Robert Frost on “the science is settled”

The New Neo Posted on by

No, the poet Robert Frost didn’t write anything about the believers versus the deniers of anthropogenic global warming. After all, he died in 1963.

When I started this blog (lo about nine long years ago!), I had some idea of things that were important to me that I planned to write about: politics, poetry, and dance, and whatever else might happen to strike my fancy. But those were the big three. As part of that idea, when I moved my blog to WordPress just a couple of years later, the photo I took and placed at the top of the page featured a carefully-arranged still life of a biography of Churchill, a volume of Frost’s collected works, and one of my old pointe shoes.

Frost has long been my favorite poet. He wrote an enormous number of poems that I (and most critics) would call masterpieces, many of them of great complexity and mystery, a feat he achieves while appearing to be easily accessible. But the poem I’m going to highlight here is not one of them; it’s a decidedly minor poem. When you read it, though, I think you’ll see why I find it an interesting example of Frost’s thought.

When I started the blog I was familiar with most of Frost’s major poems, and at least some of his minor work as well. But I knew very little about his thought—except what I could glean from the poems I had read. I hadn’t encountered what I would now call his “political” poems, although he wrote quite a few; they tend to be the lesser poems. But recently I’ve started reading about his politics—or rather, his philosophy of politics—and his views on eduction and a host of other things that turn out in some ways to be political, and I have to say I have been exceedingly impressed. He was a deep and important thinker in addition to a deep and important poet, and although that makes a certain amount of sense it’s certainly not something I’ve noticed in most other poets whose work I admire.

Some day I plan to write more on Frost’s ideas. But it’s a big topic to tackle, so for now I’ll just offer what I hope will be a tantalizing glimpse, the sonnet “The Broken Drought,” which was written in 1947:

THE BROKEN DROUGHT

The prophet of disaster ceased to shout
Something was going right outside the hall.
A rain, though stingy, had begun to fall
That rather hurt his theory of the drought
And all the great convention was about.
A cheer went up that shook the mottoed wall.
He did as Shakespeare says, you may recall,
Good orators will do when they are out.
Yet in his heart he was unshaken sure
The drought was one no spit of rain could cure.
It was the drought of deserts. Earth would soon
Be uninhabitable as the moon.
What for that matter had it ever been?
Who advised man to come and live therein?

Does he not have the AGW prophets’ number, including the idea somehow that man is a blight upon the earth?

Frost is often thought of as a quaint and homey New England bard, he of the silver mane and the Yankee accent. It was an image he carefully cultivated, and it wasn’t really a lie. But it was a great oversimplification. Frost was, among other things, an erudite and extremely well-read man who knew Greek and Latin and was deeply versed not only in the ancient classics in those languages but in the Bible, Shakespeare, science, philosophy, you-name-it.

If you’re interested in learning more about Frost’s thought, his notebooks were published a few years ago and are well worth looking at. Here are excerpts from several reviews of the book:

The notebooks bring Frost alive as a person and poet, showing him in the process of thinking through, rethinking, and formulating many of his most important beliefs, ideas, observations, and epigrams…They show a remarkable intelligence at work and provide access to the (typically concealed) processes underlying Frost’s performances, as well as a catalog of his most important concerns. Also important are Frost’s more general observations on human nature and behavior and on social and governmental organization (these often struck me as remarkably prescient of contemporary scientific and philosophical views.)

This work deserves a place with other editions of major writers such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Twain. One measure of the importance of this edition is that it demonstrates that Frost belongs in the company of America’s greatest writers, whose significance grows with our access to their complete works.

Since Frost used his notebooks to think through his poems, his essays and his teaching, they reveal only his working mind–and that’s revelation aplenty… By now, nobody buys Frost’s old image as a rustic autodidact or a versifying Andy Rooney. He read as widely and deeply as any American poet–the notebooks allude to the likes of Dryden, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein, Santayana and Maria Montessori–and funny as he was, he could still outbleak T. S. Eliot. He was also American poetry’s biggest ham (at least until Allen Ginsberg), and his poems were performances: not just in his well-known public readings but on the page.

What also surfaces is the immense erudition of Frost, who was better versed in the classics than Pound, and hugely read in the Bible and English poetry as well…Truth be told, it’s hard to think of another American poet who knows as much about what little we can safely apprehend as Robert Frost.

More than 40 years after his death, Robert Frost remains America’s quintessential poet and perhaps its least understood…What can be found is intellect in action, as Frost explores literature, history, philosophy, and religion. The voice is similar to that in his verse–clear, authoritative, sometimes sharp or funny–but the currents flowing through these pages predate those in the poetry, meaning that the water is colder and deeper, not a warm, easy dip.

But a rewarding one.

Getting Christie

The New Neo Posted on by

Anti-Christie forces have struck pay dirt with the revelations that some of his aides were engaged in some mighty nefarious and completely indefensible practices. The scandal involving aides who engineered George Washington Bridge lane closings as an act of political revenge is the talk of the MSM and the blogosphere.

There is unanimity on the condemnation of the aides’ acts, and Christie has joined in—and fired the offender as well. The real question is that of his own responsibility; Christie has himself declared “I’m responsible” and added that he had no idea that “anyone on my staff could be so stupid and so deceitful.”

Opinions on this line up in the ways one would expect. My opinion is that in general it hurts him, but unless more emerges to implicate him directly, it’s not a fatal blow. If President Obama can claim lack of knowledge of far greater and more systemic and repeated offenses on the part of those under him, and somehow come out of it with reputation only slightly damaged (it’s been Obamacare that seems to be sinking his polls, not all the rest), then Christie could do it as well.

If this turned out to have been a widespread and recurrent pattern for Christie’s staff, that’s different, and would inform both his general judgment and his control of his staff and the messages he’s giving to them about what’s acceptable and what is not. Obama has been criticized, rightly, on those grounds; he’s had too many things happen under his watch, too many incidents for which he must say “I had no idea it was happening.” Christie’s just beginning, and he may get a pass for this one.

But he’d better watch out, because the press will not be kind to him the way they’ve been to Obama. Au contraire: he has a target (metaphorical, I assume) on his back.

[NOTE: As for whether Christie can win the Republican nomination, even minus this scandal, I’m on the fence about that. I think conservative opposition has been consistently strong. For quite some time now I’ve favor Scott Walker of Wisconsin.]

Liberty: the great dividing line

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “DNW” has a question:

How in the world could these [liberal and leftist] others not value liberty and voluntary association as the very premisses that made human life worth living? But they obviously don’t…

We now have a situation wherein the classic justifying predicate of this polity and our civil association ”“ the preservation and enhancement of personal liberty ”“ has been officially abandoned by one major party and a large portion of the electorate, in favor of a fascist scheme of state enforced social solidarity and life-energy redistribution.

I can’t speak for all liberals, “progressives,” or leftists. Nor do they even speak for each other, because there’s a great deal of variety among them in how far they want to go to stifle liberty, and how much they value liberty.

In my own family of origin, for example, there was quite a variety of points of view on that score, especially if you included distant relatives. My own father and mother were garden-variety liberals (“liberals” as defined back then, which was not as leftist as now). But the very-extended family included leftists various and sundry, including those who were Sovietphiles and even a few later on who were Maoists.

Talk about fun! Family gatherings involving this larger group (which occurred quite infrequently) usually featured—after a few hours of conviviality—a degeneration into shouting matches over politics. I wish now I had paid more attention to the details of the content. But even as a child I heard enough to be both vaguely entertained by these arguments and repelled by them. The latter emotion won out, in part because of the arguments’ repetitive nature (nobody ever convinced anyone of anything) and in part because what the leftist branch was saying seemed so dogmatic, unreasonable, and manifestly wrong to me.

Those of you who lump together leftists and liberals may be surprised to hear that the arguments between the two wings of my family were so bitter (there were one or two conservatives, too, who had married in). But the liberals and the leftists were at loggerheads, the liberals believing in liberty, capitalism, and that the USSR was a totalitarian slagheap of a police state up to no good in the world, and the leftists believing that the true liberty lay in defeating capitalism, and that the Soviets were the greatest thing since sliced bread.

That was in the 50s and 60s, of course, and a little bit in the 70s as well. The mainstream of the Democratic Party, which my parents then represented, has moved to the left over the ensuing years. Some of the liberals I know have moved to the left with it, but some have not. And in the last couple of years, as the assaults on liberty have cascaded, I have noticed that the liberals I know seem to divide naturally into two camps: those who love liberty and to whom it is important, and those who do not and to whom it is not.

I don’t know the relative size of the two groups, because I don’t seek out political discussions with my friends and family; I don’t want get-togethers to degenerate into the useless, repetitive, unproductive arguments I witnessed in my youth, which they easily could, with me now as the sole conservative. But I know that those two groups exist, and I think that what differentiates them are (a) the person’s need to control others and/or society; and (b) the degree that the person thinks he/she can do so effectively and get the desired results.

Among most of my friends their motives are “good”—that is, they want people to be happier, healthier, and in general just better. Some leftists I know have the same motivation (I would add that most of the people who think they are doing good are also motivated by the need to feel that they are good people for wanting that). But many leftists—we’re talking about quite a few of the leaders of the movement, and certainly people such as Stalin—have a different motivation: they are motivated almost purely by the desire for power and control.

There is an unholy alliance between the two groups. The first is the much-larger pack of would-be do-gooders who believe that liberalism is the way to go about it, whose minds are formed by a combination of their families growing up, present-day peers, the MSM, eduction, politicians, literature, the entertainment business, and in some cases their “progressive” churches and synagogues. The second is the smaller but extremely influential group of leftist activists, some proudly out as unrepentant “progressives,” and some just quietly going about their business, some motivated by the desire for power/control plus the idea that they’re doing “good,” and the rest just wanting the power/control part.

Back when Mayor Bloomberg of New York was heavily engaged in banning Big Gulps, I had some discussions with a couple of liberal friends about it. Some were offended by what Bloomberg had done, although others were in favor. That was one of the strongest demonstrations I’ve seen of what I have come to consider a very important and somewhat invisible dividing line between those liberals who love and value liberty and those who do not. You might call them the non-statists (or perhaps the less-statists) and the statists. Don’t forget, too, that there are statists on the right, too, although in my experience there are far fewer.

But it was the Sarah Conly book that really crystallized things for me. Remember Conly, author of Against Autonomy? I can think of no better demonstration of the statist impulse plus the supposedly do-goody one combining to create a vile synergy. And who better to explain it all but Ms. Conly herself:

I argue that autonomy, or the freedom to act in accordance with your own decisions, is overrated””that the common high evaluation of the importance of autonomy is based on a belief that we are much more rational than we actually are. We now have lots of evidence from psychology and behavioral economics that we are often very bad at choosing effective means to our ends. In such cases, we need the help of others””and in particular, of government regulation””to keep us from going wrong.

If you want to know how a person can justify such tyranny to themselves, that’s how. How they can be so stupid as to believe it a good idea (assuming that Conly does believe it rather than merely mouthing it in order to get a lot of publicity and maybe even power one day) is another, more mysterious question. It’s a question I have yet to answer to my satisfaction, actually, but let’s just say that I’m beginning to think the desire for liberty versus the desire to control others might just be something innate.

The sad thing is that even those liberals who love liberty are for the most part voting for people dedicated to ending it.

[NOTE: I’m gratified to see that the majority of the Amazon reviews for Conly’s abominable oeuvre are mostly very negative.]

The sad stories of Obamacare

The New Neo Posted on by

It occurs to me that Obamacare is one of the few liberal policies that gives the Republicans the chance to highlight sob stories from ordinary people. Liberals think they own that approach, and so they find it hard to believe that the anti-Obamacare forces have successfully used it. After all, the Republicans are supposed to be the meanies and the Democrats the compassionate ones.

The left keeps trying to find success stories to counter this. I have no doubt there are such stories, and that there will be more of them to come as Obamacare goes forward. But the left may be discovering that a sad story gets more attention than a happy one.

Especially when there are so many sad stories, some of them coming from Democrats.

Obamacare and religious freedom: for who?

The New Neo Posted on by

There have been a host of recent cases (and pending ones) involving the Obamacare mandates and religious freedom. This article explains that nonprofit religious employers (churches, for example) can be exempted from Obamacare and/or from the Obamacare penalty/tax if it violates their religious beliefs to be forced to help foot the bill for birth control for other people, and therefore to facilitate and enable birth control, and if paying the penalty instead would be an onerous burden for the group. However, for-profit businesses who have religious beliefs that go against contraception are not exempt so far, although they have mounted court challenges on that issue. Groups such as the nuns of the Little Sisters of the Poor—who are “affiliated with religious organizations but not owned or controlled by them”—fall into an in-between gray area.

One of the main legal questions that has yet to be determined in cases involving for-profit group exemptions on religious grounds is whether such groups/corporations are to be considered “persons” for the purposes of Obamacare. However, an actual person (an individual, that is) with religious beliefs that violate the birth control provision of Obamacare is not exempt. Such an individual is ordinarily required to buy contraceptive coverage under Obamacare or pay the penalty/tax for not getting an insurance policy. He or she is not required to use the birth control coverage thus purchased, of course. Nor is he or she required to directly support anyone else using it—although he/she and everyone else is indirectly required to support it by paying into the system that subsidizes others’ use of contraception.

But that does not mean there is no religious exemption from Obamacare for an individual. There is a category of individuals (actual persons, that is, not corporations that some courts might consider to be “persons” under the law) that is exempted for religious reasons from Obamacare and its penalties, according to the IRS. Those persons are members of certain religious groups:

6. What are the statutory exemptions from the requirement to obtain minimum essential coverage?

Religious conscience. You are a member of a religious sect that is recognized as conscientiously opposed to accepting any insurance benefits. The Social Security Administration administers the process for recognizing these sects according to the criteria in the law.

Which religious “sects” would qualify? They would seem to be the Anabaptists: Mennonites, Hutterites and the Amish. Members of those groups are already exempted from the Social Security and Medicare systems, and for them the same exemption would be true of Obamacare on the grounds that the health insurance system as whole is against their religion.

There have long been rumors that the same might be true for Muslims and that they might be exempted from the Obamacare requirements. But because they have not ever been exempted from the Social Security and Medicare systems, it is thought less likely (although within the realm of possibility) that they would be relieved of Obamacare obligations on similar grounds. It would be certainly be interesting to see a court challenge on that point, though.

Another interesting question would be whether an individual Catholic who is against birth control could obtain an exemption from either just the birth control element of coverage or from the Obamacare mandate as a whole, on the grounds of that individual’s religious beliefs. The answer is almost certainly “no,” due to the aforementioned fact that there would be no requirement for such an individual to actually use the birth control coverage, just that he or she buy it, and that as an individual that person is not directly subsidizing the birth control of others.

But why couldn’t the same thing be argued of individual Mennonites about the insurance system as a whole? Why should these individuals not have to buy health insurance coverage like the rest of us, whether they use it or not or object to it or not, or at the very least to pay the tax/penalty if they don’t buy it?

After all, the mandate now goes by the lovely Orwellian name of the “individual shared responsibility provision,” according to the IRS. See, it’s not a mandate at all, nor is it a tax, although the Supreme Court said it was and the IRS is in charge of it. It’s just a “shared responsibility” to make health insurance better, and who wouldn’t want to help with that?

Here’s the IRS’s definition:

Under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government, state governments, insurers, employers and individuals are given shared responsibility to reform and improve the availability, quality and affordability of health insurance coverage in the United States. Starting in 2014, the individual shared responsibility provision calls for each individual to have minimum essential health coverage (known as minimum essential coverage) for each month, qualify for an exemption, or make a payment when filing his or her federal income tax return.

The provision applies to individuals of all ages, including children.

Those who believe that the mandate should have been found unconstitutional (and I am one of them; I think the grounds should have been that it is an unequal capitation tax) also believe that no one should be subject to it and no one should have to pay a penalty for not buying it. But even for those who accept the government’s argument that the mandate is both constitutional, and that there is a shared responsibility to provide health insurance for all, it seems to me that there’s an argument to be made that there is no reason to exempt individual members of anti-insurance religions such as the Anabaptists from paying the penalty/tax for opting out of Obamacare coverage, if Catholics and others are not afforded the same privilege. Anabaptists are in more or less the same position as individual anti-birth-control Catholics who are forced to buy coverage or pay the penalty, are they not? In other words, why are the religious beliefs of those who are against insurance as a whole protected, and the beliefs of those who are against segments of Obamacare not protected? At the very least, why shouldn’t the latter be exempted from paying for the birth control portion of their policies?

Lawyers and courts may have an answer for this. No doubt they’ll come up with one, if need be. But I haven’t seen it yet. Any legal takers out there who’d like to enlighten me on what it is?

[NOTE: I’m pretty sure the title of this post should rightly be “for whom“, but I didn’t want to sound too pedantic.

And I wasn’t 100% sure which was correct, anyway. Any really fine grammarians out there who can weigh in on this burning question?]

The Big “trickle-down” Lie

The New Neo Posted on by

What’s the lie?

That anyone on the right ever advocated it in the first place.

Thomas Sowell’s challenge has gone unanswered all these years:

Years ago, this column challenged anybody to quote any economist outside of an insane asylum who had ever advocated this “trickle-down” theory. Some readers said that somebody said that somebody else had advocated a “trickle-down” policy. But they could never name that somebody else and quote them.

But that doesn’t stop the left, because it’s such a useful lie for them to tell. And “trickle-down” is so much fun to say.

Getting Obamacare straight

The New Neo Posted on by

Last night I was reading this piece about Obamacare as a redistribution of wealth, and it occurred to me that even fairly decent articles about Obamacare seem to get some basic facts wrong.

I’m not saying I’m the world’s greatest expert on the details of Obamacare. But I have put in my hours. Wish I’d kept count, but my guess is that I’ve clocked way over a hundred so far. I shudder to even think of the grand total, and I’ve not completely mastered the subject yet, if ever.

But the upshot is that I’d like to take this opportunity to correct what I see as a few common misconceptions, and I welcome any additions or criticisms from the readers here. Please read this article first to get an idea of what I’m referring to. Here are the general corrections I’d like to add to it, for those of you who’d like to know some details (number 3 is most important, I think):

(1) The author is right about the incomes and the differential premium prices for the different incomes. But he forgets to mention that poorer people can also get big subsidies on their co-pays and the deductibles, too (if they choose a silver plan, that is), so that their monetary advantages don’t just involve the premium payments, but can involve a reduction on the entire kit and kaboodle of their out-of-pocket contributions, slowing it down to a mere trickle.

(2) Those percentages the author gives—60% for bronze (40% contribution from the patient), 70% for silver (30% contribution from the patient)—are correct, but they’re not explained correctly by him. First of all, those are just averages; the real patient contributions could differ a great deal depending on how much health care a person actually uses in a year. What’s more, he says that those are the percentages people pay after they have paid the deductible, which is wrong. Those patient contribution percentages actually include what the person pays for the deductible, too.

(3) The author is right about the differential prices for premiums depending on income, but he’s wrong about the details of the redistribution part. The money that the richer people pay to buy health insurance does not go to directly subsidize the premiums of the poor people. The money that the richer people pay for premiums goes to the insurance companies, and the insurance companies get exactly the same amount for premiums for the poor people–it’s just that the insurance companies get it mostly from the government instead of from the poor person him/herself (or from richer people’s premiums). The insurance company makes the same on rich and poor people. So where does the government get the money for the subsidies, if not from the richer people’s premiums? From a whole bunch of new taxes, for example on those making over $250K, on medical devices, etc. (see the list here), some of which are borne by the rich and some by the middle class.

So there is an income redistribution, it’s just not as direct as the author makes it seem. It needed to be hidden to preserve the fiction that Obamacare would not wreak any hardship on most of us, only on the very very wealthy.

Chicago gun sale ban struck down

The New Neo Posted on by

A federal court has ruled as unconstitutional a gun sale ban in the city of Chicago.

In the wake of the SCOTUS decisions in Heller (5-4) and McDonald (also 5-4), an outright gun ban is unacceptable. Chicago tried to fine-tune its law to restrict guns a great deal but to still comply with Heller and McDonald, but this ruling says it fell short of that. Now it will probably fine-tune the law some more:

The judge said he was delaying the effect of his ruling to allow the city time to seek a stay during an appeal or, if it elects to forgo an appeal, to consider and enact sales restrictions “short of a complete ban.”

My guess is that Chicago will continue to be very restrictive about lawful gun purchase and possession. And I predict this will have little or no effect on the possession of firearms by criminals, only by law-abiding citizens.

What’s more, note that those two SCOTUS decisions were 5-4. All that has to happen is for one SCOTUS justice to retire or die during the remaining years of the Obama administration, and with a new Obama appointment that entire dynamic reverses and I am almost certain that both Heller and McDonald would end up being overruled.