Monday, March 19. 2012
The guarantee-issue provision of ObamaCare is expected to result in many enrolling in individual plans who are ill, or waiting to enroll until ill. The Center for Consumer Information & Insurance Oversight (CCIIO) of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will require group health plans to subsidize individual health plans with about $27-billion between 2014-2016. That is expected to keep individual premiums about 10-15% lower but raise group premiums by 1%.
The estimate is supposedly based upon the experience of New York's guarantee-issue requirement since 1993, where premiums have actually skyrocketed compared to the rest of the US. According to Kaiser Health Facts, in 2010 the average individual premium in New York was $357 versus the US average of $215, while the employer-provided family coverage premium is 6% higher in New York. It'll take much more than $27-billion taken from employers to subsidize the added individuals covered by insurance under ObamaCare.
Video is at Althouse's Alexandra Pelosi "is declining to understand the critique."
Redstate: There Will Be A Reckoning Against These People.
David French: The Problem with Mocking the Poor
Via Insty:
“Maher criticizes the whites and finds excuses for the blacks. That’s because he has adult expectations for whites while having only child-like expectations for blacks.” Yeah, well, that’s how racists think.
My seatmate at a dinner on Saturday was a vascular surgeon who was touting the wonders of HCG for weight loss, said he lost 30 lbs. in 6 weeks with it. Said he felt no hunger with the 500 cal/day diet that goes with it, and hasn't felt particularly hungry since.
He also touted this book: King of Hearts: The True Story of the Maverick Who Pioneered Open Heart Surgery . Reads like a thriller, he says.
It can be said, with some justice, that libertarians apply only one measure to every issue. But what a sublime yardstick it is. Libertarians ask, about each thing they encounter in public life, “Does this promote the liberty, responsibility, and dignity of the individual?” Libertarianism can have political implications, but politics is, by definition, mass action. And libertarians don’t believe in the masses. They believe in the individuals huddled in those masses. A pure libertarian is opposed to politics down to the soles of his shoes (or, libertarians being libertarians, down to the bottom of his sandals worn with socks). Libertarianism is contra-political, an emetic dose to be given to politics.
P.J. O'Rourke, here
From the other side, Progressivism and the authoritarian impulse. About that, McQuain comments:
This is the real problem we face in America. Jeff G. calls it “un-American”. In the strictest sense of the word and given the fact that it rejects everything our founders believed in – I agree.
Sunday, March 18. 2012
Sorry - I put "sexy" in there to grab your attention and to make a point about words. If you studied cognitive psychology or good old-fashioned linguistics in college, you learned this famous theory about how language determines thought. If you didn't, it's your loss. Their theory is partly wrong, because humans can think without using words, but it is also partly right, because words do effect and shape our thoughts.
But Sapir-Whorf went beyond that. They theorized that language shapes and structures our perceptions of the world - both our output and our input.
Indeed, words and their concepts seem to do that. Goethe said "Man sees what he knows." A birder sees a Parula Warbler, a non-birder sees just a "bird," or doesn't even notice it at all. The universal metaphor of blindness for ignorance is no accident.
Sapir-Whorf is almost an "In the beginning was the word" theory. However right or wrong their theory was, it has been a useful and productive and intriguing one, which is the only true measure of a theory in science.
I refer to Sapir-Whorf because we had two posts a while ago which were, ultimately, about words and how they are used. One about "values," one about "progress." In both cases, these words and their connotations slipped into regular usage and began shaping our thoughts, sometimes without our awareness. After all, "thinking" happens somewhere in the shadowy darkness between awareness and un-awareness.
Cognitive Daily reviews the history of the hypothesis, and recent research on this dusty but still fascinating topic.
Photo is the East Haddam, CT, Congo church
...as many as 3 in 10 young adults postponed marriage, starting a family, or both, due to the economy, according to the Pew report. Another third have returned to school and untold numbers have settled for a job simply to make ends meet.
"settled for a job"?
How they view me: Why Conservatives Are Still Crazy After All These Years
Friday night news dump: Administration to move forward with and expand contraception mandate
Obama building largest campaign in history
Stop the demagoguery on oil and gas, Mr. President
Union Thugs Threaten Citizen Election Watchdogs
Santorini: This Is All That Greece Needs
EDITORIAL: Destroy all churches - Obama silent while Saudi grand mufti targets Christianity
California’s Endangered Charter Schools - The state’s powerful teachers’ unions want to regulate charters into submission
In Search of Vienna's Vanished Jewish Elite
President Barack Obama promised over and over during the health care debate that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.”
It turns out that, for a lot of people, that isn’t true.
Paul's Letter to the Ephesians 2:1-10
2:1 You were dead through the trespasses and sins
2:2 in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient.
2:3 All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else.
2:4 But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us
2:5 even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ--by grace you have been saved--
2:6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,
2:7 so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
2:8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God--
2:9 not the result of works, so that no one may boast.
2:10 For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.
Saturday, March 17. 2012
A friend recently told me that the late David Foster Wallace's best work was in non-fiction.
He advised me to read his 2006 piece on Roger Federer. Here it is.
Today’s lead editorial in the San Diego Union-Tribune, “Saving lives is the moral high ground”, validates the post I wrote February 24, "Pig Politics Vs Marine Lives". San Diego area congressman Bob Filner, one of the most liberal in Congress, along with PETA, seek to halt the training of Corpsmen using anesthetized pigs, claiming falsely that using simulators is better. The editorial may be traced not only to my piece but also to the correspondence I had with the reporter who admitted his articles in the newspaper were poorly researched. Kudos to the reporter for taking responsibility. The newspaper’s editor is an excellent, moderate and professional journalist. The editorial is evidence that there are such and they are to be prized and congratulated for upholding journalistic standards.
The newspaper editorial follows:
Saving lives is the moral high ground
by U-T San Diego Editorial Staff
There has long been a soft spot in the Editorial Board heart for animals great and small. We love the seals at Children’s Pool in La Jolla. We supported Proposition 2 in 2008 to ban the inhumane cages and crates used by many California farms to house hens, veal calves and pregnant pigs. We support efforts to protect California gray whales and to save the giant California condor from extinction.
But our soft spot hardens a bit when it comes to the controversy over the use of live pigs in the training of American military corpsmen to help save the lives of the men and women who tragically find their bodies shredded by roadside bombs or other armaments of war on far-off battlefields.
Rep. Bob Filner, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Veterans Affairs Committee and a candidate for mayor of San Diego, has introduced misguided legislation to phase out the use of live animals in combat simulations by 2016 at training grounds such as the privately operated facility at Covert Canyon near Alpine in East County. Supported by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Filner argues that there are alternatives that simulate human body injuries just as well and that the use of live pigs is unwarranted.
But military officials argue that there is no substitute as realistic as live animals in helping corpsmen learn how to keep severely wounded soldiers alive in the stressful conditions of the battlefield. And they emphasize that the pigs are anesthetized throughout the training and monitored by veterinarians.
We hope a 2009 Defense Department report proves true that in years to come there will be high-quality and cost-effective alternatives to the use of live animals for this training. But, today, the lives of U.S. military personnel in combat are being saved in unprecedented numbers thanks to medical training at places like Covert Canyon. And that gives it the moral and ethical high ground.
This isn't about Obama - it's Craig Bodeker's documentary about race from a couple of years ago,
Disclose.tv - A Conversation About Race by Craig Bodeker Video
One of my rare Yankeeland slice of life posts, for our overseas readers who are interested in what we do here in America when we lazy people aren't "working" -
Fertilize lawns
Re-load the big bird-feeders
Fertilize flowering shrubs and perennial borders with 10-10-10
Re-seed bare spots in lawn and water the seed
Put Preen on borders
Mulch and edge front garden
Pansies in pots
Final late-winter prunings (I have mastered the pruning arts, over the years)
Remove large redundant branch from the big Peach tree
Get organized for our big wild game dinner here next weekend - order delivery of spare tables and chairs, plates and silverware for 30, and warming plates, etc.
Clean self up, if possible, for fancy dinner out with group of new friends tonight
 Jesse James probably regarded himself as an idealist at heart
Anne Tyler: A writer's modesty
Alan Bean: An astronaut at 80
Siri vs. Evi voice commands
Everyone Out of the Pool
Pap smears? Mammograms? Prostate exams? Not under Obamacare
Modern Environmentalism, 1970 – 2012, RIP
White House moves into full reelection mode
Interesting Example of How the Possibility of Surveillance Interferes With Free Expression
Rotting from the Head Down - A member of Britain’s intellectual elite celebrates his nation’s social collapse.
58% Favor Taxing All At The Same Percentage Rate
So do I. Dues are dues.
Financing Terror
Obama Team Mining Personal Info to Woo Donors
No Pasaran:
There are no angels, but there are certainly more demons in trying to dupe the working man into believing that fake issues such as Gay Marriage, Global Warming, open borders (which costs the working class jobs and lowers their wages), forcing medical insurance companies to cover the contraceptive pill at no additional cost, and the like.
It’s agitprop – plain, old fashioned agitprop thrown out there in the hope that anger at the shlebobbeth can be raised, and the public’s mean IQ lowered.
A new anti-Israel tactic
Opposition to Obamacare Grows as Anniversary Approaches
Nicky Larkin: Israel is a refuge, but a refuge under siege - Through making a film about the Israeli-Arab conflict, artist Nicky Larkin found his allegiances swaying
Major RED FLAG: Military Cover-up in Afghanistan
McCain sees another Solyndra in Navy biofuels spending
Iran’s stealth financial partners in Latin America
New Pro-Palestinian Chutzpah Tactic To Silence Pro-Israel Professors
Poet, sculptor, architect, and painter (who considered painting the lowest of arts, and even designed the fortifications of Florence of which sections still remain), Michelangelo was "discovered" by Lorenzo de Medici who took him under his wing.
He sculpted the Pieta at age 24. Image below is Michelangelo at 60. He died the year that Shakespeare was born, making it easy to remember.
TO THE SUPREME BEING
The prayers I make will then be sweet indeed,
If Thou the spirit give by which I pray:
My unassisted heart is barren clay,
Which of its native self can nothing feed:
Of good and pious works Thou art the seed,
Which quickens only where Thou say'st it may;
Unless Thou show to us Thine own true way,
No man can find it: Father! Thou must lead.
Do Thou, then, breathe those thoughts into my mind
By which such virtue may in me be bred
That in Thy holy footsteps I may tread;
The fetters of my tongue do Thou unbind,
That I may have the power to sing of Thee,
And sound Thy praises everlastingly.
This poem was translated into English by William Wordsworth (1770-1850), from this site.
In a Friday night news dump, the Obama administration’s proposed solution to paying for free contraception provided to health plan members got ratcheted up to a new level of feeble three-card monte, only not transparent to utter fools, which the Obama administration relies upon.
The Obama administration already mandated that religious employers with insured plans can opt out, but their insurers will have to pay for the contraception. The transparent ruse there is that such costs will actually be passed back to employers in higher premiums, aside from violating their religious doctrine.
The Washington Post reports, Friday night the Obama administration mandated that colleges with self-insured plans, covering about 200,000 students, those in which the college directly self-funds claims via an administrator it pays to process them, will have the tab picked up by the administrator. Several schemes are proposed to accomplish this. Ultimately the cost reverbs back to the sponsor of the self-funded plan. (800,000 more students are covered in insured plans, already mandated by ObamaCare -- or should I call it FlukeCare -- to include contraceptives.)
Over a third of covered workers, over 50-million, receive their medical coverage through their employers’ self-funded plan. Employers have lately been flocking to self-insured plans, to avoid aspects of the ObamaCare onslaught. The Obama administration just brought the siege tower to breach the plans sheltering tens of millions, with more ObamaCare salvos to follow through to devastate another sector of free enterprise health care and freedoms.
Friday, March 16. 2012
CBO: Obama Budget Creates $6.4 Trillion in New Deficits.
This is getting dangerous. Don't the Dems care?
In media, connectivity is all about getting content out in as many ways possible, as quickly as you can. There is no worrying about how information is processed. When there were limited forms of media outlets, the ability to add discussion (Op/Ed pieces in print, news shows on TV) created some context and helped the information flow. With the myriad resources available today, and the speed at which information arrives, context is being pushed to the side in favor of raw data. The medium is no longer the message. The message predominates.
How is this impacting youth?
It's troubling question, leading researchers to address the different potential outcomes. There are indications that people's brains are becoming 'wired' differently. But whether that wiring is improving decision making or analysis is open to question.
My point of view is that shortened attention spans and more breadth of knowledge (exchanged for less depth) is the likely outcome, which is not necessarily beneficial.
the immersive nature of 24/7 connectedness creates the illusion that Millennials can somehow tap into a form of collective intelligence just by being online, while looking impatiently for messages every three minutes.
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Are we asking enough of our kids? 
