50 best conservative columnists?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s John Hawkins’ list.

I like Steyn, who came in #1, but I prefer Sowell, who was #3. I’ve never even heard of some of the other high-up’s, and what in heaven’s name is Dick Morris doing at #14, or anywhere on the list? Andrew McCarthy, #30, is one of my very favorite writers, a keen analytical mind and a courageous one as well. I would have placed him much, much higher.

But the list reminds me how much depth there is on the conservative bench in terms of writers. It’s too bad most of the people reading them are conservatives, too. If I were to show the list to my liberal friends, how many of them would they have ever even heard about? At the most, probably only Coulter and Malkin (whom they’d hate), Krauthammer, and Morris.

Totten on Havana

The New Neo Posted on by

This article on his visit to Havana is one of the best—and one of the saddest—essays Michael Totten has ever written. Communism destroys nearly everything it touches, not just physically but emotionally and spiritually.

Totten’s essay put me in mind of this famous quote by Winston Churchill:

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

On the same page as the Churchill quote are a bunch of other people sounding off on the topic of socialism. Some of their quotes seemed worth highlighting, as well. Here’s one from Albert Einstein which reminds me (not that I needed much reminding; it’s one of the recurrent themes of Thomas Sowell’s work) that geniuses in one field are not necessarily geniuses in other fields:

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labour…I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.

To counter Einstein, we have Roger Scruton’s: “It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe it, but the power that it confers on intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world.”

From L. Neil Smith:

Socialists get bees in their bonnets. And because they chronically lack any critical faculty to examine and evaluate their ideas, and because they are pathologically unwilling to consider the opinions of others, and most of all, because socialism is a mindset that regards the individual ”” and his rights ”” as insignificant, compared to whatever the socialist believes the group needs, terrible, terrible things happen when socialists acquire power.

And for those who label Hitler as having been on the right, we have this from the horse’s mouth:

We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.

“But what about Western Europe, for example Scandinavia?” my leftist friends might say. Well, what about it? Not only is the US different culturally and demographically, and therefore cannot be easily compared, but I have been singularly unimpressed by the state of both liberty and initiative in much of western Europe (which in any event is starting to run out of other people’s money, and which has been protected economically by the fact that the US has been providing its military security). As for Sweden, that paradise of welfare, see this, this, and this.

Well, what do you expect?

The New Neo Posted on by

After all,Obamacare is probably the very first business most of them have ever run.

Reuters reports:

The administration is planning a “workaround” for payments, said Daniel Durham, vice president for policy and regulatory affairs at America’s Health Insurance Plans.

Health plans will estimate how much they are owed, and submit that estimate to the government. Once the system is built, the government and insurers can reconcile the payments made with the plan data to “true up” payments, he said.

“The intent is to make sure plans get paid on time, which is a good thing,” Durham told Reuters.

The fix puts an additional “burden” on insurance companies, already taxed by having to double-check faulty enrollment data from the HealthCare.gov system.

Now, companies need to quickly put together financial management systems to make the payment estimates, so they can be paid beginning in January, he said.

Can an entire administration be impeached for gross negligence?

However, repeal of Obamacare is not an option, according to Obama:

“We’re not repealing it as long as I’m president,” said Obama, who was flanked by Americans who have benefited from aspects of the law. He said, “If I have to fight another three years to make sure that this law works, then that’s what I’ll do.”

But he’s not an ideologue; oh no, not Obama.

And who’s that “we,” kimosabe? When last I checked, it was Congress that passed legislation, including repeals. Of course, Obama might mean he would veto any repeal, but as I wrote in an earlier post today, if enough Democrats turn against Obama and Obamacare (not likely, but possible), his veto might be overriden.

Wonder what he’d be planning then.

Can Obamacare be tossed?

The New Neo Posted on by

“Buddhahat” asks a good question:

Even if [Obamacare] continues to collapse in such a dramatic fashion ”“ thousands of doctors unavailable, numberless accounts hacked, etc ”“ so what? The MSM starts to figure out it’s a scam and start actual reporting about the extent of the disaster? So what?

It doesn’t matter how outraged we are. It doesn’t matter how many Dem senators are tossed out in 2014. We CAN’T get rid of Obamacare. Unless there are 66 Republican votes in the Senate, the “President” will veto any repeal bill sent to him, and Obamacare will continue to grind away at our freedoms until 2016, when the cancer will have taken root and it will be too late.

Too pessimistic?

I tend to think it’s impossible to be too pessimistic about Obamacare. But I think the situation may be a bit better than buddhahat is indicating.

If things continue to go poorly—and that’s a fairly big “if”—it will be the Democrats who will put pressure on Obama to allow them to repeal it. That doesn’t mean he’ll acquiesce, of course, but it’s possible.

People often say the result of all the chaos will be to try to pass single payer. But if Democrats don’t have the votes to do this in 2014, they won’t have them during the Obama presidency (as long as his presidency only lasts two terms).

That doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen later, as soon as Democrats get back more power in Congress and a new Democratic president (Hillary? Elizabeth Warren?) is elected. But I don’t think it will be happening during Obama’s presidency. And if Congress is controlled by Republicans, and enough Democrats join in (the ones coming up for re-election in 2016, for example), there even could be enough votes to override an Obama veto.

There’s also the impeachment avenue, which I do not think will succeed because they will not have enough Senate votes to convict. But SCOTUS could also surprise us by ruling against Obamacare in some of the upcoming lawsuits.

There’s also the problem that, if Obamacare is undone, another system would need to replace it. The old system will have been at least somewhat destroyed by that time, and I’m not at all sure it could be successfully reinstated (can Humpty be put back together again?). Republicans would need to facilitate a way to do that, plus add a few of their long-suggested-but-never-enacted reforms: fewer mandates rather than more, portability, some way of dealing with the pre-existing condition problem (a national high-risk pool?). Obama might veto a bill like that, too, but if enough threatened Democrats join in with the Republicans (to protect their own political hide) there could be enough votes to override Obama’s veto.

There’s a larger issue, of course, which is that a combination of factors means that the country has been leaning more and more leftward as time goes on. Will Obamacare disillusionment result in a course correction to that drift? Perhaps, perhaps not; I really can’t predict that. But the immigration battle coming up will be very telling. If Republicans lose that one (or chose not to fight it) all bets are off, because if amnesty goes through it is likely to solidify Democratic gains enormously.

Men’s and women’s brains are different

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, duh.

It’s the connectivity, stupid:

Researchers found that many of the connections in a typical male brain run between the front and the back of the same side of the brain, whereas in women the connections are more likely to run from side to side between the left and right hemispheres of the brain…

A special brain-scanning technique called diffusion tensor imaging, which can measure the flow of water along a nerve pathway, established the level of connectivity between nearly 100 regions of the brain, creating a neural map of the brain called the “connectome”, Professor Verma said…

Men tend to outperform women involving spatial tasks and motor skills – such as map reading – while women tend to better in memory tests, such as remembering words and faces, and social cognition tests, which try to measure empathy and “emotional intelligence”.

Anyone who doesn’t think men and women are different in the way their brains operate hasn’t been paying attention. And anyone who thinks the differences are entirely due to nurture and not nature also hasn’t been paying attention (or has been paying attention but is in denial for political reasons). I’m pretty sure, however, that articles such as the one I linked to are oversimplifications and overgeneralizations, and that there’s a fair amount of overlap between the sexes in the results. But my intuition tells me 🙂 that there’s a general truth there.

However, I wonder whether they actually mean “map reading,” or whether they mean “sense of direction.” For example, I’m very good at reading a map. In the pre-GPS days I was the navigator in most of the male-female driving teams of which I was a member, and I did fairly well at that task. It’s when I’m trying to find my way around a place without a map that I fall down. When I ask for directions (which, even though I’m a woman, I really don’t like to do) I prefer to get simple instructions rather than more conceptual ones. Just tell me “go three blocks, turn left, then turn right at the Citgo station” rather than trying to get me to understand whether I’m going north or south or anything like that.

And give me a paper and pencil. I must write it down if it involves anything more than two steps.

At the Potemkin healthcare.gov website…

The New Neo Posted on by

…it seems we have Potemkin enrollments:

Obama administration officials acknowledged today that some of the roughly 126,000 Americans who completed the torturous online enrollment process in October and November might not be officially signed up with their selected issuer, even if the website has told them they are.

Technical problems surrounding the transfer of an applicant’s personal information from the federal marketplace to the selected insurance company have plagued the system since its launch, making it difficult for insurers to finalize some enrollments. The 834 forms that issuers receive from the system have been riddled with errors, including often duplicate or incomplete information.

While the front-end of the website has been vastly improved, the back-end glitches remain a serious concern, IT experts and industry officials say.

It makes sense, doesn’t it? The whole thing seems to be about PR at the moment, and has been for quite some time. We have a president who can’t manage to do much except undo things (such as, for instance, the health insurance system in America) going out to sell what he can’t manage to do: create a functional alternative health insurance system and a website on which people can actually buy it.

The title of that Politico piece to which I just linked, “White House returns to Obamacare sales mode,” seems a bit in error. After all, has Obama ever left Obamcare sales mode? He’s been selling it for four years, with no end in sight, although it has become a harder sell over time:

President Barack Obama will launch a coordinated campaign Tuesday by the White House, congressional Democrats and their outside allies to return attention to why the Affordable Care Act passed in the first place.

So Obama wants to return attention to the Cornhusker Kickback and all the other wheeling and dealing, including the use of reconciliation to get around the problem in the Senate? No, of course not; it turns out he wants to emphasize the benefits Obamacare affords:

After two months of intense coverage of the botched HealthCare.gov rollout, the president will host a White House event kicking off a three-week drive to refocus the public on the law’s benefits, senior administration officials told POLITICO.

The White House will take the lead in emphasizing a different benefit each day until the Dec. 23 enrollment deadline for Jan. 1 coverage. The daily message will be amplified through press events and social media by Democratic members of Congress, the Democratic National Committee, congressional campaign committees and advocacy organizations, officials said.

I got a new slogan for them: “A benefit a day keeps the doctor…away.” No, I guess that one won’t do.

I would think that if there actually were benefits from Obamacare, then people could perceive them and judge for themselves. Obama is afraid that won’t happen, and that it certainly won’t happen before the all-important 2014 election, so in the absence of felt benefits I guess we must have rhetorically-stated benefits. I would also imagine that those benefits will continue to be ones that are lied about, just as they were before the last election.

Some of those lies will be that the cancellations will only affect a tiny percentage of the population. Others might be about keeping your doctor; how many people will notice the narrowness of the networks right away, or realize what effect Obamacare will have on the US healthcare system as a whole over time? Other lies will involve not just the supposed benefits, but will misrepresent and exaggerate the previous problems with health insurance, including the oft-repeated one about how insurance companies were always cancelling policies when people got sick.

Lies all the way down.

Happy Chanukah!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a slightly edited version of a previous post.]

Chanukah began the night before Thanksgiving. But since it has eight days I still get a chance to wish you a happy one—tonight and for two more days, anyway.

The words of this Chanukah song in Yiddish—written in 1924 before the Holocaust and before the establishment of Israel—are not happy. But I didn’t know that when I first heard it, and I post it anyway because I think it’s very beautiful:

Here are the lyrics, as translated by Theodore Bikel (you can hear an excerpt of him singing it here):

O little lights of mystery
You recall our history
And all that went before
The battles and the bravery
And our release from slavery
Miracles galore.

As my eyes behold your flames
I recall our heroes’ names
And our ancient dream:
“Jews were learning how to fight
To defeat an awesome might
They could reign supreme”

“They would rule their own domain
When the enemy was slain,
The Temple cleansed and whole.
Once there was a Jewish land
And a mighty Jewish hand.”
Oh, how it moves my soul!

O little lights of mystery
You retell our history
Your tales are tales of pain.
My heart is filled with fears
My eyes are filled with tears
“What now?” says the haunting refrain.

Remember: written in 1924.

Bikel translated the song that way in order to make the rhymes come out. But a more literal translation of that last verse might be:

Oh little candles,
your old stories
awaken my anguish;
deep in my heart there
stirs
a tearful question:
What will be next?

Indeed.

Fixing Healthcare.gov

The New Neo Posted on by

The government has had three and a half years to construct the website, and two months to fix it after its disastrous first opening.

Before I talk about the re-opening, here’s a hypothetical: let’s suppose that Healthcare.com really had been “fixed” in those two months. What would that have said about the failure of the previous three and a half years? What was the Obama administration and the people it hired to design the website doing all that time, if it was that easy to reach the goal in a concentrated two-month push? Do backs have to be against the wall and political futures starkly at stake in order to create a functioning website? And what does it all say about the administration’s ability to perform more complex and important tasks—including, for example, designing a system by which all Americans will have effective health insurance without impacting negatively on the economy and the health care system itself?

Of course, if the website really isn’t yet functioning all that well—if (as is highly suspected) the security is still bad, or it can’t handle a large amount of traffic, or the information it conveys is often incorrect, or the website continues to be unable to interface with insurance companies to get payments to them—that also doesn’t say much for the efficiency and competence of the government.

I think we can safely say that either way, this is not government’s finest hour.

In fact, Jeffrey Zients, the man chosen to fix the website, doesn’t seem to have a whole lot of faith in the government’s ability to do this, either [emphasis mine]:

“If you bring this all together ”” private sector speed and execution; the command center in Columbia with real-time monitoring; troubleshooting when things go wrong, and overall coordination and direction; a hardware-upgrade team, and then a software-fix team ”” what’s happened is the site has gotten better and better each week,” Zients said.

If you read the entire article, it’s clear what extraordinary efforts have been made during the past two months. It’s hard not to wonder how much that has cost on top of the hundreds of millions of dollars already spent.

It also seems clear that the last two months were spent concentrating on how the site would appear to the person using it, rather than how it would actually function. The whole thing may now be a sort of Potemkin village:

One example of the “ruthless prioritization” was to focus first on fixing the site for consumers, officials said. That decision has meant that insurers are still getting faulty reports on those who have signed up for coverage, which could become a major problem once more people buy insurance and try to use their benefits.

Great.

[NOTE: Because my main source for the information in this post was this article in Politico, I’d like to point out that Politico is ordinarily a pro-Obama pro-Democratic website. So if that’s what Politico is saying, just imagine what the truth is.]

The drones of Amazon

The New Neo Posted on by

Fantasy? Soon-to-be reality?

Then again, you could just go to a nearby store if you need something that quickly.

Will people be tempted to shoot them down? How will Amazon avoid landing a drone on someone’s head? What about apartment-dwellers? Will the proliferation of drones lead to midair collisions?

Not to mention the fact that the guy in the video was waiting right at his door. How will the drone summon a homeowner who isn’t willing to hang out near the entrance?

Then there’s the competition, which has its own problems: