Stones Cry Out

1. Yum.
2. Noting Chesterton on the natural.
3. Some suggestions on healthcare.
4. Hands and the unpaved road one hath trod.
5. This cricket race will be discussed in the next few days.
6. While the end-of-life notions in the current healthcare bill have been misrepresented by left and right … the two points made here are important to remember.
7. Copts in the beltway.
8. Continuing to slog through the bill … and some further suggestions for the WH here.
9. Examining words Mr Obama offered in Moscow … and some of his actions.
10. Liberal and conservative … and conversion of the former to the latter.
11. Pre-historic/pre-human flight controls?
12. And where does one place confession?
13. Band of brothers … and the Pacific war.
14. Children on the street in the Ukraine.
15. How will (did?) they finagle keeping Congressional names out of that list.
16. A young doctor and single payer.
17. Awaiting a defense of government overreach from the left.

Jim Hanley at Positive Liberty is considering natural rights. He, like I, don’t think they exist. In fact, he goes even further, to say that:

I have been gently critiqued for being a materialist. I haven’t asked DAR enough questions to yet understand his critique, but I think it has to do with whether one can develop a meaning philosophical structure without importing some non-materialist concepts. Perhaps that is so. But I do believe that when we begin with a materialist understanding of our subject, homo sapiens, we can’t get to natural rights without importing, in a wholly ad hoc fashion, some non-materialist assumptions that lack a firm foundation.

and in comments elucidates:

I had indeed thought about your “patterns” argument. My response would be that I am not a nominalist. It is not the naming that makes it real, and it is debatable just how real the particular category we mean by the name is. But there are these particular animals that have real physical existence. We give the name bonobos to what we believe is a set of animals that are alike in a particular way, and do not give them name to all other animals that we do not believe are alike in that particular way. But whether or not our category accurately reflects the empirical reality of animal likeness/difference, those particular animals have material existence.Whether the categories can be counted as real or not, well, I think we run into the problem of fuzziness of language. I think categories are real because we create them, and understand them as being nothing more than our constructs. That is, the proper referent of categories is not actually to the physical world, but only to our interpretation of the physical world, and they are real referents to our interpretation. If people want to understand them as directly referent to the physical world, then I would argue that categories in that sense are not real.

In earlier essays I had noted that there is a large category of real non-materialist concepts, namely transcendental numbers. This includes a number of un-measureable unobtainable, i.e., transcendental numbers like pi, e, the golden mean and so forth. These are in fact numbers which arise both in our natural cognition about numbers and similar mathematical reasoning and also arise naturally (repeatedly) in any number of mathematical representations of material measurement. More complicated mathematical concepts such as groups, mappings, metric, manifold just as do real numbers are both non-material and are real.

The demonstration that some real non-materialist things are real is not a demonstration that all non-materialistic concepts are as well. It just shows that being a non-material does not exclude the possibility a priori that the said same thing is not real. It is however a demonstration that there are definitely non-materialistic things that are real in a stronger fashion than the categorical reality to which Mr Hanley alludes. So what one seeks is an ontological distinction serving to demarcate and separate the non-real and the real non-materialistic ideas. For it seems plausible that there are non-material non-mathematical concepts that share a similar reality to the mathematical concepts noted above.

During the primaries and the general election campaign last year, the most potent argument made for not supporting Barack Obama was his lack of experience. He had never managed anything. He did not have any leadership experience. And with only two years in the U. S. Senate, he lacked sufficient knowledge of how the legislative process worked in Washington. In other words, he didn’t know how to lead or to govern. Although the debate over Obamacare is far from over, this fatal weakness has been laid open for all to see in the debacle over how health care reform has been handled so far.

President Obama’s first mistake was that he did not lay out a vision for what health care reform should look like. He relied on the same nonspecific campaign rhetoric that led to victory last November in the election when talking about health care reform. He had convinced the public something needed to be done about health care but he hadn’t made the case for specific steps that needed to be taken. Even his New York Times op-ed doesn’t contain a single tangible proposal on how he will achieve the reform goals he wants to meet. By contrast, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey laid out a very sensible proposal for reform in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week. The President could have taken a cue from someone like Mr. Mackey by providing specific proposals of what to accomplish with reform legislation.

The President’s second mistake was not practicing what he preached when it came to bipartisanship. At the beginning of this debate, President Obama made it clear he wanted support for healthcare reform to be bipartisan. But instead of bringing Republicans into the process of drafting the reform legislation, he outsourced the writing of the bill to Nancy Pelosi and the House Democratic caucus. As a result, he got a bill that was chock full of goodies for their liberal supporters and controversial proposals that no one in their right mind could defend. The President then squandered precious political capital having to play defense on issues such as “death panels” and single-payer programs and flip-flops on the public option.

Now the President finds himself in a bind. His approval ratings are plummeting. The public is growing skeptical about whether they can trust him on this issue. Getting Republicans to come to the table at this point seems unlikely. Despite having supermajorities in both houses of Congress, he probably won’t be able to get anything passed anytime soon as he can’t keep his own party in line.

So what does the President do? Is it time to hit the reset button as some have suggested? You can’t erase the past but you can move forward, can’t you?

The first step for the President will be the most difficult. He has to come out and publicly admit that he has made mistakes in how he has handled health care reform. He then has to tell Congress to start over from scratch. He should bring leaders from both parties together and lay out a plan of what he wants to accomplish and be willing to listen to and incorporate ideas from both parties. There are an abundance of proposals being tossed about. The President needs to be willing to cull through them and working with Congress incorporate the best of them.

President Obama has a difficult task ahead. If health care reform is to be enacted it’s going to require him to do something he hasn’t had to do nor has the experience to do: be a leader. The chances of reform being enacted are directly tied to his ability to demonstrate leadership. If the President’s plan does fail he has no one to blame but himself.

I have always though that the US as a whole leans conservative, but now I have a Gallup poll to back up that impression.

The strength of "conservative" over "liberal" in the realm of political labels is vividly apparent in Gallup’s state-level data, where a significantly higher percentage of Americans in most states — even some solidly Democratic ones — call themselves conservative rather than liberal.

I like the accompanying graphic.

Now, why party affiliation doesn’t quite match this, or why we elect such liberals as the one currently in the Oval Office, or heck, whether or not these folks even know what "conservative" means, is an open question.  But the fact that they at least believe themselves to be it is heartening to me.

1. Press releases “of the damned.”
2. Reading the bill, and remaining unimpressed.
3. A twist to the Obama/joker poster story.
4. A new Miyazaki film noted.
5. The scum beneath the tape.
6. I’m interested … 92 mpg for 3k miles.
7. Evil and modern political parlance.
8. Pharma and price control.
9. Against drones in Pakistan.
10. One paramedic’s perspective.
11. Adding and “R” to cash for clunkers.
12. Specialization.
13. Housing numbers.
14. Byzantium (and Gondor) and why it matters, even if some of my commenters disagree.
15. The liturgical gangstas.
16. Under cover techies.
17. Suu Kyi on sanctions.
18. Into the valley of the mega-church.
19. Jurisdiction and healthcare.

One of the rising mini-blog storms in the right (and responses on the left) that arose today is about the silence on the left regarding the troops and low level conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan (and perhaps Pakistan). The default notion that arises here is that this lack of response that this reflects how much that the left was anti-Bush and the conflict was just a proxy for that animus. There may be some truth to this accusation, however I think that is not the whole or even the larger part of it. For while it is true that the anti-war propaganda and general energy/excitement that is present now has pretty much vanished, it is also true that the small government, e.g., tea party, sentiments that have and had been strong on the right vanished during much of the Bush tenure.

Ronald Reagan, I think, coined the “11th commandment: thou shalt not speak ill of your own party”, which is largely at play here. A corollary of this commandment is that while one does not speak ill of the doings by those in your party that you disagree with … one’s defense of the same is usually tepid or absent as well. For example, on my part, while I did not really soundly thrash Mr Bush for expanding Medicare entitlements … I did not defend it one bit either. I was silent. Likewise, we see the left, while they are silent as Mr Obama expands operations in Afghanistan (and likely delays withdrawal in Northern Iraq) neither will they, I suspect, leap to his defense against those who would speak against this. Likewise on Medicare and now the two COIN operations, criticism does largely not arise from the other party, which is in general agreement with those moves (even if they might criticize implementation details). The criticism arises more from non-party aligned people further to the right or left (or in the case of Medicare … the Libertarian fringe movement).

That was then.

Remember the anti-war movement? Not too long ago, the Democratic party’s most loyal voters passionately opposed the war in Iraq. Democratic presidential candidates argued over who would withdraw American troops the quickest. Netroots activists regularly denounced President George W. Bush, and sometimes the U.S. military ("General Betray Us"). Cindy Sheehan, the woman whose soldier son was killed in Iraq, became a heroine when she led protests at Bush’s Texas ranch.

This is now.

The news that emerged is that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have virtually fallen off the liberal radar screen. Kossacks (as fans of DailyKos like to call themselves) who were consumed by the Iraq war when George W. Bush was president are now, with Barack Obama in the White House, not so consumed, either with Iraq or with Obama’s escalation of the conflict in Afghanistan. In fact, they barely seem to care.

As part of a straw poll done at the convention, the Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg presented participants with a list of policy priorities like health care and the environment. He asked people to list the two priorities they believed "progressive activists should be focusing their attention and efforts on the most." The winner, by far, was "passing comprehensive health care reform." In second place was enacting "green energy policies that address environmental concerns."

And what about "working to end our military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan"? It was way down the list, in eighth place.

Perhaps more tellingly, Greenberg asked activists to name the issue that "you, personally, spend the most time advancing currently." The winner, again, was health care reform. Next came "working to elect progressive candidates in the 2010 elections." Then came a bunch of other issues. At the very bottom — last place, named by just one percent of participants — came working to end U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The only principle it seems that the vast majority of the Left stood for was partisan politics.  Their righteous indignation was so much veneer for their simple hatred of Dubya. 

1. A book noted, and in turn the other book mentioned (The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters) is available in English as well.
2. Why the change? Why, with promises of the “most open administration ever” are we guessing?
3. Becker/Posner on healthcare again, here and here.
4. On the bio-geological.
5. Asleep at the switch?
6. On women and ministry.
7. An interesting post on innovation.
8. Misplaced assumptions. “Any reform is going to require lots of regulatory oversight …”, uhm, that would not be true if the reform is based on the removal of regulation. This is a reply as well to those assumptions.
9. Healthcare and some back of the envelope cost estimates.
10. Oops.
11. Some thoughts on marriage.
12. Pointing at an excellent essay on healthcare, which the Democratic rhetoric will ignore because they are not really engaging in debate here, because those who disagree with our benighted President are apparently “simply dishonest.”
13. Thinking linking by Siris. My six word narrative. “Oops. My bad. Heroic rescue … thwarted.”
14. A film.
15. On the politics of climate change … and a problematic paper.
16. Afghanistan and the helicopter.
17. A pol with a backbone.

Y’know, maybe that whole profit motive thing and competition wasn’t so bad after all.

SASKATOON — The incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association says this country’s health-care system is sick and doctors need to develop a plan to cure it.

Dr. Anne Doig says patients are getting less than optimal care and she adds that physicians from across the country – who will gather in Saskatoon on Sunday for their annual meeting – recognize that changes must be made.

"We all agree that the system is imploding, we all agree that things are more precarious than perhaps Canadians realize," Doing said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

"We know that there must be change," she said. "We’re all running flat out, we’re all just trying to stay ahead of the immediate day-to-day demands."

The pitch for change at the conference is to start with a presentation from Dr. Robert Ouellet, the current president of the CMA, who has said there’s a critical need to make Canada’s health-care system patient-centred. He will present details from his fact-finding trip to Europe in January, where he met with health groups in England, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands and France.

His thoughts on the issue are already clear. Ouellet has been saying since his return that "a health-care revolution has passed us by," that it’s possible to make wait lists disappear while maintaining universal coverage and "that competition should be welcomed, not feared."

In other words, Ouellet believes there could be a role for private health-care delivery within the public system.

We already know that American private health-care delivery already has a role. 

And this is hilarious.

He has also said the Canadian system could be restructured to focus on patients if hospitals and other health-care institutions received funding based on the patients they treat, instead of an annual, lump-sum budget. This "activity-based funding" would be an incentive to provide more efficient care, he has said.

Heh.  That "activity-based funding" is something like what we capitalists call "pricing".  We’ve found out that it’s a more efficient way to deal with supply and demand than government dictate. 

Over at "Stop the ACLU", a bullet list of times that Sarah Palin won the debate on the end-of-life care issue she brought up.  Biggest win; the provision was removed from a Senate bill.  (A provision that her critics insisted was pure fantasy.)

Y’all just go on underestimating her.

1. Crossing the state/entertainment wall of separation.
2. The last remaining pro-life democrat passes and is mourned.
3. Production numbers.
4. The corner notes someone reading the bill.
5. Whole foods and healthcare.
6. The bear moves in the woods.
7. Explaining why/how liberals find everyone else racist.
8. And the public healthcare will give everyone a nice pony too, it’s all just moving deck chairs on the Titanic.
9. A market for education.
10. Logic or lack thereof and patching the economy.
11. A Georgian narrative.
12. A tea party noted.
13. California water and policy.
14. A better fridge.
15. Knowing the enemy … or at least the left.
16. Why small government is important.
17. Mr Obama, getting the details wrong (and in a manner that matters).

And here we have Obama attempting to salvage a concern about the track record the government has with regards to mis-managing just about anything it lays its hands on. In his own words, “It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems” (emphasis added).

One thing is becoming increasingly evident, as more of Obama’s impromptu exchanges surface – he has a most difficult time presenting himself in a coherent manner. Perhaps the Left was correct in their concerns about Sarah Palin’s lack of experience, because we’re certainly seeing Obama demonstrate his.

In a short exchange discussing my incomprehension of a leftist blogger’s claim that management was unnecessary. I have come up with a possible answer as to why a person might consider this reasonable and it ties in with notions of why the left might find government healthcare more palatable than the right. The offending quote, as a reminder was as follows:

It quickly became clear that I was the only person even remotely on the left. And it wasn’t simply that the others disagreed with me; they couldn’t even understand me. I remember us discussing a scene in Invisible Man where a factory worker brags he’s so indispensable that when he was out sick the boss drove to his house and begged him to come back, agreeing to put him in charge. When I suggested Ellison might be implying that labor, not management, ought to run workplaces, the other students (and the teacher) didn’t just disagree—they found the idea incomprehensible. How could you run a factory without managers?

As I pointed out in my original essay a realistic business that employs more than two to five people requires management. Many firms, HR service companies and general contracting firms for example, in fact are nothing but management. One way out is the model implemented by the Leninist implementation of Marxism, i.e., the state solution. Government, somehow, is seen as the organ supplying the management functions. A kinder, more modern, way of phrasing that term is that the left prefers statist solutions. Mr Swartz, I suggest, doesn’t suggest that management not occur. But instead prefers that all of management, namely HR, sales, procurement, and capital management be done by the state. This, I suggest, was why he discovered, he was the only one “remotely” on the left. Most on the left I presume in the US would balk at having the state take up all of these roles for all private industry. The eastern bloc experiment showed that giving that much power to a state, ignoring the asymmetries of the locus of information, and removing personal incentives to personally garner the fruits of one’s labour was a recipe for disaster.

Public healthcare moves us further in this direction, increasing the power of the state, ignoring asymmetric of information pools, and lessens the already too weak personal incentives in the medical industry complex replacing it with even weaker political incentives (which it might be added in actuarial situations never reliably calculate risk always preferring diminish risk to lessen costs today pushing the burden of the payment to the future). Public healthcare is not, by definition, socialism nor communism. It is an explicitly a big government, statist, solution, and shares that feature with the assumption of management by government noted above.

The “public option” version being touted by the Democrats right now isn’t even single payer. However, it is disingenuous to argue that is ultimately what many of them, including the President desire and in fact likely feel that this step will move them closer to their goal. The “keeping the private insurance companies honest” rhetoric is merely cover for what, I suspect, is their aim and the likely result. That is that the public healthcare option, which will receive much of its funding from a levy on private contributions to healthcare, will be in a position to provide unfair competition that will ultimately force the private healthcare industry out of the market and to eliminate them and thus arrive at single payer via acquisition of a monopoly.

Ultimately, if there is to be a solution to the healthcare cost situation it is my belief that it will in fact require large scale changes in how healthcare is provided. Increased bureaucratic and state involvement is not the route which will lead to more flexible and innovative approaches to how medicine is practised. Instead it will more likely entrench those practises which are now in place. Right now, medical insurance and practise is heavily regulated as it is, which in turn stifles innovation itself. It is unclear how cementing and fixing the processes more tightly to bureaucratic reigns will spur innovation, which should be a primary goal.

The White House released a statement this evening to try to squash the controversy that erupted Thursday over unsolicted e-mails they had been sending:

The White House for the first time Sunday seemed to acknowledge that people across the country received unsolicited e-mails from the administration last week about health care reform, suggesting the problem is with third-party groups that placed the recipients’ names on the distribution list.

In a written statement released exclusively to FOX News, White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said the White House hopes those who received the e-mails without signing up for them were not “inconvenienced” by the messages.

“The White House e-mail list is made up of e-mail addresses obtained solely through the White House Web site. The White House doesn’t purchase, upload or merge from any other list, again, all e-mails come from the White House Web site as we have no interest in e-mailing anyone who does not want to receive an e-mail,” the statement said. “If an individual received the e-mail because someone else or a group signed them up or forwarded the e-mail, we hope they were not too inconvenienced.”

This is a classic non-apology apology and doesn’t answer the main question which is how they managed to obtain e-mail addresses of people who did not access the White House website nor they signed up for any e-mail updates.

Since my e-mail address suddenly ended up on the White House distribution list and I hadn’t signed up for anything I would still like to know how they got my e-mail address. Could they reveal which groups had submitted lists from which they got the addresses?

For an administration that promised to be transparent, it seems to be acting a lot like Big Brother to me.

I’ve never been a Michael Vick fan and I think the Falcons are in a much better place without him, but I’m a believer in second chances, including a clean slate for lawbreakers who pay the price, complete their sentences, and demonstrate remorse. And if Dungy is counseling Vick, he’s in good hands. I wish Vick well in his return to work, except on the days he plays against Atlanta.