The new slogan: “Obamacare is more than a website”

The New Neo Posted on by

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?

The New Neo Posted on by

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

The New Neo Posted on by

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?

The New Neo Posted on by

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.]

The story of the Obamacare exchange website snafu

The New Neo Posted on by

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.

“America’s path to the gallows”

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Geoffrey Britain” had the following to say:

How many more H.W. Bush’s must we support before it is acknowledged that America’s path to the gallows is merely delayed under such men? It is not purity we seek but an understanding that, “if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything”.

My first response is that George H. W. Bush stood for quite a few things, although they might not be the things that Geoffrey Britain—or many others—would have liked to see. And I’m assuming the reference is primarily to his compromise with the Democratic-controlled Congress on fiscal matters, although I’m not certain.

But my point is not to defend George H. W. Bush, a decent man but certainly not high on my presidential list. It’s about that phrase, “America’s path to the gallows is merely delayed.”

A saying like that sounds clever, but what does it actually mean? Let’s suppose for a moment that it’s true, although we don’t necessarily know that. Let’s suppose the election of people such as Bush I—or fill in the blank with any other RINO or “establishment Republican” of your choice—is merely delaying the inevitable demise of America, either fiscally or otherwise. But is postponing a bad thing so meaningless?

Postponing a bad thing buys time. And with time, other things could be accomplished (perhaps; there’s certainly no guarantee). For example: with time, something might be done about changing the leftward takeover of the educational system, entertainment, and the media; something to stop or reverse or counter the brainwashing that’s been going on for quite some time through those sources.

That’s just one example. Another is grass roots organizing at the local level to take over local governments and work from the bottom up. Electing Republicans also helps to ensure that more conservatives rather than none are appointed as judges, by which mechanism it could be possible to delay or even reverse some of the more liberal decisions that have come down through the judicial route.

And what’s so “mere” about delay, anyway? You could just as easily say to someone with a disease such as cancer, “Don’t treat it; your path to death is merely delayed by such action.” In fact, death of the individual is far more inevitable than “America’s path to the gallows,” since all people die. Yes, all countries eventually die, too (and the earth itself will probably be obliterated in time, as well). But there’s nothing absolutely inevitable about American’s “path to the gallows” in our lifetimes, or even for quite a while after. Even though we may see America’s demise as very likely given the circumstances, that doesn’t mean we are correct, and it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be fought with the tools at hand, including delay. And voting for a RINO or “establishment Republican” or imperfectly conservative candidate or whatever you want to call them, if that person is the nominee and is facing a liberal, hardly precludes working for the nomination of more conservative candidates for other offices. The two are not mutually exclusive; they can be worked on simultaneously.

Quite a few people on the right decided in 2012 that there was no difference between between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, and so either did not vote for Romney or voted third party. This idea persists among those frustrated with the lack of conservatism and backbone they perceive in many Republican politicians. Each person of course is free to vote for whomever he/she pleases, but this idea that there is no difference—or at least, no meaningful difference—seems wrong to me. It may not be exactly the difference you’re looking for—and I admit that it may not be difference enough in the end to change a very bad outcome to a better one—but it buys time and it opens up at least the possibility of a change for the better.

But that change must be worked for. After the 60s were over and didn’t quite end up as the left wanted, the left was very patient in its Gramscian march. Has the right no patience? And to those of you who say “let it burn,” do you think you have enough foresight and brilliance to know that liberal policies will lead so clearly to a big enough disaster that people will blame it on the left? Are you sure that a financial catastrophe in this country, if you see such an event as inevitable, will cause people to tack to the right rather than further to the left as they did during the Great Depression?

When the forces of disaster and chaos are unleashed, good luck controlling them.

[NOTE: I’m not saying Geoffrey Britain subscribes to the sentiments I’m criticizing here. In fact, it’s my impression that he does not. I’m just using his sentence as a springboard to talk about those who do subscribe to these sentiments.]

Dick Cheney’s heart

The New Neo Posted on by

Of course, many of those who hate him would quip that the title of this post is an oxymoron, and that he hasn’t got one. Har dee har har har.

But this sounds pretty interesting to me—a book by Cheney entitled Heart and written with his cardiologist Dr. Jonathan Reiner. Cheney, who had a heart transplant 20 months ago, calls his recovery a miracle.

I’ll say! When he was chosen by George Bush to run in 2000, and then took office, I was convinced that Cheney would die during Bush’s first term or at the very latest his second. His prognosis was dreadful, and the stress of the office (which he apparently discounts; he didn’t perceive it that way at all) would be considerable, especially after 9/11.

For some reason Cheney’s health wasn’t that big an issue in the 2000 campaign, and the reason must have been that he was only running for Vice President rather than president. But that he survived and is thriving today underscores for me the fact that such prognostications for a particular individual are not that good except in the most obvious and inevitable of circumstances.

Remember all the brouhaha about John McCain’s age in 2008? I wrote a post predicting that McCain would be just fine at this point, thank you very much. But I wouldn’t have given two cents for Cheney’s survival. And yet here he is.

Cheney says:

…Dr. Reiner once made an analogy between the course of Cheney’s health and treatment and a person who gets up late and drives to work, but he sees all the traffic lights ahead are red. “‘Cheney,'” he says the doctor told him, “‘when you get to them, they all turn green.’ And that’s… a pretty good description,” says Cheney.

Exactly.

The suicide bees

The New Neo Posted on by

Not killer bees: suicide bees.

Yesterday was a lovely warm day, and I had lunch with a friend. We decided the weather was so nice that we’d sit outside at a restaurant that had some sidewalk tables.

I’d ordered a small bowl of turkey vegetable soup. It had chunks of turkey, a few veggies, and broth, and was served in a styrofoam cup along with a plastic soup spoon.

I’d eaten most of it and left only about an inch in the bowl’s bottom, when along came a bee and alighted on the top of the spoon handle that was sticking out of the soup. As I watched, it slowly—and as best I could tell, deliberately—crept down the spoon handle and slid into the soup.

Well, now I wasn’t going to be eating the last inch of that soup. But I wondered whether bees drown, or whether they can swim. After a minute or so of watching it flail that question was answered: they drown, and fairly quickly, too.

My friend and I continued our conversation, and I thought no more about the bee until along came another bee and began the same approach, although I’d removed the spoon by then and so this bee no longer had an easy gangplank. But it poised at the bowl’s edge, and dropped itself into the liquid to join its fellow.

As I said to my friend, “One’s an accident, two’s a pattern.”

But why? The soup wasn’t sweet; it was a bit salty. I hadn’t thought bees liked turkey, or salt. But there the two little corpses floated, the Romeo and Juliet of the apian set.

And then along came a third. This one had a bit of trouble locating its target and getting a grip on the edge of the bowl, and so it flew away, perhaps thinking better of the whole endeavor.

And then, a few minutes later, a fourth.

By this time we were finished with lunch, and I’d had it with bees. We picked up our utensils and trays to go inside and dump the refuse. But there was that fourth bee on the edge of my bowl, still alive, and I didn’t want to take a live bee into the restaurant.

So I figured I’d dislodge it from its perch and leave it outside. That proved difficult; the thing clung on, tenaciously (and bitterly?), to the bowl’s side. I couldn’t seem to talk it down from the ledge. But finally, with a very firm slap to the side of the bowl, I caused it to fall off and onto the ground.

Then I ran into the restaurant, fast, before it followed me.

NOTE: I just found this online. So perhaps they were community-organizing environmentally-minded Canadian bees?:

soupbee

In praise of memorizing poetry

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Here’s a post I first wrote in 2005. It’s a favorite of mine.]

I think it may be a lost pedagogical device, but when I was in grade school, we were forced by our teachers (mostly elderly women, as it happens) to memorize poetry. Lots of poetry. Most of it doggerel, but not all of it, not by any means.

There was an old-fashioned quality to their choices: patriotic and seasonal verse, concerning Presidents and holidays (“If Nancy Hanks came back as a ghost, seeking news of what she loved most”; “There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood”).

I was a good poetry memorizer. I’m not trying to brag here, since I don’t think this ability implies any particular merit on my part. But no sooner had I written the thing down, copied from the blackboard on which the teacher had slowly and laboriously written it in her beautiful handwriting, then it was firmly ensconced in my head.

And there much of it stays. To this day, actually. Fortunately, along with the Edgar Guest and the others (“It takes a heap o’ livin’, in a house t’ make it home”) we were assigned some very fine poetry, mostly in junior high. Shakespearean sonnets and Wordsworth and Milton, some Robert Frost and Kipling and Shakespeare, the Gettysburg Address (not poetry, but it might as well have been).

Much of this I simply memorized by rote. I understood the basic meaning, but it had no real significance to me, no depth. I had no context for it.

But since it had been filed away, somewhere, I experienced a curious phenomenon later on. I found that in crises or emotional times, a line of poetry would suddenly come to me—a phrase I’d never paid much attention to before—and I’d have one of those “aha!” moments.

At one point I sustained a serious and chronic injury. My physical limitations were such that for long periods of time I could not work, nor even read or write in any sustained way. I took to visiting a park near where I lived and slowly walking around a track there. Nearby was a small wooded area, and it was wintertime and snow was on the ground. Looking at the trees, the following line suddenly came to my mind, unbidden, (“Whose woods these are I think I know…”) memorized so long ago, and hardly thought of since.

But the words were all there, waiting for me, and when I came to the lines, “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep” they hit me with the force of near-revelation. Frost seemed to be talking about wanting to give up, to surrender to something dark and restful (what? death?) in a time of great weariness such as I was experiencing. And then the next line came, too, offering hope and resolution, “But I have promises to keep…”

This sort of thing kept happening to me. Keeps happening to me, actually. In situation after situation, a line or passage of poetry will announce itself—something that I’d apparently held in my mind, in suspended animation as it were, without any true reflection or understanding—and suddenly, it would be freighted with deep and poignant meaning.

So I’m hereby declaring myself in favor of the practice of poetry memorization in schools. I know there are many many children—adults, too—who hate poetry. I don’t think that will change; I’m not imagining that poetry will gain a lot of converts from the mere act of children being required to memorize it. But for the rest, I think there’s great value to be had in carrying around a small library of poetry in one’s head, to draw upon in the hard times—or even the joyful times.

Right after 9/11, Yeats’ “The Second Coming” was the poem that kept swirling around in my brain. It doesn’t really offer any comfort; it’s a very bleak vision, after all. But for me, even the act of recalling the lines, somber and frightening as they are, had its own sort of solace, saying to me, “Others have had this fear, others have passed through terrible times of chaos,” and, paradoxically, lending words of great beauty to the description of that terrifying state:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity…