Maggie's Farm

The importance of good conversation. AVI 

Nostalgia for racism.

Liberals should be fighting white stereotyping. Driscoll

Review the darn checklist before landing

Victory was not a dirty word in the election. So why now?

The coming middle-class tax hikes. Related: The freedom you would lose under Obamacare.

Some good news from Africa. Front Page

This recession has more government policies that discourage work. I have heard this, around. Take a sabbatical and stretch out that unemployment. Or find some disability if you can.

Hypocrite du Jour: Thomas Friedman. Glib and sanctimonious, like so many at the NYT.

Forcing people to get medical insurance who don't want it.

Iraq Powerpoint in the US Army. PowerPoint is lethal, in a way: it's mind-numbing. Powerpoint and meetings are the reasons Coyote quit corporate America to become an entrepreneur.

Not your reserved and formal Yankee-style, but darn good fun (h/t, Protein):

Michelle:

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius tried to reassure citizens in New Orleans this week that Obamacare bureaucrats will make sound medical decisions for all Americans. She failed. Under the government-run plan, she promised, a team of health care experts will recommend what should be covered: “I think it would be wise to let science guide what the best health care package is.”

I guess it didn't occur to her that doctors know some science - and they also know something else: they know their patient. No two patients are alike. People do not want an "approved treatment protocol" - they want to work it out with a doc who is working for them, and is not a de facto civil servant. I think what Sebelius means is not "science": she means a board of cost-containing medical efficiency experts.

However, I do not think anybody wants a government to have that sort of power. Governments create omnipotent monopolies.

It's one thing for a private medical insuror to tell you they don't cover in vitro fertilization, and another for the government to tell you that you cannot have it because "science says" that it's not cost-effective. In the former case, it's a freely-entered association, as Milton Friedman would say, and if you want the in vitro badly enough, you can save your pennies and get one. Furthermore, I'd much rather make an appeal to a private biz than to the government.

We suspect that the government wants two things: 1. To get more folks on the Government Plantation and, 2. To control Medicare costs. Re the latter, the O might be right that it may have been unwise for his Grandma to have a hip or knee replacement when she was dying from cancer - but he is correct that 80% of medical costs occur in the final year of life. However, unless somebody has terminal cancer or something comparable, how do you know it's somebody's final year of life in advance?

Another related issue is the equating of "health care" (a dumb term) with medical insurance. I suppose with the high costs of medical technology and hospital treatments, those costs are out of reach for the average person (which is why we buy cheap catastrophic, ie high-deductible medical insurance) but, for most purposes in life, a regular office visit for a bad sore throat or a camp physical doesn't cost very much at all, while an ER visit for your bad sore throat can set you back $750.

We agree that it is foolhardy for anybody who is not wealthy - especially for a family - to carry no catastrophic major medical insurance, because bankruptcy sucks. We also think it is foolish for people to expect insurance to cover every office visit: the whole point of insurance is supposed to be that you hope you never need it.

However, years of Medicaid (for the poor), Medicare (which pays for everything, at low rates), union-driven medical benefits and work-related medical benefits have produced a sense of entitlement and, we would argue, have driven up the cost - and the quality - of medical treatment in the US.

What is the right role for government in medical care? We don't know, and we don't trust anybody who says they know. Fact is, government already controls much of it via Medicare, Medicaid, and now SCHIP. It has been incrementalism at work, with the long socialist view. One thing we do know is that fewer and fewer Docs want to accept Medicare, and few ever accepted Medicaid except for charity clinics and inner city Medicaid mills staffed by foreign medical graduates.

Why do so many Docs opt out of Medicare? Because of the paperwork requirements and the unsustainable rates of reimbursement. When people get a doctor's bill, they often forget that it's not a bill for his time: it's a bill for his rent, his machines, his two nurses, his insurance coder, his bookkeeper, his receptionist, his staff's benefits, his malpractice insurance, etc. Your local Internist and Pediatrician is not getting rich on $65 office visits these days. In fact, they are struggling.

No, the big costs are tests, some medicines, hospitalizations, cancer treatments, dialysis, the ICU, etc. The big ticket items - and those costs are not compressible. They can only be rationed if costs are to be cut. We do not think those costs should be cut, because we believe that such decisions are a matter of personal choice and freedom and, as they always say, "All you have is your health." Or your disease, as the case may be.

We wish we knew the right answers to all of these issues but, despite the problems, we will say one thing: With the best, most innovative and most available medical care in the world, one must be extremely careful about messing with it. Freedom is always messy. We re-link Cardinal at Tigerhawk's defence of American medicine.

From another point of view, a quote from an annoyed Vanderleun's Who, Whom?, which reiterates our Roger's thoughts about The Plunder Economy:

Who—whom?" Who shall be forced to give up the health care that they like (most Americans), and whom shall receive health care they (supposedly) ain't got -- for free -- at a cost to everyone else of trillions in dollars and immeasurable quantities of freedom and privacy and security.

Who (shall give)? You and hundreds of millions of others. Anyone who has a job, or makes things, or owns things that can be taxed. And then have a fee for this or that levied (for the common good). And then taxed again.

Whom (shall receive)? The poor shall be marched to the front of the line; their ragamuffin children with protruding bellies on their shoulders for the photo-op. But right behind them will come.... the slackers, the lazy, the whacked-out, the grifters, the hustlers, the useless, the career recipients of endless government hand-jobs, the hard-core unemployable, the 17% of crack whores that do not work for the government, and a few million others that form the hard, adamantine core of Obama's and the Democrats' aptly named "base."

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," is what's going on here. Except this time the add-on is "Even if you don't need it or want it, because little Susie the crack whore does. P.S. We're gonna slip in some language to pay for her abortion too, just because it will piss you off."

That is a bit cold, Mr. V.

Written by The B and BD together.

Elegy for Jane (My student, thrown by a horse)

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,

A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw,
Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.

Milton Friedman, in 1978, puts socialized medicine in the context of government expansion of powers, and explains why it matters (h/t, Sissy):

Gathering of the Vibes this week. h/t, reader.

Buddy Guy, Levon Helm, Crosby, Stills and Nash. How bad is that?

Photo: The beach at beautiful Seaside Park, in the winter. If it weren't for the Mob, crooked pols, urban renewal, public housing projects, welfare, and the flight of industrial jobs after WW 2 seeking lower taxes and union-free locations, Bridgeport might still be the fine, crime-free and prosperous Park City that it once was.

The sad old city is a case study in how government good intentions payoffs generally fail horribly. Too bad they didn't take Texas as a model.

Our loyal and devoted webmeister Chris caught this photo with his cell phone yesterday:

A cold rainy spring and summer here in New England. Very nice indeed, with almost no a/c. Terrible for our tomato plants, though.

All about life and the Rain, with the Beatles. Always thought Revolver was their best. Was that from Revolver? Or Rubber Soul? Maybe Rubber Soul was their best. Or maybe Meet The Beatles. Probably Meet The Beatles...yes, I still wanna hold your hand, baby.

And yes, the Beatles did invent the MTV concept. They loved the cameras, and the cameras loved them.

I still miss 'em.

Villainous wonders.

That was the title of an EB White/James Thurber classic.

I think the biggest debate on the right side of the spectrum is not so much between libertarians and social conservatives as it is between those who want to be right, and those who want to win elections.

Eric at Classical Values

The O admits he is not familiar with the House health care bill he is selling.

It all just gets stranger and stranger. And desperate. This stuff is too important to people to rush through.

A tip for the gals: from 10 bizarre scientific studies, the useful fact that the length of a guy's index finger correlates with the length of his flaccid penis, when stretched ("stretched"?).

Now please stop staring at my fingers.

A study indicates that the primate brain's reward system for acquiring information seems to follow the same pathways as the reward systems for food and sex.

That is surely why readers read Maggie's Farm: we are stimulating!

Story at Frontal Cortex.

Carlos Santana turns a young 62 today. I was fortunate to hear him play in recent years. Here's a delicious Samba Pa Ti:

A bit cornball, but true - and good for kids: The American Trinity, from Prager (h/t Moonbattery):

From a harshly critical op-ed by Matt Welch in the WaPo:

What the new president has not quite grasped is that the American people understand both irony and cognitive dissonance. Instead, Obama has mistaken his personal popularity for a national predilection toward emergency-driven central planning. He doesn't get that Americans prefer the slower process of building political consensus based on reality, and at least a semblance of rational deliberation rather than one sky-is-falling legislative session after another.

The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. ⁵For we do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake. ⁶For God, who said, "Let light shine out of darkness,"^[a]made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.

 ⁷But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. ⁸We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; ⁹persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. ¹⁰We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. ¹¹For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body. ¹²So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.

 ¹³It is written: "I believed; therefore I have spoken."^[b]With that same spirit of faith we also believe and therefore speak, ¹⁴because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you in his presence. ¹⁵All this is for your benefit, so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God.

 ¹⁶Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. ¹⁷For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. ¹⁸So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

Bar exam. Oh boy. For Rules of Evidence, it's 70% exceptions to The Rules, after you learn The Rules. We did Wills and Estates yesterday. It caused us to rethink our wills.

We parents of the graduate Law Student are having fun learning this stuff. It's sort-of crazy, and sort-of not. Good rule of thumb: stay clear of The Law if possible. It seems to be its own wacko universe, and not for amateurs.

This series of photos came in over the transom, but I see that it was adapted from a NYT story:

"Clingstone, an unusual 103-year-old mansion in Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay, survives through the love and hard work of family and friends."

Sunshine doesn't cause the dangerous skin cancers (h/t, Englishman). People need that sunshine; what we used to term "bennies" - Beneficial Sun Rays. "Going out to catch some bennies and study chem."

Hold the sunblock, and go to the beach (h/t, Tangled):

Or to this one, in China:

This is too important an issue to leave with bureaucrats.

Samizdata, discussing space flight but applicable to most things

Via Dr. Clouthier:

From Jammie's piece on taxes, the view from NYC: