The latest GOP effort to repeal Obamacare

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not easy to evaluate each new Obamacare repeal bill as it comes down the pike, for two simple reasons.

The first is that these sorts of bills are inherently complex, and unless we’re in the health care insurance policy business we don’t have the time to read them or the math skills to analyze what their real effects might be. So we (that includes me) tend to leave the evaluation to the “experts.”

The second is, of course, that the “experts” (that is, pundits and politicians and even people in the health care insurance policy field who write about or lecture about such things) are mostly not objective about the topic. Politics and bias is huge here.

So when I read that there’s a new Obamacare repeal effort, I feel a sense of weary deja vu and here-we-go-again. When I look at a page such as today’s memeorandum, my weariness increases.

In the past I’ve spent many an hour trying to sort through all the hype and propaganda, and in the past I’ve found Avik Roy to be the most reliable and objective guide. So I turn to him once again, and I suggest you do so as well.

Roy’s article describes the provisions of the bill and their possible/probable effects, and my take-away from it is that the Graham-Cassidy bill is a case of leaving it to the states rather than the feds to decide what to do with the money the federal government will give it.

First, a little bit about Cassidy, from the article:

Sen. Cassidy is relatively new to Washington, but his star has been rising for some time. Cassidy, an M.D. who specializes in liver diseases like hepatitis, was first elected to Congress in 2008. I first got to know him in 2011, when he emerged as Congress’ leading critic of Medicaid’s poor health outcomes, and as one of the first Republicans to embrace Bill Clinton’s approach to Medicaid reform, called “per-capita caps.”

In 2014, Cassidy ran for the U.S. Senate against incumbent Mary Landrieu, and won in large part because of her vote in favor of Obamacare. Today, Cassidy serves on both of the key health care committees in the Senate…

Now we have what the bill is basically about:

The [previous GOP bill] replaced Obamacare with a system of means-tested tax credits that individuals could use to shop for private coverage that fit their needs. By contrast, Graham-Cassidy gives block grants to states, which states could then use to design the health care system of their choice: left, right, or center.

That sounds very federalist: leave it to the states. If a place like Vermont wants to experiment with single-payer, that’s fine with me.

More:

Given the renewed enthusiasm on the left for the abolition of private health insurance through single-payer systems, there can be little doubt that this is the direction that blue states will take under Graham-Cassidy.

On the other hand, states could also use their block grant funds to create liberalized, lower-cost insurance markets for subsidy-eligible enrollees. Section 106 of the bill specifies that states would have the ability to seek waivers from many of Obamacare’s insurance regulations, including those that force insurers to overcharge the young and the healthy, and those forcing insurers to cover services that enrollees don’t want…

The bill would institute a per-capita allotment for the legacy Medicaid program that is quite similar to the one in the BCRA. This per-capita approach is essential to ensuring that Medicaid is fiscally sustainable in the future. Both bills allow states to institute work requirements for Medicaid.

Please read the whole thing.

It all seems to come down to how much federal regulation you want in terms of requirements, and how much freedom the states ought to have.

Roy’s article doesn’t talk about pre-existing conditions or high-risk pools. But plenty of other writers do, and those on the Democratic side frame the bill as likely to deprive those with pre-existing conditions of coverage or make their coverage unaffordable. Vox offers one of the fairer treatments of the subject:

The new bill has been championed by its sponsors, Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), as giving states more flexibility in how they run their health care systems. One of those flexibilities includes a waiver system that would let states opt out of many key Obamacare regulations.

Those waivers do have some guardrails. The bill says states cannot tether an individual’s premiums to “sex or membership in a protected class under the Constitution of the United States.”

Anything else ”” a cancer diagnosis, a history of breast cancer, a mild case of asthma ”” is fair game. In states that did pursue and receive these waivers, health plans would have full authority to charge sicker patients higher premiums to offset their costs.

Cassidy argues that his plan would still protect people with preexisting conditions. It requires that any waiver application must include a description of “how the state intends to maintain adequate and affordable health insurance coverage for individuals with preexisting conditions.”

“Knowing that states may want to experiment, we specify that in the waiver request they must have adequate and affordable coverage for those with preexisting conditions,” Cassidy said in a briefing I attended last Friday.

Outside experts, however, question how strong these protections actually are. For one thing, there is no definition in the bill of what counts as “affordable” coverage. This would largely be left up to future bureaucrats in Washington to decide.

So, there are built-in protections, but do we trust them? The conundrum with pre-existing conditions is that once you prohibit insurance companies from charging more for those who have them when they sign up, then you have to charge the rest of the population more. The money has to come from somewhere. What’s more, blanket coverage for pre-existing conditions with no penalty means that the well will tend to wait till they become sick to sign up, and that will tend to increase premiums in the entire system in order to sustain it.

Articles that discuss pre-existing conditions commonly ignore or distort a great many things about insurance and pre-existing conditions. One thing that’s usually ignored is that, even before Obamacare, there was quite a bit of coverage at the state level for pre-existing conditions (I have documented the situation in some depth in this post as well as this one, and I suggest you read them both). In general, there’s a lot of ignorance about health care insurance—including a lack of understanding of the fact that if you have had continuous coverage when you get sick, the issue of pre-existing conditions is moot unless you’ve committed fraud or drop your coverage and have to pick it up again after your illness.

I’m not at all sure this most recent bill will pass. But the rush to do so is connected with the process of reconciliation and the widely-reported September 30 deadline for passing the bill that way (see this for a critique of whether that deadline actually exists or not).

[NOTE: By the way, Jimmy Kimmel (I’m only mentioning him in this context because he’s been speaking out on the pre-existing condition situation re Obamacare and replacement bills) is one of the many people who has no idea how pre-existing conditions used to work in the insurance business.]

On Trump’s calling Kim “Rocket Man” at the UN

The New Neo Posted on by

Some think it was a brilliant move to expose North Korea’s Dear Leader to ridicule and give him a nickname that might stick. Some think it was another sign of Trump’s abominable lack of decorum. Some think it was some combination of the two.

I wonder if the same people so down on Trump for the decorum breach would have said the same thing about Khrushchev when he banged his shoe on the table as Philippine delegate Lorenzo Sumulong spoke at the UN in 1960 (see this for whether he actually banged it or just brandished it). Or, how about when Arafat wore a gun (or at least a holster) while giving his first speech at that august body? Arafat said he came “bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun” and he raised his arms to display the holster/gun he was wearing. Nice touch, no?

I’m not comparing Trump to either Khrushchev or Arafat. What he said was relatively mild, actually. I’m bringing the other two up because the criticism of Trump’s calling Kim “Rocket Man” had to do with the idea of tone, of respect for the UN and its diplomatic traditions.

My response is: what decorum? The UN is an ineffective forum for much of anything except various grandstanding moves, either by third-world nations or first-world nations. Why give a man such as Kim any respect there? It’s not as though he’ll respond positively to respect, either. So far he’s been treated with respect by US presidents and has responded by going about his merry way, unimpeded.

In connection writing this post, I wondered whether Churchill had ever ridiculed or mocked Hitler, or given him a derisive name. By the time the following example occurred, England and Germany were at war:

“Guttersnipe” is a word you don’t hear too much anymore. It is defined as “a scruffy and badly behaved child who spends most of their time on the street.”

[ADDENDUM: The war of Elton John lyrics.]

Trump addresses the UN…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and no one runs screaming out of the room, tearing out their hair.

Including Trump.

Expectations are so low for Trump that many people are surprised that he can string a bunch of coherent words together, even when reading them from prepared remarks. I think in a way that holds him in good stead; people can only be pleasantly surprised, and he remains unpredictable.

Reactions were mixed but generally positive in the sense I just described. One person who loved the speech was Bibi Netanyahu:

“In over 30 years in my experience with the U.N., I never heard a bolder or more courageous speech,” Netanyahu said, according to his Twitter feed.

Other foreign diplomats were relieved by Trump’s 40-minute speech, although many approached the address with low expectations. Some were reassured that, even though he urged it to reform itself, Trump at least did not completely turn his back on the U.N.

“It was as Trumpian as expected, and we are getting used to it,” one European diplomat said.

Trump came down hard on North Korea, at least rhetorically, as well as Iran and Venezuela. I particularly like what he said about Venezuela:

The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented,” Trump added, “but that socialism has been faithfully implemented.”

Sounds like a leaf out of Thatcher’s book, doesn’t it? That’s not to say Trump is like Thatcher. He most assuredly is not. Thatcher had enormous political experience, was an extremely sharp debater, and was possessed of a solid conservative philosophy. In her time, she was almost as hated as Trump is, though. And she was even more fearless than he, and exceptionally articulate.

A trip down memory lane—Thatcher on socialism:

AGW: the science may be settled, but the models sure aren’t

The New Neo Posted on by

A new report acknowledges what I recall reading for some years now:

Computer modelling used a decade ago to predict how quickly global average temperatures would rise may have forecast too much warming, a study has found.

The Earth warmed more slowly than the models forecast, meaning the planet has a slightly better chance of meeting the goals set out in the Paris climate agreement, including limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

Scientists said previous models may have been “on the hot side.”

The report was published in Nature Geoscience, and does not retreat from the basic theory of AGW and the idea that emissions need to be curbed. But the failure of models can’t help but at least call into some question—if people are honest about it—the validity of the projections in general.

More:

The original forecasts were based on twelve separate computer models made by universities and government institutes around the world, and were put together ten years ago, “so it’s not that surprising that it’s starting to divert a little bit from observations”, Professor Allen added.

According to The Times, another of the paper’s authors, Michael Grubb, a professor of international energy and climate change at University College London, admitted his earlier forecasting models had overplayed how temperatures would rise.

So, the authors of this new paper appear to be some of the people who made the original projections. It must have cost them a lot to issue this paper, and the results must have been a pretty powerful contradiction to their earlier forecasts—results that almost literally could not be denied.

One of the authors is quoted as saying, “When the facts change, I change my mind, as [John Maynard] Keynes said.” That would put him in the company of a fairly small percentage of people, since a mind is a difficult thing to change—even with the facts forcing the issue.

Granted, though, the authors find no change in their basic theory of AGW and as well as that theory’s general political ramifications. I have written on AGW many times before, and I’m not going to go into a whole song and dance on the general topic right now, except to say that I’ve read hundreds of hours’ worth of articles and find both sides somewhat persuasive, so for me the jury is still out. My go-to person—the scientist I find to be most fair, objective, and comprehensive in evaluating these things—is Judith Curry. As I’ve done before, I suggest you follow her blog. I don’t believe she’s written about this report yet (at least, I couldn’t find it), and I’m eager to read what she has to say about it if and when she does.

College students choose psychological “safety” over liberty

The New Neo Posted on by

A new survey about college students’ attitudes towards free speech has come out (1500 students were polled):

While “hate speech” is odious, as long as it steers clear of well-established exceptions to the First Amendment…it is constitutionally protected. The survey results, however, indicate that many college students believe that hate speech is unprotected…

…[A]cross all three political affiliations [Democrat, Republican, Independent] listed in the table, fewer than half of the respondents indicated a belief that hate speech is constitutionally protected. The very significant gender variation in the responses is also noteworthy.

Only among college men did more than half of the respondents answer “yes,” and even that group was only a bare majority (51%). The only other group where more people answered “yes” than “no” was Republicans, and only by 44% (versus 39% answering “no”).

The study goes on to note that a significant number of respondents (the percentages were in the high teens and low twenties) supported using violence to prevent a speaker they disagree with from speaking. In this case, the percentages of Democrats and Republicans who felt this way were almost identical. Thirty percent of the male respondents supported violence in a situation like that, whereas only 10% of females did.

In addition, most students seemed to think that the First Amendment requires that the colleges hiring controversial or offensive speakers must present rebuttals, as well.

Perhaps the most depressing response to a question was that, when asked whether they preferred a university that presented all points of view or one that prohibited biased or offensive speech, the results were as follows:

…[A]cross most categories, and in the aggregate, the majority of students appear to prefer an environment in which their institution is expected to create an environment that shelters them from offensive views. The exceptions are among Republicans and Independents, though even in those categories nearly half of the students still expressed a preference for the more sheltered environment.

It is to be expected. After all, this reflects what students have been taught and/or not taught. The “not taught” part refers to the decline of fairly intense and ubiquitous instruction in what was called “civics” when I was young. The subject matter was government, with an emphasis on liberty in particular.

This is from a 2011 article:

“When I went to school, we had all kinds of courses on civics and government,” says retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who is pushing to revive civic education. “Today, at least half of the states don’t even require high school students to take civics; only three states require it in middle school.”

A group known as the NAEP regularly tests students for civics knowledge, among other things, and the most recent survey (2014) found that only 23% of eighth-graders performed at or above a proficiency level (the levels are basic, proficient, and advanced), with black and Hispanic students doing far more poorly than that. It’s a sad thing, and one that probably could be easily improved by curriculum changes—although I imagine many of the teachers, reared under the same civics-ignorant system, would need some heavy-duty brush-up courses in the subject themselves in order to teach it properly.

Some of the decline in civics teaching is a result of funding problems. But faced with funding cuts, school systems make decisions on what is important and what is less important, and somewhere the decision must have been made to jettison civics in many cases. I doubt this was an arbitrary decision, either. I believe it was most likely part of the leftward drift of education in recent decades, and it was purposeful. A public ignorant of its liberties is a public that can better be manipulated by political activists.

But that’s far from all. That was the “not taught” part. Then there’s the “taught” part. A big problem is the philosophy of education—and perhaps even of life—that is rampant these days. I’m not sure what to call it, but it fosters the idea that educational environments should be protective rather than challenging. That idea has many elements to it, including anti-bullying campaigns, trophies and social promotions for all, and an attitude of “you’re perfect just the way you are.”

It’s not that the impulse to protect young children from abuse is wrong. We don’t want schools to resemble Lord of the Flies. But the pendulum has swung way too far in the other direction, IMHO. I conceptualize the dilemma as the exoskeleton approach vs. the endoskeleton approach (I used a similar metaphor in a different although somewhat related context here).

When I was growing up, the world was considered a tough place. Though most parents wanted to protect their children, they thought the best way to do that was to teach their children to develop inner strength in order to protect themselves from the blows and hurts they would inevitably encounter in life. That’s the endoskeleton approach. Today’s parents may pay lip service to that, too, but these days there is far more of a tendency than in the past to use the exoskeleton approach—that is, to demand that the surroundings buffer their children so that the children never have to encounter aggression or nasty words. The idea is a surrounding shell of protection rather than a strong inner spine.

It’s not either/or, of course. Ideally, it would be nice to have both, and I would imagine most parents want some of both to a certain degree. But the balance has shifted markedly. That children’s nursery rhyme of my youth—“sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me”—do we ever hear it anymore?

I don’t know; I don’t exactly have my finger on the pulse of kids these days. So perhaps they’re too busy being on social media to chant any rhymes at all. But I can’t help but think that all of these things feed into poll results such as the ones we have today.

[ADDENDUM: Here’s another survey. This one’s of adults, and it’s just as depressing.]

I’m still going to do a bit of Emmy fashion

The New Neo Posted on by

Why? Because I enjoy it.

First up—somewhere, a raven and a flamingo are missing their feathers:

I just don’t understand the need to publicly bare so very much of one’s breasts, but it’s rampant:

What’s up with the matching Ace bandage around the elbow?:

More breast-baring. An ugly dress on a woman who, dressed differently, could easily look a whole lot better:

I sort of like this one, in a weird way. It looks like a Star Trek costume, and the colors are very unusual, but it has a certain classic elegance. Then again, maybe I’ve just looked at too many of these dresses:

Oh, Jessica, no! Say it isn’t so! Looks like a Disney villainess:

I could go on—and on and on. I’ll stop now, but I really really like this one, although perhaps it’s the skirt action:

Mark Lilla gives advice to fellow-progressives on how to get elected

The New Neo Posted on by

Mark Lilla wrote a book called The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics that caused a bit of a stir among his fellow-liberals because it said that in order to win elections the Democrats should abandon identity politics.

As an example of some of the reaction from critics, we have this Politico piece:

Today, Democrats simply cannot win evangelical voters for whom LGBT rights is an absolute deal-breaker. Of course, individuals bear multiple identities. It’s therefore incumbent upon liberals to try to convince such voters to privilege their identity as workers, environmentalists, teachers, parents, health care professionals or what have you, above their religious identity. In effect, history suggests that Democrats shouldn’t discard interest-group politics. They should get better at it.

And they should do so with steely-eyed recognition that one of the oldest and most powerful variations of interest group politics””white nationalism””is both resurgent and mainstream once again…

But it’s not the topic of identity politics that I’m going to write about today, and it’s not why I brought up Lilla. Something else he said caught my eye when I was reading this essay by Richard Fernandez. Fernandez refers to an interview with Lilla that appeared in The New Yorker recently (mostly behind a paywall, so I’m using quotes from it that Fernandez offered). In that interview, Lilla—who is a political scientist and professor at Columbia—had this to say:

…when we go out on the stump, it makes no sense to call out to various groups, as Hillary Clinton did, and inevitably leave people out. …

I want to get this across: we cannot do anything for these groups we care about if we do not hold power. It is just talk. Therefore, our rhetoric in campaigning must be focussed on winning, so then we can help these people. An election is not about self-expression. It’s not a time to display everything we believe about everything. It’s a contest. And once you hold power, then you can do the things you want to do.

Even if it’s not what the people who voted for you wanted you to do or expected you to do. In other words: lie, misrepresent yourself, do whatever you need to do to get elected, and then change the world—for the better and for their own good, of course.

Well, at least he’s being honest about it.

One thing I noticed during the Obama campaign and then presidency was how blatant this deception had become. This wasn’t just a garden-variety case of a candidate lying or shading the truth, making promises he couldn’t keep and painting a rosy picture to appeal to the largest possible number of voters. This was more, and I wrote about it several times in several posts (beginning way back during the 2008 campaign). But the summary version can be found in this sentence:

Obama is the first president who didn’t merely disappoint and fail to follow through on certain issues, but who fundamentally lied about who he was in the most basic sense, and about what he had planned…

On a very specific issue, that of gay marriage, I traced his outright lies here. But there’s plenty more where that came from.

When I was a kid, politicians on the left were more up-front about their intentions. Although there were lots of leftists in ordinary life who kept their leftism under wraps, generally speaking if a politician was running for office and he was a leftist you pretty much knew exactly how far to the left he was. Some of the more extreme leftists ran for office as members of the Socialist Party, for example. And more mainstream leftists such as Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern ran their campaigns making it quite clear where they stood and what they planned to do if they were elected.

Obama broke with that tradition—and I’m not not talking about the question of where he was born or whether he was a closet Muslim or any of those fringe issues (and by the way, I think he was born in Hawaii and that he is not a Muslim or even much of a believer of any kind). The break with tradition that I’m talking about was the fact that Obama was purposely unclear or even deceptive about what some of his more basic political positions and where he thought the country should be going and would be going during his presidency. “Hope and change”—it’s awfully vague, isn’t it?

Obama was able to successfully accomplish this because his political track record wasn’t especially long, although anyone who actually studied that record ought to have noticed that he was further to the left than he presented himself as being during his campaign. But his relative lack of political record helped to hide the extent of his leftism, and he was helped along in that endeavor by the cooperation of the MSM. That sort of approach would be likely to work best for the politically inexperienced; relative political neophytes can get away with it more easily, but if a person has a long long political trail it would be quite difficult.

That brings us to Donald Trump (doesn’t just about everything these days?), an even more extreme political neophyte than Obama was because Trump had never even held office before being elected president. Did Trump do the same thing? Did he fundamentally misrepresent himself politically?

I’m not sure, but I think the answer is “no, for the most part.” That’s because—unlike Obama—Trump isn’t an ideologue of left or right. He supports bits and pieces of both sides. His overriding presentation during the campaign was that he would put America first, and I think that has continued. On specifics, he often promised one thing one day and changed it the next, but I haven’t seen any vast ideological reversals—yet. In fact, I’ve been surprised at how much he’s adhered to the basics of his plan for the most part. I expected far less of a match between his campaign statements and his presidential acts than we’ve gotten from him so far.

[NOTE: Of course, people who believe that Trump is really a Russian agent or a closet Nazi also believe that he has indeed misrepresented who he is in a fundamental way. I don’t happen to agree with them.]

On insulting half your audience: I never watch the Emmys, but if I did I would have stopped by now

The New Neo Posted on by

Apparently the folks who participate in the Emmys have come to feel that their mission is to put down Trump and his supporters, which is approximately half of the country.

I wouldn’t think that this would be good for ratings—or much of anything else except the swelling of the Emmy participants’ own egos, which were probably sufficiently large to begin with.

Long long ago, back when I was a freshly hatched blogger (January 2005), I wrote a post about this sort of thing—not in connection with the Emmys, but the phenomenon in general. I reproduce it here.

It happens nearly every time. I’ll be reading a short story, let’s say, enjoying myself, lost in the experience—when suddenly, there it is: the gratuitous and mean-spirited and out-of-context slap at Bush, or at those who support him. It’s not as though the story is even tangentially about politics, either; it can be about anything at all, it doesn’t really matter.

The Bush-dissing will be thrown in when you least expect it, just to let the reader know—well, to let the reader know what, exactly? To let the reader know that the author is hip, kindly, intelligent, moral—oh, just about everything a person ought to be. And that the reader must of course be a member of the club, too—not one of those Others, the warmongers, the selfish and stupid and demonized people who happen to have voted for Bush.

Back when I was one of the gang, too, back when I was in with the in crowd (“if it’s square, we ain’t there”), did I notice when authors dragged in their political credentials from left field? Or perhaps it wasn’t quite as commonplace back then for them to do so?

At any rate, now it seems positively obligatory. I’m reading along, sunk deep within the story, bonding with the characters—and then, suddenly, it’s as though the author has reached a hand out of the pages of the magazine (OK, I’ll confess, sometimes it’s the New Yorker—yes, I still read it for the fiction, just as some people claim they read Playboy for the interviews) and slapped me across the face.

Authors, do you really want to do this? Because, with a single sentence, you’ve managed to alienate and offend (not to mention insult) up to half your audience.

I don’t think this even occurs to you. I think you just assume that anyone perceptive and intelligent and downright nuanced enough to be reading your fabulous work couldn’t possibly—no, say it isn’t so, Joe!!—support that disgusting, repulsive, lying POS Bush. Or maybe you just don’t care. Maybe you don’t want people like that for your audience.

It’s not just authors. It’s plays, concerts, performances of all kinds, even those given by friends of mine, people I know and otherwise respect, people with good hearts. It’s poetry readings most particularly. It’s gotten so bad that I go to all cultural events girding my loins and waiting for the blow to fall, waiting for my intelligence and judgment and ethics to be insulted. And this from people who consider themselves culturally and morally superior, although this sense of superiority doesn’t seem to reside in their needing to prove themselves to be well-informed or logical or knowledgeable about the issues—just in letting the world know that they’re on the right side of them (which would be the left side, naturalment).

Maybe Trump-bashing shouldn’t affect me the same way, because I’m not exactly what you’d call a Trump-supporter. But it does affect me the same way; turns me off utterly and entirely. And in the many years since I wrote that post, the phenomenon of liberal entertainers and artists gratuitously bashing the political opposition when performing or in their fiction or at awards ceremonies has only gotten more ubiquitous. I feel a surge of anger and annoyance whenever people do it, and they do it a lot.

Something akin to that anger and annoyance was described by John Updike in an essay he wrote in the late 80s about the Vietnam protests of the 60s and his own reaction among the literati back then:

The protest, from my perspective, was in large part a snobbish dismissal of Johnson by the Eastern establishment; Cambridge professors and Manhattan lawyers and their guitar-strumming children thought they could run the country and the world better than this lugubrious bohunk from Texas. These privileged members of a privileged nation believed that their pleasant position could be maintained without anything visibly ugly happening in the world. They were full of aesthetic disdain for their own defenders, the business-suited hirelings drearily pondering geopolitics and its bloody necessities down in Washington. The protesters were spitting on the cops who were trying to keep their property””the USA and its many amenities””intact…

It was hard to explain my indignation, even to myself. The peace movement’s predecessor and progenitor, the civil-rights movement, had posed no emotional problem…

…Those who deplored the war fit what protesting they could into their suburban schedules and otherwise dismissed it with a gesture of automatic distaste; the technocrats of our acquaintance, the electronic engineers and stockbrokers and economics professors, tended to see the involvement as an administrative blunder, to which they could attach no passion. But I””I whose stock in trade as an American author included an intuition into the mass consciousness and an identification with our national fortunes””felt obliged to defend Johnson and Rusk and Rostow, and then Nixon and Kissinger, as they maneuvered, with many a solemn bluff and thunderous air raid, our quagmirish involvement and long extrication. My face would become hot, my voice high and tense and wildly stuttery; I could feel my heart race in a kind of panic whenever the subject came up, and my excitement threatened to suffocate me…

…Were we really secure enough””high and mighty and smug enough””to become a pacifist nation? “You don’t get something for nothing,” my father, a schoolteacher, would frequently say…I would rather live under Diem (or Ky, or Thieu) than under Ho Chi Minh and his enforcers, and assumed that most South Vietnamese would. Those who would not, let them move North. But the foot traffic, one could not help noticing in these Communist/non-Communist partitions, was South, or West, away from Communism. Why was that? And so on.

I wanted to keep quiet, but could not. Something about it all made me very sore. I spoke up, blushing and hating my disruption of a post-liberal socioeconomic-cultural harmony I was pleased to be a part of…

…My thoughts ran as follows. Peace depends upon the threat of violence. The threat cannot always be idle…It was all very well for civilized little countries like Sweden and Canada to tut-tut in the shade of our nuclear umbrella and welcome our deserters and draft evaders, but the United States had nobody to hide behind. Credibility must be maintained. Power is a dirty business, but who ever said it wasn’t?…The Vietnam war””or any war””is “wrong,” but in the sense that existence itself is wrong. To be alive is to be a killer; and though the Jains try to hide this by wearing gauze masks to avoid inhaling insects, and the antiabortionists by picketing hospitals, and peace activists by lying down in front of ammunition trains, there is really no hiding what every meal we eat juicily demonstrates. Peace is not something we are entitled to but an illusory respite we earn. On both the personal and national level, islands of truce created by balances of terror and potential violence are the best we can hope for. Pacifism is a luxury a generous country can allow a small minority of its members, but the pacifism invoked in the anti-Vietnam protest was hypocritical and spurious. Under the banner of a peace movement, rather, war was being waged by a privileged few upon the administration and the American majority that had elected it…

My earliest sociological thought about myself had been that I was fortunate to be a boy and an American. Now the world was being told that American males””especially white, Protestant males who had done well under “the system”””were the root of evil.

It’s a very long essay, beautifully written as Updike’s work always is whether you like it or not. It’s sobering that he could write a line such as “Now the world was being told that American males””especially white, Protestant males who had done well under ‘the system’””were the root of evil” in describing the 60s of about 50 years ago. But yes, I remember the 60s, and I was there.

[NOTE: That last sentence is a reference to this.]

Why we increasingly shop online these days

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day I decided I wanted one of those kitchen mats that are cushy to stand on. Actually, I wanted two. I use one little rug in front of the sink for when I’m washing dishes, and one in front of my computer because I work standing up due to the effects of my long-ago back and arm injuries. The rugs I have now have seen much, much better days.

So I went to Bed Bath & Beyond to peruse their selections. They’ve got a ton of kitchen stuff; why not a little rug?

But nada. However, one of the women who worked there told me that until recently she’d worked at Home Goods and they had plenty of them. Go there, she said.

So a few days later I made the journey. I couldn’t find anything there, either. But I asked a young man who worked there and he said yes, they had some with the other area rugs, and that they were mostly to be found on the bottom shelf of the section, interspersed with all the other little area rugs.

So I went back to look. The display was chaotic and appeared as though no one had ordered it in a long long time. There were a lot of little rugs, and I had to look through most of them before I found my prize: one of those foamlike “comfort” rugs. In chartreuse. A sort of fake basket-weave chartreuse.

No wonder it was still there. Hideous.

And it immediately occurred to me that this is why brick-and-mortar stores aren’t doing so well these days compared to the internet. And it’s a vicious cycle, because as the stores do worse, they cut back on hiring staff, and therefore they are maintained a lot worse and the staff hardly cares one way or the other.

At least, that was the attitude of the guy who spoke to me. He conveyed the idea that he could barely be bothered to answer my question and point the way, much less go to the rugs and help me find one. And there was no other customer in the store at the time.

Contrast that to what you can find here. I ordinarily like brick-and-mortar stores because I like to see what I’m buying, but in this case I’ll be ordering something online.

Intelligence, heredity, and environment

The New Neo Posted on by

In school I always did very very well on IQ tests. But I also always felt they did not, and could not, measure some completely innate and unchanging thing called “intelligence.” Here is some research support for that perception.

I’m referring to a curious phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. In the huge amount of verbiage on the subject of intelligence (as measured by IQ scores) and heredity vs. environment and race and class, the Flynn effect is well-known in the field of research but far less well-known in non-technical articles for the general population on the subject of IQ. Here’s a brief definition:

In his study of IQ tests scores for different populations over the past sixty years, James R. Flynn discovered that IQ scores increased from one generation to the next for all of the countries for which data existed (Flynn, 1994). This interesting phenomena has been called “the Flynn Effect.” Many of the questions about why this effect occurs have not yet been answered by researchers.

As with many fields of scientific inquiry, there’s no small amount of politics involved in such research, both with those who perform it and those who use it to make various points. In addition, we have all the intrinsic problems and difficulties of psychological research with human subjects.

But given those caveats, nevertheless the Flynn effect seems to be both real and widespread:

In general, countries have seen generational increases between 5 and 25 points. The largest gains appear to occur on tests that measure fluid intelligence (Gf) rather than crystallized intelligence (Gc)….

…[Tests for fluid intelligence] try to emphasize problem solving and minimize a reliance on specific skills or familiarity with words and symbols. These tests on average have shown an increase of about 15 points or one standard deviation per generation…Deary (2001) notes that it is these types of tests (i.e., “culturally reduced”) on which we would not expect to see score increases if the cause of the increases was due to educational factors.

…IQ gains for [tests of crystallized intelligence) have been more moderate, with an average of about 9 points per generation…

Flynn believes that the increase is actually an increase in abstract problem solving rather than intelligence. Flynn…favors environmental explanations for the increase in test scores.

You don’t have to agree about the strength of environmental factors. But those who don’t agree still need to explain the results known as the Flynn effect. Some of the environmental factors studied and cited to explain the effect are years of formal education, which apparently correlates somewhat with the rise in scores, as well as nutrition, which has some correlation as well.

I doubt that any one factor explains it. But I think it’s likely that something is changing that’s environmental and leads to the higher scores, which indicates that IQ tests don’t just measure some wholly innate factor called intelligence, but instead measure something called intelligence that is linked (as are so many things) to some combination of heredity and environment.

The real question is how much of the variation in intelligence found among countries and among groups within a country can be attributed to heredity and how much to environment. I’ve read a great deal on the subject—much much too much to go into in any blog post (it’s a very complex subject)—and my conclusion is that the jury is out on it but that environment is definitely an important factor.

Who cares? Obviously, a lot of people do. But to me, individuals are individuals and everyone must be evaluated on the strength of his/her own personality and achievements. Some members of all ethnic groups are brilliant. Some members of all ethnic groups are dumb. Even if most of the variation among groups were to turn out to be hereditary—and I happen to think that is not the case—how would it change anything? It still wouldn’t tell us one single thing about any individual and his or her potential to achieve. And it oughtn’t to ever affect the human rights of anyone, or the concept of equality of opportunity.

But there’s plenty more information on the Flynn effect and attempts to tease out what may be going on regarding environment. For example, see under the heading “environmental factors” in this analysis of the Flynn effect. See also this, this, this, this, and this.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Car question

The New Neo Posted on by

A question for all you car folks out there—

I’m thinking of buying a used car with active safety features, although I rather I like my car—2010 Ford Fusion. Some makes and models of car introduced these features a couple of years ago (I think around 2015) as options. On some models they were even made standard on more recent cars.

I’ve never bought a new car in my life. The used cars I’ve bought have been relatively low mileage—in the 30 thousand-or-less category—and that’s what I’m planning to do now. The prices are so much better that to me it makes more sense to do that than to buy a new car for a whole lot of $$$ and have it depreciate so much immediately.

My question for you is whether you’ve driven a car with some of these active safety features, and if so what you think of the car and the features.

Isn’t this more fun than talking about Trump?