Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Gog and Magog.
Magog and Gog.
Someone find the user’s manual!

In the somewhat mysteriously titled Gog (1954) we have a movie trying to be multiple things: future documentary, murder mystery, Cold War thriller, science fiction, romance.

Sadly, none of these are a success. The science is sometimes right, sometimes wrong. The murder mystery may be mysterious, and the bodies of high powered scientists really do pile up, but the mystery lacks finesse and the deliciousness of a good head feint; the romance is little more than a mask for the polite lust of the 50s; and the Cold War aspect is given only the merest hint.

THE PLOT? A hidden American science complex, tasked with the creation and launch of a space station, has suffered two mysterious deaths, as two researchers are found dead in a cryogenics lab. Another scientist, whose specialty doesn’t seem to have been stated, is sent out to investigate; his introduction to the lab offers an excuse for talking about the wonders of science in long and leaden dialog. Finally, it’s interrupted by several more emergencies, which have the positive of actually piling up on each other, giving us a bit of tension. The scientists and their assistants are not immune to sudden death, which takes the air out of them.

And the eponymous Gog? He and his mate, Magog, are robots which are used for dangerous tasks. But how Gog earns the naming rights to this flaccid little specimen of a movie is obscure, unless it’s a Biblical allusion to the enemies of Israel, as the Cold War opponent pops up to take a bow. It’s a stretch, but maybe.

But don’t tire yourself by watching this in order to answer the question. While possibly a sensation when released, this is a dated relic of another age, and even a connoisseur of the era or these films will find this one hard going. I waited patiently for subtlety, hidden motivations, shocking consequences. They never came.

NewScientist’s Michael Le Page tramples all over the toes of the organic food movement in his concern for climate change (issue 3 December 2016, paywall):

You might think buying local food is always preferable to imported food when it comes to carbon emissions, but even this is not a reliable guide. Food flown thousands of miles can still have a much lower carbon footprint than, say, local produce grown in heated greenhouses.

The one label you’re likely to find on many food items is the “organic” one. But if you care about the environment, don’t buy it (it’s not healthier either, but that’s another story).

For starters, you are not helping wildlife. Yes, organic farms host a greater diversity of wildlife than conventional ones. But because the yields are lower, organic farms require more land, which in the tropics often means cutting down more rainforests.

And organic food also results in higher greenhouse gas emissions than conventional farming.

The trouble is, there is no way to tell whether that basic loaf of bread is better in terms of greenhouse emissions than the organic one sitting next to it on the supermarket shelf.

And since the organic movement has rejected GMOs, Michael consigns the various organic food movements to the dustbin of history. What does Michael want, if he can’t have GMOs?

What we really need are climate labels on foods, so consumers can see whether, say, gene-edited bread is far better in climate terms than organic bread. This isn’t going to be easy. Measuring all the emissions associated with producing food and getting it onto a supermarket shelf is extremely complex, not to say expensive. Most schemes so far have foundered. Tesco tried introducing its own carbon labelling in 2007, for instance, but eventually abandoned the idea.

And it’s pointless unless the labels are easy to follow. One promising proposal is to describe the greenhouse emissions associated with particular food items in terms of what percentage of a person’s typical daily carbon footprint they represent.

Climate labelling is definitely worth pursuing despite the challenges. The only alternative is to allow consumers to continue being hoodwinked by feel-good mumbo jumbo – and the stakes are far too high to let this happen.

Perhaps not the most diplomatic of approaches – but sometimes the best diplomacy is to just lay your cards out and dare a rejoinder. It makes me wonder why I didn’t think of climate labels, although it’s not obvious that American consumers would pay much attention to them. As Michael notes, the proper metric (designed to alarm and motivate the informed consumer) is not immediately apparent; no doubt the cited proposal will be rejected since it doesn’t use a target level of emissions. And a target level of emissions will lead to pitched political battles between those who think they are too high and those who question the need for their very existence. Whether or not this will go anywhere is not immediately clear.

(Tesco, mentioned in the article, is a British grocer, apparently with an advanced social conscience.)

NewScientist‘s Sophia Chen reports (3 December 2016) on the discovery of word life cycles:

THE media tends to interpret culture in annual cycles. Critics publish end-of-year best-of lists and Oxford Dictionaries just selected “post-truth” as its word of the year. But the actual words we use seem to operate on a 14-year cycle.

Marcelo Montemurro at the University of Manchester, UK, and Damián Zanette at Argentina’s National Council for Scientific and Technical Research identified 5630 commonly used nouns and analysed how their popularity changed over the last three centuries.

A curious pattern emerged. They found that English words rose in popularity and then fell out of favour in cycles of about 14 years, although cycles over the past century have tended to be a year or two longer.

They also found evidence of 14-year cycles in French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish. The popularity of related nouns – such as king, queen and duchess – tended to rise and fall together over time (Palgrave Communications, doi.org/btwd).

They don’t know why – or even if it’s a statistical fluke. I did like the analogy:

These results support previous work suggesting that language evolves in a patterned way, similar to how genes are transmitted from parent to offspring, says Mark Pagel at the University of Reading, UK.

“Language is not all over the place,” he says. “It’s remarkably consistent.”

From the abstract of the academic article:

The specific phase relationships between different words show structure at two independent levels: first, there is a weak global phase modulation that is primarily linked to overall shifts in the vocabulary across time; and second, a stronger component dependent on well defined semantic relationships between words. In particular, complex network analysis reveals that semantically related words show strong phase coherence. Ultimately, these previously unknown patterns in the statistics of language may be a consequence of changes in the cultural framework that influences the thematic focus of writers.

A reader has more information on a reported pipeline leak:

I “reported” (commented) on this a week or so ago. This is very topical for DAPL / Standing Rock for two reasons. One, the monitoring equipment failed to detect the leak, yet DAPL will use the same or similar technology to monitor their pipeline — and have made claims along the lines of “don’t worry, we have tech to make sure it’s safe”. Not very reassuring when we see how easily it fails. And two, the above leak went directly into, yep, a creek that is a tributary to the Missouri River.

Doesn’t just about everything in that part of the country?

Concerning the proposal to reform the Internet protocol, a reader writes:

Hmm. Individual IP packets don’t have return (sender) addresses, but TCP connections do, since replies have to be sent somewhere for the connection to work. Since both web (HTTP) and mail (SMTP) are built on top of TCP… I’m not sure the protocol is very much to blame for Bad Anonymous Behavior on the internet really. Is it?

Good point. Way back in my formative years, I decided that, having written a network of my own, I didn’t really wish to study another one in great depth, so I can’t claim great knowledge in this area. However, it does occur to me that Denial of Service attacks would be affected by the proposed changes, as it would permit tracing attacks.

inhumation jar:

By the end of the first season, more bones and numerous teeth had been uncovered from at least six burials of three types: primary burials, where the location is the original burial spot; secondary burials, a common form of burial rite often associated with megaliths; and, finally, inhumation jars, which are buried ceramic vessels containing bones.This variety adds to the complexity of the site and offers researchers the opportunity to consider questions they had been able to examine before: … [“Letter from Laos“, by Karen Coates, Archaeology (January/February 2017, offline only – typos mine)]

Brother and sister

An old cult horror classic appeared today and we jumped on it like metaphors jumping into a lake of jellied similes. Actually, my Arts Editor was quite reluctant. The movie is the famous Motel Hell (1980), starring Rory Calhoun. A brother and sister, now in their later years, are running a motel and smoked meat store; their little brother is the sheriff. People tend to have accidents rather easily in the area, and then disappear, but this doesn’t bother the proprietors none. After all, everyone loves their smoked meats. Even if they’re hiding a secret.

They use preservatives.

A young lady, fresh from the accident that kills her boyfriend, comes under their care, and if the sister is a bit unstable, perhaps even jealous of the young lady, the brother is more than willing to stand up for what’s right. Hell, he won’t even accept a kiss from the youngster without a proper marriage proposal. But the sister has her uses, including the medical skills needed on the small farm the pair run to support their little store. And all is well.

Until the produce breaks free and starts running around.

The production values were surprisingly good, my Arts Editor remarked, even as she gagged a little bit. Several of the vehicles appeared to be spotless antiques, at least at the start of movie; near the end, they might have been a bit banged up. And the acting was actually fun, with the actor playing the sister, Nancy Anne Parsons, doing a particularly good job of chewing the scenery. There was even a good bit of logic to the plot, and it seemed apparent that the scriptwriters really did care for the story, as they covered what appeared to be plot holes quite nicely.

Still, this is an acquired taste, so you’d better like campy horror if you’re going to appreciate Motel Hell.

Talking Points Memo has news about that State that prays for the fossil fuel industry. Now they want to tell you how to run your life while you’re heading for the toilette:

You often read that in the era prior to modern medical practice that soldiers were more likely to die of illness than from the fighting, but I rarely run across a salient example like this on the Body Horrors blog:

In 1779, over half of [General Washington’s] 10,000 strong Continental Army had contracted the debilitating [smallpox] virus during an epidemic, a grave tactical setback in the face of a largely immune British army.(5) “We should have more to dread from it, than from the Sword of the Enemy,” he wrote.(6) In February 1777, Washington would demand the use of an innovative technique, variola vaccination, to protect against smallpox and prevent the decimation of his troops in the face of the ensuing British onslaught.(7) He also instituted mandatory quarantine to prevent further spread of the infection among unvaccinated volunteers. By the end of the year, nearly 40,000 soldiers had undergone variolation and the rates of infection were dashed from 17% to 1%.(5) Washington’s oft-overlooked campaign against smallpox would be one of the most successful public health achievements of the era. The rest, as they say, is history.

The numbers are references within the original entry.

Hepatitis can be caused by overdoing energy drinks, as reported in Discover Magazine’s D-brief blog:

But take it easy on those Red Bulls, Monsters and 5-Hour Energy bottles — your liver will thank you. Case in point: Doctors at the University of Florida report what they believe to be the second documented case of acute hepatitis brought on by chugging too many energy drinks.

Those Aren’t Wings

The patient was a 50-year-old, otherwise healthy, man who had been nagged by abdominal pain, vomiting and drowsiness for a few weeks. He brushed it off as flu-like symptoms, but grew alarmed after he noticed darkened urine and signs of jaundice. After visiting with doctors, he was promptly diagnosed with severe acute hepatitis.

Doctors ruled out drugs, alcohol and sexual behavior as causes, and tests revealed this wasn’t a typical viral hepatitis infection. However, levels of B vitamins — used as “energy blends” in beverages — in his liver were literally off the charts. Sure enough, the patient told doctors he had been consuming four to five energy drinks daily, for three weeks straight, to get through his labor-intensive days as a construction worker.

I had a similar experience with Vitamin water and a kidney stone a few years back. The vitamin C, at ridiculously high levels in the nutrient-packed water, acted as an attractor for the material making up the stone (I forget which variant I had).

The lesson? Keep an eye on the constituents of what you’re drinking. A little enhancement is probably not going to hurt you, but when it says 1000% of the daily requirements and you’re chugging two or three a day, watch out.

And an example of the Standing Rock protesters‘ fear has come to pass. From The Earth Child:

A faulty pipeline has leaked 176,000 gallons of crude oil into a creek and the surrounding countryside 2.5 hours away from the Standing Rock protests in North Dakota.

The spill, which went undetected by the pipeline owners until a local stumbled on it, has spread almost 7 km (5.4 miles) from the site of the leak, and at this stage, it’s not clear what caused the pipe to rupture, or how long it’s been leaking.

According to CNN, an estimated 4,200 barrels of crude oil leaked from the Belle Fourche Pipeline in Billings County, 150 miles (241 km) from Cannon Ball in North Dakota, where protesters have been fighting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

This article seems to be guilty of using inappropriate units, in this case measuring distance by time. Perhaps it was in the original CNN article. But even more interesting:

It’s also not clear how the pipeline ruptured in the first place, but Belle Fourche Pipeline spokesperson, Wendy Owen, told the Associated Press that it might have occurred when the hillside slumped due to increased snowfall.

“That is our number one theory, but nothing is definitive,” she said. “We have several working theories and the investigation is ongoing.”

Perhaps even more concerning than a freak accident splitting the pipe is the fact that electronic monitoring equipment failed to detect the leak – something that would have prevented the pipe from spilling so much oil out into the countryside.

Indicating the technology is not perfect. That is not something to panic about – it takes time to perfect technology in the face of reality – but the maturity of the technology must be a factor when judging projects such as these, just as the viability of continuing the massive use of fossil fuels should be a factor. As the demand for fossil fuels drops, projects like these have less and less justification.

And justifies the promotion of safe, carbon-neutral sources.

A friend sent me this article from the guardian concerning the abandonment of British Fencing by the UK Sport, the Olympic funding authority for Britain:

Last week  [British Fencing] was informed by UK Sport that its Olympic funding had been withdrawn. Over the next four-year cycle, leading up to the Tokyo Games, it will receive not a penny to match the £3.1m it received from the national lottery, via UK Sport, to prepare its campaign for Rio last summer.

Why?

Zero funding amounts to official confirmation that your sport has no chance of producing a medal from the 2020 Games, or even in 2024. UK Sport’s policy is to look at each discipline from an eight-year perspective, assessing the division of about half a billion pounds on the basis, as it put it, “of the medals won, the number of medallists developed, and the quality of the systems and processes in place to find and support the nation’s most promising future champions”. Its support generally equates to between £20,000 and £60,000 per athlete per annum. For this, results are not just expected but demanded.

I believe this is how the US Olympic Committee (USOC) also operates, funding winners while ignoring the losers. On its face, it’s a baffling approach to asking a sporting federation to improve its top-line athletes, by eliminating the very support which one might think it needs in order to produce what is requested. However, the article does go on to note:

But it should be remembered that British Cycling, currently riding a boom with 130,000 members, had barely 20,000 less than a decade ago. And whoever dreamed that British gymnasts would one day be winning Olympic medals? Our fencers, who thought they had parried the worst, must now launch a swift and decisive riposte.

That suggests two things: First, the funding is not utterly necessary to produce top of the line fencers. Second, and more subversively, it suggests the funding, and the strings that come with it, could be done without. I know US Fencing was in danger of being taken over by the USOC a few years back due to a lack of financial soundness (inefficiency, etc – not criminal), and I assume this was possible because they accepted USOC funding.

I wonder if US Fencing ever considers rejecting USOC funding.

Enjoy!

strophic:

Strophic form (also called “verse-repeating” or chorus form) is the term applied to songs in which all verses or stanzas of the text are sung to the same music.^[1] The opposite of strophic form, with new music written for every stanza, is called through-composed.

The term is derived from the Greek word στροφή, strophē, meaning “turn”. It is the simplest and most durable of musical forms, extending a piece of music by repetition of a single formal section. This may be analyzed as “A A A…”. This additive method is the musical analogue of repeated stanzas in poetry or lyrics and, in fact, where the text repeats the same rhyme scheme from one stanza to the next the song’s structure also often uses either the same or very similar material from one stanza to the next. [Wikipedia]

Encountered in a Rose Ensemble program last night.

The depths to which the North Carolina GOP is sinking raises serious questions about the shared sanity of that particular branch of the party. In case you hadn’t heard, the digested form is that they called a special session, supposedly to address some disaster recovery concerns, but now are apparently trying to pass legislation effectively stripping the Governor-elect, a Democrat, of the powers employed by the current governor, McCrory, who lost the election and is apparently a very sore loser. A North Carolina resident has sent me a link to the Facebook page of Jeff Jackson (D), a state Senator, where he’s written:

When we engage in blatant power grabs, there are consequences beyond merely writing bad laws and disrespecting the voters. We also broadcast to the rest of the country that we’re a state that isn’t committed to honest, decent government – and that brings a set of consequences all its own, as we’ve seen this year.

He then goes on to list links to stories in newspapers such as The New York Times and WaPo detailing these last-moment activities. And now I see this discouraging news, also from Senator Jackson:

In the end, it took Gov. McCrory less than one hour to sign the bill that will restrict the authority of incoming Gov. Cooper.

You deserve honest, decent leadership. Not this.

Well, it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. As Jackson implies, there’s a variety of angles: voter reactions, corporate reactions, even the reactions of recruits for the famed UNC basketball program.

And the evaluation of the GOP should be interesting as well. Generally, American governance’s ideal has been to assume that the opposition is quite loyal; it may differ on policies, but the well-being of the State or Union is uppermost in our minds. The current behavior suggests that the GOP in NC has no such opinion of the Democrats; indeed, they seem to think their they’re all devils. And that, in turn, tells me that the GOP is composed of second- and third-raters, people who listen to the worst, not the best, who have learned to be obdurate and closed, rather than open and willing to learn. Or so I speculate; it’s hard to find an alternative that sounds both reasonable and better.

But one thing’s for sure: North Carolina’s legislature is making a strong bid for the title of The Most Toxic State in the Union.

When I heard Colbert making jokes about the white supremacist movement boycotting the latest Star Wars movie, I thought he was kidding and forgot about it. But, no, it’s a real thing, as Emma Grey Ellis reports in Wired. She concludes:

The alt-right aren’t the first extremist group to use this strategy. “There are clear points of comparison with how the Klan protested against film in the 1920s,” says Tim Rice, a film studies lecturer at St. Andrews University and author of White Robes, Silver Screens: Movies and the Making of the Ku Klux Klan. “These protests—then and now—seek to position the group as an underdog and the threatened minority.” And, just like the Klan, the alt-right holds up media as a symbol of the problem, so any criticism they receive can be dismissed, or used to reinforce their arguments.

But the KKK cracked up, and so will the alt-right. The group is already splintering into rival factions, and their ambition far outweighs their power. The group’s last big boycott called for people to #DumpKelloggs after the brand pulled its ads from Breitbart, and that call to action hasn’t halted Special K consumption. It’s doubtful that the fringe group will have any more impact on Star Wars—let alone Disney—than they did on the cereal giant.

I see this as a recognition by the supremacists of the power of storytelling – and their natural dread of it. They realize that the story will depict some awful fate that may await supremacists in any galaxy, and that the story will make an argument that such a fate is inevitable. Just as evil quite often breaks into self-defeating factions, as Ellis reports the supremacists are exhibiting at this early date, the story makes assertions that will discourage future potential recruits from joining the supremacists’ little hate groups. And if their little hate groups don’t grow, then the leaders are stuck with their little teacup of power, their influence will remain static and begin to wane, and … the country will end up laughing at them.

Rogue One may be the first strike in the war against the supremacists, but it’s a lot more civilized than the last time we had to deal with white supremacists.

That was called The American Civil War.

Serger:

An overlock is a kind of stitch that sews over the edge of one or two pieces of cloth for edging, hemming, or seaming. Usually an overlock sewing machine will cut the edges of the cloth as they are fed through (such machines being called “sergers” in North America), though some are made without cutters. [Wikipedia]

As my wife is a tailor, I’ve suddenly been introduced to this word several times in the last few years. Only recently did I learn the spelling, though.

Dipping into the email bag today, I see – perhaps to my surprise – that the war on both government and expertise appears to be continuing, although it’s possible this, like the bombs from World War II still found throughout Europe, is a leftover from the most recent metaphorical war.

Of course, it’s dressed up to deceive as a bit of down home humor; indeed, much like the use of children as suicide bombers (see, I can play dirty, too), its core appears to be a good piece, stolen for other purposes. Here it is.

Mensa Convention – Good One!

There was a Mensa convention in San Francisco. Mensa, as you probably know, is a national organization for people who have an IQ of 140 or higher. Several of the Mensa members went out for lunch at a local café.

When they sat down, one of them discovered that their salt shaker contained pepper, and their pepper shaker was full of salt. How could they swap the contents of the two bottles without spilling any, and using only the implements at hand? Clearly, this was a job for Mensa minds. The group debated the problem and presented ideas and finally, came up with a brilliant solution involving a napkin, a straw, and an empty saucer. They called the waitress over, ready to dazzle her with their solution.

“Ma’am,” they said, “we couldn’t help but notice that the pepper shaker contains salt and the salt shaker has pepper.” But before they could finish, the waitress interrupted: “Oh sorry about that.”

She leaned over the table, unscrewed the caps of both bottles and switched them.

There was dead silence at the Mensa table.

Kind of reminds you of Washington D.C., doesn’t it?

The emphasis is mine. What appears to be a light-hearted dig is actually a subtle manipulative maneuver, designed to convince those already suspicious of the Federal government that they’re right. It’s all in the bulk of the real humor, isn’t it? A conundrum, analyzed by the allegedly smart set, which is then solved by a waitress (who, by the implication that a waitress is also not particularly bright, is insulted into the bargain; a smart waitress would negate both the humor and the message of the missive). The problem is seen to be simple once viewed through the simple, down home wisdom of folks who lack the credentials other might have.

And, you know, credentials means expertise. Not only does the government take it in the teeth, the idea of experts is also dissed, a position sadly endorsed by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.

Now, I could go on about nuclear weapons and justice and finding balance and North Korea, but I won’t, because someone else from another era said it so much better than I ever could, so I’ll defer to his facility with words. I quote, courtesy WikiQuote, H. L. Mencken:

… there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.

Or, in other words, governing is harder than you may think.

With that in mind, shall we give the humor above the proper finish?

The Mensa folk, being far too trusting, then proceeded to use their condiments. The one who tried to use the pepper found the holes were too large, and quickly a little mound of pepper ruined his french fries. Meanwhile, the salt failed to pass through the too small holes of its fresh topper, thus inadvertently saving its would-be users from a hypertensive heart attack they were otherwise doomed to experience.

See? It’s still easy to make fun of Mensa, but now we have a more accurate insinuation concerning government. And, hey, still having doubts about that whole expertise thing? Here, let me help you out. Got a car? Would you let a 10 year old work on its engine?

Didn’t think so.

We’ve all heard of gravitational lensing. Somehow, I missed the opposite. The word may be a bit informal.

demagnification:

[Martin Sahlén of the University of Oxford] and his colleagues invoke a new field that is added to a cosmological constant to change dark energy’s density, depending on the local density of ordinary matter. That means dark energy would have behaved differently at different times. In the early universe, matter’s density was high, and dark energy would have had very little effect. But as the universe expanded and became less dense, dark energy’s effects became more prominent, causing the expansion to accelerate as observed.

Such dark energy has an observable consequence: it causes space-time in large, under-dense regions known as voids to behave differently than if dark energy were a cosmological constant alone. Where regions of high density, such as galaxy clusters, warp space-time to bend light towards us like a magnifying glass, voids bend light away like a concave lens. Measuring the amount of such “demagnification” could help test the team’s model. [“Huge cosmic voids could probe dark energy,” Anil Ananthaswamy, NewScientist (8 January 2014)]

Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute has published an article, taken from a talk he gave to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, on LinkedIn calling for a Reformation of the Internet:

There is a bug in [the Internet’s] original design that at first seemed like a feature but has gradually, and now rapidly, been exploited by hackers and trolls and malevolent actors: its packets are encoded with the address of their destination but not of their authentic origin. With a circuit-switched network, you can track or trace back the origins of the information, but that’s not true with the packet-switched design of the internet.

Compounding this was the architecture that Tim Berners-Lee and the inventors of the early browsers created for the World Wide Web. It brilliantly allowed the whole of the earth’s computers to be webbed together and navigated through hyperlinks. But the links were one-way. You knew where the links took you. But if you had a webpage or piece of content, you didn’t exactly know who was linking to you or coming to use your content.

All of that enshrined the potential for anonymity. You could make comments anonymously. Go to a webpage anonymously. Consume content anonymously. With a little effort, send email anonymously. And if you figured out a way to get into someone’s servers or databases, you could do it anonymously.

Certainly not an essay to everyone’s taste, but there is, as Walter points out, the possibility (and probably the only way to get there) for both classic Internet and new Internet to co-exist. Properly done, a web browser could probably work on both simultaneously. And I have to love his allusion to the ancient Greeks:

In Plato’s Republic, we learn the tale of the Ring of Gyges. Put it on, and you’re invisible and anonymous. The question that Plato asks is whether those who put on the ring will be civil and moral. He thinks not. The Internet has proven him correct.

And while I added that for its smile factor, in a queer sort of way it does play into my thinking about the cancer of national and international corporations (and, yes, full disclosure: I work for one of the largest). The upper management are really the people with the rings of invisibility, because while they make decisions that affect remote communities, they aren’t there to experience the negative consequences – thus they’re invisible – and consequently they don’t care what happens to the environment at their manufacturing plants. The equivalent of the Internet trolls caused the Bhopal disaster.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaanywho. This sounds like an interesting proposal which should be pursued by those with the means to make it happen.

My reader is more interested in universal health care than UBI, for good reason:

UBI is an interesting idea, but I’d more interested in universal health care at reasonable rates.

For example, I currently pay more for private health care insurance than I would pay for Medicare parts A (hospital), B (out patients), and D (pharam) if could buy all of those. (And part D is higher priced than it would need to be except Congress explicitly forbade CMS from using its size to negotiate better drug prices.) And Medicare has far lower deductibles and copays than my current plan. (And I’m counting actually paying for part A here, which normally, if you’ve paid into Medicare via FICA deductions during your work life, is “free”, i.e. has no premium. The Medicare website is amazingly helpful on this point.)

If I recall the data correctly, a major cause of homelessness is bankruptcy. Medical calamity is the number cause of personal bankruptcies in this nation, and most of those medical bankruptcies are filed by people who had health insurance.

For most of the 99%, paying for health care is a critical component of staying solvent and hence, safe and healthy. That Medicare can do so much more with so much less money, despite various political hamstrings such as the drug pricing scam, than private industry insurers demonstrates just how greedy and detrimental to society they are. And that doesn’t even begin to address other things driving sky rocketing health care costs, such as immensely profitable hospitals, excessive end of life treatments, lack of continuity of care, etc.

Yes.

I’ve been reading a couple of interviews on Vox with Trump voters who happen to use the ACA, wherein the interviewers ask if they really believe the GOP would knock down the ACA and replace it with nothing (the replies have included “I didn’t realize they could change laws” and “I didn’t really believe them”). While a couple of interviews are indeed a slender reed to hang a conclusion from, it does occur to me that the GOP may have wedged itself into a crevice filled with blue ring octopuses (highly poisonous). How so? One of the their campaign promises was to shutter the “disastrous” (their terminology) ACA.

If they do so, they may screw over a part of their base, who’ll either die of embarrassment or scream bloody murder – right into the microphones of the waiting Democrats, who’ll happily broadcast the wails of agony.

If they don’t, the rest of the base will abuse and revile them, and probably indulge in the filthy epithet RINO, pushing the party yet further into the fever swamps. Or the health insurance industry may abandon ship on them, although heavens knows there’s nothing more than a life raft out there once they get off the capsizing GOP liner.

And, as Steve Benen notes, the attempt to sidle their way out of this has already begun:

The rhetorical shift on health care among congressional Republicans is also worth keeping an eye on. After years in which GOP lawmakers said the scope of “Obamacare” is a national scourge that’s tearing at the very fabric of American society, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) recently told reporters that repealing the reform law affects “a relatively small number of people.”

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) added, “We have an Obamacare emergency in a relatively small part of the insurance market.”

Continuing the fun, the man to lead the Department of Enery, former Governor Perry of TX, isn’t a nuclear physicist – and that’s the point of the DoE. Jeffrey Lewis on The Daily Beast put it quite nicely:

But in recent years, the trend has been to appoint a Secretary of Energy with real technical expertise. President Bush appointed Samuel Bodman, who had a distinguished career as an MIT-trained chemical engineer before making a fortune in the private sector. President Obama upped the ante, appointing Berkeley’s Steven Chu and MIT’s Ernest Moniz to the position. Both are physicists. Chu has a Nobel Prize. By contrast, Perry took four chemistry courses and got two Cs, a D and an F. He got a C in physics. And a D in something called “Meat.”

So did Perry apologize to Trump or not? After all, Perry did say:

“He is without substance when one scratches below the surface. He offers a barking carnival act that can be best described as Trumpism: A toxic mix of demagoguery and mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued,” Perry said. “Let no one be mistaken — Donald Trump’s candidacy is a cancer on conservatism, and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised and discarded.”

Bankruptcy looming? Was he just drinking that night and didn’t mean it?

Or no cojones?

If I must be, reluctantly, open-minded, then perhaps Perry hopes to offer mature guidance to Trump. Although it’s not clear that Trump has any interest in that sort of thing.

Continuing the theme, this would be an upcoming scandal, so really a little out of bounds: David Frum points out that one of the defining policies of the Trump campaign is unlikely to happen:

OK here’s the best part: the only thing in the 2013 bill that bothered Puzder was … more border security.

Andrew Puzder is Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Labor, and a strong advocate of immigrant labor … because it keeps the cost of running fast food restaurants down and his profits up, as he’s CEO of CKE, which runs Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.

At best, there’ll a split right down the middle on this issue.

Rebecca Ingber on Lawfare discusses the long term consequences of a Trump Administration in which the bureaucracy may or may not work as an emergency brake on a President careless of safeguards. Noting that, at best, it will be an imperfect mechanism, she next addresses the problems facing the President following Trump in the arena of power accruing to the the Presidency:

… there is a catch-22 for presidents rising to power on promises to rein in the overreach of a predecessor on both process and substance. Remediating process fouls may make it more difficult to effect quick substantive change. Continuing to skirt the process norms of the executive branch in order to impose one’s substantive views entrenches the process errors. And yet a post-Trump president may well need to tackle both. For future presidential administrations, there are potential avenues for dialing back prior claims to power while still employing an inclusive decision-making process. Dialing back substantive claims to power of a predecessor are most effectively done immediately, upon taking office. For matters that require determining and implementing new legal positions or policies, decision-making should be channeled into processes that can examine problems ex ante and in a fashion removed from the pressures of addressing the facts on the ground inherited from the last administration, even if those pressures exist and are ongoing (i.e. forward-looking task forces to address best practices or legal positions, versus defensive litigation geared toward protecting power to defend actions already taken).

More urgently, for presidential administrations hoping to entrench internal constraints on future presidents: lay out your legal theories for action as clearly as you can; rest them on a specific theory and not in-the-alternative options; have the authors sign their legal positions to ensure accountability; publish them to ensure transparency; and include written redlines so there can be no confusion about the existence of outer legal limits on the president’s authority. The Obama Administration’s speeches, released legal memoranda, briefs, and the commendable recently released “Report on the Legal and Policy Frameworks Guiding the U.S. Use of Military Force” have over time checked several of these boxes on key national security issues.

I think it’ll be incumbent on the media and electorate that one of the discussion topics of the next campaign must be identification of power accrual and a discussion of whether this is detrimental to the Republic or not. Note this is different from the question of whether it’s good for the Presidency; the two are fundamentally different, as the Republic exists to promote the welfare of the citizenry, while the Presidency, though having a valid role in the Republic’s goal, is in itself an anti-democratic institution; only in relation to the limits set by the other two branches of government is it a tolerable institution, Therefore, arguing that limiting its power limits its efficacy is irrelevant; only in the context of the Republic as a whole can such arguments be properly judged as to their legitimacy, in terms of the dangers as well as the advantages that more power in the Presidency will cause.

I wonder if substantial portions of the electorate are up for such a discussion.