Sen. Tom Cotton on health care reform and the GOP

The New Neo Posted on by

Tom Cotton is interviewed the Hugh Hewitt show:

I think the CBO report provides useful information, but at the same time, the CBO director is not Moses. He’s not walking down from the mountaintop with stone tablets. And we should evaluate that useful information with a critical eye. You know, we should examine the evidence and the conclusions they reach, and see if those are justified. We should also examine their history with health care estimates, which pretty consistently overestimated, for instance, the coverage that Obamacare would provide. They seem to just have some challenges getting right the influence of a healthy individual insurance market. All that said, I think the Congressional Budget Office is directionally correct. They’re right that coverage levels will go down in the coming years under the House bill. They’re also right, I’m afraid, that insurance premiums will continue to go up in the near term, for three to four years, before they start perhaps falling in the long term. However, I suspect that the political consequences of those near term changes means that the long term will never actually arrive. That’s why I believe it’s so important that the House take a pause and try to fix some of these fixable problems in their committees, which is the easiest place in Congress to fix them, whereas the Senate floor is the hardest place to fix them…

I think the Rules Committee might be the place where some of these changes happen. What kind of changes do we need?…

He goes on to try to answer that question.

As usual with the topic of health care reform, the answers are complex. I’m not sure how his proposals would work out, but I very much respect Cotton and think he deserves attention on this.

Medicare, Obamacare, GOPcare: penalties and taxes

The New Neo Posted on by

The current discussion of GOP healthcare reform proposals feels almost like a stroll down memory lane. And not an entirely pleasant stroll, either.

Well do I remember going on and on and on about penalties vs. taxes, and what the Obamacare tax/penalty was (see this and this if you want to revisit some of that “going on and on and on”).

Now, because the GOP health care reform proposal includes a 30% penalty when buying insurance after a period of lack of coverage, some of that discussion about penalties has been revived (the penalty was discussed in this comment thread, for example). So I’m going to tackle this penalty topic, albeit more briefly.

If you have a plan that requires insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions, that inevitably sets up the problem of how to avoid people waiting until they’re sick before they buy coverage. People will act in their own self-interest (ordinarily, anyway), and if there’s no downside to it, why not wait to buy coverage and then buy it only when you need it? It’s pretty obvious why letting that happen would probably be fatal—not to the patient, but to any health coverage scheme (by the way, I’m calling it “coverage” rather than “insurance,” because traditionally insurers cannot be forced to cover pre-existing conditions.)

Obamacare “solved” the problem with the individual mandate and its penalty/tax. But the problem exists in any scheme that forces coverage of pre-existing conditions, and Americans want that coverage. Prior to Obamacare, it was dealt with in one of two ways: most states had a state-subsidized high-risk pool; others (a much smaller number of states, by the way) had no coverage for such people. A high-risk pool—and I was in one for several years, so I know something about this—was still usually very expensive and ordinarily offered only catastrophic coverage with a high deductible. And the money had to come from somewhere to subsidize those with low incomes (and actually, even to reduce premiums for those with higher incomes from what those premiums would have been with individual underwriting). This was ordinarily done through general public taxation rather than directly penalizing the people with the pre-existing conditions.

Medicare faces the same problem of near-universal coverage of a potentially sick population, and Medicare has long dealt with it by placing a penalty on the premiums of those who wait. It goes like this for Part B:

In most cases, if you don’t sign up for Part B when you’re first eligible, you’ll have to pay a late enrollment penalty. You’ll have to pay this penalty for as long as you have Part B. Your monthly premium for Part B may go up 10% for each full 12-month period that you could have had Part B, but didn’t sign up for it. Also, you may have to wait until the General Enrollment Period (from January 1 to March 31) to enroll in Part B. Coverage will start July 1 of that year.

Ten percent a year can really add up. And it’s a penalty you pay forever; it never expires.

Something similar happens with Part D (the drug benefit under Medicare). It’s a way to force people onto the drug plan even if they don’t need it, because some day they may need it and by then the premiums could be much higher for them because of the penalties.

The current GOP proposal is more like those penalties than it is like the Obamacare individual mandate and penalty/tax, in that (like the Medicare penalties) it is tacked on to insurance premiums rather than the tax code. It involves a higher initial amount than the Obamacare penalty/tax or the Medicare penalties, but it’s strictly time-limited:

Under the GOP bill [insurers] can…charge 30% higher premiums for one year, regardless of health status, to those entering the individual market who didn’t have continuous coverage, which is defined as a lapse of coverage of 63 days or more over the previous 12 months.

So it seems that this would involve a one-shot deal, just for the first year. To my way of thinking, that makes it less onerous over time than the Medicare penalties, particularly if a person waits a long time before buying coverage (as many young people probably would). Think of how much money a person would save each year by not buying insurance at all, versus that one-time 30% penalty. In fact, the penalty is so relatively mild (particularly for a young person who has deferred buying coverage for many years) that I wonder whether it actually would act as much of a deterrent at all to indefinite postponement of buying health coverage.

[NOTE: During the time that Obamacare was being proposed and voted on and then discussed, I often wondered why Obamacare didn’t go with a Medicare-like penalty scheme. It would have avoided any possible constitutional problems. I figured that the Democrats calculated that such a scheme might have made the bill more difficult to pass, but I’m not sure if this was the motivation.]

Yep, it’s a blizzard

The New Neo Posted on by

No doubt about it.

The weatherman (woman? person?) was correct. High winds and enough snow to reduce visibility a great deal. A day for hunkering down, which is fine as long as the power holds out.

Mid-March snowstorms are not the least bit unusual here. In fact, I consider March and much of April to be winter, whatever the calendar may say.

Is it GOPcare or Trumpcare?

The New Neo Posted on by

Whatever you call it, Trump and the GOP seem to be on the same page.

From Trump:

The House plan follows the guidelines I laid out in my recent address to Congress ”“ expanding choice, lowering costs, and providing healthcare access for all.

This plan is part of a three-pronged reform process. In concert with the plan in front of Congress, I have directed Dr. Tom Price, our Secretary of Health and Human Services, to use his authority to reduce regulations that are driving up costs of care.

We are also working on reforms that lower the costs of care, like allowing Americans to purchase health insurance across state lines. You’ve heard me say that many, many times during the debates.

And from Paul Ryan:

We are going to repeal and replace Obamacare and we’re going to do it with a three-pronged approach…

That’s called reconciliation. That’s the American Health Care Act. There are only so many things you can do in that bill because of the Senate floor rules for reconciliation. You can’t put everything you want in that legislation because if you did, it would be filibustered and you couldn’t even bring it up for a vote in the Senate.

Number two, administrative action. This law, Obamacare, has 1,442 sections or instances that gives the secretary of HHS enormous amounts of discretion to administer health care, meaning I don’t think Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid when they crammed this bill through ever thought Donald Trump would be president and Tom Price would be the secretary of HHS.

So, number two in our three-pronged approach, administrative action where the health and human services secretary deregulates the marketplace and allows more choice and more competition to come in the marketplace.

Number three, and this is where I think there’s a lot of confusion all over the map — additional legislation that we feel is important and necessary to give us a truly competitive health care marketplace. So, think of things like interstate shopping. That’s a reform that we’ve long believed in; that we think is really important to get regulatory competition to give people even more choices.

Those of you who think the feds should get out of the health care reform business will not be pleased by any of this.

Those of you who think the GOP consists of a bunch of liars and charlatans will not be pleased by any of this.

Those of you who think there’s no way back to total lack of federal involvement, and who think the GOP in Congress includes a significant number of people (although hardly all!) who are competent and mean well, should be reassured that the proposed bill is just the beginning of the process.

What is that I often say? We’ll see.

Boycotts and the law of unintended consequences

The New Neo Posted on by

Boycotts can seem to be potent political tools. But they’re not an all-purpose tool; in organizing a boycott, the target gets a lot of free publicity. But although the intent is negative publicity, the word reaches both sides. And the opposition has buying power, too.

So if you want to boycott something and the two sides are roughly equal numerically, you might want to rethink that, because the result can just as easily be a spike in sales. This is particularly true when both sides are also equally energized in the political sense.

Thus we have this phenomenon being reported:

[Ivanca Trump’s] fashion line was famously dropped by several department stores, and some of the many foes of her father organized a boycott of her goods. The result is a remarkable spike in sales ”” to near record levels, according to her company…

“For several different retailers Ivanka Trump was a top performer online,” the brand’s spokeswoman says, “and in some of the categories it was the [brand’s] best performance ever. A lot of people support Ivanka, even across both political parties.” The publicity revealed to many shoppers that Ivanka had a shoe line, and a handbag line, and they bought those items, too.

Ivanka’s perfumes have become top sellers on Amazon.com. One of them sold all of its stock. Customer reviews online show that many of the buyers were persuaded to buy by the controversy, and many of them wanted to show support for Ivanka.

Now, I suppose it’s possible that some of this is hype. Has it been independently verified? However, it’s a phenomenon that’s been seen before in boycotts.

The question of whether boycotts work, and if so under what conditions, is treated here, in an article that analyzes some of the most successful (supposedly) boycotts in US and even world history. The issues involved were a lot different than in the boycott of Ivanka Trump’s clothing line, but even then it’s not easy to know whether the boycotts actually were “successful” or not:

The [Montgomery 1955] bus and [1960s] grape boycotts were not representative because why? For starters, these were boycotts that fed into an established movement, with many existing layers of activism and support. And, maybe most important, these were boycotts with good historical timing. Change was happening, and the boycotts reflected the appetite for that change. So did the boycotts cause the change? As Daniel Diermeier says:

DIERMEIER: It’s difficult to disentangle that…

…So what was the net effect of the [2012] Chick-fil-A boycott ”” at least the financial net effect? Did boycott plus buycott equal less than or more than zero, as measured by whatever rough measures you want to use ”“ quarterly revenues, share price, etc.?

DIERMEIER: I don’t know of any kind of serious empirical work that looked at that.

…Now, remember, the Chick-fil-A boycott was a bit of a special case. But let’s ask another basic question: how well does this kind of boycott usually work?

IVO WELCH: Boycotts almost surely will never work…

Not only did the [1970s-1980s] South Africa divestment movement not seem to have played much of a role in ending apartheid, Welch says it didn’t even really hurt South African companies.

WELCH: So if you think about somebody who holds stock of a South African company, if they decide to sell their shares, it will take about a microsecond before there’s another buyer to be found in the public markets. So it’s very, very easy ”” the demand, supply of shares in the stock market is extremely elastic. And your decision to boycott ”” that is, to divest yourself of the shares ”” isn’t going to make a difference. Now, if you could make it so that everybody in the world who wanted to hold South African stocks wouldn’t have bought any shares from South Africa anymore, it would have made a difference. However, that wasn’t the case. In reality, in real life, there were just too many people that were willing to hold the shares, and they immediately snapped up all the shares that people were willing to sell.

So despite a coordinated global effort by activists and institutions, Welch and his colleagues found that South African firms were essentially unharmed by the boycott.

It’s a long article (it’s actually a transcript of a radio program) and I haven’t yet read the whole thing. But what I have read is fascinating, and contains quite a few surprises.

The news cycle: FISAgate so far

The New Neo Posted on by

By Andrew C. McCarthy:

So, we will never have resolution on whether there should have been an investigation. And in any event, the suspicion that was under investigation ”” namely, the “Russia election-hacking” plot, in which Trump allegedly conspired ”” was not reality…

In effect, it is entirely possible to conduct a “counterintelligence” investigation that quite intentionally accesses intercepted communications of an American without obtaining a FISA warrant that singles out that American for wiretapping. Consequently, the question is not merely whether Trump or his associates (or both) were the targets of FISA applications or warrants. It is whether the intelligence agencies took active steps to access and analyze their intercepted communications ”” whether through targeted FISA warrants, non-particularized FISA authorizations, or other foreign-intelligence-gathering streams.

Assuming that there are such intercepted conversations, as the New York Times has reported, the question is whether people in the Trump camp just happened to be incidentally monitored because they were dealing with some Russians of interest to the intelligence community, or whether they were targeted to have their communications monitored or at least analyzed after the fact.

It is a fascinating question. And as with the other fascinating questions, we will probably never get a definitive answer. What you’ll get is this: The Russians tried to meddle in the election, but the Russians did not “hack the election” or affect its outcome. As for the rest of it, nothing to see here, move along.

Please read the whole thing.

It’s that final sentence of McCarthy’s that has me nodding. I’ve noticed—how can a person fail to notice?—that with Trump, both before his election and after, there have been a succession of Big Stories that break like waves upon a beach. Did you ever watch waves? They come in a certain rhythm, one after the other. And on any given day at a certain time of day, they all have a similar magnitude. Oh, there’s a bit of variation—one wave might be somewhat higher or lower than another wave. But they generally resemble each other, and all tend to break harmlessly on the shore.

It’s a rare rare day that brings a tsunami. Fortunately for shore-dwellers.

The Trump-accusation waves have been somewhat like that: a day at the beach. We see them crest, and then the wave breaks, and then the next one forms.

Each wave is touted by the MSM as being The Wave of the Century. This is indicated in part by the suffix “-Gate” that’s often hopefully added. I say “hopefully,” because, although Watergate took a while to fully reveal itself, it ended up washing away the presidency of a Republican man the MSM hated.

It was their moment of greatest glory, when reporters were heroes and had movies made about them with the main characters played by the likes of Redford and Hoffman. The MSM is eager for a repeat, with themselves in the roles and the hated Trump the new target. But the public has outrage fatigue, there are too many other competing sources of news and opinion, and the MSM’s reputation has suffered so much in the ensuing years that the public no longer trusts them, either.

Erythromelalgia: hotfoot [Part II]

The New Neo Posted on by

[If you haven’t read Part I, you probably should take a look.]

When I suddenly began to exhibit symptoms of erythromelalgia I was in my early forties, and it was just one of many mysterious and distressing things that were happening nearly simultaneously to me. I had hurt my back badly, with radiating sciatic pain into both legs. I had nerve injuries in both arms from the swimming that was supposed to help my back but didn’t. And then on top of that the puzzling hot and bright-red feet.

The doctors (and there were a series of them—orthopedists and neurosurgeons and neurologists in particular) suspected I might have a systemic disease because I had so many symmetrical symptoms in so many places, and so on top of everything else I was terrified that was the case when they started testing me for MS and a host of more obscure illnesses.

Fortunately, I didn’t have any disease, although it took several months of angst (my angst, that is) for them to come to that conclusion. The doctors concluded that I’d had a series of near-simultaneous injuries, several of which were expressed in burning pain, and one of which (the hot feet) was especially mysterious and rare.

This occurred in the early 1990s, before the internet was all that active. So I felt completely alone in this because I had no way to find other people with the problem, if such people existed. I didn’t even have a name for it. In addition, when I went for a consult with a big big back specialist on the west coast, he said he’d had patients with foot pain from their backs (of course), he’d never seen anyone with hot and burning feet. Visibly hot feet, I might add.

This further frightened me. If one of the biggest back specialists in the world had never seen it, what on earth was going on with me and why?

In those days there were also fewer medications for nerve pain, and since no one was offering me any relief, I located a behavioral psychologist specializing in chronic pain. This was also a relatively new field at the time. He had me listening to visualization tapes, including one that quickly became my favorite. I was supposed to relax different parts of my body till I was very mellow (not easy when you’re in that sort of pain) and then imagine a beautiful beach—waves, sand, warm weather, the works.

And then I was to visualize walking towards the ocean and stepping into the water—the cold, lovely water. I was supposed to imagine how this would feel. It was actually the middle of a New England winter, and this summertime fantasy was a pleasant thing to think about on several levels. But it was especially wonderful to think of those gentle waves lapping at my feet and cooling them off.

I listened to that tape every day for many months. And then the real summer arrived, and some friends from the west coast came to visit. One day while they were in town we decided to go to the beach. This would mark the first time I’d actually been to the ocean in the physical sense since I’d hurt myself, and I was excited at the thought. I was especially energized by the idea of really honestly and truly putting my feet into the cold water (the ocean is really cold in New England).

And so I did. The sand was not too hot, and the walk was not too long. But still, by the time I got to the water, I knew something was very very wrong. The abrasive sand had stirred up my nerve-damaged feet, and the water—although certainly very cold—had an almost knife-like quality that added to the burning pain rather than subtracting from it.

I stood there for a couple of minutes, waiting for the bad feelings to subside. They didn’t. And so I walked back to where we’d set up our chairs and towels, and I waited some more.

It felt like someone had turned up the dial on my feet and forgotten to turn it down. It was about two months before my feet went back to feeling the way they had before that day at the beach, which was hardly “normal” but at least was better than this.

Some time during those two months I took that beach visualization tape and threw it across the room. And then I put it in a drawer and never listened to it again. In fact, after that incident I had trouble doing any relaxation or visualization at all, although I tried it several times over the years. I felt betrayed, and even though I knew this was unreasonable, I couldn’t shake the feeling.

I knew that visualization is fantasy, and walking on the sand and actually putting your feet in the water is reality. The first was a mental exercise; the second a physical one. But I was angry. I was depressed. And I was frightened.

[To be continued in the grand finale, Part III.]

Think you could do it better?

The New Neo Posted on by

Did you ever have to try to reform or redesign a real-world program?

When I was in law school, I took a course that focused on the welfare system. We were assigned to read reams of papers detailing all the things that were wrong with welfare, and as you can imagine there were plenty of them.

And then we were given the assignment to design a better system. That was both a humbling and an edifying experience, one I wish everyone could have.

That was only an academic exercise, but many years later I was part of a panel that made recommendations for divorce law reform. We did something similar in terms of process—studied the laws in many states in order to figure out what model might be best for our state. The result was the same: the complexity of the matters involved and the law of unintended consequences kept rearing their ugly little heads. We ended up with something that no one really liked, but it was the best we could do.

And believe me, we were really really trying our best.

It’s easy to sit at home at a keyboard and figure out what we might do if we were in power. No, actually, even that isn’t so easy; for example, I’ve never come up with what I consider a good plan for health care reform, one that I think would actually work well in the real world.

And even if I could, to implement it I’d have to get all those other politicians to agree on it. Good luck with that.

US-AttorneyGate: Bharara, the press, and the president

The New Neo Posted on by

Andrew C. McCarthy explains the history of the most recent brouhaha, President Trump’s en masse firing of the US attorneys, and the reasons and history behind the move:

In March 1993, Janet Reno began her tenure as President Bill Clinton’s attorney general by summarily firing United States attorneys for 93 of the 94 federal districts (one, Michael Chertoff, was retained in New Jersey, at the request of Democratic Senator Bill Bradley). That is more than twice as many as Trump attorney general Jeff Sessions fired on Friday.

Indeed, there were only 46 Obama-appointed U.S. attorneys left for Sessions to relieve because Obama appointees fully understood that this is the way things work. Many of them had already moved on, in the expectation that the president elected in November would replace them ”” an expectation that became a virtual certainty once it was clear that this change of administrations would be a change of parties, and visions. I

…policy choices are the stuff of politics. They often weigh heavily in presidential campaigns and elections. Law-and-order issues intimately affect people’s lives. When presidents make promises about them, they must expect to be held accountable.

U.S. attorneys are the instruments through which the president exercises his policy discretion. That is why they are political appointees. They do not have power of their own. Under our Constitution, all executive power is reposed in the president alone. Every officer of the executive branch is thus a delegate. The U.S. attorney exercises the president’s power and can be removed at the president’s will.

It is only natural, then, that a president will want his power wielded by his own appointees, whom he trusts to carry out his policy program. And it thus follows that, when there is a transition between administrations that see the world, and the Justice Department’s role in it, as differently as the Obama and Trump administrations, there will be sweeping turnover, carried out rapidly.

I suggest you read the whole thing; it’s not long.

The MSM is treating this in an interesting manner, not atypical. If you just scan a bunch of headlines and don’t read the articles past the first paragraph (as I initially did when the story broke) you might get the impression that something extremely unusual has occurred with these firings. If you read the actual pieces, however, a bit further down in the stories you can find sentences such as this from the Times (headline: “Trump Abruptly Orders 46 Obama-Era Prosecutors to Resign”):

It is not unusual for a new president to replace United States attorneys appointed by a predecessor, especially when there has been a change in which party controls the White House.

Still, other presidents have done it gradually in order to minimize disruption, giving those asked to resign more time to make the transition while keeping some inherited prosecutors in place, as it had appeared Mr. Trump would do with Mr. Bharara. Mr. Obama, for example, kept Mr. Rosenstein, who had been appointed by George W. Bush.

The abrupt mass firing appeared to be a change in plans for the administration, according to a statement by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

And this from CNN, paragraph #4 (in an article entitled “Anger mounts over handling of US attorney firings”):

A Justice Department spokeswoman explained that forced resignations are a matter of course when turning the agency over to a new administration.

So the problem appears to be that the people involved, and their fellow-Democrats, don’t think they were given enough notice.

Nearly every Obama-appointed US attorney had to have known his/her days are numbered. The sole exception would be those who were told they could stay on for the duration. It’s not clear whether Preet Bharara, US Attorney for the southern district of New York, was told that he would be staying indefinitely, but it seems clear he was told he would be staying on at least for a while.

Not only that, but it seems that Preet would be a good guy to keep on. The usually Trump-friendly NY Post has criticized the firing of Bahara, and I’d say rightly so:

Trump and Sessions were right the first time, and they need to rescind the order for Bharara, the most successful prosecutor yet when it comes to undoing New York’s culture of political corruption.

Indeed, this comes as he’s still investigating the de Blasio administration and other key figures in New York for possible corruption. It’s absolutely the wrong time for him to leave.

If Bharara hadn’t been included in the mass firing, it also would have deprived the MSM of their most potent weapon in their criticism of the US attorneys’ firings, although it wouldn’t have stopped the criticism.

Bharara fought back:

The high-profile US attorney for Manhattan, Preet Bharara, has indicated he will not submit a letter of resignation as requested by the Trump administration Friday — placing the President in the position of having to fire him in a public standoff, sources tell CNN.

Bharara, who had been told after a meeting with the President-elect in November that he would stay on, felt blindsided by the move, the sources said.

Then there’s this paragraph:

The President-elect asked Bharara to continue as US attorney at the behest of New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer, who made the request when he and Trump were discussing how they could work together.

As is often the case these days, it’s difficult if not impossible to figure out the truth on the motives for the Bharara firing from reading the press. Is this a way to get back at Schumer? Is it a case of carelessness? Is it just a way to make a statement that a clean sweep is needed? Or has Bharara himself done something to give Trump pause?

Right after writing those words, I noticed that the showdown predicted in that CNN article had just happened. A few moments ago it was announced that Bharara had been fired by Trump.

I repeat: why? We don’t know. We do learn this, which touches on the answer to one question about which I was curious (that is, did Trump originally say he could stay indefinitely, or just for a while, during that earlier meeting?)

After Trump won the presidency, he met in late November with Bharara. The meeting came about, according to people familiar with the matter, after Mr. Trump called Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and congratulated him on becoming the leader of the Senate Democrats. In that conversation, Trump brought up Bharara, and said he was thinking of keeping him in his job, these people said. Schumer praised Bharara and Trump then arranged a meeting with Bharara at Trump Tower.

During the conversation, Trump told Bharara to call Sessions, his nominee for attorney general, who also asked Bharara to stay.

When Bharara was leaving, according to one person familiar with the meeting, he asked the president-elect what he should tell the reporters in the lobby. Trump told Bharara to tell them he was staying on, this person said.

In other words, we don’t know.

Trump is famous for telling people “You’re fired!”. But I agree with Jazz Shaw that this particular firing seems to make little sense, and appears to be “a major, unforced error”:

Bharara has achieved deservedly legendary status in the law enforcement community and you can read the many remarkable stories of his exploits which have been covered here in the past. Replacing him would be a Herculean task in this era of political partisanship and cronyism. Donald Trump has spoken frequently and passionately, both on the campaign trail and in the early weeks of his presidency, about the need to “drain the swamp” in government and restore the trust of the voters and their elected leadership. When it comes to matters such as this, Preet Bharara is an industrial strength suction pump who could turn the Florida Everglades into a desert in under a day. He has no friends in the political establishment from either party. The most powerful elected leaders in the region absolutely dread the thought of hearing his footsteps approaching their office.

It’s worth reminding everyone at this juncture that Bharara was the man who took down the most powerful Democrat in New York State, Sheldon Silver, and followed that up with a conviction of New York’s top Republican, Dean Skelos. Both of those men currently face the prospect of very possibly dying behind bars. He currently has investigations underway into the affairs of the Clinton Foundation’s offices in New York City, the mayor of the Big Apple and the Governor himself. (He has already indicted several members of the Governor’s inner circle.)

Yes, of course Trump can do this. But it seems a stupid and shortsighted thing to do as well as a possibly ominous exercise in power for its own sake. I’ll be willing to revise that last sentence if I come across some explanation that makes sense to me.

All the news that’s fit to drive you crazy

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t know about you, but lately the MSM has been getting far more annoying than usual. And that’s really saying something.

I’ve been blogging for a little over twelve years, and although I’ve always been eager to take a look at the day’s news, and always found it interesting, I’ve never felt this degree of dislocation and frustration at the descent of the media into almost pure propaganda.

Someone asked me recently “If you had only one source to recommend to people for their news, which one would you direct them towards?” I answered “never just one.” But if it were really a forced choice and I had to pick one, I reluctantly decided on the Wall Street Journal.

And I stick with that choice; it comes the closest to being fair than any other single periodical I can think of.

But there’s a pervasive sense of unease within me about what’s happening now in the media that’s different from what I’ve felt before. Rather than go on and on about it, I thought I’d just put up this thread for discussion. I bet some of you are feeling much the same way.

This is the feeling that Trump has capitalized on, but that doesn’t mean that Trump himself is some sort of truth-teller either. Anyone who closely followed the 2016 campaign knows that.

I’ve long felt that I needed to try to cobble together the truth from many sources, and that what I came up with would only be my best (almost certainly flawed) approximation of the truth. But lately that task has become even more daunting. I feel like I’m in a forest at night, trying to hack through the too-dense undergrowth with a dull blade and no beacon, only the glow of starlight and a quarter-moon.

The special effects of UDI

The New Neo Posted on by

A group called UDI (a bunch of guys from Siberia, by the way) was recently on Britain’s Got Talent. They do a gimmicky thing, and you can probably figure out how they do it. But the effects are wonderful and magical nevertheless.

Here’s one of their routines:

Here’s an article about them in the Siberian Times.

I do believe that’s the first time I’ve ever linked to the Siberian Times.

The great debate switcheroo

The New Neo Posted on by

You may already have seen this experiment in which parts of the Trump/Clinton debates were restaged—complete with gestures and expressions matching the originals—with an actress playing Trump and an actor playing Clinton. The idea behind it was this:

Maria Guadalupe, an associate professor of economics and political science at INSEAD, had an idea. Millions had tuned in to watch a man face off against a woman for the first set of co-ed presidential debates in American history. But how would their perceptions change, she wondered, if the genders of the candidates were switched? She pictured an actress playing Trump, replicating his words, gestures, body language, and tone verbatim, while an actor took on Clinton’s role in the same way. What would the experiment reveal about male and female communication styles, and the differing standards by which we unconsciously judge them?…

Salvatore says he and Guadalupe began the project assuming that the gender inversion would confirm what they’d each suspected watching the real-life debates: that Trump’s aggression””his tendency to interrupt and attack””would never be tolerated in a woman, and that Clinton’s competence and preparedness would seem even more convincing coming from a man.

But the lessons about gender that emerged in rehearsal turned out to be much less tidy.

In fact, viewers (the majority of whom appear to have been Hillary voters; the professors were from NYU so I’m assuming it was staged in New York City) were stunned and distressed by what they saw:

We heard a lot of “now I understand how this happened”””meaning how Trump won the election. People got upset. There was a guy two rows in front of me who was literally holding his head in his hands, and the person with him was rubbing his back. The simplicity of Trump’s message became easier for people to hear when it was coming from a woman””that was a theme. One person said, “I’m just so struck by how precise Trump’s technique is.” Another””a musical theater composer, actually””said that Trump created “hummable lyrics,” while Clinton talked a lot, and everything she was was true and factual, but there was no “hook” to it. Another theme was about not liking either candidate””you know, “I wouldn’t vote for either one.” Someone said that Jonathan Gordon [the male Hillary Clinton] was “really punchable” because of all the smiling. And a lot of people were just very surprised by the way it upended their expectations about what they thought they would feel or experience.

Here’s a clip of what I believe is a rehearsal:

Absolutely fascinating—particularly for me, because I study the process of political mind-changing. Certainly some of these people must have experienced the glimmerings of a change of mind, although there are many ways to fend off and/or rationalize such an experience if it occurs in isolation and isn’t followed up by more. I’m struck, however, by the honesty of the people’s expression of their unanticipated reactions, even though they were surprised and dismayed by them. People often refuse to even admit evidence that contradicts their assumptions.

But I have a caveat in terms of the gender conclusions. The fact that Trump is a man and Hillary a women was certainly no small part of how and why people reacted to each them (and to the battle between them) as they did. But it was still just a part. Both Trump and Clinton are also specific individuals who each have very distinctive characteristics that make them absolutely unique. Although the actors mimicked the candidates’ every gesture and expression, with genders reversed, the mimicry was only of the outward form of the presentation. The essence of each person was missing (at least, in my opinion), and not just because the sexes were switched, although of course that’s a big factor.

Watching that clip, I didn’t feel as though I was seeing a female approximation of Trump or a male version of Hillary, even though the actors were speaking their lines and imitating their movements. Did you ever see a play and then see it with a different cast of lead actors? I have, many times. The genders aren’t switched, but the performances can be like night and day. We all bring our idiosyncratic selves to every single thing we do, and that’s even true of actors who are pretending to be someone else.