ShrinkWrapped

Healthcare Vicissitudes:Addendum

A very annoying meme promulgated by those who support healthcare "reform" is that the opponents have no ideas how to improve the system.  This is disingenuous at best.  John Steele Gordon offers a non exhaustive list of easily accomplished, proven effective, means to increase efficiencies and decrease costs in our system:

RE: ObamaCare Loses Brooks

But I was struck by one thing that Brooks wrote: “The fact is, nobody knows how to reduce cost growth within the current system.”

Of course we do.

Allow people to buy insurance across state lines and thus escape unwanted mandates and such economic idiocies as “guaranteed issuance.” If New Yorkers could buy health insurance in Connecticut, their insurance costs would drop by 40 percent overnight. How’s that for reducing costs, Mr. Brooks?

Read the whole thing.

Healthcare Vicissitudes

In The New Yorker,  Atul Gawande  offers some superficially compelling arguments for passage of the (thus far unseen) Healthcare bill.  Dr. Gawande is a surgeon on staff at Harvard Medical School:

Atul Gawande Became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1998. Also a surgeon, he completed his surgical residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, in 2003, and joined the faculty as a general and endocrine surgeon. He is also an associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, an associate professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health, and the associate director of the B.W.H. Center for Surgery and Public Health.

Dr. Gawande is an Academic Physician, a rare breed that tends to understand Medical Practice from a rather unique point of view far removed from the reality of most Medical practices.  Academic Physicians tend to support single payer healthcare (which most of them already practice under, ie they are usually salaried employees of large institutions.)  This does not invalidate their recommendations but it should be understood that they operate in a different environment than most American Physicians.  Dr. Gawande addresses one of the key issues in Medicine and healthcare:  [All emphases mine-SW]

Testing, Testing
The health-care bill has no master plan for curbing costs. Is that a bad thing?

Cost is the spectre haunting health reform. For many decades, the great flaw in the American health-care system was its unconscionable gaps in coverage. Those gaps have widened to become graves—resulting in an estimated forty-five thousand premature deaths each year—and have forced more than a million people into bankruptcy. The emerging health-reform package has a master plan for this problem. By establishing insurance exchanges, mandates, and tax credits, it would guarantee that at least ninety-four per cent of Americans had decent medical coverage. This is historic, and it is necessary. But the legislation has no master plan for dealing with the problem of soaring medical costs. And this is a source of deep unease.

Health-care costs are strangling our country. Medical care now absorbs eighteen per cent of every dollar we earn. Between 1999 and 2009, the average annual premium for employer-sponsored family insurance coverage rose from $5,800 to $13,400, and the average cost per Medicare beneficiary went from $5,500 to $11,900. The costs of our dysfunctional health-care system have already helped sink our auto industry, are draining state and federal coffers, and could ultimately imperil our ability to sustain universal coverage.

What have we gained by paying more than twice as much for medical care as we did a decade ago? The health-care sector certainly employs more people and more machines than it did. But there have been no great strides in service. In Western Europe, most primary-care practices now use electronic health records and offer after-hours care; in the United States, most don’t. Improvement in demonstrated medical outcomes has been modest in most fields. The reason the system is a money drain is not that it’s so successful but that it’s fragmented, disorganized, and inconsistent; it’s neglectful of low-profit services like mental-health care, geriatrics, and primary care, and almost giddy in its overuse of high-cost technologies such as radiology imaging, brand-name drugs, and many elective procedures.

The rest of the (very long) article draws an analogy between government intervention in agriculture and the resultant (or concomitant) increase in agricultural productivity to the introduction of (increased) government intervention in Medicine.  Whether or not the analogy is convincing I will leave up to the reader.  It seems to me that in Agriculture, where price signals are hidden or distorted by government intervention, we suffer market dislocations.  (It is not a coincidence that corn syrup seems to be in half the food sold in supermarkets these days.)  In Medicine, we already know that hiding or distorting price signals distorts the delivery of care and the type of Medical care offered.  To his credit, Dr. Gawande  notes that Tort reform is conspicuous by its absence in the bills being discussed, though he does not make note of the fact that such an absence supports the notion that once politicians have increased control over our healthcare system, politically motivated distortions will become increasingly problematic.

Beyond those quibbles I found myself becoming quite irritated at the assumptions in the article.  The "estimated forty-five thousand premature deaths each year" from the lack of insurance coverage is one of those statistics that makes its way into the conventional narrative, but falls apart upon closer inspection.  The original study purporting to find the number is riddled with caveats and uncertainties.  Further, access to government insurance also has its share of "premature death" associated with it:

45,000 uninsured deaths?

Let's be clear; any preventable death is a tragedy: the loss of someone's sister or brother, father or mother, spouse or lover.

Yet the study doesn't claim that the deaths it estimates among the uninsured are preventable, only that they are "associated with" lack of health care. 

By contrast, a comprehensive study of over 35,000,000 -- yes, that's million -- acute care records over  a recent three-year period concludes that preventable medical mistakes actually cause a similar number of deaths in the government-run Medicare program. The sixth annual HealthGrades Patient Safety in American Hospital Study examined records "among Medicare patients at virtually all of the nation's 5,000 non-federal hospitals" from 2005-2007 and determined that over 92,000 deaths were attributable to medical errors, about the same as the average estimate in the uninsured study.

It can never be repeated often enough: Correlation is not Causation!

No one is denied medical care in America.  Unnecessary death can result from patient's inattention and poor self care, poor Medical care, delayed treatment, and a whole host of other reasons.  Lack of insurance is on the list but it is not at all clear that it is the most important or even a major cause of premature death. 

There are certainly situations in which people lose insurance or have difficulty gaining insurance and there may be some fairly simple ways to make insurance coverage more affordable and more widely available.  Just allowing insurance sales across state lines and eliminating most mandates in insurance would do a great deal to lower costs, yet the bill actually goes in the opposite direction.

The other charge, that we pay too much for too little is also worth questioning.

US Life Expectancy at Record High

Life expectancy at birth is 77.9 years based on just released Preliminary data for 2007

US Life expectancy was 77.7 years based on final 2006 data

The preliminary number of deaths in the United States for 2007 was 2,423,995, representing a decrease of 2,269 from the 2006 total. The estimated age-adjusted death rate, which accounts for changes in the age distribution of the population, reached a record low of 760.3 per 100,000 U.S. standard population, 2.1 percent lower than the 2006 rate of 776.5.

The magnitude of the decreases in mortality (which are significant unless specified otherwise) by age group is):
* Under 1 year (0.6 percent, not significant)
* 15–24 years (2.4 percent)
* 25–34 years (1.4 percent)
* 35–44 years (3.1 percent)
* 45–54 years (1.8 percent)
* 55–64 years (1.7 percent)
* 65–74 years (2.7 percent)
* 75–84 years (1.9 percent)
* 85 years and over (2.1 percent)

This is only part of the story.  Consider this example of Medical progress:

Major breakthrough may pave the way for therapeutic vaccines for Allergies and Cancer

It should be possible to use therapeutic vaccines to create both cheap and effective drugs for diseases like cancer and allergies. One problem in developing such vaccines has previously been the lack of adjuvants, substances that make vaccines more effective. However, there has now been a major breakthrough in this area. “We have made a very important breakthrough by managing to identify a substance that is biologically degradable and that exhibits considerably higher activity than the adjuvants that have been used in the past,” says Lars Hellman. “These new and highly promising findings are an important step toward developing more cost-effective drugs for some of our major public health diseases,” he says.

Many of the treatment methods that are developed today for allergies, cancer, and autoimmune diseases are based on the use of so-called monoclonal antibodies. The cost of these protein pharmaceuticals is high, between 15,000 and 150,000 dollars per patient and year, and long periods of treatment are often needed. Therapeutic vaccines contain no pre-produced antibodies but rather stimulate our immune system to produce its own therapeutic antibodies. They are considerably less expensive to manufacture than the drugs that are now being produced.

There are two important points that are germane to the discussion of medical progress and Medical costs.  Monoclonal Antibody (MA) treatment is extraordinarily expensive yet it also offers treatment, cures and relief of symptoms, that are unavailable with older technology.  There are many people alive and well (or better) today because they were fortunate enough to live in a time when Monoclonal Antibody treatment has become available.  At the same time, if everyone who could benefit from MA were to receive it, we would be facing a greater healthcare cost crisis than we already do.  Yet, the article today also pointed out that as our knowledge has increased, a team of scientists in the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology at Uppsala University may have found a way to use the knowledge that originated in studies of the immune response to disease (which led to the development of MA) to find a much less expensive way to do the same thing that now only MA can do.  The financial savings will be marked and welcome.  Yet this is not the end of the problem.  Once the very expensive MA treatments for various Cancers and other amenable illnesses are replaced by much less expensive treatments, we will have a large cohort of patients, getting older by the day, staying within the system until the time at which they develop a new condition which will be difficult to treat and manage; in due time these new conditions will be approached with novel, very expensive treatments, with escalating costs, until the day a new research group devises a novel treatment approach that is even more expensive, and curative, eventually replaced by a less expensive treatment which comes into widespread use (because it is now affordable) and the cycle continues. 

Generally, people do not want to die prematurely (and one definition of "premature" might mean, for any particular individual, "I don't want to die as long as I am in reasonable health and can find joy in my life without too much discomfort.")  As long as we continue to "Rage, rage against the dieing of the light" Medical costs will have to increase.  There are a limited number of ways to moderate the cost of healthcare:

We can moderate the increase by stopping the advance of Medical care and effectively lowering our life expectancy.  Medical innovation is extremely expensive, not least because of all the regulatory hurdles placed in its way.

We can ration care via government edict, by establishing a hierarchy of diseases for which government insurance must pay; politics dictating treatment options.

We can ration by limiting availability to all via a diminished supply of Doctors willing to accept government established reimbursement rates; already occurring in Medicare and Medicaid and likely to accelerate as more, sicker patients enter the government run system.

We can ration via the market place, which has the advantage of accelerating Medical research because of the promise of riches for the developers and discovers of new and effective treatments; this would be immeasurably helped by also increasing market price signals for Medical care (which means increasing people's awareness of the real cost of services and increasing the portion of the price over which they have control)

Because too many of us do not want to die prematurely, the cost of Medical care can only go up at an accelerating pace.  The current bills appear to do nothing to increase price/cost transparency and will therefore worsen a difficult situation. At the same time, a great deal of power will flow from the individual patient-family-Doctor triad to a patient-government bureaucrat-family-Doctor tetrad.  (I recognize that the insurance companies are involved in the patient-family-Doctor triad but in a conflictual situation, the government can step in to override the insurance company.  Once the government effectively replaces the insurance company, there will be no such recourse.)

For all those desirous of universal healthcare, be careful what you wish for.  You might not be happy exchanging an expensive system that has managed despite all its inefficiencies to continually increase our life expectancy for an expensive system that inherently interferes with that very process.

The Open Mind III: a Liberal’s Principles Defended and Further Propounded

Jay has responded to my Riposte  and Riposte continued. 

The Open Mind III: a Liberal’s Principles Defended and Further Propounded

The idea of Principia Liberalis was to explore the roots of those partly different perceptions of reality ShrinkWrapped and I have of the world. I say partly because, of course, like most humans, we share a lot in our perceptions. I think he and I may even share more than that. But there are profound political differences. Shrink and I can play Cross Fire with each other. It had a pretty good run on CNN, and we all know what a lasting contribution it made to political discourse and to the deepening of our political understanding. Why not, instead, as some readers had suggested, see if we can determine where we part ways, which entails, as fundamental to the process, reaching back far enough in our grounded or ungrounded beliefs about the world to some ground we might actually share. Otherwise we are still suspended in the ideological air shouting at each other, with no idea how I came to hang here, and he got to floating over there, from the ground, wherever it is, on which we both began.

Now, it is abundantly clear from our exercises in posting thus far that some conservatives reading along believe they already have the various answers to that, accordingly, not so open question. Engagement, then, with any ideas I proffer, is not required. This is unfortunate, because in those instances, where people have engaged me, there have been some interesting exchanges, some modest agreements, and even surprising discoveries. Others, however, are content to rant the rants they’ve got down about as good as The Boss has got his 70’s playlist down, with their versions of “Born to Run” ready to play in their sleep. So it is that, while I write at the end of the introduction to my list of principles

I offer one closing, guiding principle for reception of this effort: note its subtitled denotation of “a” liberal. Your humble and fallible servant is neither the face nor the voice of “liberalism.”…There are others willing to play that role; I think and speak for myself

we hear quickly from one reader, “Number 24 says terror and tyranny must be opposed and freedom and democracy defended. Liberals do not believe any of that” and I am upbraided by another – suffering from a loss of faith in the whole endeavor and, oh, dear, me – “And who died and put AJA in charge of speaking for liberals?”

Sigh.

One complainant for whom complaint is like an attempted take down at the knees, to avoid confronting the ideas head on, pretends to counter by noting that I did not define “justice,” as if a blog post intended to spark discussion were an essay in political philosophy. It is worth noting, against this devastating take down, the preamble to the Constitution of the United States:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

You will search in vain through the Constitution – a pretty substantial document, I hear tell – for a definition of justice, or for that matter of “the general welfare,” though the authors were rather clear about the meaning of “people,” in whole or in part – so that while the Constitution set forth a wide range of principles of government that so many Americans found disappointingly agreeable at the time, history reports they found enough to fight about later on.

Similarly, to charge my principles with being a “jumble” or my thinking with being “sloppy” without offering reasoned analysis of the principles in order to demonstrate the incoherence of the jumble or the slapdash of the sloppy – and I am, I assure my valued readers, quite prepared to argue to the contrary – is to offer only the pretence of argument. It is not argument, particularly as it shifts focus to me and my generic liberal intellectual inadequacies and the assertion of my objectionable personal qualities. It is, instead, beer spritzing from the cheap seats. The beer drinkers may think the beer a fine conservative Doppelbock – all seriously bottled in disdainful condescension and advertisement of pedigree – but it is a spritz nonetheless. It’s okay that there are cheap seats and that people spritz from them – a full, rowdy stadium makes the contest more exciting. But cheap-seaters do not win the game. They do not even play in it. I am grateful, however, for current, lively examples of what is referred to in logic as shifting the ground and simple evasion, that I may offer them to my students, along with clear representations of ideocentrism.*

I am, of course, equally appreciative of the patronizing compliments for my willingness to discuss my beliefs, so unlike, it is claimed, the typical boorish liberal – as if I were Kasper Hauser being readied for A Report to an Academy. As many of us are likely to entreat at the moment of ultimate extremity: “Spare me.”

The ideas, ladies and gentlemen, the ideas.

SW rightly observes of many of my principles that the proverbial devil will be in the details. We needn’t necessarily look too far, however. Of my second and third principles –

2. Human beings aspire to the good and are drawn to the bad. They are both. There is no evidence to conclude which will ultimately rule in them.

3. Human history is both sublime and horrific.

Shrink responds “Who could disagree?” In fact, I think he will agree on reflection, with regard to 2, many people. Many people believe in the essential goodness of human beings. Many people of various religious traditions so believe, that despite human weakness, the essence is good. The utopian tendencies that lead, at an even more modest level, to what conservatives tend to believe is an inordinate trust by liberals in the efficacy of big government begin in this faith. Just the other day, in responding to my post Obama Abroad: Liberal, Moderate, Careful Shrink cited Richard Landes’s definition of Liberal Cognitive Egocentrism:

The projection of good faith and fair-mindedness onto others, the assumption that “other” shares the same human values, that everyone prefers positive sum interactions. In a slightly more redemptive mode, LCE holds that all people are good, and if only we treat them right, they will respond well (emphasis added).

Principle 2 asserts none of this.

In relation, regarding principle 3, while it may appear to offer a self-canceling form of balance – as is the presentation of many of the principles – this is not the case. Much debate between the left and the right is conducted at either/or extremes. The balanced ideation of these principles is intended, meaningfully, to avoid that unproductive procedure. To assert that human history, and the humans who produced it, as agents, has been horrific, sensibly requires of us that despite any countervailing sublimity in human achievement, the awful tendencies of humans be invariably considered in our political and other thinking, without illusion. In his post yesterday A world well saved, Norm Geras at Normblog makes the parallel argument with regard to our better graces.

Principle 5 states

5. There is such a thing as evil. It often conceives of itself as a good.

SW replies that “the statements seem pretty self evident” and that “one must inquire by what guidelines would Jay delineate  good versus evil?”

I do not think the statements, particularly the second, to be so self-evident. After 9/11, from some of the very quarters that Shrink would criticize (and in which criticism I would join him) came much oddly sanctimonious and ironic derision of the notion of evil. The idea of evil is frequently conceived – and then extended into caricature – as a self-knowingly malevolent force, in the manner, for instance, of Milton’s Satan: “Myself am Hell.” If not quite so definitively self-aware, there is, indeed, such evil in the world. However, the history of Utopian totalitarianism, as well as of military coups and tyranny and the theft by leaders of the liberties of their people in order to “save them,” they often sincerely believe, from some greater threat is a history of a far more complex and insidious form of evil.

The guidelines I rely on, with my fellows, in delineating good from evil – without being required to transform a blog post into a treatise – are the patient practice of reason in conjunction with natural human empathy. Shrink raises the concern of “moral equivalence and moral relativism” and claims that “one clear difference between Liberals and Libertarian/Conservatives resides in just this fact, the Libertarian/Conservatives do believe there is an absolute basis for distinguishing good and evil.” I think this is counterproductive generalization. I agree that the area of his concern is to be found predominantly (not exclusively – relativistic ideas have become pervasive within many poorly conceived sets of beliefs) on the left. However, while an absolute grounding of morality in religious belief is found throughout the political spectrum, I think it fair to claim that it predominates on the right, and moral absolutism founded in religious belief – unless God speaks to one in a manner the rest of us can overhear, or one was present at the deliverance of the tablets to Moses – is a faith casting a shadow far longer and larger than any faith in big government.

Shrink cites my principles 7-14:

7. Nations, like people, are responsible for their actions. They act as historically and legally conceived and constituted entities, and they are responsible as historical and legal entities.

8. The animating determinant of historic national responsibility is in the living consequences of past acts: no continuing consequences, no conceivable responsibility.

9. The past cannot be undone, but the future can be different; this is accomplished through understanding and acknowledgement of the past and accountability for it.

10. Accountability for the past is policy for the future.

11. The colonial epoch is ended. Its consequences are not.

12. Victors record history. This does not make the history false. Neither does it make it true.

13. Conquerors leave the past behind more easily than the conquered. This is because the conqueror owns the future.

14. To have been conquered or oppressed, to be weak, does not ennoble a people before or after the fact; the acts of a conquered, oppressed, or weak people are not legitimized by those conditions. Neither is the injustice of their conquest, oppression, or weakness abused, or the justness of redress, negated by their imperfection.

He sees in them a reflection of my interest in Native American issues (and, in fact, the issues of indigenous peoples in general). He is right to see this, but the principles go beyond them to encompass the continuing political ramifications, worldwide, of the colonial era. Shrink states, “Again, there is little to object to on the surface.” I think otherwise.

Principle 7 asserts the well established notion, internationally, of national responsibility. Principle 8, further, states that the responsibility is enacted by the “living consequences” of past acts. Principle 9 calls for acknowledgement of the past, leading to accountability, and principle 10 affirms that this accountability is the basis for future policy. Principle 11 turns from what might be a more limited national sphere to a wider, international realm. Principle 12, while balanced in form, challenges any notion that victory affirms the truth of its narrative or the values that inform it. Principle 13 is a partial response to the historically simplistic “move on” argument regarding the cultural condition of conquered and colonized populations. In some contrast, principle 14 avers, contrary to the animating sympathies of much anti-imperialist and postcolonial ideology, that disadvantaged (for whatever reason) populations are not by virtue of that relation to power ennobled and affirmed in their political actions and programs.

In truth nearly all of those principles, particularly the first four, which received focus then, were problematic, even strongly objectionable to many of the conservative readers who commented during The Open Mind 1 discussion of Native America.

In his first response to my principles, SW referred to 22 and 23:

22. Government is neither good nor bad. It is necessary. Neither is its size good or bad. It should be the size necessary to fulfill the responsibilities judged to be appropriate to it. Government is best assigned those responsibilities that are necessary to the commonweal above what is necessarily optimally efficient, though it need not be an enemy of efficiency. Sources of optimal efficiency cannot concern themselves with the common good whilst remaining optimally efficient; they must be managed when applied to the common good so that a balance is achieved between efficiency and the breadth of the benefit they deliver.

23. A breadth of interests entails a breadth of power to protect them. A breadth of power generates its own interests. Even a benign power will be caught in this cycle of mutual reinforcement. Imperial behavior, conceived only as protection of interests, can expand innocently and then be justified, in the maintenance of an imperial nature, as a necessary protection of interests.

Wrote SW, Jay “imagines a government designed to solve certain problems, with enough power and size to adequately address the particular issue, with minimal interests of its own which might skew its ability to act in the dispassionate service of its people.”

If such is the appearance, I correct it. SW asserts that I somewhat contradict 22 with 23; however, I was not focused on, nationally, the size of government in 23, but, internationally, a tendency toward a form of empire. I addressed this subject at somewhat greater length in Obama in Oslo: Power without Empire.

Shrink is right, of course, to perceive the same application to government size. I agree with it. However, the tendency among conservatives is to focus on human imperfection in the practice of government, and the accretive nature of power in the hands of government, while remaining far more sanguine about the same issues in the marketplace. As principle 22 suggests, as governments tend toward the accumulation of power, theoretically optimally efficient systems tend only toward optimal efficiency, and when they involve human beings are subject to the influence of the same human imperfections. Note today’s report on Intel’s monopolistic practices.

Finally, for now, on the matter of justice:

18. The greater the justice, the greater the harmony. All oppositions are not enemies; the reconciliation of many oppositions leads to greater harmony and greater justice.  This does not mean that all claims are valid, all positions legitimate, or that all demands should be met: many claims, positions, and demands are themselves unjust and destructive of harmony.

My interest here was in opening up discussion on a single issue – a belief in an inherent opposition between the interests of the individual and the group that appears to be, in fact, a shaky common ground for many on the left and the right. I think that a belief worth challenging.

AJA

*ideocentrism (a neologism devised independently by me and others): a belief in the superiority of one’s ideas so fixed that one is unable to credit opposing ideas as worthy even of sustained exploration. An ideocentric individual might make, for example, the fatuous statement that “Conservatives believe in human reason,” implying, in the context, that liberals do not believe in reason, or perhaps only, one might presume, in monkey or canine reason.

As ususal, comments here are closed; please leave any comments at Jay's site.

Controlling Sex in the Middle East

Since the time of Freud, accelerating with the Women's Movement (which, though it has gone too far in many respects, was invaluable in enabling our culture to optimize our human potential) we have understood mature, adult sexuality to include a number of important elements.  Among those elements are autonomy, freedom with responsibility (heavily eroded though it has been since the 1960s), and at its highest level, sexual relations as a mutually enhancing experience expressing the deepest intimacies between two people.  In this conception, adults were offered greatly enhanced freedoms to engage in the most casual sexual relations but it was well understood that physical intimacy without emotional intimacy represented an imitation of adult sexuality rather than its full expression. 

In contrast, when adult sexual freedom is restricted within a culture, it leads to the fetishization of sex and the perversion of relationships, where the sexual partner is turned into a mere need satisfying object whose own individuality and independence are truncated.  This is most obvious in very traditional tribal cultures which restrict interactions between young adults and proscribe sexual relations in significant ways.  [Please note this is not invariant; many people find long term deepening relationships in the most repressive tribal societies, but this is far more difficult to achieve in highly restrictive societies.]

In my series on The Arab Mind, I discussed some of the Psychosexual pathology that is intensified in a setting of increased male infantile narcissism, devaluation of women, and abuse.  The boys tend to grow up to be insecure men, fearful of women (who retain the infantile omnipotent core inherited form the earliest relationship to the mother) and disdainful of women specifically because of their power.   It is no surprise that the highest per capita frequency of internet searches for porn are found in Arab countries.  As a young Saudi man once told me in a personal communication, "everyone I know surfs the net for porn all day long." 

Women, on the other hand, develop under the influence of profound distrust and disdain of their sexuality along with specific assaults on their autonomy.  Mothers who see their only avenue to status as the production of Jihadi martyrs are a common outcome.

Foreign Policy magazine has an article describing Hezbollah's successful approach to leveraging this pathology in ways which enhance its stature and enlarge its power. [HT: SW reader DH]

The Militarization of Sex
The story of Hezbollah's halal hookups.

Mohammad, a 40-year old Lebanese Shiite who lives in Hezbollah's stronghold in Beirut's southern suburbs, was holding forth on the virtues of resistance, loyalty, and sex. "You could create the most loyal army by providing political power, social services and fulfilling the desires of your men -- namely, sexual ones," he declared.

"And Hezbollah has been very successful in this regard," Mohammad continued. It is hard to disagree. Hezbollah liberated South Lebanon from Israeli occupation, expanded the Shiite community's political power within the country, and has provided social services, such as health care and education, to its constituency since the 1980s. Today, it is also working to fulfill the sexual needs of its supporters, though a practice known as mutaa marriage.

Mutaa is a form of "temporary marriage" only acceptable within Shiite communities, one that allows couples to have religiously sanctioned sex for a limited period of time, without any commitments, and without the obligatory involvement of religious figures. In conservative Muslim societies known for their strict sense of propriety, mutaa offers an escape clause. The contract is very simple. The woman says: "I marry myself to you for [a specific period of time] and for [a specified dowry]" and the man says: "I accept." The period can range between one hour and a year, and is subject to renewal. A Muslim woman can only marry a Muslim man, but a Muslim man can temporarily marry a Muslim, Christian, or Jewish woman, as long as she is a divorcée or a widow. However, those interviewed for this article confirmed that Hezbollah-the "Party of God"-has allowed the practice to spread to virgins or girls who have never married before, as long as the permission of her guardian (father or paternal grandfather) is obtained.

While mutaa marriage has been used to offer religious justification for prostitution (a particularly charming device of the Iranian Mullahs) it is far more than that in Southern Lebanon:

According to Shiite writer and activist Lokman Slim, Hezbollah party members are not allowed to practice temporary marriage for security reasons, unless assigned by the party to do so. "We should make a clear distinction between Hezbollah as an organization and Hezbollah as it runs the community's culture and social affairs," Slim said.

But for everyone else, Hezbollah apparently decided to expand its support for this practice after the 2006 war, to maintain its support base and keep the Shiites in Lebanon under its control. "After the 2006 war, Iranian money came to Lebanon in abundance, and money opened the door to sexual luxury that could not be ignored or controlled," noted Slim. "Therefore, Hezbollah decided it is easier to allow sex under certain religious titles in order to keep the control over the community."

And, if the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, the way to a man's political allegiance is often through a different part of his anatomy: 

With his designer jeans, trendy haircut, and sharp sense of humor, Ali seems to be an unlikely Hezbollah supporter. He has always supported the resistance and what Hezbollah has achieved in this regard; however, in the last couple of years, he has developed a strong support for Hezbollah on issues he was previously critical of, such as its affiliation with Iran, involvement in domestic politics, and its religious rhetoric.

Coincidently or not, these developments took place as he was drawn to practice temporary marriage. In his southern village, it is difficult to meet girls and have normal relationships with them, and he acknowledges that getting closer to the party's social network has helped him meet more girls who were open to this kind of marriage. Gradually, Ali stopped drinking alcoholic beverages, took up praying and fasting, and never skipped a Hezbollah's rally or village events, where he also meets potential "wives." However, it is obvious that the slickly dressed Ali never gave up his love of fashion.

Of course, women gain their own rewards from the practice of mutaa:

It is, of course, not only men who take advantage of mutaa. Zahra, a fully veiled 25 year-old Shiite woman who is completing her master's degree in English literature, comes from a family of Hezbollah supporters and party members, and has been a lifelong Hezbollah member herself. She explained that she practices temporary marriage because it is a religious duty.

"I take good care of myself, and make sure I look perfect every time I go into a mutaa marriage because I should please my husband, temporary or not," she said. "It is my religious duty to do so. God allowed this kind of marriage for a reason, and I never question God's wishes."

Zahra is divorced and believes that Islam has acknowledged sexual desires for both males and females, which is why temporary marriage is permissible. "It is also a religious duty to fulfill your sexual desires," she insisted, noting that temporary marriages with women whose husbands had been killed fighting Israel were especially encouraged. "[T]hose who satisfy widows of martyrs have more reward in heaven," she said.

Mutaa may well be the Shia not-so-secret weapon against Sunni Islam, especially the puritanical form practiced by the Saudi Wahhabi sect that dominates Sunni Islam.  What makes mutaa perverse is the lack of autonomy.  All mutaa marriages must be sanctioned and controlled by Hezbollah, whether the disguised prostitution or the temporary, high status marriage with widows of martyrs.  As well, a marriage in which there is a third party, a quasi-state which enforces its rule with overt violence and threats of violence, is a marriage which cannot foster adult intimacy but maintains its subjects at the level of adolescents using one another for their own needs.  Dependants whose sexual pleasures are effectively controlled by another can never become autonomous adults and can never become a threat to their rulers.

From Malthus to Copenhagen: Addendum

Moore's Law in action:

Got to Admit It’s Gotten Better

One way to illustrate your good fortune of being a holiday shopper today is to measure the cost of goods by the number of hours it takes working at the average hourly wage to earn enough income to purchase typical consumer products at their retail prices, and then compare the “time cost” of goods from the past to today’s “time cost” for similar items.

Compare and contrast:

And note, there is no comparison between the capabilities of current technology versus 50 years ago; now extrapolate 50 years ahead.  It boggles the mind, doesn't it?

From Malthus to Copenhagen

A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.

-- Annie Hall (1977) Woody Allen

With apologies to Woody Allen:  A society is like a shark. ... It has to constantly move forward or it dies.  What we do not want on our hands is a dead shark*.

George Monbiot may be on to something crucial, a conflict we have seen time and again, and which is the animating issue behind the theory of AGW:

This is bigger than climate change. It is a battle to redefine humanity

It's hard for a species used to ever-expanding frontiers, but survival depends on accepting we live within limits

This is the moment at which we turn and face ourselves. Here, in the plastic corridors and crowded stalls, among impenetrable texts and withering procedures, humankind decides what it is and what it will become. It chooses whether to continue living as it has done, until it must make a wasteland of its home, or to stop and redefine itself. This is about much more than climate change. This is about us.

...

This is a meeting about chemicals: the greenhouse gases insulating the atmosphere. But it is also a battle between two world views. The angry men who seek to derail this agreement, and all such limits on their self-fulfilment, have understood this better than we have. A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right. It will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially by environmental restraints. It knows that fossil fuels have granted the universal ape amplification beyond its Palaeolithic dreams. For a moment, a marvellous, frontier moment, they allowed us to live in blissful mindlessness.

The angry men know that this golden age has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.

While economies grow, social justice is unnecessary, as lives can be improved without redistribution. While economies grow, people need not confront their elites. While economies grow, we can keep buying our way out of trouble. But, like the bankers, we stave off trouble today only by multiplying it tomorrow. Through economic growth we are borrowing time at punitive rates of interest. It ensures that any cuts agreed at Copenhagen will eventually be outstripped. Even if we manage to prevent climate breakdown, growth means that it's only a matter of time before we hit a new constraint, which demands a new global response: oil, water, phosphate, soil. We will lurch from crisis to existential crisis unless we address the underlying cause: perpetual growth cannot be accommodated on a finite planet. [Emphasis mine-SW]

For those who imagine they are saving the planet and increasing "social justice" the idea that there are limits is limitless.  (For those who are simply leveraging AGW to increase their own power and control, the moral underpinnings are irrelevant.)  Monbiot is simply following the footsteps of his illustrious predecessor, Thomas Malthus, who in 1978 proclaimed that, since population growth would always exceed food production, famine and mass death from starvation was inevitable.  In 1803 Malthus added the idea of prevention via "moral restraint", and we have been struggling with the results ever since.

[In his defense, when Malthus was living, using the means at their command, food supply could only be increased in a mathematical progression while all the evidence suggested population would grow exponentially.]

In a slightly different iteration, the Luddites rioted and attacked textile machines that threatened their livelihoods.

It is an historical fact that every prediction of the Malthusians and neo-Malthusians, Luddites and neo-Luddites, have been shown to be false, yet this does not stop their descendants from once again taking up the call to accept our limits, live within the means of Gaea, and save the planet!

That this is utter nonsense should be obvious (but is poorly understood by most environmentalists); that to follow their prescriptions would be horrendously horrific should also be obvious.

Consider that in order to prevent a 2 degree rise in global temperatures (notwithstanding that Monbiot, a prominent journalist cheerleader for AGW has admitted that Climategate is a major problem for the theory) the Warmists would consign billions to abject poverty, destroy the way of life for the global middle class (while preserving privileges and rights for the wealthy elites) and create stagnation for the global economy.  This is amoral at best; disaster in the service of evil at worst.

Consider, as well, that even without the imminent appearance of the Singularity, more and more productive endeavor is falling under the rubric of information technology.  As an endeavor's information content becomes amenable to manipulation by our burgeoning information technologies, it begins the rapid increase in productivity first described by Gordon Moore in his eponymous Law; abundance ensues. 

Yesterday, John Robb, whose concerns about the disruptive side of globalization are well known, described how farming could evolve into a (more mature) information science, in the service of Resilient Communities:

THE FOOD GAME

Most people wouldn't associate growing food with a game.  It's hard work (as the summers in my youth working on our family farm attest to).  Despite this preconception, gaming software (and particularly MMOs -- massively multiplayer online games), might be a way to supercharge local food production.  Connect these data points:

Read the whole thing; it is instructive.

Or consider Michael Anissimov's predictions of The Benefits of a Successful Singularity:

One of the greatest limitations of human intelligence is its speed. Our neurons fire about 200 times per second under ideal conditions. In contrast, silicon transistors can send and receive electronic signals more than 2 billion times per second. Our brains are massively parallel, with about a hundred billion neurons, but each neuron operates so slowly that a $10,000 desktop supercomputer can execute 933 billion operations per second, which is within a factor of 10,000 of one of the most common estimates of the processing power of the human brain, 10^17 operations per second. Several supercomputers have already passed the 10^15 operations per second mark.

...“instant intelligence, just add computing power” principle is a recipe for explosive economic growth.

Artificial intelligences with human interests in mind could use their machine minds to solve human challenges in fields like medicine, physics, chemistry, engineering, politics, diplomacy, biology, sociology, and economics. Being native to the world of computers, they could run complex simulations in mere moments that would take human researchers years to build. Complex, detailed, mathematically accurate simulations could be the default thought mode for artificial intelligences—their “thoughts” could be far superior to our best simulations.

...

The question is not whether we will gain immense material wealth and knowledge. That seems likely if we create AI. The question is whether our wisdom will keep pace with these material gains, and whether we will be able to avoid conflict in a new world of abundance. A civilization with immense power and knowledge still has to decide which goals to direct that power and knowledge towards—and these are not easy questions. Maybe some combination of human and machine intelligence will bring us closer to the answers.

The history of our accelerating technology for the last 100 years suggests that even if we never achieve machine intelligence, our progress in solving problems will continue to accelerate.  Our energy sources will continue to grow ever more efficient, cheaper, and cleaner.  (Ray Kurzweil, in the Daily News predicts that super efficient solar power will begin to decrease our dependence on oil within the next 10 years.)  Food production, including vat grown steaks which will resolve the moral issues underlying vegetarianism, will continue to become more efficient, cheaper, and cleaner. 

If we allow the Malthusians to impede our technological progress, all of their predictions will come to pass.  We will fall further behind, by the day, in the race to lift up the poorest from subsistence living.  We will fall ever further behind in our race to cure disease and prevent suffering.  As Monbiot notes, if not CO2 and AGW, there will be some other crisis that will demand that the global elites take control and slow or stop the global economy, and if the shark stops moving, it will stop breathing and will die.

If the Malthusians do not stop us, the greatest problem facing us, perhaps only 10-20 years out, will be how to manage abundance, not how to prevent resource wars, famine, and global catastrophe.

*For the record, not all sharks are pelagic, ie require movement in order to force water through the gills, ie breathe; demersal sharks, like the nurse shark, are perfectly content to lie still on the bottom of the bay.  Despite that, the simile has always struck me as too good to pass up.

Paradigms & Weltanschauung

Over the weekend, Dinocrat, in an insightful post, considered the conflict between AGW "Warmists" and "Deniers" through the prism of history:

Something’s (probably) got to give

Perhaps ClimateGate is a flash in the pan, though we view that as unlikely. It might be that the ardent scientists of East Anglia corrupted data in service of their vision of the world. Or perhaps it is the “deniers” who are in error. In either case there is a conflict of visions. Perhaps thinking back to a previous conflict of visions could add a little enlightenment.

In 1962 Thomas Kuhn, then at Harvard, published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which quickly became one of the seminal books in the history of science. Kuhn argues that radical changes in thought often require, and create, a whole new way of seeing the world. He invented the term “paradigm shift,” to describe the phenomenon. Often, it is only when you have crossed over to the new paradigm do you see reality the way it really is.

One example Kuhn uses to illustrate his point is the Copernican Revolution. In 1500, the accepted view in the Christian world of western Europe was that the earth was the center of the universe, and that the sun and the planets revolved around the earth. The astronomer Ptolemy in the second century AD had worked out a set of equations for the movements of the planets and the moon based on the the earth being the center of the universe. Of course the set of equations describing the Ptolemaic universe had terrible problems since they were attempting to describe a universe that doesn’t exist.

Dinocrat briefly summarizes the struggle to preserve the earth as the center of the universe in the face of scientific sand mathematical data showing otherwise.  He notes that a great many people had a great deal of prestige and emotion invested ("professionally, culturally, religiously, psychologically" in Dinocrat's words) in the earth centric universe; the paradigm shift to a heliocentric universe (the beginning of the long march to a view of the universe in which not only is the sun a rather insignificant speck in an immensity but life is quite possibly incidental, a rather humbling fall from grace)  was resisted so strongly precisely because it would shatter their world view.  Dinocrat's conclusion is worth noting:

Final point. ClimateGate may not be the Copernican Revolution. However, it does remind us of some recent events in history. Most of the smart money and praise from the wise has been for the pro-AGW crowd. They represented the superiority of the knowledge of the elite over that of the lumpenproletariat. Not surprisingly there has been to date precious little glasnost about their data, and little perestroika as well. That seems about to change. Things didn’t end well for the incumbents as that situation developed over the succeeding several years. We’ll just have to see which worldview a critical re-evaluation of the data supports.

My knowledge of science and the scientific method has led me to have serious doubts about the entire theory of AGW and especially of the derivative and elaborate structure for redress.  When scientists hide their raw data and their statistical manipulations, they have forfeited their right to be referred to as scientists.  The release of the Climategate e-mails cannot be dismissed as meaningless, primarily because there are very smart people, well schooled in statistics and scientific methodology, who have already been able to use the raw data to show multiple instances of scientific misbehavior at best, fraud at worst.

However, as Dinocrat notes, what Climategate may actually represent is far more than simply a limited paradigm shift in climate science as evidence begins to clarify the distinction between scientific fraud and real climate danger.  As he points out, the Copernican Revolution eventually led to the undoing of the old authorities, the beginning of the end for the clerical elite who had superior knowledge of the world and were therefore better able to control the levers of power.  Climategate is part of an accelerating process of empowerment of individuals and the continuing erosion of the prestige of the elites.

In contrast, Matthew Yglesias links to, and endorses, a post suggesting that even in a period of uncertainty, the danger of AGW should be addressed by recourse to the "precautionary principle".

Precaution and Uncertainty

The point’s been made before, but I think Mark Kleiman’s explanation of why uncertainty in climate science* makes the case for action stronger rather than weaker was very good and clear. It’s important to note that this doesn’t require an appeal to a completely generalized and hazy “precautionary principle,” it’s implicit in any reasonable concept of cost-benefit analysis.

Of note, Matthew Yglesias does not question the conventional wisdom that AGW is a fact.  He does admit to questions about the various not well understood interactions between man made CO2 and climate variables, but believes that even with the uncertainty, the risk to the planet is so extreme that almost any remedies, no matter how draconian or costly, would be warranted.

In reality, the data is actually so muddled that it is impossible to actually tell if we are warming now (as opposed to having warmed from the lows of the Little Ice Age, which was itself a cooling after the Medieval Warm Period, a period conveniently disappeared by the Climategate perpetrators.)  It may well be, if those who believe the sun's output dwarfs human contributions to climate are correct, that the far greater risk is of entering another cooling period.  Either way, the idea that we should devote untold trillions of dollars to fight a problem that might not exist, as opposed to generally bringing ever more people into the global middle class with all the benefits to the environment which follow when people become less worried about their next meal and more concerned with the world beyond their cooking pot, is problematic.

Some of Matthew Yglesias's weltanschauung is on display in another post from the weekend.

A Conspiracy So Vast

Brad Johnson has two posts up from Copenhagen in which leaders of small island nations Cape Verde and Tuvalu plead for the developed world in general and the United States Senate in particular to not willfully condemn their nations to extinction.

This is another piece of the puzzle that the climate denial conspiracy theorists never seem to deal with. Maybe Al Gore made up all this climate science in order to sell tickets to his documentary, but what on earth is the government of Tuvalu doing? Why would they be running around the planet pretending that the existence of their nation is threatened by greenhouse gas emissions? Aren’t these the people with very large incentives to correctly understand this issue? Don’t you think they want to believe that the skeptics are right and there isn’t really a problem here?

In Matthew Yglesias's world, leaders of countries (at least when they are on the left) always have the best interests of their subjects at heart.  They never respond to unintended incentives or respond perversely to incentives.  I am fairly sure he and his readers would take issue with my characterization, but consider the import of his comments that the government of Tuvalu have "very large incentives to correctly understand this issue".  In fact they have no such incentives.  If AGW is supported and under UN auspices a plan is developed by which trillions of dollars are transferred form the wealthy developed world to the poor developing world, the people who comprise the government and elites of Tuvalu stand to become fantastically wealthy, far beyond anything they could dream of simply leveraging the natural bounties of Tuvalu (which I am sure is a lovely place with wonderful people.)  By the time any AGW could threaten Tuvalu, these people will be living in comfort in the West.  This is the story of Western aid to the impoverished; a rather sizable percentage is siphoned off by the elites well before it trickles down to the people.  However, that unfortunate reality is simply ignored in the view of those who are pressing for immediate remediation, whatever the facts may be.

Our trillions will be far better spent investing in such technology as nanotech and biotech, such that by the time Climate Change has manifested itself as either benign or malignant, we will be in a far better position to either remediate more effectively, or adapt.

The idea that our elite superiors have arcane knowledge of the world from which lesser mortals are estranged has been eroding since the invention of the printing press.  The invention of the internet (with all due thanks to Al Gore) has exponentially accelerated that progress.  We are approaching a time when the edicts of the elite will no longer be accepted simply because they are deemed authoritative.  Interested professionals and amateurs alike will join as An Army of Davids and improve the efficacy of The Wisdom of Crowds.  The Universe no longer revolves around the earth; soon, it will no longer revolve around our elites and this threatens their weltanschauung in ways as revolutionary as anything Copernicus and Galileo once did.

What You See Depends on Where You Stand

Note the first two paragraphs of a rather alarming story in the New York Times from Saturday which suggests we are, once again, failing our most vulnerable and poor children:

Poor Children Likelier to Get Antipsychotics

New federally financed drug research reveals a stark disparity: children covered by Medicaid are given powerful antipsychotic medicines at a rate four times higher than children whose parents have private insurance. And the Medicaid children are more likely to receive the drugs for less severe conditions than their middle-class counterparts, the data shows.

Those findings, by a team from Rutgers and Columbia, are almost certain to add fuel to a long-running debate. Do too many children from poor families receive powerful psychiatric drugs not because they actually need them — but because it is deemed the most efficient and cost-effective way to control problems that may be handled much differently for middle-class children?

Notice that it is only in paragraph 21 that mention is made that the Medicaid population has certain attributes that may confound the import of the headline:

Experts generally agree that some characteristics of the Medicaid population may contribute to psychological problems or psychiatric disorders. They include the stresses of poverty, single-parent homes, poorer schools, lack of access to preventive care and the fact that the Medicaid rolls include many adults who are themselves mentally ill. 

As a result, studies have found that children in low-income families may have a higher rate of mental health problems — perhaps two to one — compared with children in better-off families. But that still does not explain the four-to-one disparity in prescribing antipsychotics.

Professor Crystal, who is the director of the Center for Pharmacotherapy at Rutgers, says his team’s data also indicates that poorer children are more likely to receive antipsychotics for less serious conditions than would typically prompt a prescription for a middle-class child.

But Professor Crystal said he did not have clear evidence to form an opinion on whether or not children on Medicaid were being overtreated.

And it is only paragraph 25 that makes explicit, though in an understated way, that the overt behavior of "Medicaid kids" makes the initial headline impossible to evaluate.

“Medicaid kids are subject to a lot of stresses that lead to behavior issues which can be hard to distinguish from more serious psychiatric conditions,” he said. “It’s very hard to pin down.”

The aforementioned paragraph does not do justice to the problems of the "Medicaid kids".  I have always split my time between private practice and clinic practice working with the financially less fortunate.  In the first clinic at which I worked I saw children for evaluations and, on several occasions, for treatment.  I did not prescribe medicine in the vast majority of cases.  I do not like the idea of bathing a developing brain in psychoactive chemicals unless the indications are overwhelming.  In any case I found that while I could offer the children therapy and gain their parents' acquiescence to the treatment plan, I could never obtain much long term compliance, even (maybe especially) when the children responded well to the treatment.  Either the parent (and the majority were living in one parent homes, the product of relationships that were never formalized by the state) missed too many appointments because of competing needs/desires, or they suddenly disappeared from the clinic (sometimes because they moved with no warning to therapist or child.)  On other occasions one parent would use attendance by the child as a club with which to attack the other, ie in one case, the father wanted the child in therapy (and the actual involvement of the father was the exception rather than the rule) while the mother, realizing she could hurt the father, refused to allow the treatment to continue even after the school told the mother her son was improving.  After enough of these failed attempts, I essentially gave up; it was too distressing to see so many children suffering because of their parents' pathology.  It is difficult to become attached to a child, even if only therapeutically, and to see the child becomes attached and involved in their therapy, and then have the child taken out of therapy despite its manifest benefits.

[It is certainly possible that I was handicapped by my inexperience, my lack of cultural and ethnic similarity, or some other combination of factors that rendered me a particularly poor fit for these children or, I might just have been a terrible therapist.  Yet, I never had similar problems with White or Oriental children.  (The children it the clinic were predominantly Black and Hispanic {Mexican}).  Nor did I have trouble treating adult minorities; my patients tended to have better than average outcomes for the clinic.  Finally, even if I was a poor child therapist with all sorts of limitations, the question must arise as to why it should be that one set of children are able to gain benefits even from a sub-optimal therapist, while another set of children could not.]

By the time I began to work in the second clinic I joined, I decided not to treat children there.  In this clinic, too, far too many of the "Medicaid kids" were referred to the clinic because their behavior was so out of control (in school primarily) that they were disruptive to others and impossible to teach.  It was quite literally impossible to tell with many of these youngsters if their behavior reflected an internally disordered Central Nervous System or was a reflection of a CNS that could function adequately in a better environment.  In other words, the chaos at home was being put into action by the child.  Most of these "Medicaid kids" were given Medicine to treat problems whose source lay in the home environment.  In addition, far too many had trouble keeping appointments because the parents' pathology interfered.

This kind of news story, and I do not believe that there is any conscious intent to distort or obfuscate the news, is the kind of story that has traditionally led to disastrous social interventions.  For example, it was found quite some time ago that minority children, especially poor minority children, had disciplinary problems and were suspended and expelled at far higher rates than White or Oriental children.  Lawyers and Judges decided the disparity was evidence of bias and rules were established that made it extremely difficult to remove disruptive children form the classroom.  As a result, actual teaching became a secondary exercise, children who might have been educated went through school with their self esteem artificially enhanced while their 3 R's were nearly non-existent, and the urban schools became places for intact, achieving parents to eschew for their children. 

If that pattern is repeated, we will soon have mandates that minimize our ability to treat disruptive and disturbed children (and admittedly, the treatment options are suboptimal and the most useful treatments, ie changing their home environment, near impossible to achieve) , there will be more children disrupting mainstream classrooms, more children forced into Special Ed classrooms, and fewer children actually available for learning in our schools; all with the best of intentions, to protect poor children.

The current administration could begin to address the problem of failing minority families that are leaving us with such difficult trade-offs, but that would require a conversation that our courageous Attorney General and President have thus far avoided.

The Ant and the Grasshopper

This is making the e-mail rounds; it is amusing.

THE ANT AND THE GRASSHOPPER

This one is a little different... . Two Different Versions.... ......... .....  Two Different Morals

OLD VERSION

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away..

Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. 

The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Be responsible for yourself!

NEW VERSION

The ant works hard in the withering heat and the rain all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. 

The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. 

Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why theant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while he is cold and starving. 

CBS, NBC , PBS, CNN, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. 

America is stunned by the sharp contrast. 

How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so? 

Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper and everybody cries when they sing, 'It's Not Easy Being Green.' 

ACORN stages a demonstration in front of the ant's house where the news stations film the group singing, “We shall overcome.” Then Rev. Jeremiah Wright has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper's  sake.   

President Obama condemns the ant and blames President Bush, President Reagan, Christopher Columbus, and the Pope for the grasshopper's plight.

Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid exclaim in an interview with Larry King that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and both call for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share. 

Finally, the EEOC drafts the Economic Equity & Anti-Grasshopper Act retroactive to the beginning of the summer. 

The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the Government Green Czar and given to the grasshopper. 

The story ends as we see the grasshopper and his free-loading friends finishing up the last bits of the ant’s food while the government house he is in, which, as you recall, just happens to be theant's old house, crumbles around them because the grasshopper doesn't maintain it. 

The ant has disappeared in the snow, never to be seen again. 

The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident, and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the ramshackle, once prosperous and once peaceful, neighborhood.

The entire Nation collapses bringing the rest of the free world with it.

MORAL OF THE STORY:  Be careful how you vote in 2010.

Not With a Bang but a Whimper

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

The Hollow Men - TS Eliot

With all due apologies to T.S. Eliot, this is truly remarkable:

The rich (bureaucrats) keep getting richer

USA Today reports that federal salaries have increased rapidly during the recession, leading to an explosion of six-figure salaries in the public sector:

The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal salary data.

Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession’s first 18 months — and that’s before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.

Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector.

Bureaucracy is the real recession-proof industry.  The numbers are mind-boggling.  In 18 months, the number of federal employees making over $100K have increased 46%.  The number making over $150K has more than doubled.

It’s not as if they’ve been asked to do more with less, either.  In the first six months of the year, the federal government was adding 10,000 jobs per month, and over the recession had grown the ranks of bureaucrats by 9.8%.  The private sector, during that same period, shed 7.3 million jobs to contract 6.3%.

Here’s the fun fact of the day from USA Today:

When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000.

Got that?  Seventeen hundred employees at DoT make $170,000 per year.  Eighteen months ago, there was one.

Bureaucracy arises initially to increase efficiency.  When the bureaucracy is small and primarily involved with facilitating the functioning of a system, it can actually add value.  However, as the bureaucracy grows, it inevitably (and often rather quickly) reaches the point where its own perpetuation and the enhancement of its power and resource utilization become primary motivators.  We have long since reached that point.  It seems that now our government is determined to move from the merely ridiculous to the completely absurd.  The goal, apparently, is to have so many people working for the bureaucracy, promulgating new rules controlling how we live our lives, that soon all commerce and progress will slowly grind to a halt.  At that point the last one out will not have to turn off the lights; the electricity will have already been turned off, crushed by the weight of regulation.

Can any good come out of this incredible expansion of government?

Two possibilities come to mind:

1) The backlash could lead to a resurgence in libertarian thinking in the Republican party.

2) There could be no greater spur to the establishment of Resilient Communities than an ossified, overweight, top heavy bureaucratized government.  At some point when you can no longer fight city hall and revolution is unlikely in the extreme, to "turn on, tune in, and drop out" will take on a whole new meaning.