You might want to take a look at this summary of the varied ways in which Obamacare pays off the health insurance companies who play ball with the exchanges: risk adjustment, reinsurance, and risk corridors.
The Times struggles to keep on propagandizing in the face of the harsh realities of Obama’s foreign policy
The NY Times has a dilemma. It cannot help but notice that the expected and predicted fruits of Obama’s foreign policy (or of his mere presence in the White House) seem to be rotting on the ground. Even more importantly, the Times figures that its readers are noticing too. The situation is just too fetid to successfully deny any more, and if the newspaper continues to do so, those of its regular readers who retain some integrity might consider the paper to be the completely owned propaganda organ that it is, and take offense.
So, what to do? The answer is to write editorials like this one from yesterday, a delicate balancing act that acknowledges just enough reality to sound credible to those readers but not enough to really risk any of their strongly-held beliefs that Obama is pretty decent and has America’s best interests at heart. It’s a bit tricky to successfully pull off, but the Times proves it’s up to the task in an effort that is a tour de force of the genre.
For every acknowledgement of the mess the Obama administration has caused, there’s a subsequent apologia absolving him fully or at least considerably softening the blow. And the editors don’t forget to make sure they say that, however bad it is, Bush was worse. So the editorial is a series of steps forward and steps back, written so smoothly that most readers are probably unaware of how the sashaying is done.
From the first paragraph–first, the bad news:
…President Obama is being pummeled at home and abroad for his international leadership. The world sometimes seems as if it is flying apart, with Mr. Obama unable to fix it.
Seems that way rather than is that way, so even that accusation is tempered at the start. Then the semi-exoneration:
Through a combination of a few significant missteps, circumstances beyond his control, unreasonable expectations and his maddeningly bland demeanor, Mr. Obama has opened himself to criticism that he is not articulating a strong, overarching blueprint for the exercise of American power and has not been able to bend authoritarian leaders to his will.
Let’s pause for a moment to admire the editors’ handiwork. You think they don’t know how to write? Well, think again. I offer that last sentence as one of the finest examples of exquisitely nunanced shilly-shallying I’ve ever read. The supposed dose of reality comes with the recognition that Obama has committed “significant missteps,” although that’s tempered by the unsupported notion that they are “few” in number. Well, everybody makes mistakes, don’t they? The rest of the problem for Obama is, according to the Times, a combination of just plain bad luck (unnamed “circumstances beyond his control”); the fault of others noticing his own wonderfulness (“unreasonable expectations”—presumably expectations for Obama and not by Obama); his calm character, heretofore considered a good thing, but which the Times admits can be “maddening.” All of this has “opened” Obama “to criticism that he is not articulating a strong, overarching blueprint for the exercise of American power and has not been able to bend authoritarian leaders to his will.” The Times is being especially tricky in that last phrase, because the editors are not really saying that Obama is in fact failing to articulate this blueprint or to bend those leaders, just that he has acted in a way that invites criticism.
That’s paragraph one. Paragraph two goes like this:
It is paradoxical that, in key respects, Mr. Obama is precisely the kind of foreign policy president most Americans and their allies overseas wanted. He rejected the shoot-first tendencies of George W. Bush, who pretended to have all the answers, bungled two wars and asserted an in-your-face American exceptionalism that included bullying allies. We know where that got us.
Shorter version: Obama is exactly what we all yearned for after that horrible Bush. And wasn’t Bush awful?
The next paragraph is devoted to the idea that Obama’s critics have been too harsh on him and have ignored his very real accomplishments. That those accomplishments are listed as “salvaging” the economy (someone in the comments section wrote that perhaps the eds meant “savaging” instead) and producing “the first possibility of a deal on Iran’s nuclear weapons” gives you an indication of the quality of the Times’ claims.
The next paragraph, number four, tries to describe what Obama’s critics think is wrong with him: maybe, they say “he lacks a passion for foreign policy,” “has no inspiring ideological prism, or “is too resigned” to obstacles to American power. But these are tepid critiques that don’t even begin to deal with what many of us on the right have said from the early days of Obama’s first term: that he does have an ideological prism, and that it is leftism and geared to harming our allies and helping our enemies, and that he’s not merely “resigned” to a loss of American power but is instead actively engineering that loss.
In the next paragraph, the fifth, the Times comes closest to articulating a real criticism of Obama—and perhaps its own actual views as well—which is that the president has been “unfocused, weak, and passive.” The editors refuse to consider—and probably would never say if they did realize—the possibility that his passivity on the world stage is conscious, purposeful, and strategic.
Why do I keep harping on the Times, when we all know this is the way they roll? I still think it’s edifying to learn how they do it. Also, I don’t know about you, but my liberal friends and family still respect the Times and are hugely informed by it. The Times is also tremendously influential in setting the tone and the approach for other periodicals as well as pundits on the left. We may mock it, but its propaganda still shapes our world—not the world of reality, but the world of public opinion, which then influences reality.
But Dude, if you think about it…
…Tommy Vietor was only re-stating the oft-repeated message of the Obama administration about the Benghazi emails.
I yield to none in my contempt for Vietor and in my rage that someone so callow and disrespectful was allowed anywhere near the American presidency. But his actual message—that the right is focusing on behavior both trivial and past the statute of limitations when it criticizes the White House’s lies and politically manipulative messaging to the American people on Benghazi—is actually more pernicious than his lack of style. What’s more, although other Democrats and White House spokespeople haven’t yet gone so far as to say “Dude” when they talk about it, their message is his message and his message is their message. It’s a regular Vulcan mind-meld.
That message is a bigger outrage than “Dude,” or the smirk on Vietor’s face. Theirs is an implicit smirk, a thumbing of the nose, a big middle finger to the American people and to the four men killed that evening in Benghazi.
Transparency? Accountability? That’s for suckers, not for Obama and his people.
[ADDENDUM: Case in point, just from today.]
Why dance films and videos don’t really work all that well
Whenever I write about dance, I’m handicapped by the fact that all I can offer is a video and some words, and perhaps a few still photos.
That’s better than nothing. But it doesn’t even begin to compare with seeing a dance performance in person. On a flat screen you cannot properly appreciate depth and height, closeness and distance, and the living breathing force of the person moving in space right before your very eyes.
Dance is partly illusion—of floating, soaring, and flying; of indefatigability and ease while performing almost impossible feats (sometimes consisting of a variation after which the dancer pukes in the wings), of effortless beauty and eternal love (sometimes between two dancers who are at loggerheads).
Here’s a particularly good example of what I’m talking about. I’ve seen the following dance in person at least three or four times, and each time it has been extraordinary. The first time I ever saw “Caught” (when it was new, in the early 80s) I decided the illusion was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, I’ve ever seen in the theater—arresting, startling, and magical.
But the video gives you almost no sense of what I might be talking about (the real action only gets started around minute 2:15; I strongly suggest you watch it in full screen mode). To appreciate the illusion, the viewer must be aware of three dimensions, including and especially the location of the stage floor vis a vis the leaping strobe-lit dancer, and depth and height perception and scale. In the real thing, live, the dancer looks for all the world as though he is either flying or walking on the air:
Alas, David Parsons no longer performs the piece. But his company does, and I highly recommend going to see them if you get the chance, in no small part because it’s one of the few modern dance companies that feature humor as well. I wish I could find a video of Parson’s “Sleep Study,” one of my favorite examples of that genre. But I can’t, so here’s a still—which gives you only the very roughest idea of what I might be talking about:
[ADDENDUM: I’ve just learned that “Caught” was Parsons’ very first work (an old video of part of it can be found here). Here’s Parsons talking about having choreographed “Caught” at the very outset of his career:
And here’s a nice clip of excerpts from the Parsons Dance Company’s repertoire, for those who want to see more. It doesn’t give you much idea of Parson’s formidable comedic talents, but it does give you a notion of his choreographic dynamism, and it ends with a couple more seconds of “Caught” that give the best example on video I’ve yet seen of the experience of seeing it in person:
And a short one of another dancer doing “Caught”:
That should whet your appetite.]
Before you reach happily for the butter and the steak…
…let me just say that this article is as bad or worse than the science it purports to debunk.
I could write either a book on this topic or a short post. Since it’s Saturday, you get the short post. But here are my main points in response to Nina Teicholz’s case against the anti-animal-fat crowd:
(1) It is almost impossible to design a really good and definitive study of diets and what they do and don’t do, healthwise. There are too many variables impossible or difficult to control for, and people’s reports are unreliable as well.
(2) So you can find a study or studies illustrating just about anything you want, and others can find fault with those studies and they’d be right.
(3) You can’t pick and choose just a few; you have to look at the entire spectrum of studies on a topic (and that takes not just a book, but a very very long book, and much of it will be garbage in/garbage out anyway).
(4) It’s well-known even in the medical world, and many books have been written on the subject, that a simple cholesterol/heart disease connection is suspect, especially for women and the elderly.
(5) It’s not just animal fat vs. low animal fat, it’s what sort of diet replaces the animal fat if you reduce it: what type of new fat, what type of carbohydrate, what quantities, what else you’re eating, what else you’re doing, etc.
(6) Different ethnic populations may have different propensities to have trouble with different foods.
(7) There are mitigating factors: for example, a lot of red meat could be counteracted by a lot of red wine in some diets.
(8) Heart disease is hardly the only thing that gets us. Just to take one example, it’s possible that animal fat isn’t so much implicated in heart disease but raises cancer risk significantly.
In summary, how about the old moderation approach?
Orwell, Animal Farm, and socialism’s inherent contradictions
Yesterday commenter “Nick” wrote this on the thread about Krystal Ball’s Animal Farm summary:
OK, OK, I hate to be this guy, but Orwell would have been fine with Ball’s reading. Orwell was a socialist. His problem with the pigs was that they became no different from the neighboring farmers; his problem with Soviet Marxism was that it acted just like capitalism
Orwell self-identified as a socialist, and “Nick” makes a thought-provoking point, but I disagree with it. Animal Farm isn’t about Orwell’s own complicated and contradictory political stance. It’s a parable that was meant to illustrate some of the inherent evils of Communism. Yes, economic exploitation by those in power towards the workers (all in the name of a false “equality”) was part of it. But the focus was on totalitarianism, lack of liberty, and statist control—problems he located in the left, not capitalism.
That said, it is also true that Orwell was very much against income inequality. In fact, that’s the main reason he identified as a socialist. His socialism was a strange beast, however, and he himself recognized the inherent contradictions and difficulties of adherence to it:
As [Orwell] describes so well in “Capitalism and Communism: Two Paths to Slavery”: “Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect.”
Orwell was a brilliant man, and he struggled to reconcile his wish for a certain type of world with his knowledge that such a world could probably never come to be as he wished it. Much of his writing was devoted to the horrors of failed attempts to achieve that world.
Animal Farm is a critique of Stalinism/Communism, and although capitalism as an exploitative system plays a role at the beginning of the book, by the end the astute reader sees Communism as at least as bad or even worse. Orwell was also aware of the strong possibility that liberty and socialism of any sort (not just Communist Stalinism) could not be reconciled, as the above quotes from him indicate. It is my opinion that Orwell came very close to understanding that his vision of a planned economy plus freedom could not come to pass, that the contradiction was basic, and that socialism would always sow the seeds of its own destruction. I just think he couldn’t fully face and embrace that knowledge because to do so would have meant renouncing a lifelong dream. So he clung to some notion of a kinder gentler socialism without the totalitarianism, while at the same time he wrote tirelessly about the evils of Communism.
More:
Socialists have also raised some interesting questions about what Orwell seems to be saying about Lenin and the rise of Stalinism. In fact, Orwell has suggested elsewhere that Trotsky and Lenin are partly responsible for the rise of totalitarianism in Russia and that Bolshevism itself contained elements of authoritarianism. Molyneux, the British socialist, has written a compelling article with a very close reading of the plot and characters of Animal Farm, and concludes that Orwell equates Lenin with Stalin (morphed into the single Napoleon character). Molyneux argues that Orwell gives no way to understand the reasons for the revolution’s failure except human nature (as opposed to insufficient material conditions). All this leaves the book with the reactionary message at the heart of it”“that all revolutions fail.
…Even in his best political writing, and his sharp exposés of aspects of capitalism, Orwell was never sure whether a real alternative was possible. Whatever Orwell’s intentions, his most famous books undoubtedly reflect these frustrations and despair. Writing as an isolated intellectual removed from day-to-day struggle, (with the notable exception of his participation in the Spanish Civil War), Orwell never regained the hope for workers’ power he experienced while in Spain.
And that’s coming from a pro-socialist, writing in a socialist periodical.
Obama’s foreign policy advisors: the parade of the puerile Best and Brightest
First we have Ben Rhodes, fiction writer morphed into Obama’s deputy National Security Advisor while barely in his mid-thirties, with nary a bit of foreign policy experience under his belt except what he learned on the job. But he has a way with words, and that’s what we want, don’t we?
Next meet Tommy Vietor, the 33-year-old former press van driver and Tweeter extraordinaire who became spokesman for the National Security Council under Obama. He newly distinguished himself the other day for—well, I’ll let him tell it himself:
I don’t usually quote YouTube video comments, because they’re not known for their high level of discourse. But looking at some of them right now, they seem pretty spot on:
This condescending little prick works for us, the people of the United States.
Not being completely morally bankrupt, I think I’d remember the events surrounding everything I did in conjunction with the deaths of 4 human beings. There is no moral compass in this Administration. We shouldn’t think for a moment that we who are in opposition to this Administration can expect an ounce of sympathy and human decency from this bunch if and when the bottom falls out of this country. If this clown is an example of the ‘quality’ of human being this Administration seeks to represent them, we are all in trouble. Zero integrity. Zero empathy. Zero humanity. Zero respect. Zero conscience. Zero tolerance. Zero spiritual awareness. Zero moral values. Zero appreciation for the truth. Zero compassion. Shall I go on, Dude?
Yeah dude who remembers things from two years ago anyway?
How old were you two years ago? That’s like, ancient history man.
Say what you want about this kid but, you really should pay very close attention to him. He is a portrait of what this nation has become and the character of its future leadership.
Another comment at YouTube refers to a “White House full of frat boys.” Bingo. I would amend that to “frat boys with power.”
The Vieter interview encapsulates and personifies the fundamental unseriousness of so much of the crew surrounding Obama and hand-picked by the President. They are play-acting at adulthood and responsibility, with a vast storehouse of arrogant snark underneath (I could say the same thing about Obama, except I think he’s a lot more serious—a lot). Is there any behavior that would disgrace these people, other than a clandestine tape showing them using a racist or homophobic epithet? Or have they lost that notion along with the idea of dignity?
[ADDENDUM: In a post about Ben Rhodes from about a year ago, I wrote:
Obama prefers to be surrounded by politically astute sycophants who are in way over their heads and don’t realize it. That way he is less likely to be threatened or challenged.
So it occurs to me that maybe the simplest way to describe what happened in Benghazi is that, from start to finish, nearly everyone in charge and everyone who was a close and trusted advisor to those in charge was a political operative. Everyone. This of course includes Obama and Hillary Clinton, and all the supposed national security advisors such as Rhodes.
So they are a bunch of rank amateurs who literally have no idea what they were doing except in the political sense. And then when things went bad, they lied about it””using their words to try to get out of a jam, with the help of their friends in the MSM. It’s worked for them in the past, and might well work again.
But perhaps that was a little too kind.]
Itty bitty rhino
I know that rhinos are tough and powerful beasts, and nothing to cozy up to.
But baby ones are—surprisingly cute:
David Horowitz on his lifelong subject: the left
David Horowitz has devoted his entire adult life to the left.
First, working for it. And then for the last three or so decades, fighting against it.
One of the many ways to fight it is to inform people about it, and Horowitz certainly knows whereof he speaks, having looked at politics and history from both sides now.
Horowitz is 75 years old, and had a major health scare a few years ago. So it makes sense that he would be looking back over his life’s work, which in the case of Horowitz consists of a ton of writing. So what better way to look back—and forward—than to issue a multi-volume compendium of his output that constitutes one long warning about the left’s strategy and duplicity, and its plans for the future.
I’ll let Horowitz tell the rest:
…[T]hese are not articles written on random subjects that happened to catch my fancy. Nor were they written as intellectual exercises that set out to explore various aspects of current issues. They are dispatches from a war zone, written to identify the nature, agendas, and long-term goals of a political movement of historic proportions that is also global in scope…
The nature of these conflicts as part of an ongoing war was, in my view, scarcely recognized by conservatives at the time, and has still not fully sunk in. Conservatives have rarely approached the individual conflicts with the seriousness they deserve, describing their adversaries as “liberals” ”” as if they subscribed to the principles of Lockean individualism, tolerance, and political compromise. Only with the advent of the Obama administration have some conservatives begun to connect the dots of origins and outcomes and to grasp the real nature of the national transformation that their adversaries intend.
It is for this conservative audience ”” a constituency on whom the American future depends ”” that I undertook to put together The Black Book of the American Left. It is first of all a narrative map of the battles fought over the last 40 years and ”” it must be said ”“ lost, almost every one. The Black Book contains a record as complete as any likely to be written of the struggle to resist a Communist-inspired Left that was not defeated in the Cold War but took advantage of the Soviet defeat to enter the American mainstream and conquer it, until today its members occupy the White House…
…[T]he movement now in motion to dismantle the American system, and bring this country to its knees, is no overnight phenomenon and is not the result of misguided idealisms or misunderstandings that can be easily repaired. The adversary cannot be dissuaded, because what drives him is a religious mission on which his identity and quest for a meaningful life depend. He can be stopped only by a political counterforce that is determined and organized, and ”” most importantly ”” that understands the gravity of the threat it faces…
…[My work] draws aside the veil of “good intentions” to reveal the malice underneath. That is its utility, and the main reason I am putting these volumes together…
…While I hope this book may be useful to those fighting to defend individual freedom and free markets, I do not deceive myself into believing that I have finally set the harpoon into the leviathan, a feat that is ultimately not possible. Progressivism is fundamentally a religious faith, which meets the same eternal human needs as traditional faiths, and for that reason will be with us always. In the last analysis, the progressive faith is a Gnosticism that can only be held at bay but never finally beaten back to earth.
MSNBC commentater Krystal Ball discourses on the plot and significance of Orwell’s Animal Farm
No, her name’s not a joke.
And yes, this quote of Ball’s would be funny if it weren’t so sad and so scary that this women hosts a show at MSNBC:
For his trouble, Piketty has predictably gotten the full Cold War treatment. The National Review calls his book “soft Marxism” and Lord only knows what they’re saying over at less responsible outlets or the comments section. Even the august and ostensibly economically literate Wall Street Journal tells him to read “Animal Farm.”
Animal Farm,” hmmm — isn’t that Orwell’s political parable of farm animals where a bunch of pigs hog up all the economic resources, tell the other animals they need all the food because they’re the makers and then scare up the prospect of a phony bogeyman every time their greed is challenged? Sounds familiar. Hey conservatives — it’s time to stop the childish Cold War name calling and deal with facts. Either that or be relegated to the kids’ and the crazy uncle table at holiday dinners.
Well actually, Krystal, it’s Orwell’s parable of the evils of Communism, which was no phony bogeyman. But hey, the Cold War is so 20th century, isn’t it? As was Orwell.
Is Ball a knave or a fool? I don’t think you can go wrong with the answer “both.”
She also reminds me of the following passage from “Fiddler On the Roof.” In the play it’s played for comedy, and it really is a funny scene. But what it’s mocking isn’t so very funny at all, because the character “Perchik” is a young leftist revolutionary who has ingratiated himself into Tevye’s household and is employed by Tevye to teach his daughters their Bible lessons. In this little speech Perchik manages to re-interpret the story of Jacob in the light of his political slant and thereby give Tevye’s youngest girls a little leftist indoctrination:
After Jacob had worked for Laban for seven years, do you know what happened? Laban fooled him and gave him his ugly daughter Leah. So to marry Rachel, Jacob was forced to work another seven years.
So, you see, children, the Bible clearly teaches us: you can never trust an employer.
One of Tevye’s oldest daughters, Hodel, overhears Perchik. Hodel’s got his number—although she of course ends up falling in love with him—and asks him sarcastically, “And that is what the Bible teaches us?”
Perchik’s reply: “That is the lesson of the story of Jacob… if you interpret it correctly.”
Indeed. It’s all in the interpretation.
The Benghazi email: it’s lies all the way down
As time goes on and the mendacity piles up, it’s getting harder to sort out and remember the entire hierarchy of lies this administration has told about Benghazi. And this, no doubt, is part of the plan—to get the opposition to dizzy itself playing a long-running game of whac-a-mole.
So let’s just say the whole thing is pretty much a house of lies, and that the latest Jay Carney statement—that the Rhodes email, the one instructing Rice to spin the protests as being motivated by the video, was not actually about Benghazi—is only the latest and perhaps most ridiculous of them all.
Andrew McCarthy points out the additional fact, usually ignored, that even if you look only at the Cairo protests rather than the Benghazi ones, the ones in Cairo were not motivated by the video either. The video as motivation was always a spin and a lie, from the very outset, designed to protect the administration:
The State Department knew there was going to be trouble at the embassy on September 11, the eleventh anniversary of al-Qaeda’s mass-murder of nearly 3,000 Americans. It was well known that things could get very ugly. When they did, it would become very obvious to Americans that President Obama had not “decimated” al-Qaeda as he was claiming on the campaign trail. Even worse, it would be painfully evident that his pro”“Muslim Brotherhood policies had actually enhanced al-Qaeda’s capacity to attack the United States in Egypt.
The State Department also knew about the obscure anti-Muslim video. Few Egyptians, if any, had seen or heard about it, but it had been denounced by the Grand Mufti in Cairo on September 9. Still, the stir it caused was minor, at best. As Tom Joscelyn has elaborated, the Cairo rioting was driven by the jihadists who were agitating for the Blind Sheikh’s release and who had been threatening for weeks to raid and torch our embassy. And indeed, they did storm it, replace the American flag with the jihadist black flag, and set fires around the embassy complex.
Nevertheless, before the rioting began but when they knew there was going to be trouble, State Department officials at the embassy began tweeting out condemnations of the video while ignoring the real sources of the threat: the resurgence of jihadists in Muslim Brotherhood”“governed Egypt, the continuing demand for the Blind Sheikh’s release (which underscored the jihadists’ influence), and the very real danger that jihadists would attack the embassy (which demonstrated that al-Qaeda was anything but “decimated”).
The transparent purpose of the State Department’s shrieking over the video was to create the illusion that any security problems at the embassy (violent rioting minimized as mere “protests”) were attributable to the anti-Muslim video, not to President Obama’s policies and patent failure to quell al-Qaeda.
Because there was a kernel of truth to the video story, and because the American media have abdicated their responsibility to report the predominant causes of anti-Americanism in Egypt, journalists and the public have uncritically accepted the notion ”” a false notion ”” that the video caused the Cairo rioting. That acceptance is key to the administration’s “Blame the Video” farce in connection with the lethal attack in Benghazi.
McCarthy’s article is (as usual) so good that it’s well worth reading the whole thing to get an idea of the depth and breadth of the administration’s lies, and how early in the game they were being promulgated.
I would like to point out another episode connected with Benghazi that’s gotten lost over time in the pile of other lies: I’d love to know what really was happening with Candy Crowley in the second debate. I continue to believe that was pre-orchestrated between some person (or persons) connected with the White House and Crowley herself. If you’re interested in refreshing your memory on what happened and my analysis of it, take a look here, here, and especially here.
Will Picketty’s book change the world?
The left certainly hopes so.
My new article is up at PJ.