cheese it, the cops!

Mangled! CNN Debate, Night 2

 

 

print version: @splicetoday. 

A Sad, Shortsighted Species

I've been very sick the last couple of weeks. One course of pretty nasty antibiotics and I started to feel better and then wham! Back to the local Stop&Doc where I got the first prescription and the office, which serves a couple of hundred people daily. They couldn't find a substitute to cover while the normal guy took some vacation. We commiserated back and forth, since I needed help; and they -- four people -- were waiting for the word to close shop and 3/4s of a day's pay.

While this was a personal problem, it got me thinking. I've had 2-4 cases of strep throat and associated problems every year since before Crispin was born. Had the tonsils out when I was 20 and the idea that no more sore throats was a total lie. However, there was a lot less misery. Still, when it gets full blown, I'm pretty useless. More so than normal, according to some. 

On the other hand, I've never had smallpox, tetanus, swine flu, diphtheria, thyroid, tetanus, rabies, rubella, shingles, malaria, plague, anthrax or any of the other stuff I've been vaccinated for. Made me wonder why this is so...

So, channeling Phil Ochs, I wrote about it.   

 

gruber

the jonathan gruber/obamacare scandal is devastating. in this era of incredibly stupid partisanship, the fact that it more or less unfolded on fox news makes it invisible to half the population, while making nothing else visible to the other half. the coverage by msm outlets other than fox has been unbelievably pathetic, discrediting to them, quite substantiating 'left-wing media' as a phrase encompassing, say, the new york times or the atlantic. i am telling you that you must watch some fox during a democratic administration, or you are just getting barraged with propaganda and nothing else, as this scandal shows. but it is truly as though most of the people i know are physically incapable of watching fox even for a moment. 

really what emerges is a portrayal of the way washington works now. so, gruber - mit prof/white house consultant/important source of the plan itself - starts the ball rolling by saying they'd never have got the thing through if the american people knew what was in it, that they depended on our stupidity. then it turns out that he was functioning simultaneously as an extremely well-paid consultant, and an independent authority. they took his advice on policy and on pr, then appealed to his material specifically as independent academic analysis of the aca's effects. he was writing op-eds presenting himself precisely as an independent authority, with bio squibs that did not identify his inside role. then he went out and made perhaps millions helping states with their exchanges, as pelosi and many others routinely appealed to his 'independent' research and 'mit' as evidence for the costs and benefits of the program. there were many utter disasters among the state exchanges, of course. simultaneously with this whole process, gruber was, according to himself, thinking to himself 'we've got to pull the wool over the eyes of the american public to get this thing passed and implemented'.

he was enriching himself and certainly compromising his own academic integrity and that of mit continuously. it is a very disturbing portrait of interlocked political parties/operations and academic institutions/experts, where the professors give the political positions credibility or an air of objectivity or even science, while also cashing in and moving back and forth between government and academia, one way or another. i think this should make any rational person doubt the credibility of mit professors. if you looked at the intersection of harvard, wall street, and the obama admin, you'd see the function of expertise in squishy totalitarianism, and the disturbing way that money and power flow through academic institutions, controlling every aspect of the way they are administered, who they hire, what sort of research they fund and pursue and tenure, and so on.

what you'd want to look at are things like contributions and expenditures in the endowment; uses of the research output by partisan politicians; migration of faculty into the state and migration of officials to the faculty and thence to the investment banking industry or lobbying; the ideological diversity or the reverse of the faculty; direct federal grants for research and the backgrounds of the faculty funded and the uses of research in justifying federal programs or partisan hobbyhorses, including the funding of the grants themselves; where they send their graduates. 

maybe you think that, since all harvard profs are liberals and vote democratic, they are egalitarians. well, it is time to stop listening to their yap and start attending to their actual effect: who they are and whom they hang out with and whom they are funded by and whom they serve and what they really want, which is only an ever-ascending prestige and the ascendency of their like in the various hierarchies. that the harvard or stanford administration or faculty are enemies of privilege: surely no one can possibly think something like that? withering skepticism of the research is appropriate in this situation. (ladies and gentlemen, the vast faculty of the kennedy school of government.) and i'm telling you that even humanities professors at these institutions are interlocked with the admin and political parties, and of course with the ways their own positions are funded and ways to enhance their salaries or collect the junkets or get that pic with michelle obama.

but it's the depravity of the sales strategies by the white house and the democratic party that really sticks: the condescension, the contempt for us and for the truth and for democracy, the routine miserable lack of integrity or decency in our political process, the total dedication to manipulation, the underlying incompetence.

when i figure out how to get it and embed it, i'll post the special report panel from tonight with goldberg, fournier, and krauthammer, with a report that gives a very clear account of events. obviously it's a report produced by an organization that wants to focus scepticism on the administration. but that's what we need, with regard to every administration. it's reaching the point where the nytimes is going to have to cover it, and not just cover the fact that fox is covering it as a way to discredit the story itself. to do that, the only relevant thing is to throw specific doubts on specific parts of the reporting, correct?

stick it

obama and many other rationalizers of oppression take this approach, among a hundred other distractions, red herrings, etc, to the nsa: hey google and facebook do it, so hahaha! first of all, no they don't, in many dimensions. really do you think facebook is putting backdoor code into google, etc? but here's the thing: i'll be as worried about google or verizon having my info as i am about the us government when google has 'the greatest military the world has ever known', sprawling systems of incarceration, the power of coercive taxation, thousands of heavily armed thugs in suits, predator drones, high-end torturers, and so on. until then, take this argument and stick it.

pee tardy

i just want to say this up top: no doubt the tea party consisted of ignorant rednecks operating out of racial resentment. their opinions were manipulated by fox and rush, rather than by the harvard j.d.s manipulating the opinions of decent people from portland. however, they were so, so right about obama, and about the nature of the american government now, and about the fact that the american political tradition of freedom, as enshrined in the constitution, is over, betrayed. so absorb that. pardon my 'you' but i can't help it: they were right and you were wrong. they were true and you were false. they were clear and you were muddy. they were zoysia and you were astroturf. they were oppressed and you were oppressors. they said something and you said nothing. birtherism turned out to be a nice false symbol of the truth, which is perhaps why it has a bizarre power and immunity to evidence. right the man was born in america. but he is not an american as i would understand what that means.

The Castle is really The Hospital and we're all headed for The Cancer Ward

 With apologies to Kafka, George C Scott and Solzhenitsyn, Crusader AXE must clarify that I do not begrudge Ann Romney her horse. I begrudge her husband the right to pretend that there's no difference betwen her service horses and the baby doll an old woman clutches in a filthy rest home...Since that sort of blindness is endemic to Romney and his party, I begrudge them their fucking existence...and now, it's personal. 

we have liftoff

12:22 well obama was notably wooden.

12:15 have to say, no matter what your view, there is something hopeful about roberts the turncoat. sometimes you wonder whether anyone is capable of independent ratiocination. it's just possible that scalia managed to alienate the chief justice.

10:21 it would be funny if roberts upheld on the grounds of the power to tax. the obama administration wasn't going to make that argument because then they would be portrayed as raising taxes. in other words, they precluded themselves from making the winning argument for reasons of political vocabulary. then they got bailed out: well, then we'll make the argument for you.

10:18 cnn has reported that the individual mandate has been struck down, that the whole thing has been upheld, and that parts have been struck down, parts upheld. geez y'all.

10 am: pretty wild counting down moment by moment to a supreme court decision, like a space launch. msnbc is still running paired political consultants, the last people you want to hear parse something like this.

constitutional cred

here's an example of the credibility index in action. actually on liberty-type grounds i oppose the individual mandate in obama's health insurance bill. also i think it's unconsitutional. but if i assert that it is unconstitutional, given that i think it's wrong on other, more general grounds, you should suspect that i twisted the evidence on the constitutionality. not that i necessarily have, but i had a motivation to. now before you try to grapple with the arguments, you should regard someone who opposes the mandate but thinks it's probably constitutional as particularly credible; you should eyeball their constitutional interpretation as a sincere attempt to deal with the available info. likewise someone who supports the mandate with all the fervor of a great and generous soul, but who doesn't find any authority in the constitution to do it. now, are there any such people?

gulp

my basic way into anarchism might be framed like this: in virtue of what, precisely, does michael bloomberg have the right to tell me what i can and cannot drink? i simply reject - or rather, refute - all candidate justifications, starting with the idea that i've agreed to abide with what elected officials proclaim; i'm telling you that i have not. i don't recognize the epistemic authority of the researchers to whom bloomberg appeals. the idea that he represents the majority will - if such a notion makes any sense - is one i regard with indifference: what most people believe, as i have actually proven, is less likely to be true than its negation. he has no more right to tell me what to drink than i have to tell him, and if by the democratic miracle he has become everybody, i assert that everybody doesn't have any more right to tell me what to drink than i have to tell everybody. but i will make a deal: i'll let you tell me what to drink, michael, if you let me tell you what to think. however, once you think along the lines i will prescribe, you will have somewhat more respect for the autonomy, dignity, and equality of persons.

In which Crusader AXE discusses the relationship of Health Care to Tiberius Caesar and Captain Capitualion

"And if you spend your whole life dragging horses into Troy, You will not go to Heaven, you'll go to Champaign Illinois" -- Rhett Miller

 

 

Actually authorized Dylan re-tool of Desolation Row...

 

prevent affordable care

obviously i've got no problem with contraception, and i'm pro-choice. but does anyone besides me find it disturbing that the admin, including obama, who's speaking right now, defines contraception as 'preventive care'? i don't think pregnancy is an illness, or that a fetus is analagous to a tumor, etc.

a website called 'consciencelaws'  has reprinted a piece i did for the latimes a couple of years ago.

here's a nice parable. we spent years trying to cure cancer, and this morning we did! it's a miracle! let's go to panera for some well-deserved yet moderately-priced lunch. oh dang someone broke into the car while we were chowing down and grabbed our computer, and with it the cure. dang dang dang! ok let's work on the common cold. somehow this feels like my life.

i'd say the anti-smoking police have ramped up the hysteria to maximum: Even One Cigarette Can Prove Lethal, U.S. Surgeon General Says. or even one moment anywhere near someone who's smoking: instant death. where the surgeon general can go after that is not clear, so i guess that's her last appearance on television; thank god we've heard the end of that. still you can't argue with Science. it's almost hard to imagine the litigation atmosphere this creates.

"David Corn, left, of Mother Jones and James Pinkerton of Fox News challenge Obama to cure Alzheimer's."

a nice formulation! i would think the skills he picked up in law school would help a lot here. i challenge obama to save my immortal soul, or to predict the weather in the interior of the malay peninsula for the next twenty years, or to develop a more plausible theory of everything than stephen hawking's. wait i am so disappointed! don't you think that what we expect from our political leaders has gotten a trifle fantastic?

 as we move toward "social" or government-run medicine - and very decisively in the requirement to buy health insurance - we socialize or collectivize the costs of healthcare. now i am not going to deny that there are good features of this, but of course it is also riddled with difficulties. but here is the really problematic bit: it justifies extremely wide-ranging state power over the bodies of each person.

so, the basic principle by which a scope of individual liberties or rights is delineated still in our imagination is the principle of classical liberalism: i should have a right (or i do - naturally, inherently, or as a child of god - have the right) to do whatever i want, compatible with equal liberty for all, or right up to the point where i harm someone else. so the government can step in to prevent you harming someone else, for the sake precisely of equality of freedom.

now "social cost" is a great problem for this point of view, one that john stuart mill, for example, had to deal with very elaborately. so if your bad habits lead you to disease or death, your actions do harm various other people: your family, for example, or your employer, and whoever generated whatever resources you draw on that weren't yours to begin with.

a "collective" health provision scheme very directly makes everyone's contributions seem to depend on individual decisions. what i actually pay in healthcare, for example, might (in a simpler or more rational system than we'll ever see) vary to some extent with the rate of obesity or seatbelt use in the population. the scope of your decision stops at me: my body and my resources and my rights. you are harming me by being obese. so together we can require you to observe a certain dietary regimen, etc. there is virtually no dimension of your behavior that does not potentially or statistically impose costs on others. so there is virtually no dimension of behavior that the state cannot regulate.

mill argued that we absolutely had to distinguish between direct and indirect harms, between cases where i harm you intentionally and cases where i harm myself, and in doing so harm you, as it were, accidentally. otherwise, he says, we face tyranny. but that sort of distinction - hard enough to make stick at any time - is compromised more and more by programs such as collective healthcare.

really though this is a pretty idealized sketch, and on the other side the costs to me of the obesity of one woman in arkansas, even in the worst result, is infinitesimal, and i'd do better to think about the costs of medical technologies, drug monopolies, administrative costs, and so on. but the move then is to demographics, statistics: we weigh your actions not as your actions but in terms of the statistical frequency and effects of many people making similar decisions. we're imagining 300 million people as though they were five people who have decided to share a house or something; the actual mutual dependency has ascended into the realm of pure abstraction: any one person's relation to any other one person is, we might say, notional.

but the point is that "public" healthcare will actually be the lever for many specific abrogations of the autonomy of many actual people, because the argument in terms of social costs can be squared with classical liberalism, with a basic respect for individual rights as we understand them. this vision of rights can drive a complete breakdown of anyone's actual autonomy in the face of state power: another reason to go to a tea party.

here is a piece by ruth marcus that, bizarrely, takes a thoughtful and even humble attitude toward health reform.

the idea that the passage of the healthcare bill is triumph of hope over fear is, of course, just empty propaganda. so: if i argue that anyone might be in a position to lose their healthcare, or that you might not be able to get treatment for your pre-existing condition, etc, am i not appealing to fear? isn't fear a perfectly good motivation for legislation, or for killing legislation? didn't the new deal programs appeal to people's fear of poverty, illness, old age, etc? why not? we are fragile human beings. when we go to war, we do it from fear. when we go to school, we do it from fear. say you're standing in the middle of route 95, and it's fear that motivates you to dodge the oncomong truck. is that an error or a betrayal of the best that is within us? actually: is there a distinction between hope and fear? as i dodge the truck, i hope to live and fear dying in the very same act. you can't have ne without the other, no matter what your fucking poster says. anyway: just shut up with the slop and try to give me the frigging argument.

history sure is boring and repetitive, ain't it? there have already been eighteen historical moments in the march to healthcare legislation, all of which i have already forgotten.

so when the house voted a health bill, it was a truly historic moment. it was historic when the senate voted for cloture the first time. and dramatically, quite literally, quite frankly historic when they voted for cloture the second time. then it'll be historic when the senate passes the bill. then they'll go into the history-making reconciliation process and a further series of quite literally earthshattering votes. then...i guess i'll snooze through any more literally mind-destroyingly historic events that may take place after that.

i wish i had something enlightening to say about fort hood. but on another topic, there should be some pointed way to redecouple tea parties from the republican party. any subversive insurgent event at which john boehner is waving around a copy of the constitution is, um, horseshit. the good part about the tea party movement is that there was no organization, no spokespeople, etc. it had a nice anti-statist flava, albeit with little chunks of, you know, racism and stupidity thrown in. now i think they'd better come up with another name/strategy for the movement. you need to come up with something that boehner can't use or simulate. truly, if you had actual libertarians and fiscal conservatives out there, they'd have grabbed john boehner and waterboarded him.

ron paul, who's an obstetrician, on healthcare policy. now, this won't convince you that obama's plan is wrong. but it should convince you that it's false that only an idiot could disagree with you. but it won't, because even a thoughtful little catalogue of ideas can't be allowed to rip apart the last vestiges of your self-esteem. the healthcare debate is itself mental healthcare for the obamoids: the important thing isn't to convince or construct a good argument. the only question as you take a position or develop an argument: how does this make me feel about myself? the point is never the point. the point is: if i take a position, with what group am i affiliating myself? and with whom am i disaffiliating myself? so the question isn't: 'good policy?' but 'who am i?' in a situation where personal identity and group affiliation are conceived to be identical, and where group membership is a matter of delineating standards of exclusion. it's like the grail quest: i spend my life in a single-minded, heroic search to find out, in the words of elvis costello ("two little hitlers"), the names of all those i'm better than.