll have more money and staff?  Or are you going to do completely different things, and if so, what?"  They kind of look blank and say they're going to do "economic development."  What does that look like?  Well, it's development.   Of the economy.  I never understand these sorts of conversations.

On the other hand, I'd be pleased to see someone put together a good website with information that prospective employers would want to know.  I've never understood why we don't have one already.  You'd be amazed how hard it is just to find basic information about local codes and ordinances.  Our local leadership is not what you would call wildly enthusiastic about the digital revolution.

Another question I found it hard to engage supporters on was, "How do we find out whether the 700 Texas cities who have EDCs experience better economic development than the many cities who don't?" I'm told I can easily get a list of the 700.  Sure, but you see how my question is different? Not really.  Well, the 700 cities worked really hard on economic development, which is obviously a good thing.  Right, but concrete results?  ... It's as though I were speaking a foreign language.  It's just intuitively obvious that this kind of activity, whatever it is, is valuable.

Earlier this evening I managed to find a few articles nearly on point. One was a master's thesis that couldn't find any statistical correlation between imposition of a Texas EDC sales tax and anything identifiable as economic progress.  The author admitted, however, that she was unable to put her finger on what people meant by economic progress:  was it simple growth in key metrics like per capita income, or something to do with a qualitative change in economic activity?  Either way, the pattern was murky.  Another article confidently explained that you get economic development when you can attract and retain talent, but that's tricky, because it's the nature of talent that it can relocate whenever it wants, so you have to have quality of life.  What's that?  Whatever talent wants.  Then there's probably something about making the environment business-friendly.  That's actually the only part I can readily grasp:  low taxes and regulations that are transparent and predictable.  But then there is so little consensus on whether it's a good idea to attract businesses if you can't be sure they won't degrade quality of life, as they surely will if they're not heavily regulated!  You can't trust those dang businesses!  At the same time, the coolest little town ever won't last long if there aren't any jobs.  It's a tough one.  I remain skeptical that governments can help much.  Maybe businesses can't either, but at least they employ people.

Well, as I say, the possibilities for mischief appear minimal.

"The nature of the economics didn't make sense."

Lookie here, young feller, if you wanted the economics to make sense, why were you trying to operate a socialist restaurant?  This Panera chain tried to base its business model on not just a proverbial free lunch but a literal one.

Company founder Ron Shaich explained, "We had to help [customers] understand that this is a cafĂ© of shared responsibility and not a handout." Now, see, that was a big problem. People weren't smart enough to pick up on that important distinction. It goes to show you that socialism can't work unless we get smarter people. I blame the schools.  But I wonder whether the customers' level of understanding improved after the restaurant "helped" them with this concept?

Shockingly, the restaurants reported an atmosphere of increasing resentment and disappointment before they went broke and shut down. Maybe if they had taken advantage of economies of scale and expanded the experiment to include an entire country . . . ?

A Modest Proposal

Details on the Green New Deal are out.
As well as calling for the dramatic expansion of the country’s renewable energy resources, the plan proposes:

*“Upgrading all existing buildings" in the United States to make them energy efficient, and developing a smart grid.

*A radical overhaul of the country’s transport infrastructure to eliminate emissions “as much as technologically feasible.” This would involve expanding electric car manufacturing, installing charging stations “everywhere” and developing high-speed rail links to “a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.”

*Restoring threatened lands and hazardous waste sites.

*Working with farmers to build a more sustainable food system that “ensures universal access to healthy food” and clean water.

*The plan also includes social justice objectives such as "high-quality health care" for all Americans, a guaranteed job "with a family-sustaining benefit provisions.” Another goal is “to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, de-industrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth.”
Converting America to a centrally planned economy might lower our emissions just by depressing economic output, although even that isn't certain. China's Communist economy worsened pollution.

The plan is, however, just as advertised: an attempt to take over the entire American economy, so that close to 100% of what we are doing is directed by the government and paid for by the taxpayers. It is unlimited in its ambition; even if all you wanted to do was 'upgrade all existing buildings,' that would probably be too hard to accomplish in practice. But that's just bullet point one, and we'll throw in all the social justice goals as well.

You knew we were lying, why'dya believe us?

Fascinating testimony from Thomas P. Miller of the American Enterprise Institute in his Statement before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health Hearing concerning Texas v. Azar, the Republican AG lawsuit that recently yielded a U.S. District Court ruling that the Obamacare mandate was both unconstitutional and unseverable from the statute as a whole. Miller's analysis focuses on the probable impact on Americans with pre-existing conditions and pretty much tries the usual ecumenical scolding, but now and then he makes some clear points about how badly Congress blew it.
Determining the legislative intent of Congress regarding the role of the individual mandate as it related to the rest of the law is at the heart of the severability component of the Texas v. Azar litigation. The plaintiffs contend that the Findings of Fact included in the ACA statute by the 111th Congress that passed it should be determinative on this point. That Congress essentially said that the individual mandate was essential to the functioning of several other ACA provisions, including protections against exclusions of coverage or higher premium charges for individuals with pre-existing health conditions (hereinafter more commonly referred to as “guaranteed issue” and “adjusted community rating”). Whether or not those “findings” have been borne out in practice or the economic and policy connection was quite as tight as that Congress officially assumed, the plaintiffs are not out of bounds in holding Congress to its past word, and in building on the similar reasoning used by other Supreme Court majorities to strike ACA legal challenges in NFIB v Sebelius and in King v. Burwell.
In other words, if that’s the “story” for ACA defenders, they should have to stick to it, at least until a subsequent Congress actually votes to eliminate or revise those past Findings of Fact already embedded in permanent law.
Whatever the 111th Congress “may” have really intended is far more complex. At best, one might conclude that, in the final analysis, it really aimed to pass whatever surviving, though problematic version of the ACA it could, by whatever legislative and political means would work, and then try to implement it and fix it up later, as needed, as it went along. However, this gap between what was officially said with a “wink” and what actually was the political calculation is far harder to recognize in the courts as official legislative intent.
To be blunt, one of the primary ways that the Obama administration “sold” its proposals for health policy overhaul was to exaggerate the size, scope, and nature of the potential population facing coverage problems due to pre-existing health conditions ACA advocates then argued that the only way to address those problems was with a heavy dose of (adjusted) community rated premiums and income-related tax subsidies, complemented by an individual mandate. Unfortunately, this combination also made the coverage offered in ACA exchanges less attractive to younger and healthier individuals, who were asked to pay more for insurance that they valued less. We ended up with the worst of both worlds, a mandate despised by many (low-risk) individuals that largely failed to accomplish its intended goals. To the extent that net insurance coverage gains still were achieved under the ACA, they were due overwhelmingly to the combination of generous insurance subsidies for lower income ACA exchange enrollees, plus an aggressive expansion of relatively less-expensive (but even more generously taxpayer-subsidized) Medicaid coverage in many states.
* * *
It’s important to remember that the problem of pre-existing condition coverage, before the ACA was enacted and implemented, was limited almost entirely to the individual market. A host of semi-specialized risk pools and other pre-ACA legal provisions already offered various types of such insurance protection to many otherwise vulnerable Americans. Of course, public policy to address remaining problems could and should be improved in other less prescriptive and more transparent ways than the ACA’s tangled web of less-visible regulatory cross-subsidies and income-related premium tax credits (for example, extending HIPAA’s continuous-coverage provisions and risk protections to the individual market).
* * *
Hence, if the ACA’s current, overbroad regulatory provisions involving guaranteed issue, adjusted community rating, and prohibition of coverage exclusions for pre-existing conditions were stricken down in court in the near future as inextricably tied to an unconstitutional individual mandate, there are better policy alternatives available to lawmakers.
* * *
I don’t want to neglect pointing out the disappointing results and collateral damage caused by the ACA’s execution of its stated objectives. Yes, U.S. taxpayers spent more money, or we borrowed it, and millions more Americans were covered with insurance than before while others had their coverage upgraded and subsidized more generously. At the same time, less-visible victims of the ACA lost the coverage they had preferred to keep or had to pay much more for it if they fell outside of the law’s more generously subsidized cohorts. Insurance and health care markets were substantially destabilized for years, although, with enough premium hikes and Silver-loaded subsidy alchemy in the last two years, that’s begun to change. Nevertheless, the overall size of the individual market actually have grown smaller than its pre-ACA levels.

Powerlifting and Natural Performance Enhancement

It's an irony that America's Islamic officials are the ones pushing the transgender movement in sports, but as the article from the other day pointed out it's an easier fit for some traditional cultures than accepting homosexuality.

What caught my eye about this story, though, is that this powerlifting group has a completely different standard here than strongman sports. Strongman Corporation is completely willing to accept transgender competitors. They just want you to provide evidence that your testosterone levels in the blood are low enough if you want to compete as a woman. This is what Rep. Oman is claiming is unnecessary, as I understand her remarks.
Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar recommended Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison investigate USA Powerlifting for barring biological males from women’s events, according to a Jan. 31 letter she sent USA Powerlifting.

Omar called it a “myth” that men who identify as transgender women have a “direct competitive advantage” and copied Ellison on the letter, “with a recommendation that he investigate this discriminatory behavior.”
Lest you think she's out in left field here, it turns out that another American powerlifting organization -- USPA -- has no relevant rules at all. They just say they welcome everyone, compete however you like. USPA, however, also doesn't test for performance enhancing drugs of any kind -- so if you're pumped up on steroids, and can inject as much testosterone as you like, what's the big deal about some natural testosterone?

I suppose free associations can do whatever they want here, and all of these solutions make a certain degree of sense. The American way, as it were.

Obamacare & Death

Death rates may have risen since the passage of the law.