…goes into the witness protection program:
Again with the hat: donation time!
[BUMPED UP—last day for this appeal, although feel free to donate any old time.]
Yes, it’s hard to believe, isn’t it? Time passes so quickly when we’re enjoying ourselves.
But yes, it’s been a while since I asked you to donate to a semi-worthy cause: this blog. And so I’m going to ask you again to use the “donate” button on the right sidebar beside the photo of the hat, and give whatever you see fit.
Every single donation— large or small—adds up, and helps me a great deal in continuing the blog. If each and every reader gave even a few dollars, it would be a glorious thing. But whether you decide to donate or not, please keep visiting and keep commenting. I appreciate all of you. Comments and readers are a very big part of what makes this blog work.
I thank you all in advance. I’ll probably repeat this notice every now and then for the next week, the equivalent of jiggling that cup/hat. But I’ll be discreet about it. And it’s a lot better than those fund-raising drives they have on TV, isn’t it? No interruption of the scheduled programming.
Popular baby names, state by state
It seems odd to me (although perhaps it shouldn’t) that the most popular baby names have a strong regional component.
Take a look:
The most popular girls’ names (Emma, Sophia) are all names that, in my youth, were considered hopelessly old-fashioned and completely passé. Superlative teasing material. But everything old is new again.
None of the recent girls’ name favorites are the traditional and previously-stable choices such as Mary, either. But boys’ most popular names show a mix of the new and the traditional. Tried-and-true names such as William and James and Alexander are still hanging in there, for example—in the South for William, Alaska the lone holdout for James, and a weird NY/NJ/Nevada axis for Alexander.
Florida is an outlier, standing proudly alone with Isabella for girls and Jayden for boys.
But what’s up with Mason? I’d hardly even heard of it as a first name before, except for the guy who wrote “Classical Gas,” and 70s kid ad-star Mason Reese (I know, I know; I’m old). So why has Mason completely conquered most of New England and the midwest, as well as the far-flung states of Washington and Louisiana?
Aha! It’s those super-duper trendsetters, the Kardashians.
Obamacare: intended to fail?
A popular argument on the right is that single payer was the goal of Obamacare all along. That certainly makes some sense, especially since quite a few Democrats (and even Obama, some years ago) are on record as supporting single payer.
But as Rick Moran (quoting Jim Geraghty) has pointed out:
This is where you say, “It’s designed to fail! It’s designed to collapse the existing health-care system!” That’s a really compelling theory, but the catch is that it’s got Obama’s name on it and the Democratic party has built just about all of their political capital on the idea that it would work. Democrats would be betting that after completely fouling up their signature domestic policy and one-sixth of the American economy, the voters would trust them to give it another shot, this time making even bigger, more radical, expensive, and complicated changes.
Moran adds:
Besides, for the conspiracy to work, a single-payer system would have to get through the GOP House, not to mention needing 60 votes in the Senate. Does anyone believe that after the internal bloodletting over defunding Obamacare there are any Republicans who would vote for their own electoral execution and help pass a single-payer system?
No, this is sheer incompetence, coupled with typical dishonesty from the administration. They may pay for it by owning the biggest boondoggle in American history ”” the failure of a government entitlement that could discredit the idea of big government for a long time.
Good points. But Moran is forgetting the way Cloward-Piven works: overload a system, collapse it, and then take advantage of the crisis to ride to the rescue with something more leftward, because the original Humpty-Dumpty (in this case, the private health insurance system) can’t be put back together again. Who would people be more likely to turn to in such a crisis, mean old Republicans or the kindly Democrats who mean well and wanted single payer in the first place?
Alternate theory: that the Democrats thought the problems with Obamacare would be smaller and more controllable, and that the general reaction to covering more people would be good—good enough that Democrats would gain seats in Congress. Then the case could be made later that a switch to single payer would make a somewhat-good-but-still-flawed thing even better.
But perhaps Obamacare versus single payer wasn’t and isn’t the big issue. Perhaps the Democrats don’t care so very much which it is because the real goal isn’t what sort of health insurance system we have. The real goal is solidifying political power for their side. Anything that makes more people see government as rescuer can accomplish this, as well as anything that controls more people. They probably figure that either system would increase Democratic power. Although single payer would be better for this, either would do.
The new slogan: “Obamacare is more than a website”
And I agree. Much much more.
The Obamacare website is only the tip of the iceberg, although if a substantial number of healthy non-Medicaid recipients aren’t able to sign up within a reasonable amount of time it could cause what’s known in the insurance biz as a death spiral.
So here’s the line that government propagandists seem to have agreed on, from Obama on down to underling Chris Jennings, who writes in USA Today:
But it’s important to remember that the Affordable Care Act is much more than a website…The core of the law ”” health insurance ”” works just fine…The president did not fight so hard for this reform just to build a website. He did it to make health care more secure for people who have it, and more affordable and accessible for people who don’t. That’s what the Affordable Care Act does.
The spin is somewhat ludicrous; for example, in both Obama’s and Jennings’ remarks, the website problems just seem to have happened, through no agency of theirs. But absent a death spiral that will destroy the whole Obamacare endeavor almost before it begins, they are correct that what will matter is what actually happens when Obamacare gets going.
How many people will get a free or nearly-free ride at the expense of others, or at least have their premiums substantially reduced? And how many will pay through the nose, and/or more than before? Those questions depend for answers not only on the website, which will only set the premium/co-pay/deductible/subsidy prices for a small percentage of the insured, but also on the price of insurance sold through employment.
In the short run, the numbers that gain money vs. the numbers that lose money on the premium/co-pay-deductible/subsidy score will determine Obamacare’s popularity. Obama is counting on the fact that the former group will be greater than the latter group, and will vote for those nice folks who gave them this largesse. But in the long run, how will the whole operation affect jobs; the economy; taxes; future insurance premium levels; individual initiative; the amount of intrusiveness by government into people’s lives; and the number, quality, and availability of doctors and other health care professionals and the quality of care they are able to provide?
Indeed, much more than a website.
But Obama and Jennings also ignore the fact that the website itself is much more than a website. It’s a portal into a system about which they’ve been crowing for years, saying how great it will be. They’re still crowing. But as a first impression of this system, the website is not the least bit reassuring. It’s an indication to the public of how good government might be at doing this sort of thing. So far, it’s not just a failure; it’s an abysmal, mind-boggling failure of epic proportions.
So when Obama and Jennings disown the website as though they are on the outside looking in at someone else’s screw-up, and reassure us that the White House will be the ones on the white horse riding to the rescue, it’s almost laughable.
[NOTE: And speaking of the availability and quality of health care…]
Obamacare: all the world’s a stage anyway, isn’t it?
So why not stage an Obamacare photo-op, featuring people who may or may not have actually enrolled?
It’s all about the visuals.
And even if the entire group of thirteen had in fact enrolled, it would be meaningless. Obamacare’s success or failure won’t be measured by numbers like thirteen.
By the way, I’ve been spending many extra hours lately doing research on Obamacare and its actual provisions, and how those are likely to affect people. It’s been a fascinating but overwhelming task to try to order what I’m finding, and write about it in a coherent, focused way. For now I’ll just say that the anomalies and inequities are vast and perplexing. It’s not just the website that’s chaos; it’s the thing itself.
RIP: Norm Geras
I am sorry to report that Norman Geras has died.
Geras was a blogger from 2003 on, and instrumental in helping out other bloggers back in the days when blogging was new and very exciting. He was the man I consider my blogfather, and he reached out a hand to me when I was just beginning (here’s a feature he kindly did about me back at the start of my blogging career).
I met Norm in 2005 when he visited the states, and he was a friendly and intelligent guy in person, too, just as one would expect. He was good at getting people together, and he just may have been the very first fellow-blogger I ever actually met in regular rather than cyberspace. I wrote many posts in the early years that were sparked by things Geras had written, mostly about the war in Iraq and the war against Islamic terrorism in general, or about the Holocaust (see this list for some of these pieces).
Notice I haven’t yet written about Norm’s achievements outside the blogosphere, but they were substantial:
Norman Geras (25 August 1943 – 18 October 2013) was a political theorist and Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Manchester. He contributed to an analysis of the works of Karl Marx in his book Marx and Human Nature and the article The Controversy About Marx and Justice.
Geras was born in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, to a Jewish family. Arriving in the UK in 1962, he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Pembroke College, Oxford and graduated in 1965. He was a research student from 1965 to 1967 at Nuffield College, Oxford before joining the University of Manchester as a Lecturer in 1967, retiring as a Professor in 2003.
As you can glean from the above, Geras was a man of the left. But what the Wiki article doesn’t even begin to describe is that he was a very unusual man of the left, one who actually fought against tyranny and meant what he said (see this piece of mine for a description of Geras’ stance on the Iraq War).
Norm was also a movie buff and a devoted cricket fan (I must confess I didn’t read his pieces on cricket). His obituary in the Guardian has more to say:
His interests were rich and varied, but his thought and writings form an integrated whole. He was centrally and always a man of the left, but one who became a scourge of those parts of left/liberal opinion which, in his view, had slid away from commitment to the values of equality, justice and universal rights, and in so doing ended up by excusing or condoning racism and terrorism.
From his perspective, the response to the events of 11 September 2001 was appalling. He found the readiness of many to blame the US for bringing the terrorist attack down on its own head to be intellectually feeble and morally contemptible. He argued that this section of the left was betraying its own values by offering warm understanding to terrorists and cold neglect to their victims. He detested the drawing of an unsupported and insupportable moral equivalence between western democracies and real or proposed theocratic tyrannies in which liberty of thought and speech, and the protection of human rights, would play no part. Norm wanted to engage in this debate and not just with academics. So he went online, to provide himself with a space in which he could express these and other views, and Normblog was born.
It was a runaway success. Thousands of readers all over the world were drawn by Norm’s mixture of serious political and philosophical reasoning, and more lighthearted pieces on cricket, Manchester United, country music, films, books ”“ whatever he was currently interested in. The most striking feature of the blog was Norm’s distinctive arguing style: independent, rigorous, fair to adversaries, exceptionally clear, always (well, almost always) civil ”“ and that in a blogosphere noted for widespread vituperation and insult.
On reading that, it occurs to me that maybe I tried to model my own blog style on his more than I ever realized.
My condolences to Norm’s family and friends. RIP, Norm Geras, my old friend, and thank you.
What happens to a society when its young people don’t want to have sex?
You read that right. I didn’t say, “don’t want to get married” or “don’t want to have children.” It’s “don’t want to have sex.”
Japan may be about to find out.
As you might imagine, the “don’t want to have sex” crowd doesn’t include all the young people, not by a longshot. But it’s a worrisome percentage, especially considering that this is an age group where the blood usually runs hot. As you also might imagine, the phenomenon involves more women than men, although the number of guys is not insignificant:
A survey in 2011 found that 61% of unmarried men and 49% of women aged 18-34 were not in any kind of romantic relationship, a rise of almost 10% from five years earlier. Another study found that a third of people under 30 had never dated at all. (There are no figures for same-sex relationships.) Although there has long been a pragmatic separation of love and sex in Japan ”“ a country mostly free of religious morals ”“ sex fares no better. A survey earlier this year by the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA) found that 45% of women aged 16-24 “were not interested in or despised sexual contact”. More than a quarter of men felt the same way.
The article doesn’t say who these people are. Is it mostly the highly educated and more well-to-do? Or the less so? The answer matters in terms of the demographic makeup of the next generation; will it be mostly the poor and uneducated who are having kids, how many will they tend to have, and are they having them in or out of wedlock?
A sex and relationship counselor in Japan has this to say:
“Both men and women say to me they don’t see the point of love. They don’t believe it can lead anywhere,” says Aoyama. “Relationships have become too hard.”
I very much doubt they’re actually any harder than they used to be. But their rewards are a great deal less, especially in Japan, so the cost-benefit analysis is quite different.
The article goes on to describe the reasons: women in the workforce whose promotion chances end at marriage and who often quit after having children because Japanese firms demand such unusually long hours of its employees, hosts of young people living with parents, ease of single living, and immersion in the world of computers rather than entering the messy fray of human contact.
There are other possible reasons that the article doesn’t mention. I merely list the factors that come to mind; one could easily write a book on the subject:
(1) In a society with less differentiation between the sexes, where the roles and demeanor of men and women become more alike, some of the “otherness” that enhances and feeds sexual passion wanes.
(2) Marriage has been stripped of most of its usual purposes. We used to need it economically, and to have children or acceptance as a productive and full member of society. Now marriage has been cut loose from those moorings. No wonder young people are confused as to why they should do it at all. And since sex can lead to one or other of the members of the couple pushing marriage, it’s unsurprising that people would be less inclined to engage in sex as well. Best not to start down that particular slippery slope.
(3) When nearly all is permitted (sexually, that is), the prospect of sex loses its forbidden fruit aspect and becomes more ho-hum. Same for the postponement of sex that used to come when premarital sex was more frowned upon: it acted as an aphrodisiac.
(4) Computer sex is not only ubiquitous and easy, it’s habit-forming. One of the physiological truths about sex is that the things we get used to when young—the fantasies, the turn-on triggers—can become very difficult to change. If people grow up using computers for sex and find it satisfying and simple, why would they stop?
(5) The problem is merely a subset of a host of problems caused by changing mores regarding men and women, and of society as a whole and loss of purpose in life. Some of this is obviously related to the societal changes that come from feminism, but some may be related to the decline of religion (although I’m not at all sure that has too much of an effect in Japan) and of nationalism. More Japanese used to feel they had a special national destiny, and although that idea led to some very bad stuff—World War II comes to mind—it also helped give the society a cohesiveness and purpose. The idea of having sex and children for the good of the country and society would be laughed at by today’s youth, but it was a not-unimportant motivator in the past.
No wonder the result is more widespread ennui.
[Hat tip: DrewM at Ace’s.]
New look at Legal Insurrection
William Jacobson’s blog Legal Insurrection has a spiffy new design featuring more photos, and posts that stay on the mainpage longer.
Oh, and all of us “contributors” (including moi) have our photos on the right sidebar. Don’t get too excited, though; mine is the same one I use here.
Red Sox…
…win the pennant.
Onward!
I guess…
…they couldn’t take the heat.
[Hat tip: Instapundit.]
The story of the Obamacare exchange website snafu
Long, but well worth reading.
Excerpt:
Some blame the contractors involved for not being upfront about the potential for such fundamental difficulties, but some say the contractors did offer warnings, and especially that the contractors believed the time they were given for development was totally inadequate. It seems clear, though, that the administration was not warned to expect quite what has happened here, and was not prepared for it…
CMS officials and the large insurers thought at first that the garbled data being automatically sent to insurers must be a function of some very simple problems of format incompatibility between the government and insurer systems, but that now seems not to be the case, and the problem appears to be deeper and harder to resolve. It is a very high priority problem, because the system will not be able to function if the insurers cannot have some confidence about the data they receive. At this point, insurers are trying to work through the data manually, because the volume of enrollments is very, very low. But again, if that changes, this could quickly become impossible.
In a couple of ways, then, the severe user-interface problems at the front end of the federal exchange has actually had some advantages from CMS’s point of view, because by keeping enrollment volume low it has kept some other huge problems from becoming instantly uncontrollable.
But that low volume is mostly a very bad thing for Obamacare, of course, since the viability of the exchanges depends on a certain size and demographic mix which cannot be attained unless these problems are resolved very quickly.
There’s much, much more.