Richard Fernandez, that is.
My favorite line: “There’s no problem so pressing that you can’t forget it by changing the subject.”
It’s a brilliant, brilliant piece.
[Hat tip: commenter “J.J.”]
Risky childhood play
A while back The Atlantic had an article by Hanna Rosin describing how it was that in just a couple of generations Americans became intolerant of exposing their children to what used to be considered normal risks.
Some of it had to do with lawsuits:
…[P]ark departments all over the country began removing equipment newly considered dangerous, partly because they could not afford to be sued, especially now that a government handbook could be used by litigants as proof of standards that parks were failing to meet…[T]he cultural understanding of acceptable risk began to shift, such that any known risk became nearly synonymous with hazard.
The consequences are somewhat paradoxical, but they make sense. Removing danger does away with an important learning experience:
Children are born with the instinct to take risks in play, because historically, learning to negotiate risk has been crucial to survival; in another era, they would have had to learn to run from some danger, defend themselves from others, be independent. Even today, growing up is a process of managing fears and learning to arrive at sound decisions. By engaging in risky play, children are effectively subjecting themselves to a form of exposure therapy, in which they force themselves to do the thing they’re afraid of in order to overcome their fear. But if they never go through that process, the fear can turn into a phobia. Paradoxically, Sandseter writes, “our fear of children being harmed,” mostly in minor ways, “may result in more fearful children and increased levels of psychopathology.”
Not to mention dependency. On government regulation and protection from risk, perhaps?
The public does not ♥ Obamacare
Despite all efforts, Obama and the Democrats have not been able to make the public like Obamacare, a fact reflected in polls such as this one from Gallup.
This is the chart that must make them gnash their teeth:
It is remarkably flat over time, isn’t it?
And this chart can’t warm the cockles of their hearts either:
That’s pretty low support among blacks and Hispanics, considering their support for Obama and Democrats as a whole, and considering that Obamacare was designed to supposedly help low income people the most.
How widespread is the VA rot?
It now appears that an award-winning VA hospital in Texas was cooking the books for years—falsifying wait times in order to keep winning those awards and bonuses.
Investigations went nowhere:
Emails and VA memos obtained exclusively by The Daily Beast provide what is among the most comprehensive accounts yet of how high-level VA hospital employees conspired to game the system. It shows not only how they manipulated hospital wait lists but why””to cover up the weeks and months veterans spent waiting for needed medical care. If those lag times had been revealed, it would have threatened the executives’ bonus pay.
What’s worse, the documents show the wrongdoing going unpunished for years, even after it was repeatedly reported to local and national VA authorities. That indicates a new troubling angle to the VA scandal: that the much touted investigations may be incapable of finding violations that are hiding in plain sight…
“This newest case just further illustrates that the scandal is much more far reaching than most people realize,” Rieckhoff said, “Phoenix was just the tip of the iceberg. Scandal has become the new normal, it’s the status quo at the VA right now.”
Apparently it’s been the status quo at the VA for years. The only difference now is that it’s being revealed.
So we have the lengthy wait times, which would be bad enough. But then there was the coverup, motivated by the fact that long wait times were penalized and short wait times incentivized. The solution: lie about the wait times. It worked for quite a while, didn’t it? In a system that rewards lying, the truth-teller loses:
There’s enormous pressure to report favorable wait times for VA patients, the Texas whistleblower explained, even if those wait times are completely false.
“If [VA] directors report low numbers, they’re the outlier. They won’t stay a director very long and they certainly won’t get promoted. No one is getting rewarded for honesty. They pretty much have to lie, if they don’t they won’t go anywhere,” the whistleblower added. Weighted more heavily than other performance measures, the wait time numbers alone “count for 50% of the executive career field bonus, which is a pretty powerful motivator.”
Though VA hospitals may be struggling with increasing patient loads and inadequate resources””including too few medical providers””they are punished for acknowledging those problems.
Something that looks good on paper and seems to make sense—rewarding short wait times—is deeply flawed if it’s really really hard to effect short wait times because the resources to do so just aren’t there. So the lying begins, and people realize there’s no other way to function in that system.
That doesn’t make the lying okay, but it does make it explicable. Those who won’t lie tend to be winnowed out in a process of natural selection, a survival of the fittest for that particular environment. Not everyone in the system was corrupted, but enough were to make it a widespread and practically standard occurrence.
The article goes on to describe a coverup of the coverup, exoneration by an investigation that was also fraudulent.
And the final paragraphs of the article are just plain sad:
The current investigatons are not enough, Rieckhoff said. Having a White House political operative looking into this is not an adequate solution. This is not something that one of the president’s lieutenants should be handling.”
“There’s definitely reason to think there may have been criminal activity,” Rieckhoff said. “Maybe it’s time for Attorney Genral Holder and the Department of Justice to get involved, or for someone else trained to investigate criminal cases to take the lead on this.”
Do not sit on a hot stove waiting for that DOJ investigation to take place. And what is Eric Holder if not one of the president’s most loyal lieutenants?
The search of the area where “pings” were heard…
…thought initially to possibly be from the missing Malaysian airplane is complete, and it has turned up nothing.
Back to the drawing board.
The linked article calls the fate of the airplane and its passengers “one of aviation’s most baffling mysteries.” But I’d say it actually is aviation’s most baffling mystery so far.
Here’s a list of ten other supposedly baffling mysteries involving aviation. Some aren’t even baffling; they’ve been solved. Others continue to baffle, but I don’t think any of them are in quite the same league as Flight 370. They either occurred before instrumentation and tracking had reached today’s sophisticated level, or they represent a mystery in the sense that we don’t know why they crashed or why they weren’t found. No single event presents the depth of mystery that Flight 370 offers, involving these questions and more: why did the entire communication system turn off while the plane continued to fly for a long time? Did the plane even crash? Why has no debris ever been found, if the plane landed in the ocean?
Obama goes to battle against straw men…
Headline: Greatest Orator Since Cicero Successfully Refutes That Which Was Never Contended
Variously seen on Twitter, spoofs of Obama’s foreign policy address to the commencement class at West Point:
Lachlan Markay: “”Some say we should nuke the entire Asian continent. Others want our capital to be Pyongyang. Unlike everyone else, I’m a rational centrist.
Ben Shapiro:”We need to do stuff. And the stuff we will do will not be stuff that a crazy person says we should do. It will be good stuff.”
In a shocker, Obama informed the captive audience at West Point that from now on, the US military will be using might in the service of right. A revolutionary thought!
More from Scott Johnson at Powerline on the address:
I find it difficult to imagine the mental nullity required to draft and revise this speech.
I have felt that way about all of Obama’s speeches. But hey, that’s just me.
It also strikes me as ironic that, unlike their fellow graduates at so many other universities, the West Point graduates were unable to protest their commencement speaker, who dearly deserved it.
Why no outcry from Obama on this?
Mariam Yahia Ibrahim Ishag, under sentence of death for apostasy, has given birth in a Sudanese prison.
The US Embassy in Sudan has released a statement protesting her incarceration, and a few US Senators have also supported her. Others, including Kelly Ayotte of NH (Ibrahim’s wheelchair-bound husband, who suffers from muscular dystrophy, is from Sudan but is a US citizen and a resident of New Hampshire), have gone further and written a letter:
…asking John Kerry, U.S. Secretary of State, to offer political asylum to Ibrahim.
“We also urge you and President Obama to reappoint an Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom, whose primary purpose is to monitor, prevent, and respond to this exact type of incident,” the letter stated.
Some groups such as Amnesty International are on the case as well.
And what of President Obama? The guy who spoke up readily in the Henry Louis Gates arrest and the Zimmerman case? The answer appears to be silence—at least so far—and silence from Secretary of State Kerry.
Obama is in exactly the same position vis a vis Islam as Mariam Yahia Ibrahim Ishag herself, by the way, although of course he’s not in prison for apostasy. Here are the facts of her life as reported:
Mariam was born to a Muslim father, who left her mother to bring her up alone from when she was very young, and an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian mother. She was raised in her mother’s faith and married a Christian man.
That’s her defense to the charge of apostasy: she was never a Muslim in the first place, so there was no conversion. The parallels are that Obama was also born to a Muslim father who then departed from his life and a Christian mother (I’m not talking about beliefs, I’m talking about nominal religion of birth). He was raised mostly by his Christian grandparents, although his mother was also involved off and on. All of this would make him an apostate under the same reasoning that the court applied to Ibrahim Ishag. But whatever Obama’s religion (and my gut feeling is that he has none but leftism), he certainly seems reluctant so far to say much to defend this woman from the barbarism of Islamic law.
[NOTE: There’s a lot more background information about the couple’s story and background in this Telegraph article. It reads partly as a history of Africa’s troubles, reflected in the lives of these two people [emphasis mine]:
Like many in Sudan, both Daniel and his wife’s childhood were blighted by civil war.
Daniel managed to escape the brutal conflict in 1998 when he travelled to America with his brother Gabriel.
The biochemist returned to Sudan to marry Meriam at a Christian service in a chapel which was attended by around 500 people in December 2011.
Most who were at the wedding ceremony could vouch for the pair being committed Christians, defence lawyers say.
But witnesses who were willing to give evidence on her behalf were barred from testifying because they were Christian.
She even produced a marriage certificate identifying herself as a Christian.
Despite this, the judge determined that because her father was a Muslim, even though he abandoned the family while they were living in a refugee camp in the South East of Sudan when she was six, she too was a Muslim who had broken the law by leaving Islam.
But her mother, who is now dead, brought her up as Christian. Her mother was born in Ethiopia to Christian parents, but fled to Sudan because of famine, and chose to raise her daughter in the same religion.
Read the whole thing.]
I spy with my little eye…
The above link is to an interview Edward Snowden gave to NBC’s Brian Williams, but I’ve only read excerpts from it because the link to the original interview isn’t working right now. My use of the word “traitor” is based on previous conclusions of mine, rather than new revelations in the interview. But the reference to the word “spy” in the title of the post is due to the fact that in his Williams interview Snowden claims he was “trained as a spy,” not just a low-level computer operative.
His use of the word “spy” seems odd to me, mostly a self-aggrandizing attempt to make himself out to have been far more exceptional and ungeeky than he was:
“I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word in that I lived and worked undercover overseas – pretending to work in a job that I’m not – and even being assigned a name that was not mine.”
Describing himself as a “technical expert,” Snowden said: “I don’t work with people. I don’t recruit agents. What I do is I put systems to work for the United States. And I’ve done that at all levels from – from the bottom on the ground all the way to the top.”
Sorry, Ed, but that’s not the traditional sense of the word “spy,” although I can’t say the semantics matter all that much. Spies usually do either “work with people” and/or steal the secrets of other nations. But no matter; spy, schmy, it’s Edward Snowden the great and powerful, whose only spying was on the United States.
And nothing is his fault, either, including the fact that he’s living in Russia:
“I had a flight booked to Cuba and onwards to Latin America and I was stopped because the United States government decided to revoke my passport and trap me in the Moscow Airport,” Mr. Snowden said in the portion of the interview released Tuesday night. “So when people ask ”˜Why are you in Russia?’ I say, ”˜Please ask the State Department.’”
Why, if it weren’t for that mean old State Department, Snowden would be in grand old Venezuela, living it up.
RIP Maya Angelou
The news that Maya Angelou has died at the age of 86 reminds me of how deeply impressed I was when I read her book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings when it first came out in 1969.
Those who read it now probably can’t quite imagine how fresh and powerful it was at that time. In the interim, coming-of-age memoirs by women—including by black or other minority women—have become far more commonplace, as have descriptions of childhood sexual abuse. Those things were part of Angelou’s book back in a time when they were unusual to read about, and that was arresting. But a lot of other things about her book remain extraordinary, and they are the reason I read it and found it memorable.
The first is the power of her unique and lyric voice, which was (and remains) utterly arresting and utterly engaging. The reader is drawn at once into the world of Angelou’s childhood, where black children are sent on trains halfway across the country with notes pinned on their clothing as to where they’re going, and met by grandmothers who take them in and raise them with strength and religion and firmness in a world that is entirely black, including the schools and the teachers. The portrait in the book of Angelou’s grandmother Annie Henderson is one of the great ones of memoir. Nor is it sugar-coated and touchy-feely; her grandmother was deeply loving but extremely formidable.
The rape that occurs later, at the hands of Angelou’s mother’s live-in boyfriend when 8-year-old Maya and her brother have been sent back to St. Louis to live with her, is heartbreakingly rendered. Described from the child’s viewpoint, it somehow manages to depict something that has rarely been conveyed so well: how the child’s starvation for paternal affection can set up the neediness that makes him/her vulnerable, how wily and then how brutal the rapist can be, and how a sensitive child might react. In Angelou’s case, when her uncles took revenge and murdered the rapist, she felt that her talking about the rape had caused his death, and so she decided to stop talking entirely:
“I thought, my voice killed him; I killed that man, because I told his name. And then I thought I would never speak again, because my voice would kill anyone …”
It took a long time for Angelou to find her voice again—five years of silence. Initially she was sent back to Stamps, Arkansas to live with her grandmother in a more stable environment, and that helped a bit. But it was literature and a wonderful teacher that convinced her to return to the world and its people.
Angelou wrote many more memoirs besides Caged, and over the years I’ve read quite a few of them. They’re of interest to anyone interested in Angelou’s life, and they constitute a story of overcoming great odds. But none of them even remotely touches the heights of her first book. I’ve often thought that many writers have one book in them that they must write, are driven to write, and that for Angelou that book was Caged. The rest was commentary.
The same for her poems, which I don’t much care for. But Caged was a masterpiece when it was first written. I don’t know how it holds up today because I haven’t read it in many years. But I bet it holds up just fine.
Angelou gained fame as a writer, but she was not only a writer. If you read about her life you may be struck, as I’ve been for years, by how varied and accomplished it was. Hers was a life lived fully. Of how many people can you say that?
RIP, Maya Angelou.
[NOTE: There’s not all that much in Angelou’s obits or even her Wiki entry about her politics. She was very active in the civil rights movement as a young woman, and Wiki mentions an early pro-Castro period, but it is my impression (including the indications in this article, as well) that she was a liberal Democrat. She seems to have been especially close to the Clintons, and supported Hillary’s bid over Obama’s in 2008. Her ties to Arkansas probably at least partially explain that fact.)
The “Obama, fool or knave?” debate…
I say “both, but knave predominates.”
I also say that, if you’re going to be a knave, better that you also be a fool. Competent knaves are the most dangerous. And I think Obama’s been plenty competent enough, unfortunately.
100 years is a lot of years…
…but Dorothy Custer seems to sail right through it:
I missed it when she became a sensation on the Leno show in 2011. I just came across the above video recently, and I thought I’d check to see how she’s doing today. Still alive and kicking, and about to celebrate birthday #103. I also learned that her sense of humor isn’t just a case of being amiable and fun; she’s been a comedian (an amateur, but performing) for much of her life.
There’s a set of the very old who seem to be impervious to many of the ravages of age, keeping their mental abilities and vigorous life force till the day they die. They look old, but not as old as they actually are. It’s as though the aging process goes only so far in them and then it stops, or remains on hold for a while.
[NOTE: In an odd coincidence, the subject she talks about at the beginning of her interview resonates with this post I wrote earlier today.]
Obamacare and employment-based health insurance
The Obama administration and the IRS act to ensure that employers don’t just dump people onto the exchanges:
When employers provide coverage, their contributions, averaging more than $5,000 a year per employee, are not counted as taxable income to workers. But the Internal Revenue Service said employers could not meet their obligations under the health care law by simply reimbursing employees for some or all of their premium costs.
Christopher E. Condeluci, a former tax and benefits counsel to the Senate Finance Committee, said the ruling was significant because it made clear that “an employee cannot use tax-free contributions from an employer to purchase an insurance policy sold in the individual health insurance market, inside or outside an exchange.”
If an employer wants to help employees buy insurance on their own, Mr. Condeluci said, it can give them higher pay, in the form of taxable wages. But in such cases, he said, the employer and the employee would owe payroll taxes on those wages, and the change could be viewed by workers as reducing a valuable benefit.
Andrew R. Biebl, a tax partner at CliftonLarsonAllen, a large accounting firm based in Minneapolis, said the ruling could disrupt arrangements used in many industries.
“For decades,” Mr. Biebl said, “employers have been assisting employees by reimbursing them for health insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs. The new federal ruling eliminates many of those arrangements by imposing an unusually punitive penalty.”
When an employer reimburses employees for premiums, the arrangement is known as an employer payment plan. “These employer payment plans are considered to be group health plans,” the I.R.S. said, but they do not satisfy requirements of the Affordable Care Act.
These “unusually punitive penalties” are to the tune of $100 a day per employee, bringing it to a grand total of $36,500 per year per employee.
The administration was faced with an interesting dilemma. Which was worst of all its options? Forego all those extra tax dollars and allow employers to assist employees as in the past? Run the risk of letting employers dump people into the horror of the exchanges, which could cause widespread dissatisfaction not just for those who use the individual insurance market (which has already occurred) but for the much larger number of people who previously had been helped out by employers? Many of these people would not qualify for subsidies and the coverage for them would be both more expensive and far worse than what they were probably used to.
None of this would seem to bode well for the all-important election, but apparently the powers that be decided that getting the tax dollars and forcing the employers to provide Obamacare-compliant insurance off the exchanges was the best combination for their purposes.
There’s other Obamacare news, too, although I’m not at all sure that this is actually “new.” I seem to recall reading and writing about something very much like it quite some time ago (see also this):
In a new [sic?] regulation, the Department of Health and Human Services said it would provide financial assistance to certain insurers that experience unexpected financial losses this year. Administration officials hope the payments will stabilize premiums and prevent rate increases that could embarrass Democrats in this year’s midterm elections.
Republicans want to block the payments, which they see as a bailout for insurance companies that supported the president’s health care law.
I can’t imagine that it’s only Republicans who “see” it that way. What else could it possibly be?